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

I am going to make my mid-year prediction now:

If Fitzgerald exhonerates Karl Rove of any wrongdoing, and I believe he will, a year from now Chrissee and her buddies will be still punctuating arguments on all sorts of topics with "Karl Rove outed a covert CIA agent."

DontTreadOnMe wrote:

.... email saying that, in august, mars is going to be closer to earth than it has been in something like 65,000 years. it will be nearly as visable as the full moon. ...

Akshully, Mars and Terra were at their closest in around 50,000 yerars 2 years ago, in late summer of '03, and much then was made of the event. The current email concerning Mars' impending Halloween "Closest Approach" is, to put in very few letters, B.S....

The "not a covert agent" canard was put to rest long ago. LOL

Chrissee wrote:

The "not a covert agent" canard was put to rest long ago. LOL

Really? By whom?

The issue of whether or not Valerie Plame was a covert agent at the time of the disclosure is one of the key unanswered questions in this matter.

The other is why is Judith Miller sitting in jail, and whom is she protecting?

Where did Finn go???

I believe we can put his canard to bed finally:


From the new isue of Time magazine:

Quote:

But while she may no longer have been a clandestine operative, she was still under protected status. A U.S. official told TIME that Plame was indeed considered covert for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection law. And even if the leak was not illegal, intelligence officials argue, it is not defensible. "I'm beyond disgusted," a CIA official said last week. I am especially angry about the b_______ explanations that she is not a covert agent. That is an official status, and there are lots of people in this building who are on that status. It's not up to the Republican Party to determine when that status will end for an agent."

Whatever the damage to Plame, there remains the cost paid by the CIA generally. In the wake of the disclosure, foreign intelligence services were known to have retraced her steps and contacts to discover more about how the CIA operates in their countries. Outside of a James Bond movie, spies rarely steal secrets themselves; they recruit foreigners to do it for them. That often means bribing a government official to break his country's laws and pass state secrets to the CIA. "It becomes extremely hard if you're working overseas and recruiting [foreign] agents knowing that some sloth up in the Executive Branch for political reasons can reveal your identity," says Jim Marcinkowski, who served four years in the agency and is now the deputy city attorney for Royal Oak, Mich. "Certainly this kind of information travels around the world very quickly. And it raises the level of fear of coming in contact with the United States for any reason."

Ticomaya wrote:

Chrissee wrote:

The "not a covert agent" canard was put to rest long ago. LOL

Really? By whom?

The issue of whether or not Valerie Plame was a covert agent at the time of the disclosure is one of the key unanswered questions in this matter.

The other is why is Judith Miller sitting in jail, and whom is she protecting?

Go back and read the threads. It has been clearly established that Plame is covered under the act. Of course, no amount of evidence will convince those obstinate apologists in denial.

Now stop wasting your time and mine and bone up on the facts.

Thomas writes

Quote:

interpret this as Mr. Bush raising the threshold at which he is willing to fire the person who outed Valery Plame. He will fire any staff member who "committed a crime". But if a staff member has only leaked the information and managed not to commit a crime in the process, the president would keep him. By itself, outing a CIA agent for partisan gain appears to seem insufficiently improper to the commander in chief for firing the person who did it.

There is another way to interpret the President's words.

Even if it develops that the CIA considers her to have been "under protected status," or even if the CIA uses the term "covert agent" to refer to Ms. Plame's status as she came and went from her desk job at Langley, that doesn't mean she is in fact a "covert agent" as that term is defined by Sec. 426 of the IIPL.

A U.S. official told TIME that Plame was indeed considered covert for the purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection law.

... but I believe most Americans, including republicans, are beginning to realize this administration is poison for America and the world.

POLITICS AND POLICY

Memo Underscored Issue of Shielding Plame's Identity

By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and JOHN D. MCKINNON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 19, 2005; Page A3

A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document.

A special prosecutor is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by intentionally outing a covert intelligence operative. Investigators are trying to determine if the memo, dated June 10, 2003, was how White House officials learned that Valerie Wilson was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.


News that the memo was marked for its sensitivity emerged as President Bush yesterday appeared to backtrack from his 2004 pledge to fire any member of his staff involved in the leaking of the CIA agent's name. In a news conference yesterday that followed disclosures that his top strategist, Karl Rove, had discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with two reporters, Mr. Bush adopted a different formulation, specifying criminality as the standard for firing.

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan later disputed the suggestion that the president had shifted his position.

The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may also be looking at whether other crimes -- such as perjury, obstruction of justice or leaking classified information -- were committed.

On July 6, 2003, former diplomat Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, disputing administration arguments that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The following day, President Bush and top cabinet officials left for Africa, and the memo was aboard Air Force One.

The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson's involvement in her husband's trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn't be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn't specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.

Generally, the federal government has three levels of classified information -- top secret, secret and confidential -- all indicating various levels of "damage" to national security if disclosed. There also is an unclassified designation -- indicating information that wouldn't harm national security if shared with the public -- but that wasn't the case for the material on the Wilsons prepared by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It isn't known what level of classification was assigned to the information in the memo.

MORE



• Text of Bush-Singh Press Conference
07/18/05

• Storm Persists Over CIA Leak Probe
07/18/05

FROM THE ARCHIVES



• Memo May Aid Leak Probe
10/17/03




Who received the memo, which was prepared for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and how widely it was circulated are issues as Mr. Fitzgerald tries to pinpoint the origin of the leak of Ms. Wilson's identity. According to the person familiar with the document, it didn't include a distribution list. It isn't known if President Bush has seen the memo.

Mr. Fitzgerald has subpoenaed the phone logs from Air Force One for the week of the Africa tour, which precedes the revelation of Ms. Wilson's CIA identity in a column by Robert Novak on July 14. In that piece, Mr. Novak identified Valerie Plame, using Ms. Wilson's maiden name, saying that "two senior administration officials" had told him that Ms. Wilson suggested sending her husband to Niger.

Mr. Novak attempted to reach Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, in the days before his column appeared. However, Mr. Fleischer didn't respond to Mr. Novak's inquiries, according to a person familiar with his account. Mr. Fleischer, who has since left the administration, is one of several officials who testified before the grand jury.

In an October 2003 article on the memo, The Wall Street Journal reported that it details a meeting in early 2002 in which CIA officials discussed how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium ore from Niger. Ms. Wilson, an agent working on issues related to weapons of mass destruction, recommended her husband, an expert on Africa, to travel to Niger to investigate the matter.

White House officials had been warning reporters off the notion that the trip to Niger was ordered by Vice President Dick Cheney, as Mr. Wilson had suggested. Emails and a first-person account published this week of his grand-jury testimony by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper support this notion. The grand jury is set to expire in October in this case, though its tenure could be extended for six months.

It is possible that reporters learned Ms. Wilson's identity from government officials who hadn't seen the memo. Mr. Cooper has testified and written that he was first told of Mr. Wilson's wife by Mr. Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff. Mr. Rove didn't identify Ms. Wilson by name. Similarly, one of Mr. Cooper's other sources, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, said he had heard Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, but he didn't identify her any further, according to Mr. Cooper.

The fact that two top White House officials discussed a CIA agent with reporters has prompted a furor in Washington, with Democrats calling for the firing of Mr. Rove.

A new ABC News poll signaled how the matter has damaged the administration's credibility -- and the political peril Mr. Rove still faces. Just 25% of Americans say the White House is fully cooperating with the federal investigation into the leak of Ms. Wilson's identity, down from about half when the investigation began nearly two years ago. Moreover, 75% said Mr. Rove should lose his job if he leaked classified information. The poll of 1,008 adults, conducted July 13-17, has a margin of error of three percentage points.

kuvasz wrote:

the appeals court decision was left standing.

Of course the Appellate Court's decision was "left standing." To quote our sage Chrissee: "Duh." Why would I try and twist it -- that much is obvious ... and I should point out that is about the only correct statement you made in your effort to explain the unknown rationale of the Supreme Court in its decision to not grant cert in this particular matter. The "twisting" here is being done by you as you try and assign meaning to the very routine and discretionary function of the Supreme Court in deciding whether or not to grant cert.

Quote:

you can twist it any other way your right wing heart desires but you are going to have to accept that the Supreme Court decided that the appeals court decision was decided correctly. otherwise, they would have stepped in and taken the case.

Again, I will ask you to provide ANY substantiation for this claim. In the absence of any evidence to back up your claim, I will accept your statement that you are purely guessing here, because you really don't know what you're talking about.

The fact that the Supreme Court decided to not grant cert does NOT mean it decided the underlying matter was decided correctly.

Quote:

by not accepting the case, the Supreme Court found the of the circumstances illustrated by the amicus brief filed by the media lawyers without merit vis-a-vis the legitimacy of the Grand Jury.

Really? Let me ask you this: When in those rare instances the Supreme Court actually decides to grant certiorari, is it your position that in doing so, it has decided that the arguments of the appellant(s) -- and in fact the arguments of any amici curiae who may have filed briefs with the lower court -- are meritorious? Given your demonstrated limited understanding of this process, it would not surprise me in the least ...

Quote:

that is why the Appeals Court sent Miller to jail. the fact that Miller sits in a jail today is prima fascia evidence that the Supreme Court concurred with the Appeals Court that there as sufficient evidence that a crime had been committed. it rejects the argument that Plame was no longer covered by the law Fitzgerald was using to sit the Grand Jury.

That statement might be even more ridiculous. The fact that Miller is in jail is because the Court of Appeals' ruling -- that any qualified reporter's privilege was overcome on the particular facts of this case -- stands. By refusing certiorari, the Supreme Court does not concur with the findings of a lower court. If you continue to insist otherwise you are only showing the breadth of your lack of knowledge on this particular subject.

The fact that the Supreme Court decided to not grant cert does NOT mean it decided the underlying matter was decided correctly.

"there should be abundant concern that the CIA may have initiated this investigation out of embarrassment over revelations of its own shortcomings."