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

There is no time given for when the phone number for the businessman is given to the CIA.

However, considering that warehouse was examined in December 2002, and Wilson went to Niger in February of 2002, it seems likely the phone number became available after Wilson's trip. Unless the CIA had a tip about uranium in a warehouse and did not bother to examine the warehouse for a full nine months, which seems unlikely.

Cy,
Ditto. Link doesn't work

here, re: analysis on the data on allegations niger selling press cakes, baker report "secret sources".

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000930.html

Very interesting stuff there.

http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=1&ColumnsName=miv

This is Molly Ivins' most recent column, as an independent syndicated columnist. She has known George Bush since high school, worked as a political journalist for the major newspapers in Houston, Dallas, and Ft. Worth. Written two best selling books, one on the Bush Texas campaign.
If you would like, you can click on About the Author to check out her credentials.

I would say that her comments on the Rove business are fairly tepid, as she can let loose with some real zingers. My guess is that she has said it all before (re: Rove) in other places, in other times.

Yeah, it was the same link as a few pages back.

Let's try it again tho

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10016

Cycloptichorn

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/intel.officers.letter.pdf

Anyone who claims that it wasn't a big deal to out Plame should read the above link.

I am inclined to believe that these people know slightly better than you or I who needs protecting and who does not.

Cycloptichorn

I've had a couple of pm's asking about the source on the Wilson / phone number issue.

It isn't from the 9/11 report, its from the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq

I found it at FINDLAW. Just go about 1/4th of the way down the page, after the letters and memo's and you'll see it. Click on the Niger (section II) heading for the Wilson info.

Nope, link still doesn't work. Message says that it isn't in the section 'root'. Try Back and look some more, but my Back was not clickable so it didn't apply to me. Perhaps the link is relevant to your machine only?

Of course she needed protection.

The Left continues to hope for the downfall of Karl Rove and possibly George Bush based on their insistance that Joseph Wilson told the truth, that Saddam Hussein was not seeking yellow cake in Niger (or anywhere else), and that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent. After looking at the controversy for weeks now, I have come to the conclusion that the real story is here:

Jonathan Gurwitz: Like Felt, Rove exposed wrongdoing to the public
Web Posted: 07/20/2005 12:00 AM CDT
San Antonio Express-News

Karl Rove ?- whistleblower, patriot and hero. That's an epitaph you won't read with regard to the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. But those are precisely the words that dominated commentary about Watergate leaker Mark Felt little more than a month ago.

Felt, of course, did the country a great service by secretly revealing to the media the cancer that was growing on the Nixon presidency.

But Felt, it should be remembered, had more than simply altruistic motives for doing so. Richard Nixon slighted Felt by passing over him for the top job at the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover's death. That indignity was magnified by the efforts of elected officials to rein in and reform the FBI after Hoover's long and abusive tenure.

But there was more. As the third- and then second-ranking official at the bureau during this tumultuous period, Felt was in charge of uncovering the source of the Watergate leaks and silencing Deep Throat, whom he knew to be himself.

Yet Felt used his authority to direct the FBI investigation toward Richard Gerstein, a county prosecutor in Miami who was investigating the Watergate money trail. Does a hero and patriot put the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency on the hunt after a man he knows to be completely innocent?

We now know, from Time magazine journalist Matthew Cooper's own words, that Rove did not disclose the name of a covert CIA officer. What Rove did tell Cooper was that former Ambassador and Kerry campaign adviser Joseph Wilson's wife had a hand in sending Wilson to investigate claims Saddam Hussein wanted to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger.

In another time, the story here would be one of potential nepotism at the highest and most sensitive levels of government, or of the conflicts of interest that can arise when members of the intelligence community become active participants in partisan politics.

Or the story might be about the investigations conducted by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee or Britain's Butler report confirming that Saddam Hussein was indeed interested in buying uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Or it might be about the fact that, contrary to Wilson's later assertions in the service of the Kerry campaign, his own investigation ?- according to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee ?- "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency reports on the uranium deal."

We also know from Wilson's own book, misleadingly titled "The Politics of Truth," that Plame had not operated overseas under official or non-official cover since at least 1997, when she came back to Washington, married Wilson and had children.

Which means even if Rove acted intentionally and maliciously in 2003 by inferentially disclosing Plame's identity, he statutorily could not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

A violation of the act requires, among other benchmarks, the intentional disclosure of a covert agent "who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States."

So please, let's dispense with the feigned indignation about national security. Where were all these intelligence hawks and experts on classified information when Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, illegally removed from the National Archives and later destroyed copies of a classified document covering the Clinton administration's record against terrorism?

Anyone in a position to do so who didn't castigate Berger in a far more severe manner than Rove or who in Mark Felt saw the savior of the Republic yet perceive in Rove the Antichrist of democracy is hereby sentenced to 40 lashes with a wet subpoena by the court of partisan hypocrisy.

Rove is no hero in the Plame affair, nor is he a felon. He is guilty of handling sensitive information in a careless manner, for which he deserves punishment.

He also deserves credit, not least from journalists, for exposing potential misuses ?- if not outright abuses ?- of positions of power
http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/columnists/jgurwitz/storyindex.html(edited to fix link and typos)

From the letter you linked ....



On this point I clearly agree. They appear to understand that as former CIA analysts they are not qualified to determine whether the IIPA was broken. I wonder if some of you folks ever will ....

If the IIPA needs to be modified, it should be modified.



Why doesn't she do another photo-op in Vanity Fair?

Careful with that axe, Tico.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

According to the Washington Post today, the Solicitor General is arguing in the case of Jose Padilla that the United States is a battlefield in the "war on terror" and therefore the government can hold enemy combatants indefinately even if they are arrested here.

Doesn't that mean that Rove leaked secret information while both on the battlefield and in the service of the Commander-in-Chief? Even if he did not break a law, as the administration consistently tells us, we are at war, and the stakes are higher. Any soldier that reveals secret information while on a battlefield would be sent to the stockade immediately. So how can Rove continue to work at the White House?

An Unlikely Story
An Unlikely Story
Karl Rove's alibi would be easier to believe if he hadn't hidden it from FBI investigators in 2003.
By Murray Waas
Web Exclusive: 07.19.05

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove's first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story.

If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same information.

Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely the result of a hoax. But President Bush had still cited them during a State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a covert status with the agency.

Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and Cooper, about Plame.

The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plame's status has been central to the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; under the law, a government official can only be prosecuted if he or she knew of a person's covert status and "that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent."

But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his use of the term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it appeared to provide legal protection for whoever his source or sources were. And although Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations regarding Plame were largely consistent, they appeared to be self-serving.

It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that Fitzgerald so zealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and Judith Miller of The New York Times, according to sources sympathetic to Fitzgerald. Cooper testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, after earlier having been found in civil contempt for refusing to do so. In contrast, Miller has refused to testify, and is currently serving a sentence in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail.

Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's assertions that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA from a journalist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The New York Times first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson.

The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and reportedly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The report was circulated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling with President Bush to Africa.

Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of Plame's identity from one of the many senior White House officials who read the memo, according to the Times account and attorneys whose clients have testified before the federal grand jury.
----------------------------------------------

Murray Waas is an investigative reporter. He will be reporting further about the Plame grand jury on his blog, Whatever Already.

"So how can Rove continue to work at the White House?"

They can't find a new puppeteer?

Got nothing else to say about their letter, Tico?

About how it is dangerous and wrong to say that someone isn't undercover, just because they work at a desk?

Fox,

That article you posted is, yeah, ridiculous.

Cycloptichorn

BumbleBeeBoogie, your signature is timely and appropriate.

Decreased activity on this thread and absence of headline coverage re Rove this morning suggest that the damage control folks at the White House got the temporary respite they were direly needing through zipping the SC nomination into the foreground. But god knows how many reporters are digging around now on the Plame story and that poses daily dangers.

Like I said on the other thread,

3 days of coverage for the new SC appointee.

Then it's going right back to Rove, b/c the senate won't hold the hearings till September.

I wouldn't worry about it too much; you'll be hearing more about Rove today or tommorrow...

Cycloptichorn

Damn. bumbleBeeBoogie's link stole my thunder. But I 'm going t say it anyway.

According to Foxfyre's link.




So then why all this secrecy? Why didn't Libby call a press conference and Rove call a press conference and say, "That's right. It was me. I said Valerie Plame was the one who got Joseph Wilson the unpaid assignment to that pit, Niger, and I stand by the story. I told this reporter, I told that reporter, I told all those reporters. Me. I did it. And there's nothing wrong with it because she isn't a covert agent.

So whatcha gonna do about it, huh? Nyaaah Nyaaah Nyaaah.

So why didn't they do that? Why didn't we know the identity of Rove for weeks, and of Libby for even longer. Why all this "Who, me?" if nobody has anything to worry about?