Rove-gate???

Jo Canadian

Jo Canadian

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PEI...for now
 
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Reverend Blair

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I keep waiting for this to break big-time. Somebody from the White House is going to crack eventually. When that happens, it's all over for Rove and Bush will be heading for impeachment faster than ever because it will be clear that he lied to start an illegal and unpopular war.
 
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Reverend Blair

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I don't think they are invincible, El Polaco. They were when the press was afraid of them, but now that this story is breaking (finally) things are changing. Bush's numbers have been going down, mostly over Iraq, but that's got the press willing to ask questions.

When The Nation broke this story two years ago, nobody else would touch it. Now it's hit the mainstream media and there's a major investigation. Bush is on the run and the RNC are flailing at anything they think might help.

Is it going to change the minds of the red-staters who worship Bush? No. It will change the minds of those who swing back and forth though.
 
Ocean Breeze

Ocean Breeze

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Re: RE: Rove-gate???

ElPolaco said:
The neocons have gotten away with every illegality since their rise to power in the early 80s--they're invincible--sure is nice though to fantisize--that whole regime behind bars--it is too good to be true.
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makes one wonder: How come the population as a whole is so quiet about this?? How come the "neo cons" have gotten away " with so much ??? Seems the USG Is not of the US people.....but of the US RICH ....who control just about everything. Doesn't the average US citizen have any say/voice anymore??? One would think that people would show their disdain with protests or some kind of statement........and therefore they too are complicit in this. Why do they have to wait for the Press to vocalize things.??? (for them). When the press actually tackles a serious issue, the bush worshippers (fanatics) either dismiss it or bash the press. Something quite pathological going on in the US society now......and many simply refuse to "see" it.
 
Ocean Breeze

Ocean Breeze

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Re: Rove-gate- TREASON-Gate

REPUBLICANS MUST CHOOSE: BUSH OR AMERICA? By Ted Rall
Mon Jul 18, 8:05 PM ET



NEW YORK--"Karl Rove is loyal to President Bush," a correspondent wrote as Treasongate broke. "Isn't that a form of patriotism?" Not in a representative democracy, I replied. Only in a dictatorship is fealty to the Leader equal to loyalty to the nation. We're Bush's boss. He works for us. Unless that changed on 9/11 (or 12/20/00). Rove had no right to give away state secrets, even to protect Bush.

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Newly loquacious Time reporter Matt Cooper has deflated half a dozen Rove-defending talking points since we last visited. Republicans, for instance, have argued that Rove had merely confirmed what Cooper already knew: that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. That claim evaporated in Cooper's piece in the magazine's July 25 issue: "This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife."

"I've already said too much," Cooper quotes Rove as he ended their 2003 conversation.

Rove may avoid prosecution under the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act, says John Dean, counsel at the Nixon White House. "There is, however, evidence suggesting that other laws were violated," he says, alluding to Title 18, Section 641 of the U.S. Code. The "leak of sensitive [government] information" for personal purposes--say, outting the CIA wife of your boss' enemy--is "a very serious crime," according to the judge presiding over a similar recent case. If convicted under the anti-leak statute, Rove would face ten years in a federal prison.

Even if Rove originally learned about Plame's status from jailed New York Times journalist Judith Miller, Dean continues, "it could make for some interesting pairing under the federal conspiracy statute (which was the statute most commonly employed during Watergate)." Conspiracy will get you five years at Hotel Graybar.

Rove's betrayal of a CIA WMD expert--while the U.S. was using WMDs as a reason to invade Iraq--is virtually indistinguishable from Robert Hanssen's selling out of American spies. Both allowed America's enemies to learn the identities of covert operatives. Both are traitors. Both are eligible for the death penalty.

And he's not the only high-ranking Bush Administration traitor.

In last week's column I speculated that Treasongate would almost certainly implicate Dick Cheney. Now, according to Time, Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby is being probed as a second source of leaks to reporters about Plame.

We already know that Rove is a traitor. So, probably, is Cheney. Since George W. Bush has protected traitors for at least two years; he is therefore an accomplice to the Rove-Libby cell. We are long past the point where, during the summer of 1974, GOP senators led by Barry Goldwater told Richard Nixon that he had to resign. So why aren't Turd Blossom and his compadres out of office and awaiting trial?

Democrats are out of power. And, sadly, Republicans have become so obsessed with personal loyalty that they've forgotten that their first duty is to country, not party or friend. Unless they wake up soon and dump Bush, Republicans could be permanently discredited.

Bush sets the mafia-like tone: "I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." His lieutenants blur treason with hardball politics--"[Democrats] just aren't coming forward with any policy positions that would change the country, so they want to pick up whatever the target of the week is and make the most out of that," says GOP House Whip Roy Blunt--and blame the victim--Rove, absurdly argues Congresswoman Deborah Pryce, was innocently trying to expose Wilson's "lies."

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Bush's credibility at 41 percent, down from 50 in January. Given events past and present, that's still a lot higher than it ought to be.

We don't need a law to tell us that unmasking a CIA agent, particularly during wartime, is treasonous. Every patriotic American--liberal, conservative, or otherwise--knows that.
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"TREASON-gate"...??? Looks like... :evil:
 
Ocean Breeze

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Plame's Identity Marked As Secret
Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01



A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

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.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife's identity was revealed to retaliate against him for accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the Iraq war. In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times and in an interview with The Washington Post, he cited a secret mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson's wife's CIA connection in telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip, according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were questioning White House officials during the early days of the investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, has testified that he learned Plame's name from Novak a few days before telling another reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband's mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove's account. Rove has also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him, said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

"He had not seen it or heard about it before that time," Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa, including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others. Bartlett's attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel. Fleischer could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson's wife with Cooper. Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from conversations with reporters.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear that information about Wilson's wife was sensitive and should not be shared. Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The Post.

The material in the memo about Wilson's wife was based on notes taken by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA where Wilson's intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson's wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA was considered "a footnote" in a background paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson's trip to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries, already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC's "Meet the Press" and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to explain Wilson's statements for Powell, according to sources familiar with the events. He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the sources said. Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to his office.
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more unravelling. "Stench" in Washington. might be an understatement. Interesting how it ties in with the Invasion based on lies.

(Is this the type of gov't (US version of deceit and deception) the US wants installed in Iraq too??? Why does the word "malignancy" come to mind??)
 
Ocean Breeze

Ocean Breeze

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It's all about the war in Iraq. And the lies that rallied this nation into the war. And tangentially, it's also about a press corps that apparently puts its confidential information conveniently in e-mails, only to have it scooped up later by prosecutors who want to do God-knows-what with these files. As a gray-beard journalist, I can tell you we were taught to communicate such stuff to an editor only in person and behind closed doors. And only to an editor you trusted to look after your dog should you be sent to jail for civil disobedience.
But this is now. The drunken fire drill we see today in Washington has to do with a presidency that misled this nation into war with lies and distortions about a purported clear and present danger from Iraq. For more than three years, the falsehoods have shadowed the Bush administration, creating a credibility gap that in its gravity hasn't been seen since Vietnam.

At the moment, but not for the first time, the gap is making big headlines. And the headliners include senior advisers in the White House who may have leaked the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Wilson, née Plame, to the press. The purpose of the leak was to discredit the operative's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former American ambassador who had challenged the factual underpinnings of the White House's rush to war.

This all happened two years ago. It took six months or so for the Justice Department to name a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who said a while back that his inquiry was complete but for two loose ends—two reporters who had refused to reveal their sources to his grand jury. Matthew Cooper of Time magazine finally agreed to comply, on July 6, but Judith Miller of The New York Times refused and was put in jail for contempt the same day.

Cooper is the reporter who named Karl Rove, President Bush's chief adviser, as the source who told him that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Cooper then wrote this up in an e-mail to his boss, who obligingly gave it to the prosecutor, over Cooper's objections. Rove says, through his attorney, that he was only repeating to Cooper what some other reporters had told him—but Rove somehow can't remember which reporters they were. So you can see that this mystery is not without its moments of farce.

Meanwhile, the war in Iraq goes on. Not much laughter there.

Except for the reporters in Iraq, the American press isn't in any unusual physical danger. The threat here at home is to their ability to do their jobs properly for the public. This presidency, now in its second term, seems hell-bent on replacing independent journalism with state-produced journalism. In the old days, didn't Washington call that state-produced stuff "Evil Empire" journalism? Something's upside down here.

This clash between the press and the White House has given all of us lessons in modern journalism. There now seems to be a growing clan of reporters and editors who believe that journalists should be more agreeable to giving up notes and sources to government. We should pick and choose, they say, depending on whether the story is important enough. That's a road map for giving away the independence a free press needs to breathe.

Another development in modern journalism, though not so new anymore, is that, with our new digital toys for instant factoid-gathering, the pace of chatter has become so unceasing that the wheat is frequently not separated from the chaff, leaving the public groping for clarity. Often lost in the babble over the Plame investigation is the Iraq war and how it was invented—which is, of course, the origin and the heart of the story.

Most people I talk to are completely confused by the guessing game that is the press coverage. Did President Bush or Vice President Cheney know anything about the leakage of the CIA agent's identity? Did Karl Rove do the leaking himself or did he—or someone else—mastermind the plan and direct others to set it in motion? Or is there a more tangled explanation behind this story?

Columnist Robert Novak, a regular conduit for Republican leaks, was the first to publicly reveal Plame as a CIA "operative." In articles published two years ago, Novak cited two unnamed senior administration officials as his sources. A few days ago, another unidentified source—described as someone who had been "officially briefed" and who seemed to believe Rove had not committed a crime—told the Times that Novak called Rove six days before publishing his first piece, on July 14, 2003. This source said it was Novak who gave Rove details about the CIA operative, not the other way around. Novak has apparently cooperated with the prosecutor. But he's not talking. And the prosecutor isn't talking—about anything. He won't even hint at whether he believed whatever tale Novak, or any other witness or target, told him. In sum, we're pretty much in the dark. I'm just as puzzled as the average reader about these things.

More leaks to the "media" will occur in the days ahead. It's likely they'll come mostly from sources on the White House side trying to make their case to the public—trying to contain the political damage to the Republican Party. In the polls, the president's credibility has been dropping. Some leaks may also come from the prosecutor's side—to prepare us for a possibly inconclusive result.

But we are not going to get any useful infusion of information unless or until prosecutor Fitzgerald, who has a reputation for thoroughness, concludes his inquiry, announces the results, and explains in detail the process and path of his investigation. He is not legally required to file such a final report, but it would be shameful if he didn't. After all the surmise and speculation and conspiracy theories, the country deserves more than just an announcement about indictments—or perhaps a conclusion that there wasn't enough evidence to produce indictments.

The press, too, needs to think about how to explain its process to the public. This could begin by inserting high up in every story a fat paragraph or two listing all the things that the reporter still doesn't know and describing in detail the White House lockdown and other secrecy shrouds that have made us half blind. That might establish a bond with the reader. Candor breeds credibility.

It would also be refreshing if, in every story about the leak, there were some clear mention of the war that continues in Iraq and how it was brought into being.
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gotta wonder if the die hards are too embarrassed to admit to themselves/orthers that they have been lied to and bought into the whole slimey package. So to "save face" (which is ever so important to some -as opposed to integrety and honesty) they continue to defend the indefensible. Values , ethics certainly don't seem to matter to the radicals in the US. (but then, that is nothing really new.-)
 
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