TreasonGate Prelude Thread

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TreasonGate Prelude Thread The Lead Up...

#21 raine1967

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Post icon Posted 20 October 2005 - 10:15 PM

QUOTE

Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry

October 21, 2005
By DAVID JOHNSTON
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. None of the lawyers would speak on the record, citing the prosecutor's requests not to talk about the case.

Bold face mine....

NYT Article here...

#22 scheusslich

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Posted 21 October 2005 - 09:56 PM

Olberman mentioned this on Countdown tonight, so I thought I'd post a link to it for everyone's edification...

Office of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald

#23 livingonli

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 12:28 AM

I wonder when we'll see the ads attacking him like the ones that are out attacking Earle, Delay's prosecutor?

#24 raine1967

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 01:01 AM

QUOTE (livingonli @ Oct 22 2005, 12:28 AM)

I wonder when we'll see the ads attacking him like the ones that are out attacking Earle, Delay's prosecutor?

Note: those ads could have happened long ago. The spin has been almost silent when you think about it. (forget the idiotic Fox pundits... they no longer count.)

I think the right wing knows better this time. They are nervous --- because *THIS* time the stakes are higher.

If this comes down as it seems to be happening, that takes the validity away from the 2004 elections and sucks any life out of 2006.

This is a holding pattern. Once it comes down you will see ads. They are strategizing as we speak.

#25 bluepilgrim

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 01:20 AM

Old Zen koan; the master tells the monk:
If you speak I will hit you with the stick; if you do not speak I will hit you with the stick.

#26 scheusslich

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 10:56 AM

Miller may have misled editors

QUOTE

Judith Miller's boss says the New York Times reporter appears to have misled the newspaper about her role in the CIA leak controversy.

In an e-mail memo Friday to the newspaper's staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller said that until Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller in the criminal probe, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end" of leaks aimed at Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson.

"Judy seems to have misled" Times Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman about the extent of her involvement, Keller wrote.

Taubman asked Miller in the fall of 2003 whether she was among the reporters who had gotten leaks about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"Ms. Miller denied it," the newspaper reported in a weekend story.

Miller and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, discussed Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, in three conversations in the weeks before the CIA officer's status was outed by columnist Robert Novak.

Keller said he might have been more willing to compromise with Fitzgerald over Miller's testimony "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby."

In response, Miller told the Times that Keller's memo was "seriously inaccurate," the newspaper said in a story for Saturday editions. It reported that in a memo to Keller, Miller wrote she "never meant to mislead Phil (Taubman), nor did I mislead him."

As for Keller's remark about "my `entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social, or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller wrote.

Miller's attorney, Bob Bennett, told The Washington Post that it was "absolutely false" to suggest she withheld information about a June 2003 meeting with Libby, saying the conversation hadn't seemed like "a big deal at the time."

Tennessean

#27 BobR

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 11:44 AM

QUOTE (raine1967 @ Oct 22 2005, 02:01 AM)

QUOTE (livingonli @ Oct 22 2005, 12:28 AM)

I wonder when we'll see the ads attacking him like the ones that are out attacking Earle, Delay's prosecutor?

I think that this time they know they can't discredit their way out of their problems. They KNOW they're screwed.

Also - they can't complain about the investigation leading from the Plame affair to the Iraq war lies, because that was how the got Clinton (started with Whitewater and ended up with Monica).

#28 scheusslich

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 11:55 AM

QUOTE (BobR @ Oct 22 2005, 11:44 AM)

Also - they can't complain about the investigation leading from the Plame affair to the Iraq war lies, because that was how the got Clinton (started with Whitewater and ended up with Monica).

Just being cynical, guess the

hasn't taken effect yet, but when has that stopped them from being a bunch of user posted image

before?

image snarffed from ErrorMerika

#29 raine1967

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Posted 22 October 2005 - 10:38 PM

They are so busy pointing fingers I think that they have little time to cry...

QUOTE

Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale

October 23, 2005, By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - The legal and political stakes are of the highest order, but the investigation into the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.

------snip------

The dispute over the rationale for the war has led to upheaval in the intelligence agencies, left Democrats divided about how aggressively to break with the White House over Iraq and exposed deep rifts within the administration and among Republicans.

The combatants' intensity was underscored this week in a speech by Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state, who complained of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and other national security issues and of a "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team.

The intensity could be further inflamed by comments from Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser during the administration of Mr. Bush's father, in the coming edition of The New Yorker that are a reminder of how the breach over Iraq had its roots in competing views of foreign policy that extend well back into the last century.

Mr. Scowcroft, a self-described realist who prides himself on seeing what could go wrong in any course of action, argues against what he characterizes as the utopian view of neoconservatives within the administration that toppling Saddam Hussein would open the door to democracy throughout the Middle East. He also suggests that Mr. Cheney is a man much changed, and not for the better, from the policy maker he worked with closely during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Mr. Scowcroft has long expressed reservations about the current White House's foreign policy approach and about the Iraq war in particular, but his comments could further exacerbate divisions among Republicans, especially to the degree that they are seen as reflecting the views of his close friend, the first President Bush.

"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. "I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

------snip------

Mr. Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Mr. Libby was immersed in painting a dark picture of Iraq's weapons capabilities and alleged that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda.

In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Mr. Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council. But in meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early February, Secretary Powell and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Mr. Libby's draft as exaggerated and not supported by intelligence.

John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy C.I.A. director, referred to this period in a statement issued in April 2005. "Much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material, including much that had been added by the policy community after the draft left the agency, that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable," Mr. McLaughlin said.

In his 2004 book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward of The Washington Post wrote that Mr. Powell had rejected Mr. Libby's draft as "worse than ridiculous," which Mr. Wilkerson alluded to in his recent speech.

That episode added to tensions between Mr. Cheney's office and senior officials at the C.I.A., which had also dismissed as unwarranted claims by Mr. Cheney and others about close links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

The wrangling over the United Nations speech exposed long-simmering suspicions by some administration officials about the reliability of the C.I.A.'s intelligence on Iraq. A former intelligence official who previously worked with Mr. Libby said that his antipathy to the C.I.A. dated back at least 15 years, to the first Bush administration, when he was working under Mr. Wolfowitz at the Defense Department.

Mr. Libby was also part of the network of Iraq hawks within the administration. He is a prot?g? of Mr. Wolfowitz, who was perhaps the leading neoconservative in the administration until he left to head the World Bank. Mr. Libby's deputy, John Hannah, had close ties to John R. Bolton, then the under secretary of state for arms control; David Wurmser, a Bolton aide who later joined Mr. Cheney's office; and Robert Joseph, then the senior director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council.

From Sunday's NYT.... very interesting read...

#30 bluepilgrim

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Posted 23 October 2005 - 12:19 AM

QUOTE

The passions surrounding the investigation and the question of why the administration got it wrong about Iraq, other analysts agree, reflect the troubled course of the war and the divisions over whether it was necessary or a diversion from the effort to fight Islamic extremism.

This whole paragraph casts things wrongly. First, the administrations did not get it wrong about Iraq -- they knew damned there were no WMD and that Iraq was anot a threat, and they had been planning this invasion long before 9-11, and before Bush even became president.

Beyond that, this idea of needing to fight Islamic terrorism is wrong: it's not Islamic terrorism; it's fighting back against the US empire using tactics of terrorism for lack of an effective army or political recourse, which happens to be pursued mostly by Muslims because it's in Muslim nations where the oil happens to be -- the Islamist angle is just one side effect of political struggle and the gaining of power by extremists. If the oil had been in Hindu nations, then we would have a 'fight against Hindu extremism'.

This really has nothing to do with Islam or terrorism as root cause -- it has to do with greed, lust for power, and resisting emperial ambitions and colonialism. The Times and most of the other press STILL can't seem to find the truthful frame for this.

#31 scheusslich

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Posted 23 October 2005 - 09:39 AM

Profile of Libby...

The sources of a source: 'Scooter' Libby, figure in CIA case, has worn varied hats

QUOTE

I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has played many roles. He has been a Massachusetts preppie, a novelist, a ski bum, a lawyer for a billionaire fugitive, a leader of the neoconservative movement, and an architect of the US invasion of Iraq.

Now Libby is in perhaps his most difficult role: He's a key figure in the inquiry into whether someone at the White House leaked the identity of a CIA agent.

This week, a grand jury examining the case is scheduled to wrap up its work, meaning that Libby may find out if he will be indicted.

Whatever the outcome, the investigation has focused new attention on the role of the vice president and his top aides in the run-up to the war in Iraq. That has led to broader questions about Libby's involvement with the so-called White House Iraq Group, which came up with strategies to justify the war. The inquiry has raised questions about whether the strategy included leaking classified information.

It is just the kind of attention Libby has strived to avoid in his tours of high-level public service. In contrast to Karl Rove, the Bush deputy chief of staff and political adviser, who also is under investigation in the leak case, Libby has tried to stay anonymous.

His ambition has been to be ''so opaque you can't tell he is there," said Jackson Hogen, who is a longtime Libby friend.

Mary Matalin, who worked with Libby at the White House, said Libby has been unfairly caricatured as an ideologue trying to shape policy. She said he ''is more than a chief of staff to the vice president. Scooter does to the vice president what the vice president does to the president. Cheney trusts him explicitly, completely."

Like many neoconservatives, Libby, 55, started his political life as an antiwar Democrat, and he gradually came to believe in a need for a more forceful US presence in the world.

He was born in Connecticut, and he attended boarding schools in Massachusetts from an early age, first at Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, and then at Phillips Academy in Andover, the school that former President George H. W. Bush and the current President Bush attended. Then, like both Bushes, Libby went to Yale.

Libby had one of his first contacts with the Bush family as the Vietnam War was at its height. George H. W. Bush, then a US representative from Texas, came to campus to deliver a speech in favor of the US military action. But Libby, according to Hogen, was not buying Bush's rationale.

Libby, vice president of the student Democrats, was a supporter of Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, and, briefly, of Robert Kennedy, according to Hogen, who went to both Andover and Yale with Libby.

Boston Globe

#32 scheusslich

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Posted 23 October 2005 - 11:57 AM

Prelude to a Leak: How Cheney and his tight-knit team launched the Iraq war, chased their critics-and set the stage for a special prosecutor's dramatic probe

QUOTE

It is the nature of bureaucracies that reports are ordered up and then ignored. In February 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney received a CIA briefing that touched on Saddam Hussein's attempts to build nuclear bombs. Cheney, who was looking for evidence to support an Iraq invasion, was especially interested in one detail: a report that claimed Saddam attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. At the end of the briefing, Cheney or an aide told the CIA man that the vice president wanted to know more about the subject. It was a common enough request. "Principals" often ask briefers for this sort of thing. But when the vice president of the United States makes a request, underlings jump. Midlevel officials in the CIA's clandestine service quickly arranged to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate the uranium claims. A seasoned diplomat, Wilson had good connections in the region. He would later say his week in Africa convinced him that the story was bogus, and said so to his CIA debriefers. The agency handed the information up the chain, but there is no record that it ever reached Cheney. Like hundreds of other reports that slosh through the bureaucracy each day, Wilson's findings likely made their way to the middle of a pile. The vice president has said he never knew about Wilson's trip, and never saw any report.

If he had, Cheney might not have been inclined to believe a word of it anyway. At the time of Wilson's debunking, the vice president was the Bush administration's leading advocate of war with Iraq. Cheney had long distrusted the apparatchiks who sat in offices at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. He regarded them as dim, timid timeservers who would always choose inaction over action. Instead, the vice president relied on the counsel of a small number of advisers. The group included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and two Wolfowitz proteges: I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped to advance their case for war.

Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to get nukes-a claim helped by the Niger story, which the White House doggedly pushed. A prideful man who enjoys the spotlight, Joseph Wilson grew increasingly agitated that the White House had not come clean about how the African-uranium claim made it into George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. In June, Condoleezza Rice went on TV and denied she knew that documents underlying the uranium story were, in fact, crude forgeries: "Maybe somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this," she said, "but nobody in my circles." For Wilson, that was it. "That was a slap in the face," he told NEWSWEEK. "She was saying 'F--- you, Washington, we don't care.' Or rather 'F--- you, America'." On July 6, Wilson went public about his Niger trip in his landmark New York Times op-ed piece.

From there, as we now know, things got a bit out of hand. Within the White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws protecting classified information. This week the two-year-long investigation of that leak could finally end. It is widely expected that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed in the case, may issue indictments of one or more top administration officials, possibly including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

Of course, Fitzgerald could always pack up without issuing a single indictment, or even an explanation why. Tight-lipped, Fitzgerald has not said a word about his intentions. That has left Washington breathlessly reading into the flimsiest clues. Last week bloggers seized on the discovery that Fitzgerald had set up a Web site, which was taken as a sure sign that indictments were around the corner. Lawyers who have had dealings with Fitzgerald's office, who spoke anonymously because the investigation is ongoing, say the prosecutor appears to be exploring the option of bringing broad conspiracy charges against Libby, Rove and perhaps others, though it's still unclear whether Fitzgerald can prove an underlying crime.

Some lawyers close to the case are convinced Fitzgerald has a mysterious "Mr. X"-a yet unknown principal target or cooperating witness. Some press reports identified John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national-security adviser, as a potentially key figure in the investigation. Hannah played a central policymaking role on Iraq and was known to be particularly close to Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress supplied some of the faulty intelligence about WMD embraced by the vice president in the run-up to the invasion. Lawyers for Rove and Libby have said their clients did nothing wrong and broke no laws. Last week Hannah's lawyer Thomas Green told NEWSWEEK his client "knew nothing" about the leak and is not a target of Fitzgerald's probe. "This is craziness," he said. Whatever news Fitzgerald makes this week, however, the case has shed light on how Cheney and his clique of advisers cleared the way to war, and how they obsessed over critics who got in the way.

Newsweek via MSNBC

#33 livingonli

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Posted 23 October 2005 - 12:18 PM

Curioser and Curioser.

#34 BobR

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Posted 24 October 2005 - 02:22 PM

That Newseek article ties everything together very nicely. Not any real new info, but a good summary.

#35 scheusslich

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Posted 25 October 2005 - 09:23 AM

Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report

QUOTE

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers involved in the case, who described the notes to The New York Times, said they showed that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby's notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson's undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent's identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent's undercover status.

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby's legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday, when the term of the grand jury expires. Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, both face the possibility of indictment, lawyers involved in the case have said. It is not publicly known whether other officials also face indictment.

The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.

But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald's possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson - who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said.

It is not clear why Mr. Libby would have suggested to the grand jury that he might have learned about Ms. Wilson from journalists if he was aware that Mr. Fitzgerald had obtained the notes of the conversation with Mr. Cheney or might do so. At the beginning of the investigation, Mr. Bush pledged the White House's full cooperation and instructed aides to provide Mr. Fitzgerald with any information he sought.

The notes do not show that Mr. Cheney knew the name of Mr. Wilson's wife. But they do show that Mr. Cheney did know and told Mr. Libby that Ms. Wilson was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and that she may have helped arrange her husband's trip.

NYT

#36 BobR

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Posted 25 October 2005 - 01:08 PM

Cheney aide passed Plame's name to Libby, Hadley, those close to leak investigation say

QUOTE

With the possibility of indictments just days away, sources close to the investigation into who outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson have provided RAW STORY a more detailed account into how and why Plame's name was leaked and what role the Pentagon and the vice president's office played.

Those close to the investigation say that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been told that David Wurmser, then a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on loan from the office of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, met with Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis ?Scooter? Libby in June 2003 and told Libby that Plame set up the Wilson trip. He asserted that it was a boondoggle, the sources said.

Libby then shared the information with Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, the sources said. Wurmser also passed on the same information about Wilson to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, they added.

Within a week, Wurmser, on orders from "executives in the office of the vice president," was told to leak her name to a specific group of reporters in an effort to muzzle her husband, Wilson, who had become a thorn in the side of the administration, those close to the inquiry say. It is unclear who Wurmser had spoken with in the media, the sources said, but they confirmed he did speak with reporters at national media outlets about Plame.

"Libby wanted to discredit him right from the start," one source close to the investigation told RAW STORY. "He used David Wurmser to help him do that."

Neither Wurmser or Libby could be reached for comment.

Wurmser had a direct link to the CIA because of his work on intelligence issues related to Iraq and frequently met with CIA analysts who worked on weapons of mass destruction. Through his contacts, Wurmser was told that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent working on WMD issues and it was she who had recommended Wilson for the trip, the sources said. Those familiar with the investigation say, however, it is unclear whether Wurmser was told that she operating as a covert agent. They believe it was likely he was told she was an "analyst" working on WMDs in a similar capacity to the other agents Wurmser had interacted with.

Those familiar with information provided to Fitzgerald say that shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon "think tank," and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon "cell" whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, sources knowledgeable about his work told RAW STORY.

Although the CIA documents that Wurmser and his staff pored over never showed Iraq as being an immediate threat, Wurmser was dead set on finding and presenting evidence to Vice President Dick Cheney that suggested as much even if the veracity of such intelligence was questionable, sources close the probe said. Wurmser had met with now discredited Iraqi exiles who were part of the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the infamous single source of Judith Miller's explosive columns published in the New York Times that said Iraq was acquiring nuclear bomb components, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, they added.

With the aid of Chalabi and the White House Iraq Group, Wurmser helped Cheney's office, particularly the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, construct a case for war. He met frequently with Cheney, Libby, Feith and Richard Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board, to go over the "evidence" of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein that could then be used by the White House to build public support. Wurmser routinely butted heads with the CIA over the veracity of the intelligence he was providing to Cheney's office, sources close the investigation said.

Wurmser had long been a proponent of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Indeed, in 1996, Wurmser, his wife Meyrav and Perle, authored a paper for "Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity," according to an investigative report in the January/February 2004 issue of Mother Jones magazine.

A year later, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal titled "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and two years later authored a book, "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein."

The Administration's plans were complicated in May 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson entered the picture, and said privately to close colleagues and a handful of journalists that the intelligence used by President Bush was "twisted."

For two years, Wurmser, Feith, Perle, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had a tumultous relationship with the CIA who they blamed for not providing them with the type of evidence they wanted to see: specific, tailor-made assessments that Iraq was an imminent threat. But with Wilson they feared a public backlash.

Libby first learned that Wilson was discrediting the administration's intelligence information in June 2003. Specifically, Wilson questioned claims that Iraq tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Africa for an atomic bomb.

Wilson went to Niger in 2002 to investigate the allegations and reported that the claims were unfounded. According to a Senate report, the mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney earlier that year. Vehemently denying that his boss had requested the trip, Libby became so incensed by Wilson that he sent word to Wurmser to find out who Wilson was and sought details of his trip, those familiar with the investigation say.

Amplification: Those close to the investigation say that Wurmser told Libby about Plame. They were unaware if Wurmser told Cheney about Plame or if that information was passed to Cheney by Libby. They did say that all three of them met and at the time of their meeting Wurmser told Libby about Plame.

Correction: Several typographical errors have been corrected from the first edition of this article. We apologize for the inconvenience.

boldface mine...

#37 scheusslich

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Posted 25 October 2005 - 05:24 PM

La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed

QUOTE

With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leak investigation, questions are again being raised about the intelligence scandal that led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House obtained false Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.

The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt later turned out to be crude forgeries, created on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents -- and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then?Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proferred less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.)

The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the U.S. government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries.

The forged documents were cabled from the U.S. embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the U.S. embassy.

Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to U.S. and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion.

What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.

Was the White House convinced that the Niger yellowcake report was nevertheless true because the National Security Council was getting its information directly from the Italian source?

Following the exposure of the discredited Niger allegations in the summer of 2003 by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, White House officials at first sought to blame the CIA for the inclusion of the controversial "16 words" in the president's speech. Although then?National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Hadley eventually accepted some responsibility for the mistake, the White House undertook a covert campaign to discredit Wilson and exposed the CIA affiliation of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson.

American Prospect

This post has been edited by scheusslich: 25 October 2005 - 05:25 PM

#38 raine1967

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Posted 25 October 2005 - 09:26 PM

QUOTE

Indictments Coming Tomorrow; Targets Received Letters Today
October 25, 2005
An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN (since confirmed by another independent source):

1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.

The shoe is dropping.
More soon.
-- Steve Clemons
Update: further commentary from CBS's John Roberts

The Washington Note link.... go there for the link to CBS...