Plame Again

The mass media has finally realized that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative working to keep Iran from getting nukes. But 60 Minutes scrubbed the Iran portion from their Plame interview broadcast! After advertising it.

Doesn't leaking Plame's covert identity make Cheney, Novak and company traitors? They did help Iran. Of course, the biggest help for Iran has been the invasion of Iraq.

Will the mass media now speak about her career when she was a spy with diplomatic immunity, supposedly less dangerous, when she was captured and tortured for two days? Assuming the CIA can't keep it muzzled for long. Did the CIA or the White House scrub the Iran portion of her 60 Minutes interview?

I have had many posts about being outraged at the scam the conservatives were pulling on the Valerie Plame case. The modus operandi is always the same, if you have someone embarrassing the President smear them or their family with mud, much like the smears on the families that use the SCHIP program.

Regarding modus operandi, isn't the attack on Iran campaign a little old by now? Seeing it is the exact campaign they ran before attacking Iraq? This campaign has not been as successful with only 29% of the American public supporting an attack on Iran - even though a large majority of voters believe Iran is developing nuclear weapons and is supporting attacks on our soldiers.

Valerie Plame - The edited inside story at the WP.

An online discussion with Valerie Plame about her new book and the 60 Minutes interview today here.

Tags: Valerie Plame, fair game, Iran, Bush, Cheney, Novak, treason, nukes, attack, CBS, CIA

Cheney outed CIA agent Valerie Plame worked to keep Iran nuke free

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
One former counterintelligence official described the CIA's reasons for not seeking congressional assistance on the matter as follows: "[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public," the source said. "They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed."

The source described the findings of the assessment as showing "significant damage to operational equities."

Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described "operational equities" as including both people and agency operations that involve the "cover mechanism," "front companies," and other CIA officers and assets.

Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Washington Note: Valerie Plame Leak Sabotaged America's Iran-Watching Intelligence Effort

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

He also notes that Wilson found evidence that Iran was unsuccessfully trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

Making this personal

Several years ago now my NASA friend wrote a long essay that I was scapegoating the Bush administration. He based that conclusion on my strong expression that the administration and GOP leaders in Congress were threatening the security of the U.S. by their actions regarding terrorists getting their hands on nukes.

The evidence I presented was
1.) the outing of Valerie Plame;
2.) the repeated attempts by GOP congressional leaders to eliminate paying Russia to safeguard nuclear materials;
3.) the very low priority the GOP Congress placed on controlling nuclear material, and
4.) the inattention and low priority the administration placed on the threat of nuclear weapons in terrorist hands.

Since then some bipartisan leaders went to the trouble of helping to create a DVD and HBO special on the dangers of Russian nuclear material and the terrorist threat of nuclear weapons. I even have my free copy of Last Best Chance. I argued then that this was an attempt to educate and put pressure on primarily GOP leaders who were dismissing this threat.

"I am not cavalier. I detest the incompetent, lying, unethical, Machavelian's S.O.B.'s who are the one's cavalierly dismissing threats for their political and economic ambitions."

I have been outraged over the Valerie Plame outing and have called it for what it is - treason, from the moment it occurred. The biggest physical military threat the US faces today is terrorists with nuclear weapons. I don't know what word other than traitors to call people who expose someone trying to prevent that for petty reasons. I think this is a good example of the difference between rage and outrage. I stand by my statements regarding this administration and the GOP congressional leaders and think history is bearing me out.

Peter's attempt in his essay to put me in a box contains unsupportable statements that he is unable to see from within his box. Too bad he is inside a box where we cannot even agree on some of the facts on politics, much less the opinions. I am pleased that some of his latest expansion of the original essay has an area of our agreement - opposing the radical left's opposition to Bush's Afghanistan War and the theory of no just wars. I supported the Afghan war although with rare criticisms of some tactics and a belief that some of the motivations were hidden.

I wonder if Peter still thinks my criticism is simply scapegoating?

Tags: Cheney, Plame, Wilson, Iran, terrorism, nuclear threat, proliferation, Niger, treason, traitor, outrage, video

Woodward apologizes for remaining silent, not for lying

Big Bush supporter has a strangely evolving story.

The abrupt revelation that Woodward has been sitting on information about the Plame controversy has reignited questions about his unique relationship with The Post while writing books with unparalleled access to high-level officials, and about why Woodward minimized the importance of the Fitzgerald probe in television and radio interviews while hiding his own involvement in the matter.

Woodward said he had passed along a tip about Plame to Post reporter Walter Pincus, who was writing about Wilson in June 2003, but Pincus has said he does not recall any such conversation.

Pincus was trying to get more information about that case and Woodward claims he told him but Pincus forgot!

More - Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago

ADDED - Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting

On Oct 29th, 2005 I blogged about his strange TV appearance and polled to ask if Woodward was drunk.

Tags: Woodward, Plame, cover-up

The Plame Game Trail leads to Cheney

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Iraq, Niger, And The CIA

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.

That Cheney was one of the first people to tell Libby about Plame, and that Libby had written in his notes that Cheney had heard the information from the CIA director, Gillers said, might make it more difficult for Libby to mount a credible defense of a faulty memory. "From a prosecutor's point of view, and perhaps a jury's as well, the conversation [during which Libby learned about Plame] is the more dramatic and the more memorable because the conversation was with the vice president" and because the CIA director's name also came up, Gillers said.

The disclosure that Cheney and Libby were told of a CIA assessment that the agency considered the Niger allegations to be untrue, and that Tenet requested the assessment as a result of the personal interest of Cheney and Libby, would "demonstrate even further that Niger was a central issue for Libby," said Gillers, and would "make it even harder, although not impossible, to claim a faulty memory."

Tags: Plame, Libby, Cheney, Wilson, Niger, Tenet

Fair Game

Officials within the United States government have determined that attacking the wife of a vocal critic in order to silence that critic, and to silence the hundreds of other analysts who know full well the breadth and scope of the lies that have been told, is acceptable behavior. In other words, wives are now “fair game.”

The wife of Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, was an extraordinary person doing an extraordinary job. In the lexicon of the intelligence business, she was a CIA agent with a ‘non-official cover,’ otherwise known as a ‘Noc.’ An associated Press report about Plame described Noc status as, “the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create, often involving especially dangerous jobs.” In Plame’s case, her Noc status was created so she could covertly work to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists.

Seeing as how this is the case, that the barest standards and principles no longer have a place within this administration, that the national security of the United States can be sacrificed for low-rent political retribution, that George W. Bush and his people have been exposed as the rankest and bloodiest hypocrites in the history of American government, that everything is now fair game, I say let’s have at it. If politics is now nothing more than a WWF cage match, I want in. I have a fighter in my corner who also believes in the idea that everything is fair game.

My fighter is an independent counsel.

EL - it was Karl Rove who reported told reporters Valerie Plame was "fair game."

John Dean - This outing 'More vicious than Tricky Dick'

Salon.com -- Regardless of whether or not a special prosecutor is selected, I believe that Ambassador Wilson and his wife -- like the DNC official once did -- should file a civil lawsuit, both to address the harm inflicted on them, and, equally important, to obtain the necessary tools (subpoena power and sworn testimony) to get to the bottom of this matter. This will not only enable them to make sure they don't merely become yesterday's news; it will give them some control over the situation. In the case of the DNC's civil suit, Judge Charles Richey, a good Republican, handled it in a manner that was remarkably helpful to the Nixon reelection effort. But any judge getting a lawsuit from Wilson and Plame today would be watched a lot more carefully.

If the Bush White House is anything like the Nixon White House -- and there is increasing evidence of the similarities -- it will respond to such a lawsuit like a stuck pig. Leaking the name of a CIA official can under no circumstances be considered a part of any potential defendants' official duties, so they will not be given representation by the Department of Justice. But how about Wilson and Plame: Should they have to bear the expense of a lawsuit to deal with the harm they have suffered and get to the bottom of what happened? I don't think so, and after talking with several lawyers in Washington, I find I am not alone. I have good reason to believe that one or more law professors in the area might handle the case pro bono, or one or more of the public interest groups might underwrite the lawsuit. Needless to say, that will only cause more squealing by those who want this to go away. They will cry that it's all politics. This is an empty contention -- it was the attack on the Wilsons that was pure politics. But the Bush folks appear to have messed with the wrong man (and woman).

Time after time, Nixon tried to stem Watergate by declaring it was pure politics. But what were his people doing in the Democratic headquarters? Was that not merely dirty politics? To fight the investigations of Watergate, the White House and the Republican National Committee, the Nixon reelection committee kept their surrogates working full time. Democrats who criticized Nixon for not getting to the bottom of who was involved in the DNC break-in were endlessly accused of playing politics with nothing but "a third-rate attempted burglary." This sort of defense, of course, has already commenced from the Bush White House, with the president's surrogates similarly downplaying this vile act of political revenge against the Wilsons. Apparently, they don't realize how Nixonian this behavior is, and Nixon and his aides did not exactly set the gold standard for conduct for any presidency.

As for claims by the Bush administration that it can avoid conflict-of-interest problems by turning the investigation of leaks about Plame over to career professionals rather than to Bush political appointees, that's nonsense. That would merely turn the clock back to the initial Watergate investigation, which was conducted by career professionals. Years ago, I testified about how helpful those career attorneys were, and as the White House tapes later proved, these professionals (men with impeccable credentials) kept the Nixon White House fully informed of their investigation, as did the FBI, thereby facilitating the coverup.

Of course, Attorney General Ashcroft should appoint an independent prosecutor, or even two, as Calvin Coolidge did (a Republican and a Democrat) to investigate Teapot Dome. That would be the smart move, with a staggering 70 percent of Americans saying he should appoint a special prosecutor, and 83 percent of those polled saying this is a serious matter, according to the Washington Post.

But most importantly, I believe that Wilson and Plame hold the keys to resolving this matter: with a civil lawsuit.

The Plame Game - Will the leak of a CIA agent's name be the next big political scandal?

Slate's Jack Shafer has a good analysis on this one.

The hidden good news in the Wilson-Novak-Plame melodrama is that it disproves a thesis that jaundiced readers, myself included, have about the weakness Washington reporters have for anonymous sources bearing scoops. Any of the six journalists who were offered the Plame story and declined to run with it could have gotten some sort of career-enhancing bump out of it. That they ignored the calculated leak, and the story ended up with an opinion journalist who used it to make his political point, indicates a level of discipline I didn't know existed in the press corps.

The hidden bad news is that none of them reported that the Plame information was being leaked by sources who wished to embarrass her and Wilson—which they could have legitimately done without burning their sources by name. In other words, they all protected the White House from its blunder.

EL - Robert Novak, stauch conservative Republican, is now saying that leaking the name of a CIA analyst, as opposed to secret agent, is not against the law. It is clear that she had a secret job that took her overseas looking for WMD's and precursors and that it did some harm to the agency. That argument doesn't fly, Novak.

Valeries Plame was covert when outed

In 2004, President Bush promised to fire anyone in his Administration that was involved in the leak. Karl Rove was one of the two sources columnist Robert Novak used when he revealed Plame's identity. Bush has yet to follow through and fire Rove. Cheney and Novak have also yet to be charged with treason for outing a covert CIA agent who had taken numerous covert trips abroad on missions in the five years preceeding her outing. Her latest missions were believed to be preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons grade material.

Right wing media and blog sites have never apologized for supporting her outers and that continues to this day. They would have to admit they were repeatedly and consistently wrong on yet another issue and have supported traitors. Several guests, primarily Fred Rustmann and Reuel Marc Gerecht and Victoria Toensing but also others, on Fox News had also repeatedly told false stories about her status when they were in no position to know. Cokie Roberts on more mainstream shows also repeated that she was not covert but later backtracked.

Get the real story, avoid Fox News and other right wing propaganda outfits without doing independent fact checking. Studies have shown that Fox News viewers are the most ignorant and misinformed on basic top news stories.

Tags: Valerie Plame, Fox News, misinformation, disinformation, traitors, Novak, Cheney

Scooter Verdict Further Damages White House

At 30% approval in the polls and sinking with a brace of scandals about to hit the headlines, this verdict adds to the impression of the Bush-Cheney ship of state going under.

GOP talking point one has been Libby was such a good man and public servent and never lies. This reminds overly much of the way weeping aides stood up for Nixon when he left the White House. Libby lied repeatedly knowing it was a federal crime. His defense of forgetting was not credible given how many times he had been told of Wilson's wife and his making up a story of where he learned her name.

GOP talking point two - there is no underlying crime. This is false on two levels. Primarily, the crime is the lie. Libby lied. Second - Plame was a covert agent no matter how much uninformed partisans scream that she wasn't. The CIA and the Justice Department stipulated to that. It is difficult to prove case so no one was charged. Viewers of Fox News and GOP media outlets have been subjected to a repeated con game from uninformed sources that say she was not covert because they know that outing her like the administration did amounts to treason. Valerie Plame was working to stop regimes, including Iran, from acquiring nuclear materials for bombs. Fitzgerald even explained to reporters that the CIA labeled her covert but obstruction by Libby prevented him for being charged with that crime.

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community. Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life. The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security...

QUESTION: Mr. Fitzgerald, the Republicans previewed some talking points in anticipation of your indictment and they said that if you didn't indict on the underlying crimes and you indicted on things exactly like you did indict -- false statements, perjury, obstruction -- these were, quote/unquote, technicalities, and that it really was over reaching and excessive...

FITZGERALD: I'll be blunt.

That talking point won't fly. If you're doing a national security investigation, if you're trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and you go before a grand jury and if the charges are proven -- because remember there's a presumption of innocence -- but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.

And I'd say this: I think people might not understand this. We, as prosecutors and FBI agents, have to deal with false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury all the time. The Department of Justice charges those statutes all the time...

A juror speaks:

At some point, the jury began to feel like they were deliberating on charges for the wrong man.

"What are we doing with this guy? Where's Rove? Where are these other bad guys," he said. "It seemed like Libby was the fall guy."

He added, "Some jurors commented 'this sucks' for Libby."

According to Collins, the jury believed that the former White House aide was "tasked by Vice President Dick Cheney to talk to reporters" about Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.

How important was this case - testimony from the trial:

Craig Schmall, Libby's CIA briefer at the time, testified that Libby had discussed Valerie Wilson with him. Schmall also testified that after the leak occurred, while he was briefing both Cheney and Libby, they asked him what he thought about the leak scandal. Noting that some commentators had dismissed the leak as "no big deal," Schmall explained that he considered it a "grave danger." He explained to Libby and Cheney that foreign intelligence services could now investigate everyone who had come into contact with Valerie Wilson when she had served overseas. "Those people," he said, "innocent or otherwise, could be harassed...tortured or killed

Tags: Libby, GOP, talking points

Updating the Valerie Plame Story

Valerie Plame's CIA Group was responsible for keeping Iran from getting nuclear material. Cheney directed she be outed to show the CIA and diplomats what happened to anyone whose family crossed the White House. The security of the United States took second place to partisan politics and vindictiveness.

ADDED - I have very limited PC access at the moment and, of course, I find I had left some glaring typos.

Tags: Valerie Plame, traitors, treason

WP Editor Fred Hiatt smearing Ambassador Wilson again

A major cheerleader for the Iraq war and President Bush continues his defense of the indefensible. Refusing to acknowledge the orchestrated plan, revealed in his own paper, by the White House to smear Wilson it continues the smears at this late date.

Despite this disturbing record of the Post’s credulity (if not outright dishonesty), Hiatt has published yet another editorial concentrating his ugliest attacks not against the administration for misleading the nation to war or against the failure of officials (like Powell) to express their misgivings in a timely fashion, but against Joe Wilson.

....Hiatt also is absolving the White House, Novak and implicitly himself (since he published Novak’s column revealing Plame’s identity) from responsibility for protecting the identity of an undercover CIA officer and her spy network. Plame’s operation was then focused on Iran’s WMD programs including its alleged nuclear ambitions.

More here.

Tags: SCLM, WP, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Fred Hiatt,

Richard Armitage’s Role in Plame Case - Newsweek

The Man Who Said Too Much

The first leaker that said Valerie Plame worked for the CIA was Richard Armitage at the State Department. She worked to keep Weapons of Mass Destruction out of the hands of terrorists and Iran. There is some speculation that this is leaking now in the new book 'Hubris' to take pressure off of Libby and to embarrass Powell and the State Department. How much our limited Iran intelligence apparatus was harmed by the leaking of her status has yet to be revealed.

Tags: Plame, Libby, Armitage, Iran, leaks, CIA

Sunday Talk Shows - Iran Fever, Novak squirms

Neo-cons and allies blaming Iran and Syria. Meanwhile Novak did a good imitation of a fat weasel looking for a way out of a trap he blundered into. He used poverty as an excuse on why he turned over all his sources. Are Plame and Wilson preparing another lawsuit against him?

Earlier - GOP unsure if they are pushing for World War 3, 4 or 5.

Conservative bloggers turn on pro-American Arabs abandoning ship.

Plame responds.

Tags: SCLM, Iran, war, Novak, Wilson, Plame, Sunday talk

Administration sources: Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.

In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.

They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.

In the interview, which took place two and a half weeks before the start of the Iraq war, Wilson said the administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called terrorist threat.

"The underlying objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

The CIA and State Department officials said that a day after Wilson's March 8, 2003, CNN appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice President's office chaired by Cheney, and it was there that a decision was made to discredit Wilson. Those who attended the meeting included I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October for lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak, Hadley, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national security adviser, the officials said.

"The way I remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,' a son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very personally. He wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the progress."

Tags: Cheney, Rove, Hadley, Libby, Wilson, Plame, abuse of power, lies

Plame's Identity Marked As Secret

The biggest argument I have had with the usual gang of idiots is that they try to say Plame wasn't a covert agent. The memo Rove and Libby and others used in outing her answers that.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Plame Game Continues

A group of former intelligence officers is pressing Congressional leaders to open an immediate inquiry into the disclosure last summer of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.

Their request, outlined in a letter on Tuesday to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and others, reflects discontent and unrest within the intelligence services about the affair, along with concern that a four-month-old Justice Department investigation into the matter may never identify who was behind the disclosure. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who first identified Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. officer in a column last July, has identified his sources only as Bush administration officials, and the Justice Department inquiry has not yet produced any public findings.

Leak of CIA officers leaves trail of damage

Knight-Ridder newspapers Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson, was a member of a small elite-within-an-elite, a CIA employee operating under "nonofficial cover," in her case as an energy analyst, with little or no protection from the U.S. government if she got caught.

Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called "legends," including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.

Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency's chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.

Intelligence officials said Plame worked on an issue high on Bush's list of priorities: the spread of missiles and nuclear, biological and chemical arms, collectively known as weapons of mass destruction.

EL - the story is spreading through middle America.

Hey Reporters, Rat Out That Source!

Jonathan Alter - NEWSWEEK -- The year was 1987 and Oliver North was testifying before a congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair. As I sat listening to him in the Senate Caucus Room, I couldn’t believe my ears.

NORTH WAS TALKING about the 1985 apprehension of Arab terrorists who had tossed an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. The already famous Marine colonel was accusing members of Congress of being untrustworthy because they revealed the military details of that capture. I knew that North was shamelessly accusing other people of leaking something that he, in fact, had leaked himself—not to me, but to other reporters. He was using confidentiality as a weapon. I decided to blow the whistle in NEWSWEEK and identify him as the source. This didn’t exactly make me Mr. Popularity with my colleagues or with North, who threatened to sue. But I would do it all over again.

The investigators want information about any contacts between administration officials and Novak, and also with two other reporters: Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce of Newsday. Hmm ... Neither has been named as someone who received the original leak about Plame. Instead, Phelps and Royce had simply called around after Novak exposed Plame on July 14. They learned that she was, in fact, working undercover. By probing for contacts with Phelps and Royce, the Justice Department wants to find out who in the CIA confirmed this inconvenient fact that is causing the White House so much trouble. The real bad guy—the one who blew Plame’s cover—is apparently of less interest. Otherwise, Justice wouldn’t have waited months to investigate.

The knee-jerk reaction of most reporters is that leaking the name of the Wilson leaker would harm the efforts of all journalists dealing with all confidential sources in Washington. This fear is unwarranted. Sources don’t leak to do us favors, but for a complicated series of other reasons that are often out of self-interest. They always have and they always will. The whole game of reporters and their confidential sources has gone so far in Washington that too many of us have forgotten our first obligation. It’s not to the Oliver Norths of the world and the reporters protecting them. It’s to readers and viewers and, yes, to the truth.

The Valerie Plame Affair

A Hot-Water Leak Columnist Novak 'Surprised' by CIA Furor

Editorial: Spinning/Full bore on Wilson-Plame

Be aware also of the White House effort to turn this whole thing into a general "classified information" issue. It's not.

What does it take to get Bush fired up and ready to take names and kick backsides? Blowing the cover of a CIA agent apparently doesn't meet that test.

Dowd: The Spy Who Loved Him

Ms. Plame and Karl Rove attend the same Episcopal Church, and she joked to her husband that she should just go up to the president's strategist and ask if he really considered her "fair game" to be outed — a phrase Mr. Wilson says reporters told him Mr. Rove had used.

At his wife's request, Mr. Wilson has toned down his call to see Mr. Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." But he still holds the man the president calls Boy Genius accountable.

"The act of leaking my wife's name was clearly a political act," he says. "The White House has a political office that's headed by one Karl Rove. That's where I would look. He certainly condoned it."


White House Looks to Manage Fallout Over C.I.A. Leak Inquiry

The administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department.

"It's slime and defend," said one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, describing the White House's effort to raise questions about Mr. Wilson's motivations and its simultaneous effort to shore up support in the Republican ranks.

"So far so good," the aide said. "There's nervousness on the part of the party leadership, but no defections in the sense of calling for an independent counsel."

The Decline of Headline News and other news

Glen Beck, the conservative bozo added to CNN's Headline News and Good Morning America, said: "You know Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has confessed to 9-11 and trying to kill President Carter. Why would you try to kill President Carter? He's on your side, for the love of Pete."

Since when is accusing a former President of being on the side of terrorists acceptable on the SCLM? Does that mean we will get reports on how Bush and Cheney aid terrorists on the mass media?

If the So-Called-Liberal Media would get away from their cocktail party GOP friends and read the blogs for awhile they will see the dirty hippies have been right - following their lead will break a lot of stories for some enterprising reporters. The people driving policy in the Bush administration have a history of not being right about anything. Some reporters should just read Hullabaloo.

There are only a very very small group of people with college degrees who worship Bush. Finding them must be a full-time job. Here they found a group of these Bush worshippers to impart more wisdom to him. Isn't that a contradiction in terms, Bush worshippers and wisdom?

We have long known that Bush Is Churchill (along with all the chest-besting neoconservatives who cheer on wars), but now we learn (from Bush) that he has become convinced that he is stronger than Churchill because Bush "has God" and Churchill didn't

. Greenwald on the Department of Justice:

If the President proclaims the right to break a law, and the DOJ refuses to say it will obey that law when asked directly, and it is then revealed that that very law has been broken -- repeatedly and in quite dangerous ways -- aren't those facts rather vital to understanding what happened here?

1) Lying to Congress is a crime, even if you're not under oath. 2) Alberto Gonzales lies repeatedly to Congress. 3) QED ???

Even the conservatives suggest Gonzales should go and are mad at the White House for letting a mountain be made out of a molehill. Way to support the rule of law Captain Kirklite.

Media Matters on the Washington Post's, and other media's, hypocrisy.

AP as GOP propaganda arm; Plame sheds little light. Meanwhile, the really deranged are claiming Wilson outed his own wife. David Corn was right all along.

Joe Conason: Should people be wise to the GOP blame Clinton dodge by now?

Richard Morrison: Introducing the Man Who Will Beat John Cornyn, not me. Rick Noriega has an impressive resume and a lot of friends.

Sunday Morning political talk has been tilted toward the GOP and conservatives for years. This Week may have noticed November's power shift, not the others.

The dusted off Straight Talk Express is already out of steam and going off the rails. McCain's twelve second pause while trying to recall his latest position is a derailment. He couldn't think of his position and couldn't find a way to support the conservative position on condoms without sounding like an idiot so dead air.

LATimes gets it right: Blogs can top the presses. TPM and his Muckrakers owns the attorney firings story by good old fashioned journalism. The press is still playing catch up because their sources, the GOP leadership, is wrong on the issues. FireDogLake owned the Libby trial. They are what reporters used to be.

I include this Newsweek Poll because figures on TV, including many reporters, keep getting it wrong:

Q5. In general, do you favor or oppose President Bush’s decision earlier this year to increase the level of U.S. troops in Iraq?

Favor: 32%
Oppose: 64%
Don't Know: 4%

Q6. Do you favor or oppose Congressional legislation that would require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the fall of 2008?

Favor: 59%
Oppose: 34%
Don't Know: 7%

For four years support for this fiasco has been declining and now opposition to our occupation is similar to American opposition to staying in Vietnam.

Top Bush Official Reveals White House Never Investigated Plame Leak vs Bush: “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.“

Iraq, economic colony of Iran - NYT.

Cheney was responsible for the US intelligence used on Iraq and waged a campaign to destroy the CIA. Radical leftists? No a fully documented report on PBS - Frontline "The Dark Side." This report was last summer, how far has this knowledge spread?

There is now a climate change in DC. Cold days in Hell for Bush and the GOP.

Republicans are fretting, and Democrats are fantasizing, about what the debacle foretells for the next year and half.

"We've only had subpoena power for the last six weeks and every tree that we've barked up so far has had a cat in it," said a senior Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. "Imagine where we'll be after six months."

Gonzales, who a week earlier had brushed off the brouhaha over the prosecutors as "an overblown personnel matter," was making the rounds of network and cable news shows in an effort to save his job.

Sen. John Sununu became the first GOP senator to call on Gonzales to resign Wednesday afternoon.

Latest Scare the Yokels Campaign

Homeland Security WARNS! of terrorists driving school buses but admits "the government has no credible information to suggest terrorists are "involved in buying school buses or seeking licenses to drive them.... no indication of any immediate threat to the country."

Andrew: Will Rumsfeld forever escape the ghosts of Abu Ghraib? Will Yoo? Is Cheney impeachable?

The lemming experience.

Tags: liberal news, SCLM, Plame, hypocrisy, GOP, Gonzales, Bush, Noriega, FEAR, misc.