Bush is soft on crime

I've been interested in Scooter Libby's role in "Plamegate" since 2003. Ultimately, Libby was convicted of perjury, not leaking classified information, and sentenced to 30 months in jail, a $250,000 fine and 2 years probation.

Today, an appeals court ruled that Libby would have to start serving his jail time. Then, hours later, President Bush commuted that part of his sentence:

I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.

Given that Libby supporters have contributed $3 million to his legal defense, it seems hard to believe that a $250,000 fine is all that onerous.

My guess is that he'll get that back in a book advance and speaking fees.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, by the way, was not pleased::

“In this case an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in a statement. “It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals.”

The President seemingly agrees, as he declared on 6-6-06:

As Americans, we revere freedom and equality, the rights and dignity of every individual, and the supremacy of the rule of law.

Ah, hypocrisy.

Happy fourth of July everyone.


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Libby and his Superiors

This has been widely reported, but I wanted to save a copy of this quote on the blog. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wrote the following in a January 23 letter to Lewis Libby's attorneys. AP, February 9:

"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors,"

Libby's lawyers deny that such a defense is planned, nor do I think it would be especially relevant since Libby is not charged with leaking classified information.

He's charged with obstruction of justice, making false statements (2) and perjury (2). Five counts in all.

In any case, for the record, Libby's immediate superior was Vice President Dick Cheney, though he also worked as an Assistant to President George W. Bush. Presumably, some of Bush's top aides were viewed as superiors to Libby, who was the Veep's Chief of Staff.


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Filed as: Plame and Libby

Major media figures in minor markets

Sometimes, when major media figures (often called "journalists") appear in small media markets, they say remarkable things. Both of these Plame-related quotes were noted this week on Josh Marshall's first-rate blog:

First, Newsweek's chief political correspondent Howard Fineman was in northern New Jersey, speaking at Drew University. Basically, he declared war on Bob Woodward. The local Daily Record reported on December 13:

Howard Fineman, Newsweek's chief political correspondent, said Monday night in the first program of a Drew University lecture series, that Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward had become a "court stenographer" for the Bush administration.

Standing before a crowd of nearly 300, Fineman, said Woodward went from being an outsider "burning the beltway"with his investigative work in the 1970s Watergate scandal under President Nixon to being, " an official court stenographer of the Bush administration."

"He's a great reporter,"Fineman said of Woodward, "but he's become a great reporter of official history."

Wow! "The news about news is really bad," Fineman said.

Second, Plame-gate "star" Robert Novak was speaking at a luncheon at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina. Want to know who told Novak that Valerie Plame was CIA? Novak says to take the matter up with the President! From the local News Observer, December 14:

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

"So I say, 'Don't bug me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.'"

Wow again! Novak attacked the left for making too much of the case, but also blamed "extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it."

Rumor has it, by the way, that Karl Rove may well be indicted "before the end of the year" because prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald plans to finish by then.

Be ready, as always, to turn to firedoglake for incisive analysis of every pertinent detail.

Plausible update: the crime

Lambert at CorrenteWire notes that the Prosecutor strongly implies that something very bad may have happened to Valerie Plame's potential covert network. From the press conference:

[FITZGERALD:] And I’ve heard lots of people comment that many versions of the shield law would still have allowed us to subpoena the testimony we did in this case.

And I can tell you that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Hogan, who said if there was any qualified privilege, whatever the hurdle was, no matter how high, it was exceeded in this case.

No matter how high? As Lambert writes,

"That, to me, reads like Plame’s outing got somebody killed.

There aren’t many hurdles higher, or crimes more serious, than murder."

Later, the Prosecutor added this:

I've heard lots of people comment that many versions of the shield law would still have allowed us to subpoena the testimony we did in this case.

And I can tell you that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Hogan, who said if there was any qualified privilege, whatever the hurdle was, no matter how high, it was exceeded in this case.

And I think what people don't understand -- I understand why it is that newspapers want sources. And I read newspapers and I'm glad you have sources.

This is different. This was a situation where the conversations between the official and the reporter may have been a crime itself. It wasn't someone saying, "Hey, so and so is doing something really, really awful down the hall, but I'm going to get fired if I tell you."

If you're transmitting classified information, it's the crime itself.

But also the reporter is the eyewitness, and what I think people don't appreciate is we interviewed lots of people, very high officials, before we ever went to the reporters....

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed unanimously. The Supreme Court declined certiorari.

I think we ought to step back, take a deep breath and appreciate what the facts were here that are not the ordinary case before we rush into debates about balancing two very important things: the First Amendment and national security. And I don't take either lightly.

Even if Lambert is wrong about murder, something important is hidden in those classified filings. Valerie Plame's job status was classified, and apparently for good reason.

A commenter at Kevin Drum's Political Animal notes that Novak didn't just out Valerie Plame. He also outed her phony firm, Brewster-Jennings. On that subject, CBS News has this:

"If a CIA agent is exposed, then everyone coming in contact with that agent is exposed," says Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA agent who trained with Plame at the top-secret Virginia facility known as "the Farm." "There is a possibility that there were other agents that would use that same kind of a cover. So they may have been using Brewster Jennings just like her," said Marcinkowski, referring to the fictional firm the CIA set up as her cover that also came out when journalists, including Robert Novak, disclosed it.

Another commenter also points out that Plame could have been a NOC if she occasionally traveled abroad -- even if she lived primarily in Washington since 1997.

The right remains in denial

Some on the right continue to argue that the leak of Valerie Plame's identity wasn't a crime because she wasn't a covert agent. Commenter chicagomac on RedState.org:

It is clear that, at least by sometime in January 2004 -- and probably much earlier -- Fitzgerald knew this law had not been violated. Plame was not a "covert" agent but a bureaucrat working at CIA headquarters.

Read the thread and lots of commenters continue to claim that Plame was not covert, and thus could not have been outed.

Here's the truth from the Libby indictment:

At all relevant times from January 1, 2002 through July 2003, Valerie Wilson was employed by the CIA, and her employment status was classified.

The indictment also says that the Vice President told Libby that Plame worked in the "Counterproliferation Division," which as Josh Marshall points out, is in the Operations Directorate. The work of the OD is so secret that there's virtually no discussion of it on the CIA webpage.

The CIA webpage is kind of ambiguous on OD's organization, but the Senate Intelligence Committee in its July 2004 report on Iraq made clear that the "Counterproliferation Division" is in OD.

The right's apologists completely ignore the part of the indictment that notes Libby's legal responsibilities for handling all classified information. In other words, it wouldn't matter if she was still a NOC or not:

LIBBY was obligated by applicable laws and regulations, including Title 18, United States Code, Section 793, and Executive Order 12958 (as modified by Executive Order 13292), not to disclose classified information to persons not authorized to receive such information, and otherwise to exercise proper care to safeguard classified information against unauthorized disclosure. On or about January 23, 2001, LIBBY executed a written “Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement,” stating in part that “I understand and accept that by being granted access to classified information, special confidence and trust shall be placed in me by the United States Government,” and that “I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling of classified information by me could cause damage or irreparable injury to the United States or could be used to advantage by a foreign nation.”

Conceivably, Libby could have been charged with treason under some readings.

Numerous commenters also refer to Fitzgerald's "2-year investigation" as if the entire process was an unreasonable waste of time, given the outcome.

Well, the grand jury investigation began in January 2004 and was nearly finished by May. Remember, Matt Cooper (Time) and Judith Miller (The New York Times) fought their subpoenas to testify, in May 2004. This meant the beginning of a legal process that went all the way to the Supreme Court as the reporters kept losing (the Court refused to intervene on their behalf in June 2005).

Cooper finally agreed to testify in July 2005 and Miller went to jail that same month. Miller agreed to testify on September 30, which means it took Fitzgerald only one month to finish the investigation after he secured her testimony. It took about six to eight onths of total investigative work to wrap up the entire business. A year or more was lost fighting a winning battle against the reporter targets of the leaks.

Beyond Libby?

To me, this is the key paragraph in the Libby indictment. This pertains to Count 1, obstruction of justice:

21. On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (“Official A”) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

Who is Official A, other than one of Robert Novak's apparent sources?

If one reads the entire document, it is clear that Libby was not one of Robert Novak's sources. If he was, that would have been mentioned because the document discusses quite a number of people who Libby told, including journalists, that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA.

By the way, it also mentions that Libby had four different sources within the government confirming this fact for him.

I suppose it is possible that Libby admitted telling Novak, and therefore did not lie about it. However, the prosecutor then could have gotten to Libby's "state of mind" and considered an Espionage Act prosecution. As Fitzgerald said when using the "baseball analogy" in the press conference, the Prosecutor couldn't make such a charge because Libby was not telling the whole story and often lied.

So, who were Novak's sources? The paragraph I just quoted implies strongly that it is official A. Who is Official A? Multiple reports say Official A is Karl Rove. Rove's own attorney acknowledges that Rove remains in legal jeopardy.

Who is Novak's original second source? Most likely, it is one of the unindicted people who apparently testified against Libby -- but who are not mentioned by name in the indictment. Good guesses are John Hannah, David Wurmser or perhaps Fred Fleitz. If one or all of these men cut a deal with the Prosecutor, then they probably aren't going to be indicted. They may nonetheless lose their jobs in the administration once their testimony is required at trial.

Suffice to say that there are many unanswered questions.

As some bloggers and even The New York Times are noting, there's also good reason to believe that Fitzgerald is using Libby to pressure Vice President Cheney. The indictment mentions that Libby learned of Plame's status from the Veep, that persons in the Veep's office collectively discussed how to address media inquiries about the Wilson Niger trip, etc. I'll defer to Andrew Sullivan on this one.

Communication Breakdown

Apparently, the media has a hard time getting its story straight when it's not simply reporting White House press releases.

As commenter E-mart points out, some news agencies say that Valerie Plame didn't work in Winpac. Was Libby passing along disinformation? Was someone passing along disinformation to Libby? Or was Judith Miller just wondering about Winpac after learning that "Flame" worked on wmd issues at CIA?

I'm checking firedoglake regularly now because the talented writers there are following the news stories about "Treasongate" very closely. Plus, at least one of the bloggers there seems to be a former prosecutor. That blog, and others, have reported that Miller didn't really have a security clearance.

Hmmm.

The blogosphere and the media are truly exploding with energy about the different and rapidly changing angles on this story.

For example, writers are not merely speculating that Dick Cheney is a target of the leak investigation. No, some already have him thinking about resignation! The most fantastic speculation concerns the identity of Bush's new Veep. While some are saying Condi Rice, my money would be on a politico from the congressional leadership -- or a Governor from a red state. The person would have to be totally clean on the selling of the Iraq war, and there aren't many in the administration who are.

Vice President Marc Racicot?

Other rumors concern the theory that someone in the administration has flipped and is volunteering evidence to the leak investigators. John Hannah's name has surfaced. Remember, Hannah's name already emerged in February 2004 as a possible leaker -- along with Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Moreover, reporters are starting to turn on Judith Miller. Laura Rozen recalls that Miller didn't want to believe that the anthrax attacks were home-grown terrorism, and former Times colleague Barbara Crossette says Miller's oil-for-food stories were unsubstantiated.

Here's my contribution to these developments. Hannah not only worked in Cheney's office, he was apparently the point man in the Veep's office to receive Iraq intell info directly from the INC. From Newsweek:

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, "defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed"; the info was then reported to, among others, "appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies." The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a "principal point of contact" for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.

Did you notice the way the Office of Special Plans figured in there too?

If Hannah has flipped, he might know a lot about the origins of the Niger uranium story.

This is getting good.

Now, who could it be?

While I was out of town, Judith Miller published her version of events in the Valerie Plame investigation. The New York Times also printed its long story about Miller's involvement in the investigation. Here's one interesting tidbit from the latter story:

On July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson's article appeared in The Times, the reporter and her source met again, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, near the White House.

The notebook Ms. Miller used that day includes the reference to "Valerie Flame." But she said the name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Mr. Libby.

During the breakfast, Mr. Libby provided a detail about Ms. Wilson, saying she worked in a C.I.A. unit known as Winpac; the name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control.

So, before Robert Novak published his story, Miller had a name very much like Valerie Plame...who worked at CIA's shop specializing in weapons of mass destruction.

Does everyone remember the only time I've mentioned Winpac on this blog?

Bonus points for those who recall that John Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, ordinarily worked at Winpac. Bolton was one of the more famous people to visit Miller while she was incarcerated.

What an interesting coincidence.

This is a fascinating section from Miller's account:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no.

In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Miller doesn't recall her other sources? "How convieeenient," as the Church Lady used to say.

If the Democrats take Congress in 2006, maybe we can watch a updated version of "Church Chat."

After all, there are so many questions to answer.

How would Miller know if Libby told Cheney that he was speaking to her?

Miller had a security clearance?

Really? After what happened in fall 2001?

I wonder who granted that? Some say Donald Rumsfeld himself.

Curious.

Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked together in the Ford administration, so those guys are supposed to be old pros.

Wait, they also worked together in the secretive Nixon administration.

Maybe they are old pros.

WHIGs

According to some bloggers and reporters, Plame-leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may be investigating the WHIG members in the Bush administration.

No, this isn't a reference to the early 19th century political party of Zac Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

WHIG stands for "White House Iraq Group." This was the small club of administration officials who in August 2002 started "selling" the Iraq threat to the general public (and perhaps indirectly then, to Congress).

This is an interesting development because this investigation could explode into an array of unpredictable directions. For example, the neocons in the administration are and were embedded in many of these positions. Moreover, there are real or possible links to the fabricated Niger documents, the "16 words" in the State of the Union address, and the AIPAC spy case.

Who were the WHIG members? Sourcewatch lists this membership: Nicholas Calio, Stephen Hadley, Karen Hughes, Lewis Libby, Mary Matalin, Condi Rice, Karl Rove, and James Wilkinson. Andrew Card may have played a key role in the formation of WHIG. Later, Dan Bartlett apparently helped spin the Yellowcake-from-Africa tale.

This political operation seemed to operate with a membership separate from the "Office of Special Plans," which was an independent intelligence agency within the Department of Defense established to analyze information about Iraq's alleged "threat."

However, it has long been reported the OSP fed information to WHIG (and to the White House and Vice President's office directly) in order to help spread the word about Iraq threats.

Who was in OSP, or contracted to help its operations? Apparently, Youssef Aboul-Enein, William Bruner, Doug Feith, Larry Franklin, Michael Ledeen (!), Harold Rhode, Michael Rubin, Abram Shulsky, and David Wurmser. William Luti was the DoD overseer.

To position OSP within the vast Pentagon bureaucracy, this graphic is very helpful.

OPS had clear ties to the Iraqi National Congress, as some individuals were very friendly with Ahmad Chalabi and crew. Both the WHIG and OSP had former members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Some of these people are represented by Benador Associates too.

Judith Miller is a "Connector" (see Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point) who can help someone like Fitzgerald piece all the clues together.

While this is merely a teaser of fairly overt connections, I'm guessing that several of the people I've mentioned in this post are going to be indicted in the next month or so.

Just sit back, wait a few weeks, and then enjoy the show!

This weekend, maybe, buy some popcorn.

Plame Affair: Neo-Khan connection?

I've been thinking about something for a few days, and decided to blog about it -- just in case someone out there has any comments or information.

NY Times journalist Judith Miller is in jail because she refuses to talk to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigating the leaking of Valerie Plame's former secret identity as a CIA operative.

It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald's legal brief about Miller includes something very secret (classified) about the case. Thus, lots of people following the case are really curious about

"those crucial redacted eight pages of court documents that persuaded one judge after another to hold her in contempt in the first place. What's in those pages is obviously key to the whole Miller case."

Circuit Court Judge David Tatel referenced these "classified filings" in his ruling and noted that he might have been tempted to keep Miller out of jail but for the harmful national security implications of the leak.

Note, the judge's comments in the ruling are also secret!

So what is this secret information available to the prosecutor and the judges? Do those pages identify the person or persons who leaked Plame's name? Do they divulge Miller's source?

Maybe, but why would those be matters of national security? After all, the judge talked about the security implications.

One interesting theory is that those pages discuss Plame's status at the CIA and perhaps her secret work. Remember, this is what Robert Novak originally wrote on July 14, 2003:

[Amb. Joseph] Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.

So, I've been thinking about what we know -- and about what we'd like to know.

Valerie Plame had non-official cover as an employee of a CIA-front company called Brewster Jennings and Associates (apparently also known as Jennings, Brewster and Associates). After Novak's piece, the NY Times revealed that Plame had a nearly 20-year undercover career. The newspaper quoted Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former C.I.A. case officer and a friend of Plame-Wilson: Thanks to Novak's disclosure, "you removed from the playing field a very knowledgeable counterproliferation officer."

Anything else to know? Well, Joe Klein reported in Time, June 26, 2004 that Plame "may have been active in a sting operation involving the trafficking of WMD components."

A WMD sting? Really? Now, that's interesting.

In the field of counterproliferation, the big threats (ahem, after Iraq) are Iran and North Korea. Hmm. Oh, also in the recent past, the negotiations with Libya and the exposure of A.Q. Khan's network (Pakistan) have earned major headlines in this issue area.

Could Plame have worked on counterprolif toward any of these states? Wayne Madsen says yes: that Brewster Jennings was hot on the trail of A.Q. Khan's network!

Who then is Wayne Madsen and why isn't this story on the front pages? Well, according to Michael Froomkin (U of Miami Law Professor) at Discourse.net, he's not a wacko, but he's not always right either:

I don’t think Wayne Madsen is a nut. I’ve met Wayne a few times over the years at privacy-oriented events. He’s sometimes rumpled, often a little intense, has a spook-like love for conspiracy theory (forgivable since he is a sometime spook himself). He’s definitely out there on the fringe where left meets right, and we’re not always on the same page politically, but I have found him to be very well informed....I know this guy. Yes, he’s over-alarmist sometimes. But sometimes he’s right.

Madsen seems to link Brewster Jennings to this bust.

What do we think?

Was the leak of Valerie Plame's identity important because it ruined the Brewster Jennings CIA front that helped nail A.Q. Khan?

I'd like to know more, how about you?

Is the plot thickening?

Remember that secret memo I discussed last week? It was written by the State Department's INR (Intelligence and Research bureau), identified Joseph Wilson's spouse as an undercover agent -- and ended up on an Air Force One flight to Africa the week before Robert Novak revealed Valerie Plame's name on July 14. The memo's subject was the alleged transfer of uranium to Iraq. A retired INR official told the AP:

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation remains underway. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

Regular readers may recall that INR was skeptical about the Iraq WMD evidence throughout the buildup to war.

There are a lot of partisan rumors flying around on the web -- and in other media. On July 22, The New York Times reported an attempt to link the White House's nominee for UN ambassador to the story:

Democrats who have been eager to focus attention on the case have urged reporters to look into the role of several other administration officials, including John R. Bolton, who was then under secretary of state for arms control and international security

Do these Democrats know anything? Is this a snipe hunt? A fishing expedition?

MSNBC's David Shuster reported last week that Bolton did testify about that memo. This revelation has created a stir in the blog world because the Times says that, unlike Public Diplomacy nominee Karen Hughes, Bolton did not disclose any contacts with the ongoing legal case in the forms he filed for his Senate confirmation hearing.

It really isn't a surprise to think that Bolton talked to Fitzgerald's grand jury. After all, he was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. As Condi Rice said when announcing the nomination on March 7, his primary responsibility has been nonproliferation of WMD:

In that position, John has held primary responsibility for the issue that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has identified as one of our most crucial challenges to international peace and security: stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

At Bolton's confirmation hearings, it was made clear that the nominee often fought with people from INR about what the agency had to say about WMD.

The speculation is that Bolton may have seen the original June 10 memo and attempted to shoot down its contents sometime before Colin Powell got it on July 7. Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has previously revealed that Bolton played a critical role in the creation of a December 19, 2002, Fact Sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." This was created as part of the US response to Iraq's required report about its WMD activities, turned over to the UN in December 2002, as required by Security Council Resolution 1441. One item specifically mentioned in State's summary: Iraq had failed to disclose its "efforts to procure uranium from Niger." On July 14, 2003, of course, INR publicly revealed it had long questioned that claim. Yet, perhaps thanks to Bolton, it was part of the US case for war.

Of course, Bolton was in Australia at a conference the week after Wilson's op-ed appeared, but that doesn't mean he didn't talk to someone between June 10 and July 5 (when he was still in Washington). Indeed, Wilson heard rumors that he was going to be named publicly as the source of skeptical reports about the Niger uranium story "in late June," which is one reason he decided to write his July 6 op-ed.

If Bolton was fighting the PR battle, as well as the internal bureaucratic war with INR, who would have had the story?

Steve Clemons of the excellent blog, The Washington Note, has provided extensive coverage of Bolton's stalled nomination. Friday, Clemons reported a blog scoop. Bolton was frequently a source on WMD for Judith Miller (jailed reporter in the Plame case):

TWN has just learned from a highly placed source -- and in the right place to know -- that John Bolton was a regular source for Judith Miller's New York Times WMD and national security reports.

The source did not have any knowledge on whether Bolton was one of Miller's sources on the Valerie Plame story she was preparing, but argues that he was a regular source otherwise.

Then again, maybe Bolton just worked with his pals at the White House, Veep's office, and Pentagon. In April, USA Today quoted Karl Rove as saying that he's known Bolton for 30 years.

Presumably, they are friendly.

Naming names

In the past week, I've heard a number of Republican-friendly commenters on TV go on-and-on about the "fact" that neither Karl Rove nor Lewis "Scooter" Libby used Valerie Plame's name in their summer 2003 conversations with journalists. To these analysts, this means that no crime could have been committed in the case.

Today, NRO Corner writer John Podhoretz explains that NBC's Tim Russert might have used the same excuse with the grand jury when he attempted to explain his apparent conversation with Libby (who says he learned of Plame from Russert). I've put the key part in italics:

Is somebody lying? Maybe -- but on the other hand maybe there's a lot of weaseling going on here and some of it is Tim Russert's. Knowing as his lawyer must have that the criminally dangerous portion of the statute being invoked requires the actual use of Plame's name, maybe Russert told the special prosecutor he didn't use the NAME. "Joe Wilson's wife" is not Valerie Plame's name.

Regardless of Podhoretz's claim, check out the statute apparently in question. It only requires that someone reveal information that identifies the individual. It says nothing about leaking a name (see italicized parts of all 3 key sections):

Intelligence Identities and Protection Act (1982)

Section 421. Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources
(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had
access to classified information that identifies covert agent

Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified
information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses
any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not
authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the
information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the
United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert
agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be
fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or
both.

(b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identity of
covert agents as result of having access to classified
information

Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified
information, learns the identify of a covert agent and
intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert
agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified
information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies
such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative
measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship
to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned
not more than five years, or both.

(c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of
activities intended to identify and expose covert agents

Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to
identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that
such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence
activities of the United States, discloses any information that
identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not
authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the
information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the
United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such
individual's classified intelligence relationship to the United
States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than
three years, or both.

(d) Imposition of consecutive sentences

A term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be
consecutive to any other sentence of imprisonment.

Sorry for including the entire section, but this makes it clear that Podhoretz and the talking heads I've seen on TV are quite wrong.

Other commentators, by the way, have suggested that other crimes may have been committed by those leaking Plame's identity. John Dean mentioned the Espionage Act of 1917, for example, in a mid-August 2003 column. Liberal Oasis notes that Russert himself pointed to the possibility that one or more leakers might have violated the terms of their basic Standard Form-312, which goes along with their classified security clearance.

Podhoretz also writes that Libby is an experienced hand who couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to have revealed Plame's identity. Then again, Podhoretz writes that "Libby saw friends and colleagues sucked into special-prosecutor investigations throughout the 1980s."

I wonder if Podhoretz would have written in the '80s that Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, and Caspar Weinberger were too smart to lie to Congress?


Note: Podhoretz is Abrams's brother-in-law as Abrams married Podhoretz's half-sister.

Legal update

There are new leaks about the Valerie Plame case. Many of the leaks, however, are contradictory and concern the "chicken-and-egg" part of the story. Administration officials often claim that they heard about Plame's status from journalists...but the journalists say they learned from the officials. Hmmm. There's also the question of who read that memo I discussed yesterday.

Let's continue to consider the apparent main characters: Libby, Rove, and Fleischer.

First, there's this Bloomberg news report from earlier today:

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

This begs the question. Even if Libby is telling the truth, how did Russert find out? Which one is telling the truth? Who has more to gain by lying?

Rove: The American Prospect's Murray Waas reports that Karl Rove never disclosed talking to Matt Cooper about Valerie Plame.

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

Cooper also said that they never talked about welfare reform (Rove says that was the subject of the discussion) -- though Cooper acknowledges that his voice message may have mentioned it and he had been assigned such a story earlier. But the Wilson/Plame story pushed welfare reform to the back burner.

Finally, on July 18, 2005, Bloomberg reported that White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer was among those who looked over the State Department memo identifying Valerie Plame as a secret agent:

Fleischer was among a group of administration officials who left Washington later that day on a presidential trip to Africa. On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip.

However, today's NY Times says that Fleischer denies having read the memo:

Mr. Fleischer told the grand jury that he never saw the document, a person familiar with the testimony said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about not disclosing what is said to the grand jury.

Deny, deny, deny.

"I heard that too"

In case you were wondering, this AP photo (hat tip to Dan Froomkin) was taken in June 2003. Karl Rove and Robert Novak are side-by-side at a party celebrating Novak's 40 years writing a newspaper column. Rove's button says, "I'm a source, not a target."

Seriously.

Keep in mind that Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote his op-ed disputing the Bush administration's claims about uranium from Niger on July 6, 2003. However, he was already on the White House radar screen because he had been talking off-the-record to reporters for weeks. Wilson was ticked that the 2003 State of the Union address claimed Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa -- and he was trying very hard to spread the story about his 2002 trip (sponsored by CIA in response to a request from the Vice President's office about the possible uranium deals), which he felt debunked Bush's claim.

Novak disclosed Valerie Plame's identity in his column on July 14. Rove apparently claims that Novak told him that Wilson's wife (Plame) was CIA. When Novak asked Rove about Wilson's wife and job, the presidential advisor apparently said he had "heard that too."

Time Magazine's Matt Cooper also identified Rove as a source for his story, which appeared a few days later.

"Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes."

In short, Karl Rove has been publicly named as someone who told reporters that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent -- and yet he continues to serve as Bush's brain.

For those following the potential criminal implications of this case, note that government officials granted access to official secrets sign an oath promising not even to confirm the accuracy of an unauthorized disclosure of classified information. They have an obligation first to try to find out if the information has been declassified. If they confirm an unauthorized disclosure, that too is an unauthorized disclosure.

According to his account, Cooper also talked to Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, on the following day. Get this, Libby also apparently said, "Yeah, I've heard that too," when Cooper asked him if Plame arranged Wilson's Africa trip.

Unauthorized disclosure #2?

None of this smells good.

Here's an ironic twist concerning Libby's alleged involvement:

Libby is strikingly reticent to volunteer personal details about himself. He refuses to use his first name, for example, using only his initial, nor does he offer any details about his marital or family status.

There are lots of ways to think about what happened. I like to consider the big picture. Clearly, someone in the White House was trying to retaliate against Wilson and possibly discourage future whistle-blowers. The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson called the White House attempts to silence the truth "dirty tricks." The NY Times columnist Frank Rich said it was all "Worse Than Watergate," because the point of the original lying and the political dirty trick was to cover up a weak case for war.

Bad news continues to leak out of Washington. Even the potentially distracting nomination of a political hack to the Supreme Court hasn't pushed the story off the front page. The Washington Post reports, Thursday July 21 on p. A1:

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

You can safely ignore those Republican loyalists on TV who keep claiming that Plame's identity was "well known," or that she wasn't really a spy.

"Secret" is an official government classification level. This is from a government intelligence page outlining the different levels:

Secret, which refers to national security information that requires a substantial degree of protection. The test for assigning a Secret classification is whether its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.

The memo was apparently prepared for Secretary of State Colin Powell, based on notes from a meeting held February 19, 2002. It was written by someone in State's INR June 10, 2003 for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman (a career Foreign Service Officer), but delivered to Powell on July 7, 2003. Powell took the memo on Air Force One for a trip to Africa with President Bush and key members of the White House staff (but neither Rove nor Libby!).

Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was apparently seen reading the memo on Air Force one.

I've read quite a number of recent news stories and blog entries about the leak story. There are numerous ties to the big picture -- the administration was selling a bunch of lies about Iraqi nukes, some key people in (and out) of Washington knew it, and the hacks tried to pressure them into keeping their mouths shut. In this case, since Wilson didn't work for the government any more, they tried to apply leverage through his wife.

The key question: will anyone be held accountable?

Not so sleepy Saturday

The remnants of Hurricane Dennis have been lingering in the Ohio Valley for most of the past week. It has rained most days and is often cloudy and gray. Today was no exception, which would ordinarily make it a sleepy Saturday. You know, a day of rest and relaxation.

And I certainly didn't do much on Saturday -- watched the Yankee-Red Sox game, updated some of my University webpages, went to the grocery store, etc.

Regular readers know that I haven't blogged very much lately, and haven't added any new content in 48 hours.

So...I was more than a little surprised when I discovered that nearly 800 people have visited the site today! Most have arrived via whatREALLYhappened.com and are reading my "Forged Documents" post from February 10, 2004. That post discusses the possible origins of the Niger documents from Italy, but I assume people are reading because of the latest revelations about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame. Plame's spouse went to Africa and helped disprove the Niger-uranium story, despite the existence of forged documents suggesting Niger was selling nuclear material to Iraq.

I've long been interested in the two stories myself, so I'm not surprised people are still interested in the possible connections.

The page they are visiting is probably the most frequently viewed page on this blog, thanks to a previous link from whatREALLYhappened.com and a link from Atrios.

Over the past 18 months, literally thousands of readers have seen that post and probably think I'm running some sort of conspiracy-theory blog.

Am I?

I prefer to relate some of my more speculative blogging to the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. For example, we'd know a lot more about the Valerie Plame affair if jailed New York Times journalist Judith Miller simply told us what she knew:

1. Judith Miller is linked to "Iraq is to blame for all terrorism" wacko Laurie Mylroie. They wrote a book together!
2. Mylroie is directly linked to Lewis Libby. Libby "blurbed" Mylroie's book.
3. Libby is directly linked to the Bush-Cheney White House. He is Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff
4. The White House is dominated by "Bush's Brain," Karl Rove.

Oh, that didn't take six steps. Should I have added that Michael Ledeen is also on Benador Associates roster? Like Miller and Mylroie, he has often expressed confidence in Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi.

When this story started, Plame's spouse, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, fingered Karl Rove as the leaker.


7/19/05 Correction: Libby didn't blurb Mylroie's book; "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle did that. Libby was personally thanked for his "generous and timely assistance" by Mylroie. Paul Wolfowitz was also thanked.

Investigations update

I need to update the "neo-convicts" post already.

First, all four investigations I mentioned yesterday may be the same.

The Franklin case is apparently linked to the Plame leak and linked to the Feith op and linked to the Chalabi case.

Former CIA agent and current MSNBC talking head Larry Johnson said the other day that the Franklin affairs "was linked to the investigation on the forged uranium documents." I've found a MSNBC transcript from August 27 on LexisNexis:

I've heard about this investigation for, you know, several months now. And you know it is -- it actually is tied into the forged memo regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of -- in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife [sic] at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources.

The Marshall, Rozen, and Glastris story doesn't mentioned Israeli agents present at the Franklin/Rhode meetings with Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and SISMI in Rome.

Hmmmm.

Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder more directly makes a connection that I suggested yesterday. The Franklin-Israel investigation does tie directly to the Chalabi-Iran leaks:

An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.

The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.

In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran....both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

Richard Sale of UPI links several investigations together indirectly. For example, he ties the "non lawful" intelligence op Feith was allegedly running to the neocons in Vice President Cheney's office -- the primary area of interest to the Plame investigators, apparently:

[William] Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.

According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.

Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."

In regard to the Chalabi leak, Sale specifically discusses Harold Rhode a great deal, saying that he has had his security clearances lifted in the past (as did Ledeen in the '80s) and may even now be on administrative leave:

According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."

This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.

It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Sale also reports that Michael Ledeen worked on a contract basis for OSP under Feith!

Cheney's office, where Libby and Hannah worked, dispatched Luti to Feith, who already served as boss to Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode. Did these guys prompt someone (Israel? Italy?) to cook up the Niger uranium story, burn Plame when that forgery was found out, and leak all kinds of state secrets to their pals in Israel and the INC? And then, Chalabi screwed them all over by leaking to Iran?

That's the picture that may be coming into focus.

It is such a tangled web. Thanks go out to uggabugga for the visual aid.



Notes: Wolfowitz's name is starting to pop up in the stories, but so far I've seen no allegations tied to him.

Also, one potential problem with Sale's story is that he quotes Karen Kwiatkowski and may have used her as a source for many of his claims. Some bloggers wonder if she's 100% reliable on all this, since she allegedly tried to peddle her story to one of Lyndon LaRouche's rags. The Weekly Standard throws a lot of mud too.

Neo-convicts?

If 2002 was the year of the neocon in Washington, 2004 (well, maybe 2005) may yet prove to be the year of the neo-convict.

The neocons and their associates are apparently the subject of three investigations by various parts of the Justice Department and have the attention of several key Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee as well. All these inquiries seem to overlap, as all involve key national security figures and topics.

Here are the investigations. I'll try to highlight a few points of overlap.

1. Most recently, a former Defense Intelligence Agency expert on Iran is apparently under investigation by the FBI for allegedly leaking to Israel information about US policy toward Iran. The Washington Post reported on August 29, 2004:

FBI officials have been quietly investigating for months whether [Lawrence] Franklin gave classified information -- which officials said included a draft of a presidential directive on U.S. policies toward Iran -- to two Israeli lobbyists here who are alleged to have passed it on to the Israeli government.

Franklin works in the Bush Pentagon in the office of William Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. Luti's office is under the purview of Douglas Feith, the #3 man in Secretary's Rumsfeld's civilian chain-of-command.

Franklin last appeared in this blog as part of a travel story, as he and some prominent neocons had an interesting adventure in Rome during December 2001 and June 2002.

More on that below.

2. Earlier this summer (the first week of June), various media sources reported that Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi leaked to Iran highly classified US intelligence information. The fear is that Chalabi told Iran that the US had broken its codes -- and could therefore easily monitor Tehran's secret communications. From Newsweek:

"This is an enormous loss to the U.S. intelligence community," one former U.S. intelligence official said today about the reported leak of the secret code system. "Obviously, the Iranians are not going to use that code anymore. We're going from having a complete window into what their intelligence service was doing to having no window at all."

That's very bad, whether you think Iran is evil, or not.

Where did Chalabi receive top US secrets? That is the $100,000 question:

[There are a] spate of media reports alleging that Chalabi or one of his associates told the Iranians that U.S. intelligence had cracked a secret code system used by the Iranian intelligence service. U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official....

But, given that Chalabi is not a U.S. citizen and does not have a U.S. security clearance, the more critical issue for investigators will be to find out who in the U.S. government might have leaked such highly sensitive information to Chalabi and the INC, some officials say. Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Some sources say the investigation is centering upon US authorities based in Baghdad.

The New York Times more specifically said that investigators were taking aim at Chalabi's neocon supporters, but didn't name any names:

The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.

Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters and served as his main point of contact with the government, the officials said.

After a little digging on the internet, I discovered two guys who are often named as suspects by bloggers.

First, consider Harold Rhode, who met with Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Larry Franklin, and the head of Italian Intelligence (SISMI) in Rome in December 2001, possibly to talk about Iraq's alleged uranium trade:

Rhode got another big break when Pentagon hawks sent him to Baghdad this spring as their chief liaison (read: handler) to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmed Chalabi, the hawks' favorite exile.

But problems cropped up then, too, when, during his stay at the occupation headquarters in Baghdad, Rhode quickly alienated most of the American military and civilian pros in the country...Later he holed himself up with Chalabi at the latter's hunt-club headquarters...

So after working with Feith in the DoD, Rhode was Chalabi's handler in Iraq and lived in his compound. Interesting, eh?

Anyone else a viable possibility? Well, I always shop for neocons at Benador Associates. From the agency's webpage:

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, having recently served 18 months in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an Iraq and Iran advisor, during which time he was also seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] governance team. The only CPA official to live outside the American security bubble, Rubin was free to travel Iraq and without restriction to a single region, and so was able to maintain extensive contacts with ordinary Iraqis, be they Arab Sunnis or Shi'a, or Kurds.

Both Rubin and Rhode are neocons who were living in Iraq, had ready access to Chalabi, and served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war.

Motive, means and opportunity?

3. As I've occasionally discussed, someone leaked Valerie Plame's name in an attempt to discredit Joseph Wilson in June 2003. At the time, Wilson was publicly challenging the administration's claim that it had not known that the uranium from Africa story was based on fabricated documents at the time of the President's 2003 State of the Union Address.

While some fingers were first pointed at Karl Rove, the Justice Department investigation has apparently centered upon the neocons in the Vice President's office: Lewis "Scooter" Libby's name has appeared prominently, as has John Hannah's , in numerous news stories.

Libby is a neocon who signed the Project for a New American Century's "Statement of Principles," dated June 3, 1997. Other notable Bush administration signatories include Elliott Abrams, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

I'm not sure why Feith was not part of PNAC, but he did work for Richard Perle in DoD earlier in his career.

4. In an attachment to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Iraq, US Senators Jay Rockefeller (WV), Richard Durbin (IL) and Carl Levin (MI) criticize Doug Feith's office for running a private intelligence failure that was "non lawful" during the runup to the war in Iraq. Here's what they say:

The Intelligence Community’s findings did not support the link between Iraq and the 9/11 plot Administration policy officials wanted to help galvanize public support for military action in Iraq. As a result, officials under the direction of Under Secretary Feith took it upon themselves to push for a change in the intelligence analysis so that it bolstered Administration policy statements and goals.

After Feith and crew failed to convince the intelligence agencies to change their assessment, they took their case directly to the White House in a September 16, 2002, briefing. CIA Director George Tenet learned of this briefing in March 2004.

Following the publication of the Intelligence Community’s terrorism and weapons of mass destruction analytical estimates and the subsequent congressional vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq, Administration public statements leading up to the war became increasingly hyperbolic and urgent.

The qualifications the Intelligence Community placed on what it assessed about Iraq’s links to terrorism and alleged weapons of mass destruction programs were spurned by top Bush Administration officials, early casualties in the war with Iraq....

By the time American troops had been deployed overseas and were poised to attack Iraq, the Administration had skillfully manipulated and cowed the Intelligence Community into approving public statements that conveyed a level of conviction and certainty that was not supported by an objective reading of the underlying intelligence reporting.

Again, Rockefeller called Feith's intelligence op "non-lawful," but it's hard to say whether he was referring to the Office of Special Plans, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group or the Rome adventure.

Maybe it's a trifecta?

In any case, all these investigations (save the Plame) are focusing on the same small group of neocons who are suddenly facing some serious problems.

As Jim Lobe wrote back in June, "the neocon retreat has turned into a rout."

Dog Days of August?

Isn't August supposed to be vacation time in politics? Politicos evacuate DC because it's a hot and humid swamp, and thus media (even bloggers) get a break because of the lack of news.

Fat chance.

Bruce Springsteen has helped launch Vote for Change in order to dump Bush. He penned an op-ed for the NY Times and was interviewed for "Nightline" by Ted Koppel.

Halliburton, big surprise, manipulated perceptions about its profits during Dick Cheney's tenure as CEO. The firm committed securities fraud, essentially.

John McCain is once again defending fellow veteran John Kerry against right-wing smears of his record in Vietnam. So why was CNN still covering the campaign ad tonight on Lou Dobbs? Why give it more attention than it deserves? It is a slime ad.

And Colin Powell has been interviewed in the Valerie Plame case -- apparently about a conversation he had with George W. Bush in July 2003.

Meanwhile, I'm still swimming, eating lots of ice cream and hanging out with my wife and kids.

More later.

Vacation updates

I'm in the DC area now, the beach part of the trip is over.

Yesterday, I had no access to my computer. At least today the internet connection is reasonably fast. Tuesday night it was 28.8. Ugh.

In case you missed it, a Washington Post reporter told the Plame investigators that his phone conversation with Scooter Libby on July 12, 2003, didn't pertain to their case:

[Glenn] Kessler said he told prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald that, during conversations last July 12 and July 18, Libby did not mention Plame or her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, or Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to buy uranium there.

Kessler didn't reveal what he was discussing with Libby.

South Knox Bubba has published a list of the President's "accomplishments" on The American Street group blog. Some of the stuff is arguably over-the-top, but it is convenient to have the summary in one place.

The game last night was a lot of fun. I usually do not enjoy blowouts, but it was fun to catch up with an old friend (he pointed me to the Libby story in the Post) -- and the blowout rule doesn't apply when the Yankees are getting creamed (13-2 final). It also didn't apply for game 7 of the 1985 World Series.

The Forged Documents

Josh Marshall hints that he is on to something big. The journalist-blogger first quotes an intriguing tidbit from Monday's Washington Post story on the Valerie Plame investigation:

A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is "at a critical stage," according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries.

Sy Hersh's "stovepiping" story reported that the Niger story dates to just after 9/11:

In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or SISMI, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. “We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President,” Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report. At the time, Niger, which had sent hundreds of troops in support of the American-led Gulf War in 1991, was actively seeking economic assistance from the United States.

None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie’s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as “yellowcake.” (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)

I'm sorry for quoting so much of this, but Hersh draws a link from Italy to the US intelligence agency, to the Vice President's office.

The SISMI report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.

The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. “The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,” Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said.

Hersh points out that the administration started publicly claiming that Iraq was acquiring materials to restart its nuclear program in January 2002. In February, Ambassador Wilson was contracted to go to Niger. Later in the year, the British "dodgy dossier" apparently relied upon the SISMI report to assert that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

The forged documents themselves apparently emerged in October 2002, about the time the administration started talking about mushroom clouds and Iraq. This is from Hersh's story in the New Yorker:

At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents’ existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a glossy Italian weekly owned by the publishing empire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible.

Berlusconi, remember, supported the war.

Hersh then describes the photocopied documents received by the reporter, complete with codebook so as to interpret them. Burba turned the documents over to the American embassy in Rome on October 9, 2002. Hersh advances several theories about the forgeries. One is that SISMI fabricated them, another is that former CIA agents produced them to prove how intelligence was being mishandled by the adminsitration. Burba, incidentially, like Wilson travelled to Niger and fairly easily established that they were false. Inside the US they were also apparently discredited -- until they got to the Pentagon and Office of Special Plans.

Let's now consider Marshall's suspicions, which he acknowledges are based on circumstantial evidence. First, the circumstances, which Marshall wrote about in late October 2003:

The US and UK start a major roll-out on the nuclear claims. But the response is generally disappointing. There’s major push-back from the IAEA and, secretly in the US, from the CIA.

It was precisely at this moment (in the last days of September and the first of October) that the advocates of the Niger story were most in need of some new evidence. And it was precisely at this moment when the new evidence --- at first seemingly incontrovertible --- popped up in Rome.

And the day after the reporter gets the docs the Editor-in-Chief of her magazine instructs her to take them to the American Embassy.

Marshall provides more precise dates for all this -- take it from me that all this activity was condensed into several weeks during late September and early October 2002.

Today, Marshall wrote this on his blog:

a close look at the timeline of events in October 2002 points to the conclusion that the person who got those documents into the hands of Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba had some knowledge -- either direct or indirect -- of highly secret debates then going in between the Bush White House, the CIA and members of the Blair government in the UK.

I've been doing some digging into the timeline and likely (neocon?) connections and have arrived at some names I think Marshall means.

One is Manucher Ghorbanifar, of Iran-contra fame. Or should I say infamy? Ghorbanifar was the go-between for the US and Iranians when US arms were illegally traded for hostages. The CIA doesn't like him much:

One result of the Iran-contra scandal was a decision by the C.I.A. that it could not trust Mr. Ghorbanifar. A 1987 Congressional report on Iran-contra said that after Mr. Ghorbanifar failed C.I.A.-administered polygraph examinations, the agency issued a rare "Fabricator Notice," warning that he "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance." He has been considered a con artist by the C.I.A. ever since.

Back in early December, the New York Times ran a story about meetings between Ghorbanifar and two Pentagon officials. In August, Newsday had already identified them as, "Harold Rhode, [Doug] Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office." Apparently, the first meetings were initiated by Ghorbanifar and occurred in Paris, December 2001. Other meetings occurred in June 2002 in Rome:

Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile disdained by the CIA and State Department but groomed for leadership by the Pentagon.

Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s when he introduced Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-contra affair.

Who set up these meetings between Ghorbanifar and the US officials? Apparently neocon Michael Ledeen (the NYT names him as the broker as well), who is quoted directly in the more recent New York Times piece, after refusing to comment in August to Newsday.

In October 2003, Ledeen was the named source for a story in the conservative Washington Times claiming that Iraq provided Iran with uranium five years ago. He says the CIA refused to follow up the story because it was revealed in these meetings between the Pentagon officials and Ghorbanifar.

"We aggressively pursue all legitimate leads on weapons of mass destruction," chief CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said.

"It is true that we have no interest in meeting Mr. Ghorbanifar since he long ago was proven to be a fabricator and someone who sought to peddle false information for financial gain," Mr. Harlow said.

Fox News also had this story last October:

According to a leading Middle East expert, the CIA missed a golden opportunity to uncover a cache of Iraqi enriched uranium.

Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Manucher Ghorbanifar, a figure from the Contra-hostage arms deals from the Reagan years, contacted him.

According to Ghorbanifar, a Shiite Iraqi and a former Iraqi military officer in Iraq had access to enriched uranium. The uranium was reportedly part of a cache hidden by Saddam, some of which had been smuggled to Iran by the Shiite and the Iraqi officer.

Bottom line: Ghorbanifar met with Pentagon officials and discussed uranium smuggling in Rome in 2001-2002.

I don't know if this has anything to do with Marshall's theory, but Ledeen used to live in Rome and apparently consulted for SISMI. Journalist Jim Lobe says it was Ledeen that helped expose Billy Carter's relationship with Libya. And of course, Ledeen was pretty directly involved in Iran-contra.


6/3/04 Update: More people have viewed this post than any other on my blog. Atrios linked to it back in early February and he always directs lots of readers. Now, What Really Happened has linked to it again. Thanks.

As a followup, I took note of Ledeen's daughter Simone's connections to the new Iraq on June 1, 2004.

I think the next most popular posts here concern either Laurie Mylroie or the numerous WMD lies.


7/18/05 update whatREALLYhappened.com has linked here again. I've blogged recently about this latest wave of readers.