Indictments Would Be Grave Injustice

[Adam's Apple]

Indictments Would Be a Grave Injustice
By Michael Barone for Real Clear Politcis
October 24, 2005

For more than two years, many in the mainstream media have been buzzing about the prospect that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or Vice President Chief of Staff Scooter Libby would be indicted for revealing the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The press has been full of righteous indignation that high officials in the Bush administration would endanger the identity of a covert agent. And it has been argued that administration officials did this to protect a fearless truth-teller -- Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson -- a former ambassador who charged that the Bush administration purposefully ignored intelligence and lied about Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is that the narrative line being offered up by the press is almost entirely wrong. And it is almost certainly true that neither of the statutes that might cover the situation -- the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 and the Espionage Act of 1917 -- was violated, at least by anyone in the administration.

for full article:
http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-10_24_05_MB.html

 

[nosarcasm]

another spin doctor already making excuses ?

Any indictment of Rove or Libby brought by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, which is scheduled to go out of existence on Oct. 28, would in my opinion be a grave injustice

Without having the facts on the case and the more likely
szenario of coverup charges out there nobody but the prosecutor
knows what they really have on people.

It way too early to talk about grave injustice. The writer is just an early apologist/defender. Lets wait for the facts.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Give me a break Adam's Apple, Wilson went to Niger to investigate a British intel report that said Saddam had bought yellow cake from them in the late 90s. Wilson could never find any evidence that he had. When he brought this back to the white house, he was ignored because the whitehouse didn't want to hear anything that contradicted their war plans. So wilson wrote an op-ed for the NYT showing what he'd found and a couple of weeks following wilson's op-ed, in a mysterious coincidence, the Vice president's office leaks the name of an undercover CIA operative who happens to be wilson's wife to the media. "DUH, I guess it's all some big coincidence!" DUHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Try being a little bit more obtuse.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Well, Hag, what you've just written is the liberal's side of the story anyway. Whether it is true or not remains to be seen. Wilson's story has been disputed by the international intelligence community. Barrone's article states that neither law that would govern this situation--the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 and the Espionage Act of 1917--has been violated by anyone in the Bush Administration. Now the question is: How will Peter Fitzgerald twist things to be able to render an indictment?

 

[Annie]

Give me a break Adam's Apple, Wilson went to Niger to investigate a British intel report that said Saddam had bought yellow cake from them in the late 90s. Wilson could never find any evidence that he had. When he brought this back to the white house, he was ignored because the whitehouse didn't want to hear anything that contradicted their war plans. So wilson wrote an op-ed for the NYT showing what he'd found and a couple of weeks following wilson's op-ed, in a mysterious coincidence, the Vice president's office leaks the name of an undercover CIA operative who happens to be wilson's wife to the media. "DUH, I guess it's all some big coincidence!" DUHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Try being a little bit more obtuse.

http://media.nationalreview.com/080588.asp

Links at site

Stephen Spruiell Reporting

Press Patterns
An Open Letter to the Press: Tell the Truth About Joseph Wilson

I sent an e-mail like this to a reporter who is covering the Plame investigation. I'll let you know if I get a response. In the meantime, feel free to send this e-mail to reporters you see peddling Wilson canards:

Why do you and many other reporters persist in using the following stock description Joseph Wilson:

Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration's Iraq policy by disputing the possibility that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium fuel from Niger.

In his July 6, 2003 op-ed, Mr. Wilson wrote that he had been sent to Niger to check out whether Saddam had actually purchased uranium, and that "It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." According the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on pre-war intelligence, Wilson’s trip actually indicated that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium from Niger – he “told his CIA debriefers that during his Niger trip, he spoke to the country's former prime minister, who told him that members of an Iraqi delegation in the late 1990s expressed interest in expanded commercial contacts with Niger. The former prime minister told Wilson that he interpreted the comment to mean that Iraq was interested in buying uranium, although the word 'uranium' was not mentioned in the Iraqis' conversation, he said. The prime minister, fearful of United Nations sanctions that prevented trade with Iraq at the time, dropped the subject, Wilson reported" (Jacoby, Salon, 07/16/04). Wilson himself, in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote, “I never claimed to have ‘debunked’ the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. I claimed only that the transaction described in the documents that turned out to be forgeries could not have occurred and did not occur.”

Did you write that Wilson disputed something he did not dispute because to explain the true nature of his criticism would take too many words? Why not describe Wilson as follows:

Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration's Iraq policy by disputing the possibility that Saddam Hussein's regime actually bought uranium fuel from Niger.

That description has the added benefit of using fewer words. In addition, it shows that Wilson's claim did not contradict the administration's claim that Saddam had sought to purchase uranium from Niger — a claim that Wilson's report actually bolstered. Can you please clarify why this canard, well-documented by liberal media critic Bob Somerby, has gone uncorrected for so long?

If we don't do something to stop this error from being repeated over and over in the media, it will simply become fact. If indictments are handed down, public interest in the Plame case will skyrocket. People who have never heard of Joseph Wilson will suddenly start hearing his name. If the press continues to whitewash his credibility issues, people will actually think he was some kind of truth-telling whistleblower, rather than a lying CIA plant.

Little Green Footballs has a handy list of media contacts.
[ 10/24/2005 07:50 PM ]

 

[Annie]

Looky what the NY Times dragged out yesterday. Links at site:

http://www.slate.com/id/2131180/

Hillary's Chimerical 'Recalibration'
ABC's Note admires the smokescreen.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005, at 3:41 PM ET

Redacted all absurdum: Remember the famous 8 redacted pages in Judge Tatel's concurring opinion in the Plame case, the pages that many observers, following Lawrence O'Donnell's lead, assumed contained top secret eye-only information on the grave national security consequences of CIA "operative" Plame's outing--the pages, indeed, that O'Donnell said constituted "the one very good reason Karl Rove might be indicted"? Well, never mind! Tom Maguire notices a buried lede in today's NYT story indicating that those 8 pages turn out to contain nothing like that. They seem to mainly disclose information about witnesses, etc. involved in Fitzgerald's perjury case--not a case about horrible damage done to our intelligence agents or their sources. The upshot may be that, despite Joseph Wilson's dramatics, his wife's outing didn't really cause such national security damage--something a few scandal-poopers have claimed all along. ... 3:50 P.M.

 

[Annie]

and this is looking weirder and weirder. Lots of links. I'm really beginning to think this is the scandal that wasn't:

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2005/12/sometimes_nothi.html

Sometimes Nothing Is A Real Cool Hand

Sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime, especially when the underlying crime is not really there. Put another way, Lewis Libby is an idiot (but we knew that).

Special Counsel Fitzgerald has made a filing in response to a motion to unseal the mysterious eight redacted pages from the Feb 15, 2005 court ruling that ultimately sent Judy Miller to jail.

And what, we all had wondered, was in those redacted pages that was of such significance that it could convince three judges to threaten reporters with jail? Surely this was where Fitzgerald had noted the highly classified information detailing the dire national security implications of the Plame outing, yes?

No. From the filing:

"After being served with the instant motion,the Special Counsel arranged for the classification review of the redacted portions of this Court’s February 15, 2005 opinion by the relevant agency. Based on that review, it has been determined that the redacted pages contain no references to information that is classified as of November 30, 2005. Thus, the presence of classified information no longer provides a reason for maintaining the secrecy of the redacted pages."

In fact, the redacted pages detailed (secret) grand jury testimony pointing to possible perjury/obstruction charges, and were cited by Judge Tatel to buttress the point that the testimony of Matt Cooper and Judy Miller was critical to advancing the case.

Not that long ago we argued that, regardless of her classifed status and one-time covert past, the national security implications of the Plame outing were almost certainly minimal. That was based on certain objective facts, such as the failure of the CIA to make a few phone calls to halt the publication of the Novak column.

A major caveat and wild card in that analysis was the eight redacted pages, whose importance seems to have faded.

But for old times sake, let's let Lawrence O'Donnell explain what those pages might have implied:

I’ll be surprised if all four of those elements of the crime [outing a covert agent under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act] line up perfectly for a Rove indictment. Surprised, not shocked. There is one very good reason to think they might. It is buried in one of the handful of federal court opinions that have come down in the last year ordering Matt Cooper and Judy Miller to testify or go to jail.

...Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”

...Tatel’s colleagues are at least as impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.”

All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.

The astute Jane Hamsher was more succinct:

Does Fitzgerald have the nads to prosecute Rove et. al. as terrorists? Hell if I know, but I can say that the guy is a serious as a heart attack about national security -- his specialty is prosecuting terrorists, and if the eight redacted pages of Judge Tatel's decision to throw Jailhouse Judy in the slammer are any indication, much of Fitzgerald's inquiry is concerned with the breach of national security that her exposure and that of her CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings, may have caused.

Well, it was reasonable speculation at the time (and I'm glad I had company). So, what charges might Libby have faced if he had told the truth and taken his lumps? It looks like he will never know.

MORE: Jane Hamsher does the heavy lifting (and caffeinating) and delivers a very helpful cheat sheet.

Adam Liptak of the NY Times saves the national security implications for the closing paragraphs:

Floyd Abrams, who represented Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper before the appeals court, said Mr. Fitzgerald's filing was significant for the light it shed on the inquiry's progress.

"The revelation," Mr. Abrams said, "that Mr. Fitzgerald advised the court as early as the spring and fall of 2004 that his focus on Mr. Libby related not to potential threats to national security but to possible violations of perjury and related laws raises anew the question of whether the need for the testimony of Judy Miller and Matt Cooper was at all as critical as had been suggested."

Posted by Tom Maguire on December 03, 2005