Rove was the source of the Plame leak... so it appears

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I assume the basis for the conclusion the "leaks" Inman refers to were in fact "leaks," is that the information was disseminated to the public and was confidential. If you are going to question whether the information was (a) disseminated, or (b) confidential, state your question, and we can look into it.

I question whether anything was: (a.) disseminated since the article makes NO reference to any actual leaks but only claims "leaks."
(b) confidential since the only reference he does make is to a book cleared for publication by the CIA.

Because Inman provides an answer to neither of those questions how can he be "hilighting" anything? To claim "hilight" is a valid term for Inman's column would require you to defend the statement "Michael Moore essentially hilights the way the Saudis were flown out of the country the day after 911." as not being editorial in nature.

Your assumption is that Inman can claim "leaks" but your standard is it would be wrong for anyone to claim "covert" without proving it to the point of an impossibility.

The overwhelming evidence points to Plame being "covert". Because no one here can prove it to your impossible standard doesn't change it. A reasonable person based on the evidence known at this time would conclude that Plame was "covert." You might as well be arguing that no one can prove the sky is blue. You might have a valid technical point but it is nothing but an attempt to place an unreasonable standard for something that is pretty well shown at this point.

SInce when do people on the left of the political, philosophical spectrum NOT consider intent to be important?

Oh, please. You are a lawyer, Walk and chew gum at the same time, will ya?

cicerone imposter wrote:

Not enogh Americans are challenging this administration. The followng was sent to me by a friend.

More evidence to me that liberals love to criticize, but apparently incapable of solving the problem. Their solution: Show how much you love your country .... challenge the administration.

David Corn
1 hour, 14 minutes ago
The Nation -- Another part of the save-Rove cover story is not holding.

Once the Plame/ CIA leak became big (mainstream-media) news in September 2003--when word hit that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak, which had appeared in a Bob Novak column two months earlier--friends of the White House, including Novak, started saying that Valerie Wilson wasn't really under cover at the CIA and, thus, the disclosure of her employment at the CIA wasn't worth a federal case (or investigation). They claimed that no big wrong had occurred, and this argument also conveniently offered any leaker a legal defense. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a government official can only be prosecuted for disclosing information identifying a "covert agent" whose cover the United States government was taking steps to protect. White House allies asserted that while Valerie Wilson may have technically been a clandestine CIA official, in practice she wasn't. So all this bother over the leak was much ado about nothing.

Novak, for example, downplayed Valerie Wilson's covert status in an October 1, 2003 column, in which he vaguely described how he had originally learned of her connection to the CIA. He noted that after a senior administration official told him that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, he called the CIA:

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

Bush-backers have cited this paragraph to argue that the CIA didn't do much to protect Valerie Wilson's cover. I've heard GOP lawyer Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the Intelligence Identities Act, claim that Novak's exchange with the CIA is proof that the CIA was not taking serious measures to preserve Wilson's cover--which means the law she helped concoct does not apply in the case of this leak.

Should Novak be taken at his word on this point? Until now, the public only knew of his side of his conversation with the CIA. But The Washington Post published a piece on Wednesday that provides the CIA's version of this exchange. And it is significantly different from Novak's account. The paper reports,

[Bill] Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission [to Niger taken by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson] and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

So how many contradictions can you find? Novak indicated he had one substantive conversation with a CIA official about Valerie Wilson and he received no clear signal that revealing her name would cause any significant trouble. Harlow said there were two conversations and that in each one he warned Novak about using her name. (Harlow also said he told Novak that Valerie Wilson had not authorized her husband's trip. Remember, several Rove defenders have maintained that when Rove spoke to Time's Matt Cooper--and told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and had authorized his trip to Niger--he was merely trying to make sure that Cooper published an accurate account of what happened. Yet the CIA says she did not authorize this trip. Rove was feeding Cooper misleading information.)

Your desperation to prove Plame is a covert agent is evident.

I'd be interested to hear you articulate ANY evidence that points to Plame being a "covert agent." My "impossible standard" is simply the definition under the law. I didn't write this particular law, so you really shouldn't refer to it as MY standard ... .blame Congress.

Joe Conason
The New York Observer
07.28.05 Printer-friendly version
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Republicans ready to slime Fitzgerald
For GOP, the best defense remains a good offense

Under the harsh but savvy tutelage of Karl Rove, Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their adherence to a venerable cliché: In politics, as in sports and warfare, the best defense is always a good offense -- and the more offensive, the better. It's an effective strategy, as John Kerry and many other hapless victims have learned, and at this point also a highly predictable one.
Circled in a bristling perimeter around the White House, the friends and allies of Mr. Rove can soon be expected to fire their rhetorical mortars at Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the White House exposure of C.I.A. operative Valerie Wilson. Indeed, the preparations for that assault began months ago in the editorial columns of The Wall Street Journal, which has tarred Mr. Fitzgerald as a "loose cannon" and an "unguided missile."

Evidently Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, will lead the next foray against the special prosecutor. This week the Senator's press office announced his plan to hold hearings on the Fitzgerald probe. That means interfering with an "ongoing investigation," as the White House press secretary might say, but such considerations won't deter the highly partisan Kansan.

Of course, it was Mr. Rove's aggressively partisan style that first sparked the scandal now threatening to ruin him, back when he and other Bush administration officials "outed" Ms. Wilson in an attempt to discredit her dissenting husband during the summer of 2003. Had they not decided to leak classified information for partisan purposes, there would be no grand jury pondering indictments today.

Such ironies won't discourage the Rove Republicans from pursuing the scorched-earth strategy that has served them so well, however. Nor will those politicians and pundits pause to consider how odd their complaints about an overreaching special prosecutor will sound, emanating from once-fervent supporters of former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and his Whitewater legal jihad.

From their perspective, it's all part of the same cynical game. If Mr. Starr was subject to sharp criticism, then Mr. Fitzgerald should be a legitimate target, too. They won't remember how they once decried Mr. Starr's critics for "obstructing justice."

Defenders of the Bush White House have every right to whine about the Fitzgerald probe and the habitual excess of special counsels, no matter how lustily they once cheered the Starr inquisition. But while they'll ignore the obvious differences, with characteristic hypocrisy, that doesn't mean we have to.

The most telling contrast can be found in the matters under investigation. Mr. Starr spent tens of millions of dollars trying to prove wrongdoing by the Clintons in a defunct, money-losing land development that ended several years before they entered the White House. Somehow the Republicans -- and certain news organizations -- became convinced that those meaningless events raised questions of great national urgency.

Mr. Fitzgerald isn't looking into musty real-estate deals. He is investigating the alleged misuse of classified information by White House officials to silence a critic, and their apparent cover-up of that potentially very serious crime. Those obscure real-estate dealings in rural Arkansas probably didn't compromise national security, while the exposure of a C.I.A. official and her corporate cover may well have done so.

There is no partisan issue here. Mr. Fitzgerald is a Republican appointee, named by a Republican Justice Department to investigate alleged misconduct in a Republican administration, at the urging of a Republican President and his C.I.A. director. Mr. Starr was a Republican, appointed by a Republican-dominated judicial panel to investigate alleged misconduct by a Democratic President and his aides.

Mr. Fitzgerald is not only a Republican; he is also a highly competent prosecutor. Mr. Starr had no experience as a prosecutor, yet he was selected to replace another highly competent Republican prosecutor, Robert Fiske, who was deemed insufficiently eager to indict the Clintons for nonexistent crimes.

Mr. Fitzgerald has no known conflicts of interest in pursuing potential crimes committed by White House aides (unless it's a conflict to embarrass the President who appointed him to his current post as U.S. Attorney for northern Illinois). When Mr. Starr was appointed, he was burdened by several conflicts with the Clinton administration, including civil lawsuits where he had taken the side of President Clinton's opponents.

Finally, there's an issue of investigative duration. If Mr. Fitzgerald seeks to extend the term of the grand jury sitting in Washington, which expires next October, Republicans will instantly complain that this has all dragged on long enough and must be wrapped up forthwith.

Actually, the special counsel has pursued the Wilson leak for well under two years. The Whitewater investigation continued fruitlessly for five years, continually changing from one topic and target to another, and should have concluded long before its theme shifted from savings-and-loan shenanigans to sexual indiscretions.

If only they were candid, the Rove Republicans would say that was then, this is now -- and ethical consistency is strictly for losers.

July 28, 2005
Case of C.I.A. Officer's Leaked Identity Takes New Turn
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, July 26 - In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband's mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.

The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, "an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention" to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV "because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in 2002 at the request of the C.I.A. to look into reports about Iraqi efforts to buy nuclear materials. He later accused the administration of twisting intelligence about the nuclear ambitions of Iraq, prompting an angry response from the White House.

Mr. Pincus did not write about the exchange with the administration official until October 2003, and The Washington Post itself has since reported little about it. The newspaper's most recent story was a 737-word account last Sept. 16, in which the newspaper reported that Mr. Pincus had testified the previous day about the matter, but only after his confidential source had first "revealed his or her identity" to Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel conducting the C.I.A. leak inquiry.

Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus's own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Mr. Pincus's most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

Mr. Pincus has said he will not identify his source until the source does so. But his account and those provided by other reporters sought out by Mr. Fitzgerald in connection with the case provide a fresh window into the cast of individuals other than Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby who discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters.

In addition to Mr. Pincus, the reporters known to have been pursued by the special prosecutor include Mr. Novak, whose column of July 14, 2003, was the first to identify Ms. Wilson, by her maiden name, Valerie Plame; Mr. Cooper, who testified before a grand jury on the matter earlier this month; Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and who was interviewed by the prosecutor last year; Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic reporter for The Post, who was also interviewed last year, and Judith Miller of The New York Times, who is now in jail for refusing to testify about the matter. It is not known whether Mr. Novak has testified or been interviewed on the matter.

Both Mr. Pincus, who covers intelligence matters for The Post, and Mr. Russert have continued to report on the investigation after being interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald about their conversations with government officials.

Mr. Pincus wrote in the Nieman Reports article that he had agreed to answer questions from Mr. Fitzgerald last fall about his July 12, 2003, conversation only after "it turned out that my source, whom I still cannot identify publicly, had in fact disclosed to the prosecutor that he was my source, and he talked to the prosecutor about our conversation."

In identifying Ms. Wilson and her role, Mr. Novak attributed that account to two senior Bush administration officials. One of those officials was Mr. Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, according to people close to Mr. Rove, who have said he merely confirmed information that Mr. Novak already had.

But the identity of Mr. Novak's original source, whom he has described as "no partisan gunslinger," remains unknown.

Mr. Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote about the matter several days after Mr. Novak's column appeared, has written and said publicly that he told a grand jury that Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove were among his sources. But Mr. Cooper has also said that there may have been others.

Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter. She has refused to testify in response to a court order directing her to testify in response to a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald seeking her testimony about a conversation with a specified government official between June 6, 2003, and June 13, 2003.

During that period, Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.

The four reporters known to have been interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald or to have appeared before the grand jury have said that they did so after receiving explicit permission from their sources, most notably Mr. Libby, who was the subject of the interviews involving Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler, Mr. Pincus and Mr. Cooper. They have declined to elaborate on their statements, citing Mr. Fitzgerald's request that they and others not speak publicly about the matter.

Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler and Mr. Pincus have indicated in statements released by their news organizations that their conversations with Mr. Libby were not about Ms. Wilson.

In his article in the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, Mr. Pincus wrote that he did not write about Ms. Wilson when he first heard the account "because I did not believe it true that she had arranged" Mr. Wilson's trip.

Mr. Pincus first disclosed the July 12, 2003, conversation with an administration official in an Oct. 12, 2003, article in The Washington Post, but did not mention in that article that he himself had been the recipient of the information. He wrote in Nieman Reports that he did not believe the person who spoke to him was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get him to write about Mr. Wilson.

David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.

Who IS THIS THIRD PERSON? Who is Ledeen? And why does not Pincus not reveal the name of this person, if this person has already confirmed to Fitzgerald that he or she had the referenced conversation with Pincus? And why is Fitzgerald letting him do this?

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Your desperation to prove Plame is a covert agent is evident.

I'd be interested to hear you articulate ANY evidence that points to Plame being a "covert agent." My "impossible standard" is simply the definition under the law. I didn't write this particular law, so you really shouldn't refer to it as MY standard ... .blame Congress.

Facts we know so far that are not in dispute....

CIA lawyers determined that revealing Plame's name was a possible violation of US law.
DoJ lawyers determined that revealing Plame's name was a possible violation of US law.
US Code states that willfully revealing the name of covert agent is a violation of US law.
US prosecutor Fitzgerald and the GJ have continued to think there is a possible violation of law.
Papers filed with Court and a judge's ruling state there is the very real threat to national security from this investigation.
Plame worked for Brewster and Jennings as a NOC.
Several different present and former CIA officials have stated that Plame was covert.
An official has stated that when called for confirmation about Plame by Novak he checked her status and it was undercover.
Plame worked under cover as an energy consultant and traveled to energy conferences around the world according to sources.
We have no evidence of when she last attended a conference overseas but those that determined a possible crime do have that evidence.

Logical conclusion. The overwhelming known facts point to Plame being covert and covered under the law. Any reasonable person presented with these facts would make the same conclusion. There is a remote possibility she might not be covered but the overwhelming probability is that she was, based on findings by people with access to more facts. The only desperation is yours in questioning whether it has been proven or not. Reasonable people would say it has unless you can provide something to dispute the above known items. The preponderance of evidence says she was covert.

The only possible argument against her being covert is that she wasn't covert in the last 5 years. An argument that requires proof that can't be revealed since all Plame's COVERT operations would be classified. The problem Tico is that you want proof as required by law in a setting that can't provide it. You are not a defense attorney and A2K is not a courtroom. If this was a court of law your argument would have been shredded long ago by expert testimony and documents. Items not available here but very available to those that have already made the determination to pursue a crime.

Your argument is a classic lawyer's trick to try to seed doubt Tico but it doesn't fly in this case. Too many facts point to the opposite. The better defense is that Rove and others didn't "knowingly" reveal the information.