Valerie Plame leak case indictments.

[Bernie Gunther]

Sounds like Fitzgerald has been talking to the Italians about where they got this bullshit information from. Most likely it was from Mussolini & Machiavelli fan Michael Ledeen. See e.g. Steve Horton's stuff

 

[where to]

All America all the time

Not in Scotland.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Here's Pat Lang on the forgeries.

It is very clear now that this doucument was forged by a couple of the shadowy ex-government characters who dwell in the environs of Washington and was planted in Italy on the basis of the personal contacts of one of them with the intention of influencing the debate over Iraq in this country. How do I know that? Well, I just do in the way that intelligence officers learn things. Good sources, multiple sources, first person accounts, probabilities, that is how one learns things. Could I swear to it in court? No. Intelligence conclusions are not things that can be sworn to in court.

source

The question now is whether it can be proven in court.

 

[bigfish]

The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction

Justin Raimondo: Niger Uranium Forgery - Mystery Solved?

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

 

[bigfish]

Ray McGovern: Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney


The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald - a distinct possibility.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10697.htm


Rove Told Jury Libby May Have Been His Source In Leak Case: Top Aides Talked Before Plame's Name Was Public

Patrick Fitzgerald and the NeoCons : As rumors swirl that key NeoCons are frantically speed-dialing their lawyers in PlameGate, it's important to remember that if and when Richard Perle gets handed an indictment from Patrick Fitzgerald he is the only one we know of who will have to ask -- in what case?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101902431_pf.html

 

[oi2002]

The LAT on how for some, at the Weekly Standard, it's a vast left-wing conspiracy.

When I first read this editorial, the argument sounded vaguely familiar. And then it hit me. An old "Simpsons" episode featured a Rush Limbaugh-like talk show host bemoaning the conviction of attempted murderer and Republican loyalist Sideshow Bob. "My friends, isn't this just typical? Another intelligent conservative here, railroaded by our liberal justice system," he tells his listeners in disgust.

When it appeared on "The Simpsons," this line of reasoning was self-evident parody. Now it's being put forward in complete earnestness by one of the leading intellectual journals of the right.

The Standard article is hilarious:

Why are conservative Republicans, who control the executive and legislative branches of government for the first time in living memory, so vulnerable to the phenomenon of criminalization? Is it simple payback for the impeachment of Bill Clinton? Or is it a reflection of some deep malady at the heart of American politics? If criminalization is seen to loom ahead for every conservative who begins successfully to act out his or her beliefs in government or politics, is the project of conservative reform sustainable?

It surely couldn't be that they are a weasely bunch of crooks who've been chancing their arm?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The LAT on how for some, at the Weekly Standard, it's a vast left-wing conspiracy.The Standard article is hilarious:It surely couldn't be that they are a weasely bunch of crooks who've been chancing their arm?

Another good question might be, why is it that capital's pimps, ahem, I mean politicians, are so often crooks?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Here's an interesting one. LA Times are printing a bunch of leakage from "former White House Aides" saying in effect that Lewis Libby was an obsessive nutcase who had it in for Wilson, despite the wiser counsels prevailing in the Bush White House urging them "not to engage with Wilson"

source

Could it be that the inevitable efforts to protect Bush from any criminality carried out on his behalf is going to involve throwing Libby to the wolves?

That could be a highly risky strategy unless he's got more in common with old G Gordon than a slightly similar name.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Oh, that's interesting. The Special Counsel has just put up a web site.

source

Nothing much there right now, but perhaps something will be appearing ...

 

[bigfish]

Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State

http://alternet.org/columnists/story/26947/

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

Let's replay that one again in slow motion.

Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she's given "clearance" by the Pentagon "to see secret information" -- which she "was not permitted to discuss" with Times editors.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.

 

[bigfish]

<cough!> Miller clarifies security clearance issue <cough!>

http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/politics/story/2825454p-11471434c.html

In a first-person piece last weekend, Miller wrote that because of that status, "I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

The statement led some to charge that the Times had allowed Miller to become compromised by the military.

But Miller told the paper for a story published Thursday that her "clearance" was akin to the routine nondisclosure form for all reporters "embedded" with military units, which she signed when she was deployed with the 75th Exploitation Task Force. The unit's job was to find weapons of mass destruction.

Miller said she also agreed to additional ground rules permitting her to discuss some secret information only with two of the paper's top editors.

 

[bigfish]

Sorry, Judy... Everybody Didn't Get it Wrong on WMD

In the Times' Sunday Judy-Culpa, Judy Miller said of her woeful pre-war reporting: "WMD -- I got it totally wrong... The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sorry-judy-everybody-_b_9239.html

Hilarious stuff Judy... So, you and all of those wall to wall experts polluting the public space with your fairy stories at the time, all got it utterly and completely wrong <gulp!>

I mean, Judy, how credible is that? No, really?

 

[mears]

In the Times' Sunday Judy-Culpa, Judy Miller said of her woeful pre-war reporting: "WMD -- I got it totally wrong... The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sorry-judy-everybody-_b_9239.html

Hilarious stuff Judy... So, you and all of those wall to wall experts polluting the public space with your fairy stories at the time, all got it utterly and completely wrong <gulp!>

I mean, Judy, how credible is that? No, really?

You a big fan of Arianna Huffington?

 

[bigfish]

You a big fan of Arianna Huffington?

Not at all... but so what?

 

[oi2002]

Bobby offers up a Stratfor article by George Friedman:

Ultimately, the Plame affair points to a fundamental problem in intelligence. As those who have been in the field have told us, the biggest fear is that someone back in the home office will bring the operation down. Sometimes it will be a matter of state: sacrificing a knight for advantage on the chessboard. Sometimes it is a parochial political battle back home. Sometimes it is carelessness, stupidity or cruelty. This is when people die and lives are destroyed. But the real damage, if it happens often enough or no one seems to care, will be to the intelligence system. If the agent determines that his well-being is not a centerpiece of government policy, he won't remain an agent long.

And ultimately that's any soldier's dilemma. Perhaps that's a good reason not to be governed by warlike men who energetically strove to avoid service when it was their turn.

 

[oi2002]

Jan Frel on Alternet has this

I just got this e-mail from a Democratic House member's staffer with tons of good dirt on the Plame investigation. I'm reprinting it whole cloth to share all, and show that while these Hill staffers are well-informed, they sure could use some capitalization classes.

Among the things I hadn't seen before:

-Fred Flights, an assistant to John Bolton, is a named name who could be indicted.

-Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been suggested as replacements for Dick Cheney.

-Colin Powell told John McCain he showed the infamous memo with Plame's identity on it two just two people; Dick Cheney and George Bush.

-Fitzgerald is looking at the precedent set from the indictment of Tricky Dick's veep Spiro Agnew to pursue against Cheney.

 

[oi2002]

Steve Clemons eagerly awaits a New Yorker article:

The Bush administration is bracing for a powerful new attack by Brent Scowcroft, the respected national security adviser to the first President George Bush.

He also has this with a piece by Chris Nelson commenting on Col. Lawrence Wilkerson recent carpet bombing of the Bush camp.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Meanwhile, Jack Balkin thinks Bush is going to pardon any staffers who might be tempted to incriminate him if they were indicted for anything serious.

If important persons in the Bush Administration are indicted, and there is a significant danger that revelations damaging to the President will surface, don't be surprised if the President uses his ace in the hole-- the pardon power. Some might argue that the President simply wouldn't dare; others will insist that he would be impeached if he tries it. But what the President is likely to do depends on the alternatives if he doesn't act, and remember, the Congress is controlled by members of his own party, not by the opposition as was the case during the Clinton Presidency. This president has a knack for self-preservation; and if the pardon power is the best alternative he has, you can be sure that he will use it.

source

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Steve Clemons eagerly awaits a New Yorker article:

He also has this with a piece by Chris Nelson commenting on Col. Lawrence Wilkerson recent carpet bombing of the Bush camp.

I followed that link back and found Wilkerson's speech. It's a riot.

<snip> I don’t know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

<snip> But if you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book.

In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. It all happened because of the end of the Cold War. Harlan will tell you how many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department did we have in 1988 and how many do we have now? And they’re always working together.

source

 

[nino_savatte]

Karl Rove and Scooter Libby may be indicted and resign. Rove has done his job, expanded the Republican majority in 2002 and helped get Bush reelected in 2004. Libby demise is no big deal.

If they were responsible for outing a CIA agent then I hope they get the punishment they deserve.

All America all the crime. Rove is crook cast in a Machiavellian mould. Scooter Libby has a silly playground name and Tom DeLay is going down.

Next?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Watergate felon John Dean reckons that expecting indictments in this case is being way too optimistic. His argument is that the White House would just need to claim that they thought national security required them to lie and smear people and out CIA agents, and then they'd be untouchable.

He does however seem to think that perjury charges could be viable if Rove and/or Libby lied to the feds and got caught doing it.

It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.

In short, I cannot imagine any of them being indicted, unless they were acting for reasons other than national security. Because national security is such a gray area of the law, come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax, as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington Office and returns to Chicago.

In short, I think the frenzy is about to end -- and it will not go any further. Unless, of course, these folks were foolish enough to give false statements, perjure themselves or suborn perjury, or commit obstruction of justice. If they were so stupid, Patrick Fitzgerald must stay and clean house.

source

 

[nino_savatte]

Shame, I was hoping for some high profile scalps.

 

[oi2002]

Just to add to the shitstorm Brent Scowcroft has splashed down.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Reuters are more or less saying that Bush's closest advisor Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby are going to be indicted in the next few days, possibly for violating US espionage laws, probably for perjury and obstruction of justice, maybe also for conspiracy. source

AP provide a useful summary of the case prior to any indictments source

The Sunday Times, thinks Libby is the most likely target for indictments due to his unsubtle attempts to suborn perjury from his close friend and eager conduit for deliberate lies about Saddam's WMD, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, but that he acted on behalf of and got the info on Valerie Plame from Vice President Richard Cheney. source

I just did a quick scan of Free Republic and the freepers are shitting themselves and yelling at each other about this stuff. The consensus there seems to be that Bush should use his powers as president to pardon all of them before they start ratting on each other and him to save their skins.

If he does that, and the (deeply pissed off) Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale who I was quoting earlier on this thread thinks that's a very real possibility, then that might make the 2006 mid-term congressional elections quite interesting. If Bush loses control of congress, and his poll ratings are already in the toilet and falling, then he and his cronies can be impeached.

Still, all of this is just premature specualtion, let's see what next week brings eh? I do hope that someone turns the light on these cockroaches though, because Blair and Aleister Campbell seem to have been up to their necks in the same pack of lies and the same kinds of campaigns to destroy their critics. Which means that if the investigations in the US get deep enough and the wall of lies and mafia style intimidation crumbles, then perhaps Dr David Kelly might get some sort of justice at last ...

At the very least though, this is going to make the architects of the Iraq war very uncomfortable, even if they somehow manage to avoid going to jail.

 

[newharper]

Reuters again

"In a preview of how Republicans would counter charges against top administration officials by Fitzgerald, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas brushed aside an indictment for perjury -- rather than for the underlying crime of outing a covert operative -- as a "technicality."

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" she suggested Fitzgerald may merely be trying to show that "two years' of investigation was not a waste of time and dollars.""

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Media Matters is proving to be an excellent source on the disinformation campaign from the White House and its tame media sources.

See e.g. Top CIA leak investigation falsehoods

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Reuters again

"In a preview of how Republicans would counter charges against top administration officials by Fitzgerald, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas brushed aside an indictment for perjury -- rather than for the underlying crime of outing a covert operative -- as a "technicality."

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" she suggested Fitzgerald may merely be trying to show that "two years' of investigation was not a waste of time and dollars.""

Hilariously, some US blogger just pointed out that this is what she was saying during the Clinton impeachment.

Lying is a moral wrong. Perjury is a lie told under oath that is legally wrong....Willful, corrupt, and false sworn testimony before a Federal grand jury is a separate and distinct crime under applicable law and is material and perjurious if it is 'capable' of influencing the grand jury in any matter before it, including any collateral matters that it may consider. See, Title 18, Section 1623, U.S. Code, and Federal court cases interpreting that Section.

The President's testimony before the Federal grand jury was fully capable of influencing the grand jury's investigation and was clearly perjurious.

source

So evidently perjury is really important stuff when it's a matter of having your dick sucked, but a trivial matter when it's a matter of starting disastrous wars on the basis of lies about WMD and trashing your own country's WMD intelligence capability to attack a critic.

 

[newharper]

Hilariously, some US blogger just pointed out that this is what she was saying during the Clinton impeachment. source

So evidently perjury is really important stuff when it's a matter of having your dick sucked, but a trivial matter when it's a matter of starting disastrous wars on the basis of lies about WMD and trashing your own country's WMD intelligence capability to attack a critic.

You are clearly lacking the necessary moral fibre

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Maybe so. I do hope there are indictments though, and specifically ones that dig into the details of the Niger Uranium fakes. It looks like the UK may have been intimately involved in promoting it. Have a look at this stuff from Seymour Hersh from a couple of years back:

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and that “the Brits placed more stock in them than we did.” It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that “something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.”

source

The Butler report said in effect that the UK took the Niger documents in good faith, but both ambassador Wilson and the IAEA evidently believed otherwise.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

(same source)

 

[laptop]

the prosecutor is expected to make an announcement before Friday, the final day of the term of his grand jury. In the past, the grand jury has met on Wednesdays and Fridays.

this link may work...

And here's their take on the smokescreen:

As the White House braced for a decision by Mr. Fitzgerald, Republicans began suggesting that they would pursue a strategy of minimizing any charges as technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecution.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation to the case of Martha Stewart, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."

So perjury and lying to Congress and the people is no more than "something she said"? Henceforth known as "the T.A.T.U. defense"