I have to highlight this.
At Tailrank, the most active story is that Scooter Libby destroyed a memo from Cheney that would have implicated the VP in the Plame fiasco, led by Thinkprogress.
This, according to Maguire, who’s the only guy I know who seems to understand the story in its entirety, is bullshit (link and ff.).
It’s curious that this should be alleged just when House Republicans are pushing Justice to polygraph admitted document thief and destroyer Sandy Berger.
I just want it on record that I’m among the first to question the timing.
RELATED, from Opinion Journal:
Anyway, if the case is so simple, why can’t The New Yorker, with its army of fact-checkers, get it right? Here’s Nick Lemann, dean of Columbia’s journalism school, in this week’s issue:
In that spirit, the White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson not only came up empty-handed; he said so publicly, in a Times Op-Ed piece that he published five months later. The Administration then went on another search for evidence–the kind that could be used to discredit Wilson–and began disseminating it, off the record, to a few trusted reporters. That led to the unlawful exposure of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent.
As John Podhoretz notes, Lemann makes at least three factual errors:
He misstates who sent Wilson on the Niger junket (it was the CIA, not the White House).
He gets the date of Wilson’s op-ed wrong (it was July 2003, which was 17 and not five months after the Niger trip).
He falsely claims that Plame’s “exposure” was “unlawful.” In fact, no one has been charged with a crime, and no one has offered any evidence to back up Wilson’s claim that Plame was covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
To which we could add one more: The first person to expose Plame’s identity seems to have been Richard Armitage, then the State Department’s No. 2, and no one has suggested that he was part of an administration effort against Wilson.
To which I’d like to add that his mission was to determine whether they had obtained or attempted to obtain yellowcake, and that his debriefing with the CIA indicated it was likely that they had attempted so to do.
What? Is everybody still in bed & hung-over from last nights speech related festivities?
Who is more corrupt–Nifong or Fitzgerald? More politically motivated? Bigger douchebag?
Well, Nifong wanted to send at least 3 kids to jail for a long time. He gets my vote, nikkolai.
Dan, Nikolai—don’t forget Ronnie Earle…a Dem trifecta.
Oh, yeah.
What is up with old Ronnie? Odd that we haven’t heard anything from down that way lately, huh?
He falsely claims that Plame’s “exposure†was “unlawful.†In fact, no one has been charged with a crime, and no one has offered any evidence to back up Wilson’s claim that Plame was covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Except, of course, the folks at the CIA who referred the matter to Justice in the first place….
oh, and I liked this paragraph too:
He misstates who sent Wilson on the Niger junket (it was the CIA, not the White House).
So, when the White House through the VP’s office orders the CIA to investigate a claim, the White House can deny sending the specific envoy because someone else chose Wilson to go?
George Bush announced today he did not order the invasion of Iraq, pointing out that the soldiers and Marines of Operation Enduring Freedom were ordered into battle by CENTCOM. CENTCOM blamed Tommy Franks’s wife for sending him to Tampa in the first place.
Well done. No one ever gets tired of rehashing good ol’ Joe Wilson. Gonna be two fun trials
Apology to Dan and request to recall my “sarcasm”. After further research I have discovered that the issue of how Wilson received his assignment is controversial. Wilson always claimed Cheney’s office sent him and Cheney’s folks claimed the CIA did it. Apparently, neither side is willing to give in on that one (see today’s testimony).
My apologies.
I still stand by the first point, i.e. the CIA believe the leak was an unlawful act and that’s why it forwarded it to Justice.
Swear away, folks
Elements within the CIA appear to have believed that at the time, and it is up to the prosecutor to determine whether such a crime was committed.
But:
This is a question on the merits, and if there is evidence that that was the case, then the prosecutor ought to present it and find out who it was who actually leaked her identity. It doesn’t appear that that is the gist of this prosecution.
There’s also the issue of what Wilson actually told his debriefers, as compared with what he claims to have told them in his op-ed, which seems to have been elided in the media coverage. Wilson doesn’t want to take the stand, because he feels that it might weaken a civil suit? Hooey.
No, I think he is dead correct it hurts his civil suit. that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be called; this is a criminal trial, but the judge needs to determine if his testimony is necessary.
At some point, Dan, he will have to be deposed and you will get “the Truth” according to Wilson (although, to be frank, I see settlement of that lawsuit in the likely event Libby is acquitted. I mean, I’m not exactly reading rabid right wing news sites for the breaking news and through 2 days I know I have reasonable doubts).
Ths statute cited in the artivle is one of two that apply and both are incredibly difficult to prove. I think you see in yesterday’s testimony the official CIA position, which is that people she worked with less than 5 years prior were endangered by the leak.
Gonna be some fun trials for the political junkies
It is my understanding that any time there is any question about an agents status, it gets forwards it to the Justice Department, regardless of what a mindless bureaucracy “believes” about it.
Bmoe: Exactly! It was sometime after that the discovery was made that the specific statute says that the undercover operative has to be actively operating undercover in order for a violation of the law to have happened.
In effect what we have here is a wide ranging investigation whose original purpose was to bring a criminal complaint that could never be brought that resulted, after months of press skreechings, left wing taunting and PR grandstanding by Fitzgerald and the eponymous Wilson/Plames was a relatively weak assed indictment of Libby because he either delibrately tried to hide evidence to “protect” Cheney or just got sloppy and mixed up his facts.
But, hey, that Rove indictment is coming … any minute now …
I’m going to continue to search for the statute in question to confirm the above. Feel free to help in this regard, TimmyB.
I found it!
Here is a relevant quote:
(emphasis mine)
TimmyB you were right to say this:
It’s important to remember that this staute was passed in 1982 in response to Agee’s and Wolf’s books that published literally thousands of names of alleged covert CIA operatives. However, the legislature was cognizant of potential First Amendment concerns:
It would seem that the disclosure of Plame’s identity (when she was working at CIA Headquarters and not actively undercover) does not meet the rather stingent criteria laid out in the statute.
I think that it would be fair to say that no one involved in this sorry enterprise has covered themselves with honor.
damn straight, BJ.
In the end, Fitzgerald couldn’t prove anything about knowingly trying to harm agents, so there could be no underlying crime.
Of interest to me in this age of blogging: I think we can make an argument, separate from Vanity Fair Joe and FrogMarched Karl, that maybe we do need a law prohibiting this sort of leak.
I mean, from a left/right point of view, some crazy anarchist is much more likely to pull the trigger and publish a bunch of agents’ names in Baghdad, than Michelle Malkin is. Either way, although I’m all in favor of Congressional oversight of intelligence operations, public oversight is a bit much.
Personally, although I think rendition and black prisons are terrible and a bit gulag-ish, I still want to keep the CIA free to bash down Khalid Sheikh Muhammed’s door (and, although I oppose torturing him, a previously granted Presidential finding ordering him to undergo a quick 9mm headache might be warranted.)
Is that inconsistent? Let’s just say I always thought Kierkegaard was wrong about Sisyphus. Wonder which side of that debate KSM would be on now?
I will admit that the torture debate often makes my head hurt. I have always been extremely skeptical of the concept of Constitutional guarantees for enemy combatants (and, for that matter, Geneva Protections.) I believe that too often we bend over backward to leave the appearance of being “the good guys” when it buys us nolongterm useful PR capital. when do we say “screw the PR?”
The truth as I see it is that the GWOT is a nasty war against really nasty people that’s going to require some nasty business. Vigorous interrogation, occasional delibrate ignoring of territorial sovreignty, occasional collateral damage and the 9mm to the head (but only after option 1) are all on the table to various degrees. How to manage it all is a headache inducing event without even talking about the over the shoulder nature of our Republic and civlian military oversight along with an inconsistantly ethical press.
That having been said blowng the hell out of everyone is not the answer, but neither is treating this as strictly a criminal enterprise. The answer lies somewhere in the middle and that middle is vast chasm of Mariannas Trench proportions.
Just look at how you, me and RTO talk to each other about this. We can agree on some basics but a shared vision on the operational details (and, quite frankly, even the descriptions and understanding of terrorist organizations) appear to be beyond us.
What’s a country to do?
PS: With regrads to the “black prisons” I find myself trying, and failing, to evoke a shread of sympathy for these 7th century Islamic originalists. I guess that makes me a wingnut because I just can’t care about the brown/yellow/white/black people in these secret hellholes.
See, i take the long-term view that by making friends, we win. Let me explain, before you pull your hair out. The Bing West story in the Atlantic is interesting (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200610/haditha) in many ways, but especially in its description of successful counter-insurgency. The Marines made friends with the locals, who pointed out the insurgents, who were removed. Unfortunately, the Marines left, the nice guys were killed, and now there was no one to point out the bad guys.
I extrapolate that to nations. The Saudis have been inspired to hand over some crazies, so have the Paikistnais, because we treat them nicely. Doesn’t mean we don’t show tough love now and then, but they are more likely to know where the crazies are.
Steven Ambrose noted the US took less casualities in WW2 than the Russians or Germans in similar operations and posited it was because the Germans knew they would treated well when they surrendered. On the Eastern Front, you fought to the last man and called artillery strikes on the ambulances, because you were gonna die anyway…Our reputation for being good is what garners us friends.
As far as the black prisons go, I think the torturers suffer also. We don’t want those kind of people representing us, I believe, because they are fundamentally bad.
I know it does not shock you that I think there needs to be more law enforcement involved in the “GWOT”. After all, the Brits have broken alleged attacks with police work, not the SAS.