Truth Out (on Jason Leopold)

The Fly Under the Bridge Academy's Shadow Jason Leopold Committee reviews the record:

Thursday 20 April 2006
...Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case and introduced additional evidence against Rove, attorneys and other US officials close to the investigation said.
...sources close to the case said... that Fitzgerald told the jurors that he would soon present them with a list of criminal charges he intends to file against Rove in hopes of having the grand jury return a multi-count indictment against Rove.

Wednesday 26 April 2006
Karl Rove's appearance before a grand jury in the CIA leak case Wednesday comes on the heels of a "target letter" sent to his attorney recently by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, signaling that the Deputy White House Chief of Staff may face imminent indictment, sources that are knowledgeable about the probe said Wednesday.

Friday 28 April 2006
Despite vehement denials by his attorney, who said this week that Karl Rove is neither a "target" nor in danger of being indicted in the CIA leak case, the special counsel leading the investigation has already written up charges against Rove, and a grand jury is expected to vote on whether
to indict the Deputy White House Chief of Staff sometime next week, sources knowledgeable about the probe said Friday afternoon.

Friday 12 May 2006
Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Saturday 13 May 2006
Special Prosecutor Patrick ....Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of
the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

And the denouement:

WASHINGTON, June 13 — The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove.

We Have a Nice Egyptian Cruise You'd Like

Barging upriver past the pyramids, the chronicler of Thomas White's criminal career keeps the faith by upping the ante:

In one of the boldest moves yet in the 22-month investigation into the outing of a covert CIA agent to a handful of top reporters covering the White House, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is extending his probe and pursuing much more serious charges against senior White House officials, specifically President Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, lawyers directly involved in the case told RAW STORY Friday.

While many people were left confused by news reports that said Rove wouldn't be indicted Friday, the lawyers said that Rove remains under intense scrutiny and added that Fitzgerald is betting on the fact that he can secure an indictment against Rove on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, the misuse of classified information, and possibly other charges, as early as next week.

“This investigation is not yet over,” one of the lawyers in the case said. “You must keep in mind that people like Mr. Rove are still under investigation. Rather than securing an indictment on perjury charges against Mr. Rove Mr. Fitzgerald strongly believes he can convince the grand

The lawyers said that in the past month Fitzgerald has obtained explosive information in the case that has enabled him to pursue broader charges such as conspiracy, and civil rights violations against targets like Rove. Specifically, the lawyers said Fitzgerald is focusing on phony intelligence documents that led to the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity: the documents that claimed Iraq was attempting to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger.

And, he is not alone. Also booking staterooms; the entire ensemble of the Huffington Post:

That's right -- it isn't a one-day holiday like Fitzmas. This could go on and on. One day a great gift like Libby, the next day a pair of socks (Ari Fleischer), the next day, who knows: maybe an Xbox 360 (Karl Rove)! Maybe this can be dragged out until the 2006 midterms.--Al Franken

Today's indictment of Vice President Cheney's Chief Aide Scooter Libby is an important first step in holding this Administration responsible for its efforts to deceive the American people and their elected representatives to bolster the case for going to with Iraq. But it is only the beginning.

In many ways, it raises more questions than it answers.--John Conyers

Rather than be the eighth person in the herd trampling after meaningless comments from "lawyers involved in the case," who'll spill first now to the NYT just to help its credibility-rebuilding campaign, why not camp out at Steve Hadley's office? There, you could try to get his comment on the blockbuster series this week in an Italian newspaper which seems to be the definitive story, so far, on how the forged yellowcake-Iraq-Niger documents, the story at the bottom of Plamegate, ended up at the White House.

One of the key moments in the story is a meeting, unusual in protocol terms, between the head of Italy's intel agency SISMI and Hadley, at the time Condi Rice's chief assistant at NSC.--Harry Shearer

None of whom seem to have noted Fitzgerald's many cautions against 'reading too much into' his continuing investigation, since it's routine in cases where there has been an indictment.

Nor the grudging admission near the end of the question and answer period when the prosecutor said there was no Official Secrets Act in America. That for revealing classified information to be a crime there must be criminal intent to do harm, and that just wasn't there.

Krugman Refuted in Record Time

The FLUBA Committee to Chart the Sad Decline of Once Respected Economists notes that Paul Krugman's employer is now the holder of the speed record for proving his claims to be false. On the same day that Krugman attacked Karl Rove for leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press:

...as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage.

The Times carried a front page story that revealed that the direction of that information was actually the reverse; from the press (and Bob Novak specifically) to Karl Rove:

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist [Robert Novak] the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq....

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, ... Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak....

You're Welcome, Big Guy

Karl Rove says we helped:

Rove considers Memogate a watershed in the rise of the alternative media.

“The whole incident in the fall of 2004 showed really the power of the 'blogosphere',” he said in his West Wing office.

“Because in essence you had now, an army of self-appointed experts looking over the shoulder of the mainstream media and bringing to bear enormously sophisticated skills,” he added.

....Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign.

“From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign,” Rove said of Mapes and Rather.

“They made a decision in this instance – I think quite prematurely and quite unfairly – to pursue a story that attacked the president,” he added. “And I thought it was, to me, one of the most incredible examples of how fundamentally unfair it was.”

Rove expressed astonishment that CBS ignored the warnings of document experts hired by the network to authenticate the National Guard memos.

Blonde Joke

[Update: One of the causes for action claims, in the lawsuit, is that the Wilsons suffered a 'Violation of Fifth Amendment Right to Equal Protection of the Laws'! Which guarantee Blondie and Beau will find in the 14th Amendment, not the Fifth.]

Made for each other:

WASHINGTON – Former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, said today they decided to sue Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential adviser Karl Rove because they engaged in a "whispering campaign" to destroy her career.

Plame told a news conference that "I and my former colleagues trusted the government to protect us in our jobs" and said it "betrayed that trust. I'd much rather be continuing my career as a public servant than as a plaintiff in a lawsuit."

....In the suit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, Plame and her husband said that Cheney, Rove and Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, leaked her CIA status to reporters to punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame, who left the CIA in January and is writing a book about what's happened to her.

The FLUBA Committee on Narcissistic Personalities wonders if the Wilson's are aware of the fate that befell Alger Hiss when he unwisely sued Whittaker Chambers for telling a Meet the Press panel that he'd known Hiss as a Communist in the 1930s?

Blonde Joke

Made for each other:

WASHINGTON – Former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, said today they decided to sue Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential adviser Karl Rove because they engaged in a "whispering campaign" to destroy her career.

Plame told a news conference that "I and my former colleagues trusted the government to protect us in our jobs" and said it "betrayed that trust. I'd much rather be continuing my career as a public servant than as a plaintiff in a lawsuit."

....In the suit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, Plame and her husband said that Cheney, Rove and Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, leaked her CIA status to reporters to punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame, who left the CIA in January and is writing a book about what's happened to her.

The FLUBA Committee on Narcissistic Personalities wonders if the Wilson's are aware of the fate that befell Alger Hiss when he unwisely sued Whittaker Chambers for telling a Meet the Press panel that he'd known Hiss as a Communist in the 1930s?

Karl Rove Holds Up a Mirror

And the Democrats don't like what they see:

Leading Democrats reacted furiously on Thursday to remarks by Karl Rove that liberals had responded to the Sept. 11 attacks by wanting to "offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," with some Democrats calling for him to apologize or resign as a White House adviser.

How hard would it be to find examples of liberals doing just what Rove stated? Well, Googling up, why do they hate us, brings a plethora of such examples post 9-11-01:

"We've got to ask, why is this man (Osama bin Laden) so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries ... that are riddled with poverty? He's been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"--Senator Patty Murray

"Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound…. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."--Bill Clinton

"I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that [Axis of Evil] statement." --Jimmy Carter

Enough of the elected officials (past and present) how about their supporters:

...although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can't, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn. --Tim Robbins

"But what would happen to [Osama's] cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love." -- Alice Walker

My, my, what could Karl have been thinking.

Not going to do it. Wouldn't be prudent.

Byron York attempts to talk to David Corn about his conspiracy mongering past in this video.

Hilarious.

[Update]

The reason Corn doesn't want to talk to York is because he knows that York will demolish his claims not to have promoted conspiracy theories. York mentioned two pieces that do just that;

1. Rove Scandal: A Conspiracy Charge for the White House?

2. The Cheney Conspiracy?

From #1 above we can read him relating what a friend who is a prosecutor told him:

...check out Title 18, Section 371, of the US Code, he advises. It's entitled "Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States."

This...is straightforward and rather wide-ranging:

If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

....Under this law, if there was any conspiring among the leakers--say, one White House aide suggested to another that they use the classified information in hand to disclose Valerie Wilson's connection to the CIA in order to undermine Wilson's account of his trip to Niger--then the acts of each conspirator can essentially be charged to the other(s).

If I understand this correctly--did I say I was no lawyer?--that means if one person violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (or lied to Fitzgerald or the grand jury) any one who conspired with them to make the leak happen (or concoct the false account) could be nailed. "From a prosecutor's standpoint," this former prosecutor says, "a conspiracy charge is how you get in each strand--all the strands--of what happened."

Nabbing Karl Rove on a conspiracy? To some that might sound rather appropriate.

[emphasis the FLUBA's]

Next He's Joe Wilson's Biographer?

Jason Leopold yet again scoops the world with the Karl Rove imminent indictment:

...the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials.

These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the investigation.

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

But even a cat has only nine lives [emphases the FLUBA throughout]:

Let me start off by saying that I'm hated by many, many mainstream and independent journalists. My exposes are routinely discredited by the public figures I write about and by the journalists I routinely scoop. I'm a lightning rod. Oh, I should also tell you that I've got a rap sheet. I'm a convicted felon. I was charged with grand larceny almost ten years ago.... I wrote a book about ...my double life exposing oily politicians and corporate crooks in my investigative news stories while hiding my own past criminal behavior.... Perhaps you've also heard my publisher canceled it after receiving a threatening letter from the former press secretary to Governor Gray Davis ....a week ago I did a really stupid thing. ....well-known journalists -- like investigative reporter Murray Waas....questioned my credibility as a reporter because of my criminal record.

....He said I was a "poor man's Jayson Blair," a reference to the discredited New York Times reporter who fabricated and plagiarized dozens of stories during his tenure at the paper. First off, that's an outright lie. I'm no Jayson Blair. Secondly, what he wrote about me is libelous. I know it is because I've got experience with libel. I was sued for libel by an attorney who represented producer Aaron Spelling. But let me back up for a minute and put this all into context.

In August of 2002, I wrote a story for Salon.com tying former Army Secretary Thomas White to the fraud at Enron, where White once was a vice president. A month later, the story was picked up by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and immediately came under fire by every right-wing hack journalist in the country. No joke. Without so much as doing a shred of investigative work to follow up my story, the mainstream media zeroed in on a smoking gun email I used in my story and said it was phony, doctored, forged. ....Salon removed that story I wrote from its website saying it couldn't vouch for the authenticity of the email. ....Then the bastards at Salon called me a plagiarist because I failed to credit the Financial Times adequately in my piece. I credited the paper two times, but I should've credited them four times. That's hardly a case of plagiarism. ... journalists started writing about me in a negative light ....

Believe it or not, posts about me like Waas' have really hurt my career. Even the so-called independent media, the progressive magazines like In These Times and The Progressive won't run anything I write because of the carnage left by that whole debacle back in the fall of 2002. The stigma that's attached to me has been like a cancer for almost three years now. I can't get rid of it. I would love nothing more than to beat a guy like Murray Waas senseless for writing crap about me. The same goes for Howard Kurtz, Bob Novak, Andrew Sullivan, and everyone at the National Review. ....Journalism is my passion. I don't make money from doing this. I think I earned about $5,000, maybe less in the past three years and I've written close to 100 stories. They're published on websites and in magazines that can't afford to pay its writers. ....

My point in telling you this story, particularly the stuff about my past, is that I feel that by coming clean I'll be able to earn your trust as a reader. Journalists and the average Joe will contiinue to write harsh things about me. Some of it may be true. But it won't change the fact that the investigative stories I have written and will write are my best efforts to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Eleven Happy Campers

And their St Valentine's Day Massacre, in which they butcher the evidence and vote send a nice guy who would be a ton of fun to prison:

In the Hardball interview linked to above, Juror # 10, Ann Redington, mentioned the same piece of evidence being key, as Juror #9 Denis Collins; that an annotated NY Times Op-ed by Joseph Wilson had been 'given' to Scooter Libby by Vice-President Dick Cheney, and that proved Libby didn't forget that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

The problem with that revelation being that there was absolutely no evidence produced in the trial that the Op-ed had been 'given' to Libby.

Not to mention that the syllogism isn't valid even if he had been given the Wilson Op-ed. To wit:

Major premise: Cheny annotated an Op-ed in July by writing that Wilson's wife was at the CIA

Minor premise: Libby was given the Op-ed by Cheney in July

Conclusion: Libby could not have forgotten, in October, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA

Not only is the reasoning invalid, the minor premise was not established with evidence during the trial. Yet two jurors have said it was! (Undoubtedly because prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald suggested it during his unanswered rebuttal after the Defense closed its case.)

But, Jonah Goldberg feels the pain of the victims:

The Wilsons' civil lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Rove et al — filed, they assure us, "with heavy hearts" — claims that the White House's revelation of her identity put her life and the lives of her children in danger. (Never mind that it wasn't the White House who outed her but Richard Armitage over at the State Department.) Even after baring all for Vanity Fair, the golden couple clearly take every effort to maintain their privacy. While heading for a vacation getaway, Wilson couldn't resist giving one last interview at the Houston airport. One of his sons blurted out for everyone to hear, "My daddy is famous, my mommy is a secret spy."

Clearly the pressures of the Wilson family code of silence had gotten to the lad.

Just last month, the golden couple was spied lunching with Morgan Fairchild at the Four Seasons in Washington. The trio supped on soup and salad and shared a lovely mushroom risotto, which probably won't be on the menu wherever they send Libby. You'd think the golden couple would rate higher than the faded star of "Falcon Crest." But there's a buzz that she might play Valerie in the movie Warner Bros. has just green-lighted about Valerie's life. Other boldface names under consideration include Sharon Stone and Gwyneth Paltrow, so it was really a kindness for the Wilsons to even take the meeting.

Sure, all this might sound glamorous to the lumpenproletariat who don't understand the Wilsons' plight. But such rubes can't comprehend that the only reason the Wilsons had to leap straight to a movie deal in the first place was that the CIA is holding up Valerie's $2.5-million book deal by slow-walking the clearance the book needs for publication. Doesn't anyone understand how development works? Clearly not the CIA, which claims that it still wants to keep secrets. Don't those people read Vanity Fair? That is, like, so 2003!

Can We Dance

Barack Obama in his speech on the economy today:

This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won't get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come, or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past. We arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, DC. For years, too many Wall Street executives made imprudent and dangerous decisions, seeking profits with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny, and too little accountability. Banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn't afford. Politicians spent taxpayer money without wisdom or discipline, and too often focused on scoring political points instead of the problems they were sent here to solve. The result has been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.

Funny he didn't mention anyone by name. But, Karl Rove can supply some of them:

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster. Later, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed, Mr. Dodd asked, "Why weren't we doing more?" He then voted for the Bush reforms that he once called "ill-advised."

But Mr. Dodd wasn't the only Democrat to heap abuse on the Bush reforms. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defended Fannie and Freddie as "fundamentally sound" and labeled the president's proposals as "inane." He later voted for the reforms.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York dismissed Mr. Bush's "safety and soundness concerns" as "a straw man." "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was the helpful advice of both Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Maxine Waters of California. Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York berated a Bush official at a hearing, saying, "I am just pissed off" at the administration for raising the issue.

Plague...both...houses

Karl Rove points out that if both the parties have the candidates they deserve, neither is deserving of victory in November:

Barack Obama and John McCain are busy demonstrating that in close elections during tough economic times, candidates for president can be economically illiterate and irresponsibly populist.

....Joseph Schumpeter...explained that capitalism is inherently unstable because a "perennial gale of creative destruction" is brought on by entrepreneurs who create new goods, markets and processes. The entrepreneur is "the pivot on which everything turns," Schumpeter argued, and "proceeds by competitively destroying old businesses."

Most dramatic change comes from new businesses, not old ones. Buggy whip makers did not create the auto industry. Railroads didn't create the airplane. Even when established industries help create new ones, old-line firms are often not as nimble as new ones. IBM helped give rise to personal computers, but didn't see the importance of software and ceded that part of the business to young upstarts who founded Microsoft.

So why should Mr. McCain expect oil and gas companies to lead the way in developing alternative energy? As with past technological change, new enterprises will likely be the drivers of alternative energy innovation.

Messrs. Obama and McCain both reveal a disturbing animus toward free markets and success. It is uncalled for and self-defeating for presidential candidates to demonize American companies.

It is understandable that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the Senate, would endorse reckless policies that are the DNA of the party he leads. But Mr. McCain, a self-described Reagan Republican, should know better.

Flown Under Any Bridges Lately?

When you're a Massachusetts' liberal and you've lost Don Imus and Karen Tumulty, you've lost:

You've got to wonder about John Kerry's eye-hand coordination. His career is falling into a pattern. Whenever Kerry is confronted with a big decision, he tries to compensate for his last mistake.

He voted against the first Iraq war, which turned out to be a success. So when the second one came around, he swallowed his misgivings and voted for it. That also turned out to be a mistake.

So when it came time to vote for the $87 billion to fund the war that he had voted for, he produced what must be the single most damaging sound bite in modern political history by voting for it before he voted against it.

So now, when U.S. troops are suffering their worst casualties in nearly two years, he insulted them. Could Karl Rove have dreamed up a better October surprise than having the Democrats' most recent choice for Commander in Chief suggest that the men and women are dying there because they weren't smart enough to get into law school?

His initial impulse, predictably enough, was to fight back against the criticism. He didn't want to fall again into what turned out to be the biggest trap of 2004, when he failed to understand that a relatively small ad buy from a group that no one had ever heard of could be more damaging than he imagined.

He was determined not to be "swift-boated" again. So he declared: "If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the President and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp — rubber-stamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families."

But even Rand Beers, his national security adviser in the 2004 campaign, said: "It's unfortunate that Senator Kerry misspoke. No one who has ever been in combat would intentionally impugn our brave troops."

In other words, Kerry has managed on the eve of what could be a watershed election to remind pretty much everyone what it was they didn't like about the Democrats, and especially what they didn't like about him.

A fool for a client...

...deserves a fool for a lawyer. Hugh Hewitt finds that Joe Wilson is getting what he's paying for with Duke Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky:

HH: Please tell me you're getting paid, Erwin.

EC: I'm not. I'm doing this pro bono.

HH: Unbelievable. Now Erwin, of course it's all nonsense, and Joe Wilson...what are you going to do when he gets on the stand and people try and reconcile his eight different versions of what he said and did?

EC: Oh, I don't think there's eight different versions. I think we have an extremely strong case. Here's what we all know at this point. Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he showed that there were falsehoods in President Bush's State of the Union address. As a result of that, the Vice President, his top aide, Lewis Libby, and the President's key political advisor, Karl Rove, decided to reveal that Valerie Plame was a secret CIA operative. They did so by telling journalists like Robert Novak this, and was reported by Robert Novak in a column published three weeks ago Friday.

The problem being that (1) Wilson himself had to admit to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he had not debunked the '16 words' in the 2003 SOTU.

And, (2) they did not decide to leak Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak--someone else did that, and there is no evidence it was anything other than an inadvertent revelation that shed light on Wilson's deceitfulness in claiming he'd been sent by Dick Cheney to Niger.

This is a genuinely frivolous lawsuit, and Federal courts take a dim view of lawyers who file them.

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas

Left a lump of coal
For the stocking of the blithering idiot Joe
Whose story was a lie, we now all know:

Rove Apparently Is Not Indicted Today

Dumb Redhead Joke

Arianna Huffington discovers what has been known to the blogosphere for some time now:

It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." ....So [Judy Miller] calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.
This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source.

But, she gets it wrong. If, Miller is protecting a source, it is someone at the CIA. Perhaps someone married to a blabbermouth former diplomat.

'Can't anybody here play this game?'

The FLUBA Committee on Stengelisms directs us to this Walter Pincus-Jim Vandehei piece in the Washington Post:

In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002.

Along with the question, 'Why, oh why, can't we have a competent reporter at the Post?'

As the not exactly Top Secret report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously reported, Joe Wilson not only said that an Iraqi, who later came to fame as Baghdad Bob, had in fact made overtures to Iraq in 1999 about buying uranium, but that the CIA analysts who graded his debriefing found that to be the most important bit of information he brought back from his trip to Niger.

Wilson merely offered his own opinion that his contacts in Niger should be believed when they told him they had refused to do so. Which brings us to Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

A fairly senior CIA female bureaucrat, not involved in risky activity in the field, proposes her own husband for a mission to Niger, on the very CIA-sounding grounds that he enjoys good relations with the highly venal government there, and in particular with its Ministry of Mines. This government, according to unrefuted intelligence-gathering from British and other European intelligence agencies, is covertly discussing sanctions-breaking sales of its uranium to a number of outlaw regimes, including that of Saddam Hussein. The husband, who has since falsely denied being recommended by his wife, revisits his "good contacts" in Niger for a brief trip and issues them a clean bill.

Hitchens fails to add that said husband is a retired diplomat who now earns his living representing people who would like to invest in gold mines in that country. Imagine the outrage amongst the crowd currently throwing charges of treason at Karl Rove if that former diplomat had turned out to be a foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush rather than John Kerry.

Disclosure for Me, But Not for Thee

In Joseph Wilson's book, The Politics of Truth, the timeline of the disclosure of Valerie Plame's name by Bob Novak, according to Wilson himself, pretty clearly exonerates Karl Rove from any charge of outing a covert agent of the CIA on July 11th, 2003.

Wilson learned that Novak knew about his wife on July 8th, six days before Novak's article appeared in print. A friend, who was a total stranger to Novak, encountered him walking on a Washington DC street, and apparently decided to amuse himself by asking Novak what he thought about Wilson's Op-ed in the NY Times two days earlier. Getting this reply:

“Wilson’s an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She’s a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him.”

Wilson says the friend immediately broke off from Novak and went to alert to him about this.

Keep in mind that Wilson has been claiming that disclosure of his wife's CIA status endangered her life, and sit down to read what he did to prevent it:

I contacted the head of the news division at CNN, Eason Jordan, Novak’s titular boss, whom I had known for a number of years. It took several calls, but I finally tracked him down on his cell phone. I related to him the details of my friend’s encounter with Novak and pointed out that whatever my wife might or might not be, it was the height of irresponsibility for Novak to share such information with an absolute stranger on a Washington street.

He compounded the 'damage' by informing another journalist that his wife was a CIA agent! Apparently in violation of the law.

With his wife's life supposedly in the balance, Wilson reacted with cat-like cunning:

I asked him to speak to Novak for me, but he demurred — he said he did not know him very well — and suggested that I speak to Novak myself. I arranged for him to have Novak call me and hung up.

Novak called the next morning, but I was out, and then so was he. We did not connect until the following day, July 10.

What's a couple of days when it's only a matter of life and death for the mother of your twins.

Nor was Wilson alert enough to deny to Novak that his wife was in fact CIA. Though what Novak was up to could prove deadly to several people (Wilson later has claimed) he merely:

... assumed...that the CIA would itself quash any article that made reference to Valerie. ...I knew that protection of the identity of agents in our clandestine service was the highest priority, and well understood by the experienced press corps in Washington. Novak had still been trolling for sources when we spoke on the telephone, so I assumed that he did not have the confirmations he would need from the CIA to publish the story. I told Valerie, who alerted the press liaison at the CIA, and we were left with the reasonable expectation that any reference to her would be dropped, since he would have no way of confirming the information — unless, of course, he got confirmations from another part of the government, such as the White House.

But of course, Novak got all the confirmation he needed from that very same CIA. Crackerjack diplomacy, Joe!

Kevin Drum: 'Joe Wilson is as big a liar as JFK'

Proof that liberals shouldn't be allowed to try logic at home, the Political Animal says, all Republicans should roll over and play dead for lying liberals:

To understand just how reckless and venomous Rove's actions were, let's take a trip down memory lane. The year is 1960. John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon for the presidency and making much electoral hay over the "missile gap," a supposed disparity between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the quantity and quality of ballistic missiles at our disposal. The Reds, Kennedy claimed, were kicking our butts, and he promised to fix this pronto if he was elected president.

Except for one thing: there was no missile gap. What's more, Kennedy had received top secret briefings from the Pentagon and knew this. Did that stop him from talking about it? Not at all. It was one of the big issues of the campaign.

Richard Nixon lost that election by a hair, and public perception of the missile gap was probably one of the reasons. Despite that, he never revealed — either publicly or privately — the classified information about Soviet capabilities that could have saved his campaign.

Think about that. This is Richard Nixon we're talking about. His opponent was spreading clear misinformation that he knew to be untrue. And there was a presidential election at stake!

The FLUBA Committee of Connoisseurs on Flawed Analogies wishes to point out that JFK at least did his lying for himself rather than ask CIA agents to do it for him. Other than that, if this is your story, you're welcome to it.

Rove was Right

They do want to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

A sampling of comments from Semi-Daily Journal:

When I studied in London I lived on Tavistock Square, where one of the bus bombings was. It's one of London's many small, lovely parks. this particular one is dedicated to Mahatama Gandhi, and has a bust of him. It's tragic to think of a place dedicated to peace, non-violence and democracy the site of something so awful. I've having a hard time with it.

and,

Shouldn't we be pledging to bring those responsible to justice, rather than to carry out revenge killings?

and,

An anti-terrorism strategy based on reducing attention and alarm produced by attacks, rather than primarily on saving lives, might do much to make terrorism more pointless.

and,

Western gov'ts should principally be concerned with bringning the terrorists involved in this attack to "Justice". As in: captured wherever they may be, extradicted to Britain, tried in a British court of Law, and punished according to the Letter of the Law--if found guilty. One of the big problems I have had with the American response to 9/11 has been the vigilante attitude that has been bandied about concerning the Al-Qaeda perpetrators and their supporters: "Dead-or-Alive, Bring'Em On", etc. These people are criminals, not super-villains in some comic book or Hollywood movie. They should be treated as criminals, albeit suicidal ones, no more and no less. Western societies have Laws and Courts, we left behind the need for "Wild West" style justice in the 1880's.

and,

Every single day, the U.S. and Britain kill dozens of completely innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, who happened to be committing the offense of living in their homeland and getting in the way of American and British bullets, bombs or missiles. We have killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians; probably coming up on 200,000 now. It is hardly a surprise that some of those parents who have seen their children blown away, some of those children who've seen their parents blown away, would like to get revenge on the people who have done this to them.

We, the white, English-speaking, "first world" nations are the evil here. We fully support the evil; both the U.S. and Britain have had a chance to oust the leaders who started these attacks on a sovereign, non-combatant nation; and both the U.S. and Britain have chosen instead to stand behind the warmongers.

You started this war. You support the killing of Iraqi children every day with your tax dollars. You don't like the consequences? Should have thought of that earlier, shouldn't you. If you can't do the time - or in this case can't take Islamic retaliation in the only way available to them - don't do the crime.