Frogmarch?

“"The Acid Queen" from the rock opera, TOMMY??”

“SO now we know who the real patriot is in the whitehouse, eh?”

“Liars and Crooks ??”

“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.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.
[...]
Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger.
[...]
The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.
[...]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517_pf.html”

“Got to feel sorry for these 'geniuses' that can't figure out what Fuego (politics, religion, etc.) threads are for.”

“Nanny?

Is that you?”

“July 22 (Bloomberg) -- Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

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.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame's name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

more...”

“How long before Scotty decides to 'spend more time with his family'?: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000989535”

“I remember the first time I saw Scooter's name in print. Ah, yes... the "Office of Special Plans"....

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Special_Plans”

“Eight Days in July
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 24, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after
all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack
in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the
hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead
of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed
showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have
been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill
Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer
for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the
conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the
intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its
desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard
proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the
war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post
nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the
paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo
circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the
C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of
the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post
reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame
with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew
that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the
forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as
much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its
haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not
to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white
guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto
Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on
the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft
on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this
scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the
Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an
investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That
notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr.
Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must
"preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour
delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but
since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist
who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate
Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an
18?-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay
could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator
Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first
revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process
now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr.
Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for
16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House
casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the
early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory
scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake
of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free.
They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6,
2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and
the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no
investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled
investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take
over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to
seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire
a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris
characteristic of this administration, had already been quite
careless.

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan
declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis
Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" -
neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any
reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now
written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that
he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the
C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling,"
"involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute
with
F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an
obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the
hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's
investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting
against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003
between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and
the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a
presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force
One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning
Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times.

That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the
Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged
enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be
found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15,
the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr.
Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment.

On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American
soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been
extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they
were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's
correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove
of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House
communications shop" had given him that information.

Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman
revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House
involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as
gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who
turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of
Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House
and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green
reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring
feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has
been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation."

THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline
is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone
questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission
Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the
weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on
American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But
the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the
enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting
desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his
incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the
first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear
Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its
publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s.
Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after
that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening
statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium
"should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the
Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been
retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January
2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding
W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities."

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to
hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo,
the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom
clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations
into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our
intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how
the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war.
That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the
Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised
to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to
Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a
third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled
cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit
strategy that will not inflict pain.”

“I love the sound of a frogmarching band on a crisp fall day.



WASHINGTON - Judith Miller, The New York Times reporter jailed since July 6 for refusing to identify a source, was released this afternoon following a telephone conversation with the alleged source - the vice president's chief of staff.

She is expected to testify before a grand jury in Washington, a source said, possibly as early as Friday.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/12775934.htm”

“Statements by Sulzberger, Keller, and Miller on Her Release: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001219289”

“A lawyer who knows Mr. Libby's account said the administration efforts to limit the damage from Mr. Wilson's criticism extended as high as Mr. Cheney. This lawyer and others who spoke about the case asked that they not be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01leak.html”

“Why do liberals hate due proccess and being innocent until proven guilty so much ?”

“BWAH---HAHAHahaahahahahahahahaaaa...

So Long, Sucker!”

“<snip>

...[L]awyers close to the case, who asked not to be identified because it's ongoing, say Fitzgerald appears to be focusing in part on discrepancies in testimony between Rove and Time reporter Matt Cooper about their conversation of July 11, 2003. In Cooper's account, Rove told him the wife of White House critic Joseph Wilson worked at the "agency" on WMD issues and was responsible for sending Wilson on a trip to Niger to check out claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But Rove did not disclose this conversation to the FBI when he was first interviewed by agents in the fall of 2003—nor did he mention it during his first grand jury appearance, says one of the lawyers familiar with Rove's account. (He did not tell President George W. Bush about it either, assuring him that fall only that he was not part of any "scheme" to discredit Wilson by outing his wife, the lawyer says.) But after he testified, Luskin discovered an e-mail Rove had sent that same day—July 11—alerting deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley that he had just talked to Cooper, the lawyer says. In the e-mail, Rove said Cooper pushed him on whether the president was being hurt by the Niger controversy. "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote Hadley, adding that he warned Cooper not to get "far out in front on this." After reviewing the e-mail, Rove then returned to the grand jury last year and reported the Cooper conversation. He testified that the talk was initially about "welfare reform"—a topic mentioned in the e-mail—and that Cooper then changed the subject. Cooper has written that he doesn't recall a discussion of welfare reform.

<snip>

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9630676/site/newsweek/
last edited: 10/10/05 12:55:27 PM”

“http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002883.html

and

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Cheney_aide_cooperating_with_CIA_outing_1018.html”

“A second aide to Vice President Dick Cheney is cooperating with the special prosecutor's probe into the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, those close to the investigation say.

Late Monday, several sources familiar with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe said John Hannah, a key aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and one of the architects of the Iraq war, was cooperating with Fitzgerald after being told that he was identified by witnesses as a co-conspirator in the leak. Sources said Hannah was not given immunity, but was likely offered a “deal” in exchange for information that could result in indictments of key White House officials.

Now, those close to the investigation say that a second Cheney aide, David Wurmser, has agreed to provide the prosecution with evidence that the leak was a coordinated effort by Cheney’s office to discredit the agent's husband. Her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was one of the most vocal critics of the Iraq war.

Wurmser, Cheney’s Middle East advisor and an assistant to then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, likely cooperated because he faced criminal charges for his role in leaking Wilson's name on the orders of higher-ups, the sources said.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Second_Cheney_aide_cooperating_in_leak_1019.html”

“WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - As he weighs whether to bring criminal charges in the C.I.A. leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel, is focusing on whether Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, sought to conceal their actions and mislead prosecutors, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday.

Among the charges that Mr. Fitzgerald is considering are perjury, obstruction of justice and false statement - counts that suggest the prosecutor may believe the evidence presented in a 22-month grand jury inquiry shows that the two White House aides sought to cover up their actions, the lawyers said.

Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy, the lawyers said, but only this week has Mr. Fitzgerald begun to narrow the possible charges. The prosecutor has said he will not make up his mind about any charges until next week, government officials say.

With the term of the grand jury expiring in one week, though, some lawyers in the case said they were persuaded that Mr. Fitzgerald had all but made up his mind to seek indictments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/politics/21leak.html?hp&ex=1129867200&en=0304bde7ed94ce48&ei=5094&partner=homepage”

“For those interested:

Niger Uranium Forgery
Mystery Solved?

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History”

“Anyone read Italian?

http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/sismicia/sismicia.html”

“La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10506”

“Today is the day, CBS reports.”

“Here's part 2 of the La Repubblica story (in Italian): http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/bodv/bodv.html”

“ROME (AP) - The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5369408,00.html”

“Maybe it's just my machine but the .pdf in the link above causes an error. This one works fine:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/documents/libby_indictment_28102005.pdf”

“Everyone sure is quiet about this!”

“Hey Phaed!”

“Hey Ped!”

“Crickets...”

“Crabs!!”

“Everyone is just waiting for the other shoe (or shoes) to drop.”

“When Rove goes to prison he might need a pen pal....................Violin?”

“Dear Official A,

Ha-ha!

Yours Truly,
Violin”

“After a two year investigation no one was even charged with leaking classified information. Reminds me of the election of 2000. Liberals still in denial.

Libby is charged with perjury and making false statements. I hope they at least prosecute him. Giving public officials preferential treatment in these matters is poor form.

Hillary and Bill were charged with the same crimes, but were never prosecuted. American's want justice for all. Except Liberals they just want vengence :-)”

“That wish for vengeance (or any other motivational spark) is futile...they're too fickle to sustain.”

“Too clever by half

Gene Lyons

Fortunately, Scooter Libby has a second career to fall back on. He’ll need one. The recently indicted former White House aide’s first novel, “The Apprentice,” was published in 1996. Set in Japan, it came billed as a creepy political thriller with exotic sexual overtones. Some reviewers found the sex a lot creepier than the intrigue, but that’s a matter of taste. Libby’s present dilemma is less subjective. It should be obvious to anybody who’s seen three episodes of “Law & Order.” Basically, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s got him by the—well, Scooter’s in an extremely vulnerable position, and the prosecutor’s squeezing him. Either he rolls over and tells the unvarnished truth about the White House scheme to leak the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame or he’s looking at serious time in a federal penitentiary.

Fitzgerald’s running the thing like a classic organized crime investigation. Republican-oriented pundits, however, are playing dumb. On “Meet the Press,” former New York Times savant William Safire, who spent the Clinton years making futile predictions of Whitewater indictments, claimed that Fitzgerald had exonerated the White House.

“Everybody is walking around thinking, ‘Well, you see ? There was a conspiracy to undermine or uncover an agent.’ Well, there wasn’t,” Safire said. “And he said it very clearly. And so I think we ought to keep that in mind. This was a cover-up of a non-crime.”

Safire’s anything but dumb. He and other pundits mouthing the same line are merely hoping you are. In reality, the Libby indictment alleges anything but a technical offense. Comparing himself to a baseball umpire who had sand thrown in his eyes, Fitzgerald pointedly refused to say there was no underlying crime.

“I’ll be blunt,” he said. “That talking point won’t fly. If you’re doing a national security investigation, if you’re trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and... [if ] it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.”

He didn’t need to add that Libby was lying for a reason. Without saying so, the indictment spells out in far more detail than is really necessary the broad outlines of what a White House conspiracy to punish Plame’s husband, Iraq war critic Joe Wilson, by revealing her secret identity might look like if Libby would tell all.

Libby’s own notes show that none other than Vice President Dick Cheney first told him that “Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division.” (Hence, secret by definition, as both men had to know. ) This happened after Wilson started talking to reporters probing pre-war intelligence failures, but before his July 6, 2003, New York Times article accusing the White House of twisting intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

In the meantime, Libby reportedly discussed Plame and her husband with others in the administration before talking about her to the press. If he goes on trial, those officials, including Cheney, will have to testify under oath in open court.

In retrospect, President Bush may have given the game away at the beginning.

“I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is,” he told reporters on Oct. 8, 2003, “partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. You tell me : How many sources have you had that’s leaked information that you’ve exposed or had been exposed ? Probably none.”

Less than a week later, Fitzgerald claims, Libby falsely told FBI agents that NBC newsman Tim Russert had told him about Plame’s CIA identity. But Libby was only half as clever as he thought. See, Fitzgerald didn’t need to make Russert testify about what a source told him, only what he told a source. No U. S. court would shield that from scrutiny. Risky, sure. But remember, these are the same geniuses who believed their own propaganda about a cakewalk into Iraq. The White House simply cannot afford to let Libby go on trial. Nor could Bush get away with pardoning him before the 2006 congressional elections at the very earliest. So look for Libby’s lawyers to employ every imaginable stalling tactic to postpone his day of reckoning as long as possible. Or he might roll over. Much tougher guys have flipped. As for Karl Rove, identified as the so far unindicted “Official A,” who also spoke to the media about Plame, here’s the question : Did Rove lie if he told Bush he had nothing to do with it, or was Bush deceiving the American people when he denied knowing the guilty party ? Either way, why is Rove still working at the White House ?”

“Quoting Gene Lyons is funny. You should read some of his other stuff. Gene is a local boy with a flair for the ridiculous.”

“Posting as bacpac is funny.

You should read some of your other stuff.”

“Thank you.”

“It ain't all done with yet on the charge front, I tell you that much.”

“William F. Buckley on Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation:

[T]he root cause of the disturbance.... had to do with revealing that Valerie Plame Wilson was secretly in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, using a cover employer to disguise her affiliation.
[...]
We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay — that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company.
[...]
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted.”

“Yes... Novak outed the cover company as well (engineering firm?), putting any other agents using it at risk as well.”

“From the Wall Street Journal:

Six in 10, including 43% of Republicans, say there should be a public investigation and hearings into exposure of operative Valerie Plame's identity. Republican congressional leaders don't plan to go along. Among conservatives, 60% say other administration officials aside from Libby may have acted illegally. Fully 69% of Americans hold Cheney personally responsible for the matter; 54% hold Bush responsible.”