I am very much afraid, that if one uses the "Mr. Imposter Political Qualification Syndrome" as Mr. Imposter used it on a link to a marvelous essay by John Porhoretz( which utterly destroyed the idea that President Bush lied about Iraq) then Mr. Waas is also to be completely disregarded( as Mr.Imposter suggested that John Podhoretz be disregarded because he was a neo-conservative) since he is on the staff of "The American Prospect"--a magazine founded in 1990 to disseminate LIBERAL ideas.
I am very much afraid that Mr. Imposter and Mr. Cyclopitchorn have made some rather egregious errors.
l. In the forums in which I have participated, the consensus was that any answer to a post which said, as Mr. Imposter commented, "I have outlined why your neo-conservative's claim is bull shet" is a very weak answer, especially when the outlined did not rebut any of Mr. Podhoretz' comments.
2. Mr. Podhoretz took his ideas from documentation. Note footnotes at the end of his presentation.
3. Mr. Cylcopitchorn indicates that there is a difference between an "opinion piece" and "reporting". Indeed there is, but he failed, as Mr> Imposter did, to point out the alleged areas which are just "opinion" and those which are "reporting"
(I am certain that Mr. Cyclopitchorn did not label as "opinion" the fact that the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and France agreed with the judgment that:)
"Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear and missle programs contrary to UN resolutions"
If he does label the statement as "opinion" he should know that it is established fact which I will be happy to reference for him.
(I am certain that Mr. Imposter did not label as "opinion" the fact that all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States, made the conclusion which resulted in the finding two paragraphs above)
If he does label the statement as "opinion" he should know that it is established fact whicvh I will be happy to reference for him.
( I am sure that Mr. Cyclopitchorn did not label as "opinion' the DIRECT QUOTATIONS FROM Senator Reid,Hans Blix, Lawrence Wilkerson, Kenneth Pollack, Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Sandy Berger, William Cohen,Nancy Pelosi, Senator Bob Graham, Senator Carl Levin, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Al Gore, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Robert Byrd)
If Mr. Cyclopitchorn knows that the quotes in Mr. Podhoretz's presentation are inaccurate, I repectfully request that he indicate which ones are inaccurate and then tell why they are inaccurate.
(I am sure that Mr. Imposter did not label as "opinion" the DIRECT QUOTE from the Editorial pages of the Washington Post in Jan. 2001)
If Mr. Imposter knows that the quotes in Mr.Podhoretz's presentation concering the Washington Post Editorial are inaccurate,I respectfully
request that he indicate why it is inaccurate.
I am very much afraid that Mr. Imposter cannot dismiss such evidence with a comment like "bull shet". I am certain that any organizer of a debate would declare such a comment as irrelvant, non-responsive and rather crude.
Perhaps, Mr. Imposter and Mr. Cyclopitchorn did not read the essay carefully enough( they may have not noted that it is carefully footnoted and that the quotes in it are linked to specific individuals--a thing quite easy to check with regards to accuracy--
I will therefore replicate the essay again. I do respectfully request that they re-read it and attempt to rebut it WITH EVIDENCE.
I am very sorry but I cannot accept the comment," bull-shet" as either an appropriate or a conclusive rebuttal.
COMMENTARY
December 2005
Who Is Lying About Iraq?
Norman Podhoretz
Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.
What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.
The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.
This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."
Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that
[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person?-a person, Mr. Libby?-lied or not.
No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting that
[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.
Yet even stipulating?-which I do only for the sake of argument?-that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that
Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and?-yes?-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix?-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past?-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP?-Ammunition Supply Point?-with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson,
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written,
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that
Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.1
But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President
to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush's benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force?-if necessary?-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.2
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that
without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was
hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation.
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that
[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous?-or more urgent?-than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.3
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it
did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding
no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war.4 Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."5
National Journal: Novak Assured Rove He Would Protect Him
National Journal: Novak Assured Rove He Would Protect Him
Robert Novak
By E&P Staff
Published: May 25, 2006 1:20 PM ET
Murray Waas, who has broken so many key stories in the Plame/CIA leak case for the National Journal, has been rather quiet this month, but emerged today with another bombshell.
On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, "columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men," Waas writes.
"Suspicious that Rove and Novak might have devised a cover story during that conversation to protect Rove, federal investigators briefed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on the matter in the early stages of the investigation in fall 2003, according to officials with direct knowledge of those briefings....
"Sources said that Ashcroft received a special briefing on the highly sensitive issue of the September 29 conversation between Novak and Rove because of the concerns of federal investigators that a well-known journalist might have been involved in an effort to not only protect a source but also work in tandem with the president's chief political adviser to stymie the FBI."
According to Waas, Rove testified to the grand jury that during the phone call, Novak said words to the effect: "You are not going to get burned" and "I don't give up my sources." Rove was one of the "two senior administration" officials who were sources for the July 14, 2003, column in which Novak outed Plame as an "agency operative." Rove and Novak had talked about her on July 9.
Rove also told the grand jury, according Waas' sources, "that in the September 29 conversation, Novak referred to a 1992 incident in which Rove had been fired from the Texas arm of President George H.W. Bush's re-election effort; Rove lost his job because the Bush campaign believed that he had been the source for a Novak column that criticized the campaign's internal workings.
"Rove told the grand jury that during the September 29 call, Novak said he would make sure that nothing similar would happen to Rove in the CIA-Plame leak probe. Rove has testified that he recalled Novak saying something like, 'I'm not going to let that happen to you again,' according to those familiar with the testimony."
James Hamilton, an attorney for Novak, said he could not comment. A spokesman for Rove, Mark Corallo, told Waas, "Karl Rove has never urged anyone directly or indirectly to withhold information from the special counsel or testify falsely."
Waas quotes Mark Feldstein, the director of journalism programs at George Washington University: "A journalist's natural instinct is to protect his source. Were there no criminal investigation, it would have been more than appropriate for a reporter to say to a source, 'Don't worry, I'm not going to out you.' But if there is a criminal investigation under way, you can't escape the inference that you are calling to coordinate your stories. You go very quickly from being a stand-up reporter to impairing a criminal investigation."
The rest of the lengthy article can be found at:
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0525nj1.htm
I am very much afraid, Mr. BumbleBeeBoogie, that your source, Mr. Waas, is not acceptable.
I have it on the highest authority( Mr. Imposter, to be precise) that a writer who is clearly partisan cannot be in possession of the truth.
Mr. Podhoretz, who I referenced in his excellent article, was judged by Mr. Imposter to be a neo-conservative, and therefore ineligible to have his opinion considered.
I therefore charge, Mr. Waas, A staff writer for The American Prospect, a publication founded in 1990 to explicitly put forward the LIBERAL viewpoint as also ineligible to have his opinion considered.
Of course, I do not agree with Mr. Imposter,but we must be consistent, must we not.
I will be happy to honor and thoroughly read Mr. Waas' contribution and comment on it, as soon as Mr. Imposter and others on the left read and comment on Mr. Podhoretz' article.
Thank You, Bumble Bee Boogie.
Um, I Forgot 7 People Talked of Spy - Libby
Um, I Forgot 7 People Talked of Spy - Libby
By James Gordon Meek
The New York Daily News
Friday 26 May 2006
Washington - Borrowing a defense used by tax evaders and schoolkids who don't do their homework, Vice President Cheney's indicted former top adviser told a grand jury he forgot that seven people told him about CIA spy Valerie Plame.
Lewis (Scooter) Libby is charged with lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he first learned of Plame's identity. Cheney, his boss, was among those who told Libby that an Iraq war critic's wife worked at the CIA, prosecutors allege.
But Libby said in his now-unsealed 2004 testimony that "it seemed to me" he heard about Plame "for the first time" from NBC broadcaster Tim Russert in July 2003.
Russert denies telling Libby that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was an undercover spy - a disclosure now at the center of a scandal rocking the White House.
On March 5, 2004, a prosecutor asked Libby if it was "fair" to say he knew Plame's CIA identity a month before Russert supposedly revealed it to him.
"I had forgotten it," Libby explained.
Solomon Wisenberg, a lawyer who probed the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said, "Barring some unusual mental condition, to make a claim like that is not likely going to fly."
Libby allegedly discussed Plame with six others besides Cheney in June 2003, including CIA briefer Craig Schmall.
But Libby's lawyers blame any "errors" in his testimony on "confusion, mistake or faulty memory."
In the case of Libby's chats with Cheney about Wilson - such as one after he spoke to Russert - he said, "When I had that conversation I had forgotten about the earlier conversations in which [Cheney] told me ... that the wife worked at the CIA."
Time Magazine Ordered to Turn Over Libby Documents
Time Magazine Ordered to Turn Over Libby Documents
The Associated Press
Friday 26 May 2006
Judge orders Time to hand over information in CIA leak case.
Washington - A federal judge on Friday ordered Time magazine to turn over documents for a White House aide to use in his defense to perjury and other charges in the CIA leak case.
The order by US District Reggie B. Walton also said the New York Times might have to turn over some information but reduced the scope of documents the newspaper and other news organizations would have to provide to lawyers for the defendant, former top vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Citing a lack of relevancy, Walton said that Judith Miller, a former Times reporter, doesn't have to provide two notebooks, her phone records or appointment calendars to lawyers for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. Walton also said NBC News does not have to provide Libby's defense team with one page of undated notes taken by correspondent Andrea Mitchell because she is unlikely to testify at Libby's perjury trial, which is set for January.
In granting in part and denying in part Libby's subpoenas for the media's records, Walton ruled that reporters do not have a right to refuse to provide notes, drafts of articles or other information in a criminal case.
"The First Amendment does not protect a news reporter or that reporter's news organization from producing documents ... in a criminal case," Walton wrote in a 40-page ruling.
Inconsistencies Noted
Walton said Time magazine must provide Libby's lawyers with drafts of first-person stories that reporter Matthew Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby because the judge said he noticed inconsistencies between them.
All of the news organizations had asked Walton to review the materials sought by Libby - including e-mails, drafts of articles and reporters' notes - in hopes of convincing him that they were not relevant and that the defense was on a "fishing expedition."
During that review, Walton said, he found "a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles" Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby and the reporter's first-person account of his testimony before a federal grand jury.
"This slight alteration between the drafts will permit the defendant to impeach Cooper, regardless of the substance of his trial testimony, because his trial testimony cannot be consistent with both versions," Walton wrote.
It is unclear from Walton's ruling what those inconsistencies are.
Libby, 55, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. He is accused of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he subsequently told reporters about her.
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak named Plame in a column on July 14, 2003, eight days after her husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.
The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Libby's indictment grew out of conversations he had with Cooper, Miller and NBC's Tim Russert in June and July 2003, a two-month period in which the White House, according to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, was mounting a campaign to undermine Wilson's charges about the Iraq war.
Different Stories Remembered
The key to Libby's defense is whose memory is correct - Libby's or the three reporters.
At the trial, Libby's lawyers will try to raise questions about the credibility of Miller, Russert and Cooper and whether they could have learned about Plame and her CIA connection from other reporters at their respective news organizations or government officials besides Libby.
"These three news reporters did not simply report on alleged criminal activity, but rather they were personally involved in the conversations with the defendant that form the predicate for several charges in the indictment," Walton wrote. "Their testimony is critical to the government's case, and challenging it will likely be critical to the defense."
Walton also said he won't require the Times to immediately produce materials it has regarding Wilson or a transcript of an interview the paper's reporters did with Miller in a review of her role in the Libby matter. He said he will wait until trial to decide whether the materials are relevant to Libby's defense.
The judge insisted that his narrowing of Libby's subpoenas will not have a "chilling effect" on the press because his ruling "does not swing open the gates for either the government or a criminal defendant to learn the identity of all sources of a reporter or to gain access to all information a reporter has amassed."
Experts Says Cheney Can't Avoid Testifying
Experts Says Cheney Can't Avoid Testifying
By Toni Locy
The Associated Press
Thursday 25 May 2006
If a prosecutor calls him as a witness, Vice President Dick Cheney probably can't avoid testifying in his former chief of staff's perjury trial, legal experts said Thursday.
"There may be significant issues of executive privilege and significant issues of classified information. But there are obviously significant factual issues that bear on the charges the prosecutor has brought" in the CIA leak investigation, said former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella Jr.
"So there is a far better than average chance that you are going to see the vice president sitting in the witness chair" if he is summoned, Barcella said.
In a court filing late Wednesday, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald suggested Cheney would be a logical prosecution witness because he could authenticate notes he jotted on a copy of a New York Times opinion column by a critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Fitzgerald said Cheney's state of mind at the time he jotted those notes is "directly relevant" to the perjury and obstruction of justice charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's former top aide.
Libby faces trial in January on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity and what he later told reporters.
But former federal prosecutor Ty Cobb said Fitzgerald's revelation about using Cheney as a witness seems like an act of desperation. "You don't play that card unless you think you are in danger of being shut down," Cobb said.
Cobb said he doubts Libby's case will go to trial because of the enormous amount of classified evidence involved. A key element of Libby's defense is that he was too preoccupied with heady, national security issues to leak Plame's CIA affiliation to reporters as a way to strike back at her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of the administration's push to invade Iraq.
Fitzgerald's filing, Cobb said, was a signal to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who has expressed concern about the amount of classified information the prosecutor may try to keep Libby from using in his defense.
"Now Fitzgerald's pitch is, 'This goes all the way up in the White House. Judge, don't shut me down,'" Cobb said.
The prosecutor has already raised the possibility that Libby's lawyers are trying to commit "graymail," a term used to describe how former government officials force the government to dismiss their cases or see its biggest secrets revealed during their trials.
White House spokesman Tony Snow referred questions about Cheney's possible testimony to the Justice Department, which, in turn, referred reporters to Fitzgerald's office. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the prosecutor, declined comment.
In the Times op-ed on July 6, 2003, Wilson accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.
In 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to determine whether Iraq tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But a version of the allegation, attributed to British intelligence, wound up in President Bush's State of the Union address in 2003.
Cheney wrote on the article, "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
Libby told a grand jury that Cheney was so agitated about Wilson's allegations that they discussed them daily after the article appeared.
Eight days after Wilson's article, syndicated columnist Robert Novak identified Plame and suggested that she had played a role in the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Niger.
Fitzgerald wants to use Cheney's notes on the Wilson article to corroborate evidence that he says shows Libby knew about Plame's CIA status - from Cheney and other government officials - and lied when he told a grand jury that he learned about her from reporters.
Cheney would have a tough time arguing that his notes on Wilson's article qualify as a national security secret, said attorney Stanley M. Brand, a former general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives.
"He's commenting on something he read in the press, and that is hardly a national security issue," Brand said.
sumac, Good q. If they don't speak in their own defense, the prosecution will use everything at their disposal to find them guilty. If they speak up, they can always ask for mercy.
Mr. Cicerone Imposter wrote:
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I already responded to Podhoretz's article; he's a conservative neocon that starts out his article with the wrong premise based on rewriting of history. For most people, what he wrote is garbage.
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I do hope that I did not miss Mr. Imposter's EVIDENCE which clearly showed that Mr. Podhoretz's article was( as Mr. Imposter puts it) "an article with the wrong premise based on rewriting of history.". I went through the threads carefully to find Mr. Imposter's EVIDENCE that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of history"
I can not find anything written by Mr. Imposter that gives evidence that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of History. The only thing I can find is Mr. Imposter's claim that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of history, but I am willing to be convinced.
Mr. Imposter, would you please be so good as to give EVIDENCE that Mr. Podchoretz's article had, as you put it, "A wrong premise based on rewriting of History".
If you wish, I will be glad to replicate the article for you but I am certain you can find it...I am expecially interested in the "wrong premise" and "rewriting of history" sections.
Oh, and if you do not or cannot help me in your response with SPECIFIC evidence to bolster your claim, I will replicate Mr. Podhoretz's article sinced someone else may be able to take on the task based on your claim
Thank you, sir, Mr. Imposter!!
