quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo who thinks Joe Wilson is the target of the investigation right now? just a hunch.

Given what we know so far, what makes you speculate that?

And I did make a mistake in my criticism earlier of Coulter - she was right - the CIA did, in fact pay for Wilson's trip to Niger.

But again, and I do have to clear another very earlier point I made a while ago - Wilson had never made the claim that Cheney sent him to Niger. It was all through the CIA, by which the request to the CIA came from Cheney's office. From Wilson's first NYTimes op-ed:

quote:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office. After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

hey Opus. you still got that moonbat BB gun? you're gonna need it to shoot down a crow. which sucks man, because i heard they taste like shit.

Coulter's the man, however, this write-up has some different venom. cracked me up.

quote:

The Frog Marches In On a Dark Horse Now comes the time for the Main Steam Media, known affectionately as the MSM, to drink the "frog-marching" truth serum like the men that they aren't. For the past two years the MSM has been bringing us the classic Washington nightmare on the big screen televisions of America, this time starring the marching Fog Frog. The producer of the graphic and frightening "March of the Fog Frog" has been Washington Superboy Joseph Wilson, who craftily obtained full government funding for his work of fiction, something that not even the wizards at PBS can accomplish

the rest is here. DISCLAIMER: this from a conservative blog

http://kerfuffles.blogspot.com/2005...e-and-frog.html

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo hey Opus. you still got that moonbat BB gun? you're gonna need it to shoot down a crow. which sucks man, because i heard they taste like shit.

It sucks that I can't find any modern shells for my grandfather's old 8 gauge.

quote:

Originally posted by Trancer-X It sucks that I can't find any modern shells for my grandfather's old 8 gauge.

That's alright, it'd probably break your shoulder anyway!

Rove leak is just part of larger scandal


Anatomy of Rove's Leak

David Corn Thu Jul 14, 1:11 PM ET

The Nation -- Two years ago, after reading a Bob Novak column, I called former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and asked, half-jokingly, "Why didn't you tell me your wife was in the CIA?" In a somber voice, Wilson said, "I can't tell you that now." When I first read that Novak column outing Valerie Wilson (a k a Valerie Plame) as a CIA officer and citing "two senior administration officials," I didn't immediately comprehend the leak's seriousness. But as I spoke with Wilson, I could see the potential harm. And I realized the leak was no accident. At the time, the White House and its allies were mounting a fierce campaign against Wilson, who had revealed in a New York Times op-ed that on a 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Niger he had gathered information undermining one of George W. Bush's justifications for the Iraq War: that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Africa. And as we discussed the Novak leak--that is, talked around it--it occurred to me that the leakers might have violated an obscure law that prohibits government officials (not journalists) from knowingly disclosing the identity of an intelligence officer. I mentioned this to Wilson; he was unfamiliar with the law. I said I might write about the leak and this law. He didn't encourage me. He was hoping that somehow this story might blow over and was not eager to draw more attention to it. He was in partial (though understandable) denial. Two days later I posted a piece that first raised the question of whether this leak was evidence that White House officials had committed a crime.


Initially few in the mainstream media cared about the leak. But liberal bloggers and other Internet denizens howled. A handful of Democratic Congress members complained. Two months later, the news broke that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak, and there was a flurry of media coverage. Then the story receded, as the investigation generated little news (i.e., few leaks). But through the early stages, the White House claimed Bush wanted to get to "the bottom of it"; that leakers would be punished; and that Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Elliott Abrams--three White House officials linked to the leak by Washington's rumor mill--had not been involved. Next the case came to be dominated by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's zealous pursuit of reporters--particularly Time's Matt Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller. But now that the Cooper and Miller cases have been resolved--with Miller imprisoned--and evidence implicating Rove has emerged, the focus has returned to the original sin: the leak itself.

Because of Fitzgerald's (appropriate or inappropriate) hounding of Cooper--which led to Time's surrendering Cooper's e-mail and notes--Newsweek's Michael Isikoff was able to obtain a damning e-mail that Cooper wrote three days before Novak's column appeared. That e-mail noted that Cooper had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that Wilson's "wife...apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." This was the first documentary evidence that Rove had been involved in the leak. His lawyer's immediate spin was that Rove had not mentioned Valerie Wilson/Plame by name. (This was a thin defense; a Google search would have yielded her name.) The White House stonewalled, absurdly refusing to answer any questions about Rove or its previous statements on Rove and the leak. Angry White House reporters accused the White House of having misled the public.

It has taken a while, but the leak has finally led to a flood of trouble, and Bush's most important aide is in peril. Rove might escape legal jeopardy, given how the relevant law is written. But if that famous e-mail contradicts what he told Fitzgerald's grand jury, he should fear a perjury charge. The issue, though, is not only whether Rove engaged in criminal behavior. It's also what the White House will do about Rove--and others involved in the leak. (Novak did say he had two sources.) The Cooper e-mail proves that Rove leaked national security information to undermine a critic. (And if Rove didn't know Valerie Wilson was under cover, he leaked without checking, which means he handled secret information recklessly.) By the White House's earlier statements, Rove engaged in wrongdoing that warrants dismissal--regardless of how Fitzgerald's investigation ends. And if Bush was sincere when he called for the leakers to "come forward and speak out," shouldn't he order Rove to tell us all he knows? But Team Bush has hunkered down, ignoring press inquiries, deriding Democratic criticism as baseless partisan attacks and hoping this storm will pass. It is refusing to acknowledge the reality revealed by that e-mail. But the White House--at least, Rove--has always known what happened. Bush needed no special prosecutor to "get to the bottom" of this. He only had to ask his own people to tell him the truth. That is, if he didn't already know.

The Nation

quote:

Originally posted by Shakka That's alright, it'd probably break your shoulder anyway!

I'd be willing to take the chance to find out. I have a nice Browning 12 gauge which has considerably less recoil than my non-gas operated 20 gauge (over and under), but that 8 gauge is old technology and would probably induce some good shoulder pain.

quote:

Originally posted by Trancer-X Rove leak is just part of larger scandal Anatomy of Rove's Leak David Corn Thu Jul 14, 1:11 PM ET The Nation -- Two years ago, after reading a Bob Novak column, I called former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and asked, half-jokingly, "Why didn't you tell me your wife was in the CIA?"

you know, it's funny you posted this by Korn (who is the beady eyed epitome of a left wing shill) talking about how the administration's malice was the cause of Plames outing when, in all honesty, it was him that actually outed Plame as a "Top Secret" "covert" operative.

he published this just two days after Novak's article which referred Plame as only a "WMD operative". which she was.

quote:

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others? It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted. In a recent column on Nigergate, Novak examined the role of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV in the affair. Two weeks ago, Wilson went public, writing in The New York Times and telling The Washington Post about the trip he took to Niger in February 2002--at the request of the CIA--to check out allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Niger. Wilson was a good pick for the job. He had been a State Department officer there in the mid-1970s. He was ambassador to Gabon in the early 1990s. And in 1997 and 1998, he was the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council and in that capacity spent a lot of time dealing with the Niger government. Wilson was also the last acting US ambassador in Iraq before the Gulf War, a military action he supported. In that post, he helped evacuate thousands of foreigners from Kuwait, worked to get over 120 American hostages out Iraq, and sheltered about 800 Americans in the embassy compound. At the time, Novak's then-partner, Rowland Evans, wrote that Wilson displayed "the stuff of heroism." And President George H. W. Bush commended Wilson: "Your courageous leadership during this period of great danger for American interests and American citizens has my admiration and respect. I salute, too, your skillful conduct of our tense dealings with the government of Iraq....The courage and tenacity you have exhibited throughout this ordeal prove that you are the right person for the job." The current Bush administration has not been so appreciative of Wilson's more recent efforts. In Niger, he met with past and present government officials and persons involved in the uranium business and concluded that it was "highly doubtful" that Hussein had been able to purchase uranium from that nation. On June 12, The Washington Post revealed that an unnamed ambassador had traveled to Niger and had reported back that the Niger caper probably never happened. This article revved up the controversy over Bush's claim--which he made in the state of the union speech--that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program. Critics were charging that this allegation had been part of a Bush effort to mislead the country to war, and the administration was maintaining that at the time of the speech the White House had no reason to suspect this particular sentence was based on faulty intelligence. "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said days before the Post article ran. "But no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions." Wilson's mission to Niger provided more reason to wonder if the administration's denials were on the level. And once Wilson went public, he prompted a new round of inconvenient and troubling questions for the White House. (Wilson, who opposed the latest war in Iraq, had not revealed his trip to Niger during the prewar months, when he was a key participant in the media debate over whether the country should go to war.) Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came. Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation. Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an [COLOR=yellow]undercover CIA officer. Wilson says, "I will not answer questions about my wife. This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the President's statement in the state of the union speech." So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife--who is the mother of three-year-old twins--works for the CIA. But let's assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it. The sources for Novak's assertion about Wilson's wife appear to be "two senior administration officials." If so, a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as "nonofficial" and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson's wife is such a person--and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her--her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration. (Assuming she did not tell friends and family about her real job, these Bush officials have also damaged her personal life.)dging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames." If she is not a CIA employee and Novak is reporting accurately, then the White House has wrongly branded a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA officer. That would not likely do her much good. This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent. The punishment for such an offense is a fine of up to $50,000 and/or up to ten years in prison. Journalists are protected from prosecution, unless they engage in a "pattern of activities" to name agents in order to impair US intelligence activities. So Novak need not worry. Novak tells me that he was indeed tipped off by government officials about Wilson's wife and had no reluctance about naming her. "I figured if they gave it to me," he says. "They'd give it to others....I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate. I generally use it." And Wilson says Novak told him that his sources were administration officials. So where's the investigation? Remember Filegate--and the Republican charge that the Clinton White House was using privileged information against its political foes? In this instance, it appears possible--perhaps likely--that Bush administration officials gathered material on Wilson and his family and then revealed classified information to lash out at him, and in doing so compromised national security. Was Wilson's wife involved in sending him off to Niger? Wilson won't talk about her. But in response to this query, he says, "I was invited out to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject. None I knew more than casually. They asked me about my understanding of the uranium business and my familiarity with the people in the Niger government at the time. And they asked, 'what would you do?' We gamed it out--what I would be looking for. Nothing was concluded at that time. I told them if they wanted me to go to Niger I would clear my schedule. Then they got back to me and said, 'yes, we want you to go.'" Is it relevant that Wilson's wife might have suggested him for the unpaid gig. Not really. And Wilson notes, with a laugh, that at that point their twins were two years old, and it would not have been much in his wife's interest to encourage him to head off to Africa. What matters is that Wilson returned with the right answer and dutifully reported his conclusions. (In March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that the documents upon which the Niger allegation was based were amateurish forgeries.) His wife's role--if she had one--has nothing but anecdotal value. And Novak's sources could have mentioned it without providing her name. Instead, they were quite generous. "Stories like this," Wilson says, "are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears." Will there be any inquiry? Journalists who write about national security matters (as I often do) tend not to big fans of pursuing government officials who leak classified information. But since Bush administration officials are so devoted to protecting government secrets--such as the identity of the energy lobbyists with whom the vice president meets--one might (theoretically) expect them to be appalled by the prospect that classified information was disclosed and national security harmed for the purposes of mounting a political hit job. Yet two days after the Novak column's appearance, there has not been any public comment from the White House or any other public reverberation. The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

just throwin it out there. make ya think. Korn has already admitted to calling his boy Wilson 2 days after the Novak article, then comes up with this? makes me wonder. speculate. whatever.

Last edited by Q5echo on Jul-15-2005 at 20:39

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo you know, it's funny you posted this by Korn (who is the beady eyed epitome of a left wing shill) talking about how the administration's malice was the cause of Plames outing when, in all honesty, it was him that actually outed Plame as a "Top Secret" "covert" operative. he published this just two days after Novak's article which referred Plame as only a "WMD operative". which she was. just throwin it out there. make ya think. Korn has already admitted to calling his boy Wilson 2 days after the Novak article, then comes up with this? makes me wonder. speculate. whatever.

Hey, did it ever occur to you that your argument would be more substantiated if you would learn to attack the message itself, rather than the messenger?

quote:

Rove E-Mailed Security Official About Talk By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president's No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence. The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter divulged CIA officer Valerie Plame's secret identity. "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations. The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove testified to a grand jury about it last year. Earlier in the week before the e-mail, Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written a newspaper opinion piece accusing the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence, including a "highly doubtful" report that Iraq bought nuclear materials from Niger. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley. "When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this." Hadley, now Bush's national security adviser, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment Friday. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances, never invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the president's executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides. Rove, Bush's closest adviser, turned over the e-mail as soon as prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's covert work for the CIA. He later told a grand jury the e-mail was consistent with his recollection that his intention in talking with Cooper that Friday in July 2003 wasn't to divulge Plame's identity but to caution Cooper against certain allegations Plame's husband was making, according to legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony. They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury investigation. Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that another journalist he had talked with, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was planning an article about Plame and Wilson. Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet planned later that same day to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question some of Wilson's assertions, the legal sources said. The AP reported Thursday that Rove acknowledged to the grand jury that he talked about Plame with both Cooper and Novak before they published their stories but that he originally learned about the operative's identity from the news media, not government sources. Republicans cheered the latest revelations Friday, saying they showed Rove wasn't trying to hurt Plame but instead was trying to informally warn reporters to be cautious about some of Wilson's claims. "What it says is, Karl Rove wasn't the leaker, he was actually the recipient of the information not the provider," Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said on Fox News. "So there are probably a lot of folks in Washington who have prejudged this, who have rushed to judgment who are trying to smear Karl Rove." Democrats, however, said that even if Rove wasn't the leaker, someone still divulged Plame's identity and possibly violated the law. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders asked Speaker Dennis Hastert on Friday to let Congress hold hearings into the controversy regardless of the criminal probe now under way. "In previous Republican Congresses the fact that a criminal investigation was under way did not prevent extensive hearings from being held on other, much less significant matters," Pelosi wrote. Federal law prohibits government officials from divulging the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. But in order to bring charges, prosecutors must prove the official knew the officer was covert and nonetheless knowingly outed his or her identity. Rove's conversations with Novak and Cooper took place just days after Wilson suggested in his opinion piece in The New York Times that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Summarizing a trip he made to Africa on behalf of the CIA, Wilson wrote that he'd concluded it was highly doubtful the nation of Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq. Tenet issued a lengthy statement five days later saying that he never should have allowed Bush to use the Niger information in his State of the Union address but that Wilson's report did not resolve whether Iraq was seeking uranium from abroad. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050715...h/cia_leak_rove

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo hey Opus. you still got that moonbat BB gun? you're gonna need it to shoot down a crow. which sucks man, because i heard they taste like shit.

Ahh, too many bones in 'em.

But in all seriousness, let's take this back a step. For two years now the White House and Rove himself had claimed that Rove did not leak anything to reporters. We have known this entire week that this is false. There is no spin to get away from that point. Do you confirm of deny this, given what we know so far (and admittedly we only know what's given in the press)?

Let's just answer that question and go from there. I'll speak more on this tomorrow. I've got a hot date with the Mrs. down by that lovely Knob Creek...

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

quote:

Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Ahh, too many bones in 'em. But in all seriousness, let's take this back a step. For two years now the White House and Rove himself had claimed that Rove did not leak anything to reporters. We have known this entire week that this is false. There is no spin to get away from that point. Do you confirm of deny this, given what we know so far (and admittedly we only know what's given in the press)? Let's just answer that question and go from there. I'll speak more on this tomorrow. I've got a hot date with the Mrs. down by that lovely Knob Creek...

As Q5 legal council, I recommend he not answer any of your questions because the investigation is on going and he might incriminate himself. If he must reply I suggest he use the Scott McClelland stone wall or the Ari Fleischer redirect.