If the Democrats were determined to grab the headlines and turn attention back to the Libby indictments, they’ve likely succeeded. In a press briefing moments ago, Harry Reid is justifying his secret session gambit, calling it a victory for the American people—followed up by a litany of leftist talking points with regard to Iraq: the President lied about WMD; there were no Al-Qaeda/Iraq connections [an assertion disproved by the last Senate Intelligence committee report]; that Joe Wilson’s report proved that the White House knew they were taking us to war on false premises; that Republicans are “blocking” an investigation into these issues.
And so now we’ll have that investigation, which the Democrats desperately wish to tie to the Libby indictments.
Two recent Stephen Hayes pieces seem particularly important and astute in light of today’s political theater.
Here’s Hayes, writing in the Daily Standard:
AFTER A 22-MONTH investigation into the compromising of CIA operative Valerie Plame, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald handed down a five-count indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff,
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Even before that lengthy investigation reached its conclusion, critics of the Bush administration had begun to articulate the new conventional wisdom on its outcome: The Bush administration lied about Iraq before the invasion and has been lying ever since.
Frank Rich, in a column that ran on October 16, 2005, in the New York Times, wrote under the headline, “It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby.”
Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove’s boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby’s boss, Dick Cheney.
The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel made a similar argument in an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews last week. In response to a question about the Fitzgerald investigation, she said: “These are serious matters of national security, of misleading the country into the gravest crime one could commit, an unnecessary war.”
These efforts to frame the investigation so as to inflict maximum damage on the White House appear
to be working. By last Friday morning, David Gergen, who often serves as chief spokesman for the conventional wisdom, was calling the upcoming court battle the “trial of the war in Iraq.” This, he says, will “keep the administration on the defensive” for months and will make it very difficult to govern. Congressional Democrats used the occasion to call for hearings into the alleged misuse of intelligence.
In the literal sense, attempts to link the case for war in Iraq to the Fitzgerald investigation are illogical. If a White House official lied to a grand jury in 2004, as Fitzgerald contends, that fact has little bearing on the case made for war in Iraq in 2002.
Fitzgerald was asked directly about the connection between the indictment and the Iraq war during his press conference Friday.
Question: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.
Does this indictment do that?
Fitzgerald:
This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s 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.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.
Fitzgerald is, of course, right. And in any case the attempt to link the two issues seems counterproductive. Where they do overlap–Joseph Wilson’s claim that he had “debunked” Bush administration assertions about an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger–they point to an embarrassment for the war critics and reporters who invested so much in his self-aggrandizing fantasies: Wilson lied.
Exactly. Which is why yesterday I rebuffed progressive claims that Republicans were overjoyed Wilson and his bogus charges were off the front page.
Personally, I welcome this debate—as do many Republicans and hawkish Democrats.
I mean, why were there UN weapons inspectors in Iraq if we didn’t—along with the rest of the world—believe there were WMD in Iraq?
Here’s Hayes again, this time from the Oct 31 Weekly Standard:
FOR FOUR YEARS, A slow-motion war between the CIA and the Bush administration has been unfolding over America’s airwaves and on its front pages. A principal weapon in this war has been the deliberate leaking of information to the media.
When the history of this damaging episode is written, two leaks will stand out as having been most consequential. One of them is famous: the alleged leak to columnist Robert Novak that led to the compromising of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
But there was another big leak that no one seems to care about: the leak of the CIA’s referral to the Justice Department concerning the Plame matter. That second disclosure, perhaps even more than the initial leak, set off the chain of events that resulted in the naming of a special prosecutor and finds us now anticipating indictments of senior White House officials.
Some additional relevant details: The CIA referral to the Justice Department was classified, an intelligence source tells The Weekly Standard. Anyone who disclosed the existence of the referral and described its contents broke the law. The agency, however, has thus far refused to send a referral to the Justice Department that could result in an investigation into the source and effects of that leak. Why? An intelligence source tells The Weekly Standard that there are limits–of time and manpower–to how many such referrals the CIA can make. Perhaps. But there’s another possible explanation: The second leak came from the CIA itself, and lawyers there are reluctant to call for an investigation for fear of what such an investigation might reveal.
On Friday, September 26, 2003, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell and MSNBC’s Alex Johnson broke a big story on the MSNBC website. “The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa, NBC News has learned.”
This report came after a lull in the narrative. Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, had accused the Bush administration of disclosing his wife’s identity to retaliate for his “truth-telling.” He boasted in speeches that he would mount a campaign to get Karl Rove “frog-marched” out of the White House in handcuffs. And while many reporters in Washington may have been sympathetic to Wilson, few took his threat seriously.
That changed with the news from NBC that the CIA had referred the case to the Justice Department for investigation. Other news organizations scrambled to catch up. Over the next two weeks the New York Times would run nearly three dozen stories on the case, the Washington Post more than forty. News reports noted the close relationship between Attorney General John Ashcroft and the White House. Editorials called for Ashcroft to recuse himself. Prominent Democrats stepped up their calls for a special prosecutor.
Trying to determine the source of leaks is a popular parlor game in Washington. The obvious question: Who does the leak hurt and who does it help? With that in mind, the leak of the CIA referral achieved two important results. First, it embarrassed the White House and put pressure on the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. A September 29, 2003, news story in the New York Times is illustrative. It reads, “The very fact that Mr. Tenet referred the matter to the Justice Department comes as a major political embarrassment to a White House that is famously tight-lipped, and a president who has repeatedly vowed that his administration would never leak classified information.”
The second effect of the leak was equally obvious. It produced a series of news stories in which journalists reported uncritically the claims of the CIA and Joseph Wilson regarding the original Iraq-Niger uranium deal and stated unequivocally that the White House had simply ignored their strong warnings about the intelligence.
[…]
So who were the chief beneficiaries of the leak to NBC News about the CIA referral to the Justice Department? Joseph Wilson and the CIA.
“We all assumed that it was the [Central Intelligence] Agency that leaked it to ratchet up the war that they were having with the White House,” says a former Justice Department official.
The referral process works like this. The CIA monitors media reporting to determine whether there has been a disclosure of classified information. When such an incident occurs, the CIA notifies the Justice Department. Justice then sends a questionnaire to the CIA to obtain more information about the possible breach and, if warranted, opens an investigation. (In recent years, these two steps have been collapsed into one: The CIA simply sends a completed questionnaire to the Justice Department.) There are approximately 50 such referrals from the CIA to the Justice Department each year. Few of these result in prosecutions, and fewer still are ever disclosed to the public.
In the months before the Iraq war, officials at the CIA engaged in a broad campaign of leaks designed to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. It was a clever hedge. The finished intelligence products distributed by the agency made a strong case that Iraq was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. Dissenting assessments were buried in footnotes. (These “intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program,” said Senator Hillary Clinton on October 9, 2002, an unlikely shill for the Bush administration.)
But the agency leadership knew its assessments amounted to an educated guess. It was an entirely defensible educated guess, based on a decade of deceit by the Iraq regime and reinforced by behavior that suggested the regime’s work on weapons continued. But it was an educated guess nonetheless.
[…]
A war in Iraq risked exposing this incompetence, and the CIA began to wage its own preemptive war: Leaks from the agency implied that analysts were being pressured into their aggressive assessments. Footnotes filled with caveats became more important than primary texts. This campaign intensified after the war, with the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It culminated in the leaking to the news media of the CIA’s referral of the Plame matter to the Justice Department.
None of this should be mistaken for an attempt to minimize the seriousness of knowingly and deliberately leaking the name of a CIA operative. If that is what happened in this case, a full prosecution is not only justifiable but necessary.
Even so, this entire episode reeks of hypocrisy and blatant double standards. The result may well be a renewed interest in prosecuting leakers of classified information. That would be an unfortunate development for reasons long articulated by the political left–the silencing of dissent and the muzzling of whistleblowers.
But if prosecuting leakers becomes the norm, certainly the CIA cannot expect to be exempt from prosecution. Can it?
On with FOXNews’ John Gibson moments ago, Bill Kristol spoke for many conservatives who have been frustrated with this Administrations timidity in making its case for war.
The sad truth is, Bush is a “uniter”—or, at the very least, he wants to be. But you cannot unite with today’s Democrats, and even their minority leader has now joined the leftist fringe in suggesting that the President lied to take us into war.
I welcome a full investigation and airing of these bogus and harmful assertions that Democrats have been peddling for years. And more than that, I welcome the unmasking of Joe Wilson, and of the entrenched CIA and State Department lifers who believe that it is their right to run foreign policy from behind the scenes, unencumbered by the wishes and dictates of sojourning Administrations who do nothing so much as worry all the comfortable habits into which these bureucrats have settled.
time to dust this off…”Lets Roll”
meanwhile, Kate O’Beirne just coined a new phrase…these senators are acting like
“Joe Wilson-Democrats, a bunch of frustrated losers.”
OUCH!
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner archive.asp#081549
The Warden wrote here yesterday that he posted on Harry Reid’s blog:
And sadly, I think Harry Reid read that and said…”GENIUS!”
Being a history buff, this episode reminds me of a couple of episodes from ancient history. Basically how entrenched and corrupt ministries help to weaken and eventually destroy the Roman and Ottoman empires.
When will these people realize that they are employees? They are not responsible for foriegn policy.
Nothing like a little fresh air to dry up a festering wound…
tw: once. Once upon a time, there was a little man named Harry. Every time Harry felt he wasn’t getting enough attention, he frew himself to the gwound and held his widdle bweaf.
The first time I was old enough to vote, I proudly campaigned and voted for Jimmy Carter. I loathed Nixon, the plumbers, and most of all the dreaded CIA. I can’t begin to express how surreal this is all becoming.
tw: power, ha….ha….
Does this mean they’ll ask Clinton and Gore for the source of their statements that Iraq had WMDs?
Of course not. Silly of me to ask, really.
This is the more important point of the this whole episode:
“I welcome a full investigation and airing of these bogus and harmful assertions that Democrats have been peddling for years. And more than that, I welcome the unmasking of Joe Wilson, and of the entrenched CIA and State Department lifers who believe that it is their right to run foreign policy from behind the scenes, unencumbered by the wishes and dictates of itinerate Administrations who just worry all the comfortable habits into which these bureucrats have settled.”
Never mind all the prior resolutions and delay by Saddam which led us to this point, never mind the trip and non written reprot by one man, never mind the “collective” intelligence picture but lets just focus on this last bit hear of selective leaking and the other war.
Let us, big WE the people, who “elect” our officials who, decide how budgets are spent, and who is appointed and hired to work where, that WE the people want a “full” account into this other war.
I, too, welcome an honest investigation but I’m not at all convinced that that’s what we’re going to get. Just look at the 9/11 Commission. Whether you believe the assertions of the Able Danger crew or not, the fact is that it was worthy of at least a follow-up but it was buried because it didn’t fit the pre-conceived conclusions…, excuse me, I mean didn’t fit the timeline that they’d already established for Atta’s travels. Also the partisan attacks of the Ben-Venistes and others were disgusting.
Take the Judiciary Committee hearings as another example. We get 9:48 Joe Biden monologues culminating in a question for which he demands no more than a one-word answer. The Dems smell blood and are counting on, with good reason, receiving positive coverage from their allies in the MSM, on an entrenched bureaucracy that shares their interest in damaging this administration and on a White House that is utterly pathetic at defending itself. Do you think they would be pushing so hard for this if they didn’t believe they already knew the outcome?
Maybee,
Sorry. I didn’t realize that, for Democrats, satire and strategy are synonymous.
One of the questions all of this raises in my mind is when is this administration going to stand up, take off the gloves and fight back?
The democrat party aided by careerists in the CIA and State Department who are mostly democrats, have invented an entire narrative, which their allies in the MSM, who are also mostly democrat, have taken and run with. A narrative that we all know is a lie!
These groups are pounding this administration and the republicans in general. Republicans are on the defensive and seem to be running for cover with few exceptions.
The democrats and the left can’t win an election so they have resorted to lies and subterfuge to derail this administration, its agenda and all it has accomplished in the hopes of near future electoral gains.
This is so utterly craven that it’s almost unbelievable, but then again we’re dealing with leftists.
From a historical perspective this is not just damaging in the short term. This type of hyper-partisanship where any means justify the ends is damaging to the republic as a whole as all involved keep upping the ante.
The democrats in their desperation fail or refuse to recognize this.
I only hope that most folks see these democrat games for what they are and express their displeasure at the poles and the only way for people to get the whole story is for this administration to fight back.
Jeff,
Lori, over at Poli Pundit has signed up.
Jeff
Why don’t we engage in some speculation as to the charges we could bring against Wilson? He joined the Kerry campaign about two weeks before his NY Times time.
Conspiracy indeed! The game is afoot.
Before his NY Times piece. Sorry.
WMD found in Iraq since the war began.
1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium, 1,500 gallons of chemical weapons agents, 17 chemical warheads containing cyclosarin (a nerve agent five times more deadly than sarin gas), over 1,000 radioactive materials in powdered form (meant for dispersal over populated areas), and roadside bombs loaded with mustard and “conventional” sarin gas.
I don’t understand any of this “Bush lied” nonsense…. it seems to me if the Dems had a brain they would say, see we were all right before Bush came in office! (When they were on the WMD badwagon.)
Truth- You have a cite for that? I’m keen to read it. Didn’t know about the uranium.
Would someone please also remind those damned Iraqis just how unnecessary this war is, please? Oh – and tell them to scrub the ink off their fingers. That just looks silly.
Um…enriched uranium? I rather doubt that. Uranium ore, more likely, which is just a little more dangerous than my smoke detector.
There were 500 tons of yellowcake in Tawaitha too
It was partially enriched. Saddam had centrifuges too.
I had a long running “discussion” about this on John Cole’s blog yesterday.
I had essentially agreed with the lefties that Libby had to go, and that I thought that it was likely Rove would be gone in 10 days. But then I called for the same standard to be applied to the CIA leakers.
I tried to make the case that the CIA’s job was simply to provide data and analysis and they had no business trying to influence policy. Can’t link to comments, a few repeats run together:
I am saying you do your best to present objective data to the administration. Policy is not defined based solely on what the CIA is sending over and the CIA has no business attempting to set policy, especially by selective leaks.
Where we are now – Libby/Rove should be frog-marched out the door for (possibly inadvertently) leaking 1 piece of classified info. Yet the CIA which has been leaking like a sieve in an attempt to influence policy for years gets a pass.
In our system, voters elect a president and legislators. They determine policy. CIA, NSA, FBI and the other 3 letter acronyms provide data, ideally neutral data. Foggy bottom implements (foreign) policy. None of these groups have the authority to make policy, but more and more seem inclined to do just that via backdoor means.
The responses pretty much boiled down to it was OK for the CIA to leak and try to influence policy in this case because, well you know, Bush lied, etc.
Typical response: Bullshit. Their loyalty is to the country, not the administration.
I gave up with this final comment:
BS back at ya’. Their loyalty of late is to the Democratic party.
They are not an independent branch of government, 3 of those is enough thank you.
I’ll bet you that when one of them leaks classified information they think exactly that. It’s justified because My loyalty is to the country, not the administration, and I know what’s best for the country.
The funniest part? For years the CIA was the boogieman of the left. Now the left is comfortably with the CIA making policy decisions.
This whole affair is a CYA move by the CIA nothing more. Their are only two possabilitis and they don’t reflect highly on the CIA.
1) The CIA gives the POTUS intelligence that points to Iraqs continuing research and procurement of WMD, remember Tenet: It’s a slam dunk. This intelligence proves to be incorrect. So that means this intelligence was wrong before the war and going back to at least 1995. You had promenent Dems. and officials all saying that Saddam was a grave and growing threat. Anyone remeber the N0-Fly zones, sanctions, weapons inspectors, etc. Why were they neccesary if everyone did not believe Saddam was a threat?
2) If this intelligence was correct from 1995 to right beforce the war, then the CIA missed weapons transfers out of Iraq, probably to Syria with the help of the Russians.
Either way the CIA is a corrupt and useless organization. They have been wrong on so many levels. Pakistan going nuclear, Chinese technology theft, 1993 WTC bombing, 9/11, etc.
I think it is time the CIA got a top-to-bottom
overhaul!!!!
I absolutely agree. Plame and everyone in CPD has to be canned immediately. They havae a lot of explaining to do.
Someone ought to call for a Congressional Inquiry, no?
====================
BREAKING NEWS ALERT
====================
We now go live to Washington,
Bruce Sanford, the author of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, has filed several federal lawsuits against Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the lawsuits also include several democratic party minority leaders.
The court papers charge each defendant as coconspirators, the charges include, abusing Mr.Sanford, his family and the case in chief is centered on Mr.Sanfords written statutory law known as the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, this lawsuit is a first in American legal history. The aggrieved party Bruce Sanford said at a news conference today, quote
“Hey its my law, I am the author of The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and it is being abused and misapplied, by Joe Wilson, the democrats the liberals on the left and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald . They are going after me and my family to discredit my law, everyone knows it would be impossible to convict anyone in this case under this law. The law itself requires and defines covert agent, which it speaks of, as somebody who has been stationed abroad within the past five years. Now, its clear from Joe Wilson the Wilson’s were married in 1998 and Wilson’s Wife, “Valerie Plame” she had not been stationed abroad within the last five years. That means she’s not a covert agent within the meaning of the statute. The statute cannot be applied to the disclosure about her. Wilson and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald are trying to discredit my family and my law and abusing my law for the pleasure of the liberal media, its a vast left wing conspiracy”
Sanford also filed two other actions today, one against Michael Moore and one against Moveon.org for no apparent reason.
The plaintiff, Bruce Sanford is not seeking money damages however the court papers demand the defendants learn how to read. The damages sought in the plaintiff’s case specifically single out Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to return to grade school for Special remedial reading class.
THE REAL DEAL:
The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, ( I I PA )
Congress passed the law under a bit of Intelligence agency pressure, our intelligence community was apoplectic over one individual named Mr.Philip Agee during the 1970s, Mr.Agee acts defined the term “outing†of CIA covert agents stationed abroad, Mr.Agee knowingly, willfully and purposefully “ outed “ agents abroad intentionally to disrupt the agency’s operations.
The 1982 ( I I PA ) was written in unusually specific language and requires a prosecutor to show that a person has disclosed information that identifies a “covert agent†(not an “operativeâ€Â) while actually knowing that the agent has been undercover within the last five years in a foreign country and that the disclosed information would expose the agent. For a person who had no classified access to the outed agents identity, the law provides the additional hurdle of proving a pattern of exposing agents with the belief that such actions would harm the governments spying capabilities. As a practical matter, this high degree of proof of willfulness or intentionality would be almost impossible to find in any circumstances other than in a Philip Agee clone (and maybe not even him).To interpret the statute more broadly would flout the long-standing American jurisprudential tradition of narrowly construing criminal laws, especially those that encroach upon free-speech First Amendment values.
NOTE:
Legislators emphasized in crafting the 1982 ( I I PA ) to “exclude “ the possibility that casual discussion, political debate, [or] the journalistic pursuit of a story on intelligence . . will be chilled.†The statute was thus not intended to target executive branch officials who make disclosures  whether carelessly, out of personal or bureaucratic animus, or in pursuit of an important foreign-policy objective  while talking about national security matters with reporters. Indeed, even if Congress wanted to criminalize  which it in fact emphatically did not  executive branch release for policy reasons of a particular type of intelligence information, such a regulatory scheme would have serious separation of powers problems.
Bruce Sanford, Esq.
Practices law in Washington DC, as a First Amendment attorney