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

from a libertarian blog



http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=2155


QANDO - free markets, free people

ehBeth--

That supports what I said. Knowingly is the key to the legal implications. That's what we were talking about.

If you want to take it further and say someone will be fired or impeached, that's a different issue. If Rove talked to a reporter, but didn't say certain things, he and Bush are likely thumbing their noses at everyone on this.

He may have told Bush "I talked to Novak, but I didn't tell him she was an agent." The Bush administration IS allowed to talk to reporters.

There is another guy Novak talked to at the CIA, who told him not to use her name.

We don't know who said what right now.

Wrong on "operative".

I've heard the word used to describe Democrat and Republican rainmakers and such.

He's a Republican operative.... and if people saw her around town and it was an open secret that she worked for the CIA, who would equate that with spy? Don't most people assume spies work in foreign countries?

hi girl! thanks...great piece.

You need to take another look at some of the libertarian blogs, Lash. They're not in agreement with your angle on whether it mattered whether Rove "knew".

But what the heck, you're having fun with this.
Enjoy your weekend.

rove was ...
i did not watch the "mclaughlin group" last night. too bad !
o'donnell seems to be pretty sure of what is going on. if he is incorrect he would certainly have a lot of egg on his face ... at least.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

07.02.2005 Lawrence O'Donnell

Rove Blew CIA Agent's Cover
I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don't expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.

...THE HUFFINTONTON POST...

Well.

We'll see how it goes.

Have a nice weekend!

Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece after the State of the Union address calling out Bush for lying about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger. Wilson was in a position to know, because he had been sent to look into the claim.

After Wilson's op-ed, Robert Novak wrote a column trying to discredit Wilson by implying that he didn't know what he was talking about because he wasn't qualifed to look into the claim. Novak implied Wilson was sent because his wife the CIA agent got him the job.

That was 1) a way to try to discredit Wilson; 2) a way to punish Wilson; 3) a way to try to intimidate others from being critical and 4) (some have speculated) a way to shut down Valerie Plame's investigation of WMDs in Iraq.

Novak claimed two senior sources exposed Plame as an agency operative suggested sending him to Niger. Novak went ahead with his column despite the fact that the CIA had urged him not to disclose her identity.

The White House wanted to undercut his Niger/yellowcake piece in the Times by implying that he really had no expertise. They wanted to make it look like the CIA only hired him because his wife had pull to get him the job.

In Novak's original column, he said Plame was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

It doesn't matter if she rans spies or was a spy herself. If she had what they call "official cover" then she was covert.

Officially, she was an analyst for an energy company. But the CIA clearly wouldn't be investigating if she really didn't work for them. Ergo she's covert.

The key are the words; covert agent. The words covert operation are further defined in the US Code Title 50 Chapter 15 Section 413b as



The key words are where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly. To give some examples from history will be helpful to clear up media and other distortions of differences in programs. Under the Eisenhower Administration, a covert activity took place inside the USSR where certain military activities needed to be verified. The Agency utilized non United States, non English speaking persons to man a non-USA marked prototype plane to land inside the USSR for on the ground verification of the needed information. If caught, the men used were non USA citizens, with no known ties to the United States, hired by a non governmental organization to fly a new prototype aircraft. They had been isolated from other activities and had no knowledge of their true employer. The military activities plus future nuclear weapons benefits from inside the USSR were veified. That is covert.


You cannot be a covert agent unless you are on a covert operation.

Mrs. Wilson's employment was verified by the CIA to Novak. That is a matter of record. It has a legal and operational definition, not the political definition that has been applied to it for partisan purposes by right wing propgandistas.

Her career as a clandestine officer is over. That alone was an act of vengeance towards the Wilson family.

That is but a single point in the illegal disclosure made to Novak and others by White House sources.

The laws that make it a felony to disclose such information is listed below.
It is illegal under the following articles of the US Code of Justice:



http://www.washingtonwatchdog.org/documents/usc/ttl50/c...

Source
(July 26, 1947, ch. 343, title VI, Sec. 601, as added Pub. L.
97-200, Sec. 2(a), June 23, 1982, 96 Stat. 122.)

SHORT TITLE
For short title of this subchapter as the ''Intelligence
Identities Protection Act of 1982'', see section 1 of Pub. L.
97-200, set out as a Short Title of 1982 Amendment note under
section 401 of this title.

SECTION REFERRED TO IN OTHER SECTIONS
This section is referred to in sections 422, 424 of this title;
title 5 section 8312; title 8 section 1101; title 18 section 3239;
title 22 section 2778.[/quote]

http://www.washingtonwatchdog.org/documents/usc/ttl50/c...
http://www.washingtonwatchdog.org/documents/usc/index.h...

The critical remark about Wilson's credentials appears to be one of contention, viz. that Wilson was of lying about whether or not his wife made the recommendation for his trip to Niger. Charges that he lied were made by Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch's additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq.

Wilson's reply to their politically motivated attacks is linked below.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56501-2004Jul16.html



http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/07/16/wilson_letter/index_np.html



I find the apologists for the treasonous behavior of White House "operatives" quite disappointing. Such apologists have repeatedly referred to the public outing of a functioning covert agent as a minor thing. Yet these same people accuse with Old Testament righteousness Joe Wilson as a liar and one who actually outed his wife before Novak did. I would like to see objective substantiation for those claims.

Hi ya Blath! Yur welcome.




Lash, I believe its been established that Plume was CIA covert.

Story released on a Friday night before the 4th of July weekend.

Oh MAN its hard not to be a conspiracy theorist sometimes.

Liar Joe Wilson. What a friggin' liar.

Our Man in Niger
Exposed and discredited, Joe Wilson might consider going backAfter a whirl of TV and radio appearances during which he received high-fives and hearty hugs from producers and hosts (I was in some green rooms with him so this is eyewitness reporting), and a wet-kiss profile in Vanity Fair, he gave birth to a quickie book sporting his dapper self on the cover, and verbosely entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir.

The book jacket talks of his "fearless insight" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and "disarming candor" (which does not extend to telling readers for whom he has been working since retiring early from the Foreign Service). .

For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson says in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)

Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," as he put it. On the basis of this "investigation" he confidently concluded that there was no way Saddam sought uranium from Africa. Oddly, Wilson didn't bother to write a report saying this. Instead he gave an oral briefing to a CIA official.

Oddly, too, as an investigator on assignment for the CIA he was not required to keep his mission and its conclusions confidential. And for the New York Times, he was happy to put pen to paper, to write an op-ed charging the Bush administration with "twisting," "manipulating" and "exaggerating" intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs "to justify an invasion."

In particular he said that President Bush was lying when, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he pronounced these words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

We now know for certain that Wilson was wrong and that Bush's statement was entirely accurate.

The British have consistently stood by that conclusion. In September 2003, an independent British parliamentary committee looked into the matter and determined that the claim made by British intelligence was "reasonable" (the media forgot to cover that one too). Indeed, Britain's spies stand by their claim to this day. Interestingly, French intelligence also reported an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Niger.

.

But that's not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger.

And in recent days, the Financial Times has reported that illicit sales of uranium from Niger were indeed being negotiated with Iraq, as well as with four other states.

According to the FT: "European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq."The Senate report says fairly bluntly that Wilson lied to the media. Schmidt notes that the panel found that, "Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on a document that had clearly been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'"





A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger, interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Another former government official told Wilson that Iran had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. That's the same year that Saddam forced the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Could the former official have meant Iraq rather than Iran? If someone were to try to connect those dots, what picture might emerge?

Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never "fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin."

I was the first to suggest, here on National Review Online a year ago ("Scandal!" and "No Yellowcake Walk"), that Wilson should not have been given this assignment, that he had no training or demonstrated competence as an investigator, that his inquiry had been obviously superficial and that, far from being a "centrist," he was a partisan with an ax to grind. [/i]

But my complaint was really less with Wilson than it was with the CIA for sending him, rather than an experienced spy or investigator, to check out such an important and sensitive matter as whether one of the world's most vicious killers had been trying to buy the stuff that nuclear weapons are made of.

For this, I received a couple of dishonorable mentions in Wilson's memoir. He has a chapter called "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which might be used as a case study for CIA trainees and others who need to understand the fundamental principle of logic that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." In other words, Wilson fails to grasp that because he didn't find proof that Saddam was seeking African uranium does not mean that proof was not there to be found.

In reaction to his "fearless candor" and "disarming insight" about the "sixteen-word lie," Wilson writes that "right-wing hatchet men were being wheeled out to attack me. More ominously, plots were being hatched in the White House that would betray America's national security.

He writes: "Clifford May was first off the mark, spewing uninformed vitriol in a piece in National Review Online blindly operating on the principle that facts, those pesky facts, just do not matter."

Well, facts, those pesky facts do matter and a bipartisan Senate investigative committee has now established that Wilson has had very few in his possession. And, for the record, I was never advised anything about Wilson by anyone serving in the White House, the administration, or the Republican party. I never even had a discussion about him with such folks.

There is much more that could be said about the Wilson affair, and certainly many questions that ought to be both asked and answered. But in the interest of time and space, let me leave you with just one: Now that we know that Mrs. Wilson did recommend Mr. Wilson for the Niger assignment, can we not infer that she was working at CIA headquarters in Langley rather than as an undercover operative in some front business or organization somewhere?



It is against the law to knowingly name an undercover agent. It is not against the law to name a CIA employee who is not an undercover agent

Here's a blueprint for the loons on the Left LOL.

<Rove was right to call the libs losers>

Stradee--

Yes. You're correct. My emphasis is on the probability that Rove or the leaker at the WH (if there is indeed a leaker) did not know she was undercover. They thought she was some average administrative employee working wiht WMD investigation.

They can't be guilty unless they knew she was covert.

"All of that may mean that no White House official actually committed a crime, but that doesn't mean they're in the clear. Woolsey said what White House officials did do was worse than a crime, "it was stupid"...

Lash, I agree.

WH officials have committed a rather huge "explainable" mistake. One of the reasons why Ashcroft recused himself from investigating the charges.

"All of that may mean that no White House official actually committed a crime, but that doesn't mean they're in the clear. Woolsey said what White House officials did do was worse than a crime, "it was stupid"...

Lash, I agree.

WH officials have committed a rather huge "explainable" mistake. One of the reasons why Ashcroft recused himself from investigating the charges.

JW--

That's hilarious!!! LOL!!!!

Stradee--

Guess time will tell if we've got it right. Will be interesting to watch the procession, eh?

Rove is innocent, the leak came from Cheney. Rove is the fall guy.

I keep seeing Bionic Cheney on Saturday Night Live when he talks like that...LOL!!!!

Instead of being in an undisclosed location, he's in a cave getting a Steve Austin operation.

"They can build him better than he was before..."