Rep Conyers: "How were the intelligence and facts being fixed?"

[understandinglife]

How were the intelligence and facts being fixed? We are starting to see the tip of the iceberg. There is, of course, Joe Wilson. A career public servant, he had the audacity to come back from Niger to tell this Administration news they did not want to hear: claims that Saddam Hussain was trying to acquire uranium from Africa were false (and based on obvious forgeries). So they went after him by outing his wife's identity as a covert CIA operative. Thus, the facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy of going to war --- the method: ignoring information that conflicted with the preferred narrative that Saddam Hussain had WMD and smearing anyone who espoused such heresy in the hopes that the smear would deter other whistleblowers from coming forward.

Now, in today's New York Times comes another allegation of fixing the facts and intelligence around the policy. The lead paragraph:

"The Central Intelligence Agency was told by an informant in the spring of 2001 that Iraq had abandoned a major element of its nuclear weapons program, but the agency did not share the information with other agencies or with senior policy makers, a former C.I.A. officer has charged."

From How the Intelligence and Facts Were Fixed by Congressman Conyers on August 1 2005

Link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/john-conyers/how-the-intelligence-and-_4961.html

And, here is the thread started yesterday evening on this important revelation:

Spy's Notes on Iraqi (WMD) Aims Were Shelved, Suit Says by James Risen:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4233496&mesg_id=4233496

As Congressman Conyers concludes: "In his lawsuit, he says his dismissal was punishment for his reports questioning the agency's assumptions on a series of weapons-related matters. Among other things, he charged that he had been the target of retaliation for his refusal to go along with the agency's intelligence conclusions."

Sounds familiar doesn't it?"

Sure does.

http://www.peacecandy.com/gwbush/remindus
REMIND US

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - How ever long it takes, the day must come when tens of millions of caring individuals peacefully but persistently defy the dictator, deny the corporatists their cash flow, and halt the evil being done in Iraq and in all the other places the Bu$h neoconster regime is destroying civilization and the environment in the name of "America."

[understandinglife]

1. Link to comments on Rep Conyers' blog:

http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000192.htm


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

2. London Times: "Key No 10 aides were split over war"

Key No 10 aides were split over war

by Robert Winnett

July 31, 2005

THE SPLIT over the Iraq war, which ran through the Labour party, reached into Tony Blair’s innermost circle, according to an updated biography of the prime minister.

Key Downing Street advisers including Alastair Campbell, former director of communications, and Baroness Morgan, former director of political and government relations, are revealed to have had “private reservations” about the prime minister’s strategy.

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Seldon writes that during the autumn of 2002 British diplomats and politicians were involved in tense negotiations at the UN, but it seemed that Blair was being bounced into war. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was hostile to Blair and the British and sat in meetings “like a lump”, according to one official present.

However, Blair was told by diplomats, thought to be Meyer and Greenstock, that he could have stopped America invading Iraq had he been prepared to use his influence.

<clip>

Much more at the link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1715005,00.html

And, as one would expect: "The updated version of Seldon’s biography of Blair draws heavily on their revelatory material — the publication of which Whitehall officials are now attempting to block."


Mr Blair you are responsible for an illegal war of aggression, crimes committed during the illegal occupation, and 7/7, and 7/21.

Why don't you resign before your black mark on history gets even larger; it cannot get any blacker.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

4. London Times: "LEAKED DATA REVEAL REASONS FOR INCREASED BOMBING RAIDS ...

... WERE A SHAM"

Figures released by the Ministry of Defence have shown the reasons given by Britain and America for stepping up bombing raids in Iraq in the run-up to war were a sham, writes Michael Smith.

Geoff Hoon, who was then defence secretary, and Donald Rumsfeld, his American counterpart, both claimed that the rise in air attacks was in response to Iraqi attempts to shoot down allied aircraft

However, the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s war cabinet on July 23, 2003, leaked to The Sunday Times, record Hoon saying "the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime".

<clip>

Link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1715005_2,00.html

Interesting that The Times appended this item to the revelations in Seldon's biography of Blair.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.com

[NewJeffCT]

3. thanks - good post, recommended

I'm replying now so I can read more thoroughly at home tonight.

[Coexist]

5. Recommended

go Conyers. Never let up!

[Trevelyan]

14. Please visit Conyers Blog. A lot of good recent information from

Rep. Conyers and Bloggers. http://www.conyersblog.us/:o

[understandinglife]

16. Welcome to DU, Trevelyan. And, I agree ...

... thus comment # 1, above.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

6. " top officials all intent on pinning the tail painfully on the CIA donkey

Making Sense of the Plame Affair: The Media's Roving Eye

by Tom Engelhardt

July 31, 2005

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So, to sum up, at just one-remove, from the President, Vice President, and National Security Adviser, you have top officials all intent on pinning the tail painfully on the CIA donkey for the President's "fixed" intelligence (to use the apt word at the heart of the original Downing Street Memo).

Now, add in one more dot: If Rove and Libby were, in the end, unsuccessful in maneuvering Tenet off a gangplank into shark-infested seas, if Tenet took the fall (but only onto the gangplank itself), later retiring from his disastrous CIA tenure with a Medal of Freedom from the President, it may be that he later leveled his own challenge at the President's men. After all, the Plame case would not be threatening anyone if, when evidently approached by angry CIA officials over Novak's outing of Plame (based on information from those "two senior administration officials"), Tenet hadn't sent a memo in September 2003 to the Justice Department "raising a series of questions about whether a leaker had broken federal law by disclosing the identity of an undercover officer" and requesting an investigation. At that time, Mike Allen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported that, "fter an ensuing rush of leaks over White House handling of intelligence, Bush's aides said they believed in retrospect it had been a political mistake to blame Tenet." Indeed. It was Tenet who officially started in motion the Plame case we live with today. (However, it is possible, as others have suggested, that his hand was forced by CIA insiders, that he essentially had no choice but to write such a memo once one of his agents had been outed in such a fashion.)

Just before the President left on that trip to Africa, according to the Post's Pincus, in answer to a question about whether he considered the Niger uranium matter -- the matter of those sixteen words -- over and done with, he replied, "I do." And then he and his aides boarded the plane and, with Secretary of State Colin Powell having that State Department document in hand, they -- and Rove and Libby back in Washington -- evidently began furiously to plan for payback.

It's the war, stupid. That's the mantra anyone looking at this administration should keep in mind as the dots spin and the details pile up (a point Frank Rich made clear this Sunday in Eight Days in July, another of his remarkable columns of late). Iraq -- that wanted war, the first urge of the Bush administration's top officials as the September 11, 2001 attacks sank in -- has proved the black hole sucking the administration into the depths, despite frantic efforts at damage control beginning that intense week in early July 2003. Now, those dots, hardly noticed for so long, encircle the President's and Vice President's right-hand men; a prosecutor waits in the wings; and information as well as guilt, as we learned from Watergate so long ago, have a tendency to migrate upwards where two other men wait, each with his own lawyer.

Much more at the link:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=76&ItemID=8413

As Mr Engelhardt notes, he has "written regularly about the media's inability to connect the dots."

With this article he identifies key dots and makes some reasonable connections.

Wonder just how large Bush and Cheney's private lawyer fees already are.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[FreedomAngel82]

9. The media didn't do it

because they were paid probably from Bush go or something. Now we know why they gave George Tenet that medal!

[understandinglife]

18. "White House consciously dug out Plame’s identity, used it, and then ...

... engaged in a massive cover-up by pinning blame elsewhere. Moreover, it appears far more players were involved in this orchestrated, administration-wide effort than previously believed. The key question, if these revelations are true, is why did these administration officials lie so overtly to the special prosecutor? Knowing hard evidence would come out sooner or later against them (through leaks, emails, etc), the White House officials still chose to lie. What could they possibly be trying to hide? Perhaps this wasn’t just a “third-rate smear.”

<clip>

From Leaking Scandal Encircles More Administration Officials Than Previously Believed

at Think Progress

More at the link and comments:

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/31/growing-scandal

Other relevant comments can be found in the DU thread Time Magazine: When They Knew:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4231374&mesg_id=4231374

While reading the comments at Think Progress I became aware of an article by Roger Morris published on July 28, 2005 at Common Dreams. Roger Morris was Senior Staff on the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. He credits the research of Professor Gary Leupp of Tufts University in his “Faith-Based Intelligence,” CounterPunch.org, July 26, 2003, specifically. Here are a few items and I encourage all of you to read the full report if you haven't.

The Source Beyond Rove- Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration’s immediate retaliatory “outing” of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President’s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak—altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely — or deliberately ignored — in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium - Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

<clip>

The evidence of Rice’s complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice’s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn’t simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice’s deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President’s, Rice’s, and the regime’s inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity — in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.

<clip>

(What follows is an annotated chronology and a blistering analysis - leaving no one unscathed, including the Wilsons, and most definitely, the CIA.

And, Morris, like O'Donnell, brings attention to the aspect of Fitzgerald's investigation that certainly must be most disturbing to the participants in all the deception and crimes -- Judge Tatel's opinion and decision to support Fitzgerald's demands that Cooper and Miller testify.)

Link:

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0728-25.htm

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[paineinthearse]

7. Related post in GD

From this morning - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1973256&mesg_id=1973256

[understandinglife]

8. "classified by the C.I.A. not to protect national security but to conceal

... politically embarrassing facts from public scrutiny."

Mr. Krieger said he had asked the court handling the case to declassify his client's suit, but the C.I.A. had moved to classify most of his motion seeking declassification. He added that he recently sent a letter to the director of the F.B.I. requesting an investigation of his client's complaints, but that the C.I.A. had classified that letter, as well.

<clip>

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/politics/01weapons.html?ei=5070&en=8473fe468ccc8e13&ex=1123473600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

Notice the timing.

"In December 2000, the intelligence agencies issued a classified assessment stating that Iraq did not appear to have taken significant steps toward the reconstitution of the program, according to the presidential commission report concerning illicit weapons.

The agent meets with his source in the Spring of 2001 (after Cheney and the neocons had occupied the White House) and the source says essentially 'no Iraqi nuke program.' The agent's report is not disseminated. Or, perhaps, it was disseminated - to Cheney or one of Cheney's goons.

Somewhere else in the behemoth CIA, Valerie P and her Brewster, Jennings colleagues were onto the WMD scam, as were their colleagues in State INR. But, they may have been onto more than just the facts that Iraq doesn't have any WMD. They may well have been onto the fact that neocon folk in DC were manufacturing documents about an Iraqi transaction with Niger.

No matter how diligently they do their job, Bush leads America into an illegal war.

Whoops - no WMD.

Valeri P and her colleagues are covert - none of them could say a peep without being immediately arrested as traitors during time of war.

Ambassador Wilson was not bound by such constraints and he had the courage to write and publish.

Cheney and the neocons, knowing that they constructed a big lie for Bush to use to start a war of aggression, also knew that either they plant WMD's in Iraq or they better have someone to blame for the lack of WMDs. They chose the latter and that is why they had compiled a file that contained information on what {top secret}Valerie P{top secret} and others knew.

What Cheney and the neocons never anticipated was an out-of-control reporter, already being exposed as having used the New York Times to spew propaganda about Iraqi WMD, going batshit ballistic when word of Wilson's article got to her.

What Cheney and the neocons also could not stop was the CIA pressing the DoJ and FBI for an investigation.

What Cheney and the neocons also never anticipated was the leaking of the "Downing Street" documents.

What Cheney and the neocons also never anticipated is the fact that more and more people are aware of their lies and are preparing to hold them accountable.

In all of this, Rove and Libby, are bit players. It's Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Rice, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Ledeen, .... and their wealthy neocon supporters and allies who are being exposed, in ever more detail, as each day passes, as each leak, leaks.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[FreedomAngel82]

10. This is all amazing

This is their flaw in their plans. Thank goodness they were stopped. I hope.

[understandinglife]

11. July 28, 2005 - some info on Ledeen, Martino, Lady, and others:

The female journalist soon told Martino that the trip to Niger had not produced any real confirmation, and also the French confirmed to Martino that the reports he had passed on to them were groundless. In other words, Bush’s war rationale was debunked way back in 2001 by amateur and professional sleuths.

Furthermore, it was a very amateurish forgery, not likely produced through official channels by any state intelligence agency with their vast resources. However, it was soon resuscitated as the Bush administration, in its first year, ramped up its public relations campaign for war.

More at the link:

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7239

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

12. Cincinnati Post: "Forgery the real spy crime"

Forgery the real spy crime

by John Hall

August 1, 2005

WASHINGTON - The outing of a CIA officer isn't the only potential crime that occurred in the long, tortuous attempt to prove that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa. There also is the little matter of forgery.

Someone planted fake documents that helped both President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair reinforce their case that Saddam was actively seeking the raw material for an atomic bomb. It was at the heart of the rationale for invading and disarming Iraq - that Baghdad was reconstituting its outlawed nuclear program.

The question now is whether the Justice Department's special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, will be allowed to get to the bottom of this crime. He has a reputation for looking under every stone. And the so-called yellow-cake forgery is directly related to the intramural scandal he is now uncovering, except that it involves substance, not personalities.

<clip>

It was the International Atomic Energy Agency that eventually found that the yellow-cake documents were forgeries. Both the British government and the United States were said to have been duped.

<clip>

A first-rate Western intelligence service could never have produced such poor quality fakes. But a first-rate Western intelligence service could never have fallen for such amateurish forgeries, either.

More at the link:

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050801/EDIT/508010332/1003&template=printpicart

A 'first rate' intelligence service didn't produce the forgeries.

And, a 'first rate' intelligence service was NOT duped.

All the 'duping' was done by the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain - of their citizens.

The source of the forgeries could not be more obvious, Mr Blair, now could it - just read Matthew Rycroft's words once again, carefully, "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY 2003 - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607_1,00.html)

Yes, Mr Blair, 'fixed' means 'fixed' and that's why it took the IAEA all of a few moments to know they were looking at a shabbily baked yellow-cake.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

13. Jim Lobe: "Dating Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat: Framing the Plame Case"

As Tom Engelhardt notes:

"As I soon found out, I did not stand apart from most others in poor coverage of Cheney's role. Jim Lobe, whose pieces for Inter Press Service I've quoted from, linked to, and recommended endlessly over the last years, sent a few lines my way to tell me that I, too, was off in my Cheney timeline, that the Vice President had started in on the subject of Saddam Hussein's supposed nuclear program significantly earlier than I realized, and that this mattered greatly in understanding the nature of the events to follow. I asked him for a bit of clarification and the next thing I knew I had a piece in hand -- Lobe's first appearance at Tomdispatch -- an exercise, as he put it, in the sorts of connections that begin to appear when you pull a single string in the tangled ball of yarn that is the history of the Plame case. It's a reminder, as he points out below, of how a powerful web of neocon insiders and outsiders (and their allies) set the U.S. on the path to war in Iraq.

What follows then, from the man who has, in my opinion, done better reportorial work on the neoconservatives and the Bush administration than any other reporter around, is a disquisition on timing -- on Vice President Cheney's behaviour immediately before and after former ambassador Joseph Wilson's report on Saddam's supposed search for Niger yellowcake.

Dating Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat: Framing the Plame Case

By Jim Lobe

August 1, 2005

In the wake of the release of the Downing Street Memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush administration "fixed" its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration's war effort -- in particular, the overlapping networks of relationships that tied together so many key figures in the administration, the neoconservatives and their allies on the outside, and parts of the media in what became a seamless, boundary-less operation to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an intolerable threat to their national security.

Vice President Cheney, for instance, is widely credited with having launched the administration's nuclear drumbeat to war in Iraq via a series of speeches he gave, beginning in August 2002, vividly accusing Saddam of having an active nuclear weapons program. As it happens though, he started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.

Cheney's initial public attempts to raise the nuclear nightmare did not in fact begin with his August 2002 barrage of nuclear speeches, but rather five months before that, just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, ...

<clip>

In that context, it is worth noting the first moment that the specter of an advanced Iraqi nuclear-weapons program was propelled into post-9/11 public consciousness. On December 20, 2001, the New York Times published Judith Miller's version of the sensational charges made by Chalabi-aided defector al-Haideri. Her report was immediately seized on by former CIA Director and DPB member Woolsey, (who had just spent many weeks trying desperately but unsuccessfully to confirm the alleged Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that would have linked Saddam to the 9/11 attackers). Appearing that same evening on CNBC's "Hard Ball," he breathlessly told Chris Matthews, "I think this is a very important story. I give Judy Miller a lot of credit for getting it. This defector sounds quite credible." Within a week, he was telling the Washington Post that the case that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons was a "slam dunk." (Now, there's a familiar expression!) He continued confidently, "There is so much evidence with respect to his development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles… that I consider this point beyond dispute."

One week later, Perle weighed in ....

Link:

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/08/cheney_drumbeat.html

All roads lead to Cheney. And Judy Miller knows it.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

17. "The White House Iraq Group had a perfect deal with Miller,"

<clip>

As scrutinized as Miller's writing has been, how she got her information was a matter of as critical importance as what she did with it. By her own admission, the majority of stories she wrote about weapons of mass destruction came from Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled leader of the U.S. backed Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi, who had not lived in Iraq for four decades, was a convicted Jordanian embezzler. According to a military court in Amman, Chalabi embezzled $70 million dollars from the Petra Bank, which he founded in the 1970s. The case was tried in absentia after Chalabi had fled the country. Friends said Chalabi was framed by Jordanians who were political allies with Saddam Hussein because Chalabi was trying to fund a resistance effort to overthrow the Iraqi leader.

<clip>

There was also a good chance Chalabi and the White House were working on Miller, even though, as a seasoned correspondent, she was an unlikely candidate for manipulation. A former CIA analyst, who has observed Miller's professional products and relationships for years, said he had no doubt of how the lines of communication were operating.

"The White House Iraq Group had a perfect deal with Miller," he said. "Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something, and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a ‘senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn't spend a little more time talking to those of us in the intelligence community who had information that contradicted almost everything Chalabi said."

From That Awful Power: How Judy Miller Screwed Us All by James Moore on August 1 2005

Much more at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/jim-moore/that-awful-power-how-jud_4986.html

When Wilson's article appeared (or even before) I can just imagine the call from Judy to Dick .....


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

15. Larry Johnson: "Lame Bob Novak"

After reading Robert Novak's latest column today, the biggest revelation is that Novak still thinks he has "integrity" and is a legitimate journalist. Talk about delusional.

<clip>

But, we now are reminded what a complete, disgusting douchebag (to quote Jon Stewart) Robert Novak really is. He admits that he was told that revealing Plame's identity would cause "difficulties". He describes her in his original article as an "operative". Note, not "analyst" but "operative". Bob Novak has been in town long enough to know the difference. An operative is someone who carries out operations. An analyst is someone who sits at a desk and tries to make sense out of information that operators collect. Bill Harlow says he asked Novak not to use her name and Novak confirms this. CIA spokesmen were in the position of having to protect a sensitive, covert asset and this joke of a journalist did not appreciate that creating difficulties for an intelligence agency in a time of war is a bad thing?

From Lame Bob Novak by Larry Johnson on August 1, 2005

More at the link:

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/08/lame_bob_novak.html

I think "lame" is a far too polite term for Novak.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[brettdale]

19. kick

kick

[bleever]

20. Rec'd. I think that Cheney's visits to the CIA were actually not to

put pressure on analysts; it was to weed out those who weren't team players, so that the analysis would all come from neo-con believers and their witting and unwitting stooges.

Just as they weeded out all the independent thinkers from the military high command, so that only "team players" who knew NOT to ask for more troops on the ground would be in charge. Thus they can blithely say that they've always given the commanders the troop levels they requested.

Evil. Evil. Evil.

Guess who REALLY hates our freedoms? Guess who REALLY hates democracy?

[understandinglife]

21. "Just as they weeded out all the independent thinkers from the military

... high command, ..."

I think you are correct. Cheney had a solid neoconster agenda well before November, 2000, and by coronation day in January 2001, was targeting those within the military, the CIA, State, ...., who had to be clear-cut.

He rushed and now he's not going to be able to escape all the trees that are crashing around him.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[understandinglife]

22. "the kind of story that Washington journalists cover least well ..."

Journalistic Curiosity Is in Short Supply in the Plame Scandal

by John Fund

August 2, 2005

It's a safe bet that the kind of story that Washington journalists cover least well is one in which they play a starring role. That helps explain why the reporting in the Valerie Plame scandal has been so myopic and limited, leaving big and obvious holes in the public record. What's more, the audience is left with the suspicion that many journalists "reporting" on the scandal know more of the truth than they're telling their readers and viewers.

<clip>

Isn't it about time that the Beltway media turn ever so slightly away from their obsession with Karl Rove and ask a few questions about journalists involved in the Plame story who are not named Robert Novak?

More at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/john-fund/journalistic-curiosity-is_5042.html

Isn't it about time that the executive management of the New York Times tell the whole story about Ms Judith Miller ... they will someday - from the witness stand.


Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us