Posted on 10/20/2005 11:51:55 AM PDT by MikeA
As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's mandate expires, Karl Rove's only crime may be not that he "outed" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative but that he exposed her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, as a liar.
Wilson, who later was a foreign affairs adviser to the Kerry campaign, turned out to be a physician in need of healing himself when it comes to truth-telling, as revealed on July 9, 2004. That was when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The report concluded that Wilson lied when he denied his wife got him the Niger assignment. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his book, adding, "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
But according to the Senate report: "Interviews and documents provided to the committee indicate his wife . . . suggested his name for the trip." This included a memo Plame herself sent to the CIA.
The report also said Wilson lied when he told The Washington Post he knew the Niger intelligence had been based on forged documents. The CIA didn't obtain the document said to be a forgery until a full eight months after Wilson's return from Niger.
Wilson told the public Niger had denied the uranium connection. But the Senate found that Wilson's own report said that the Niger government had confirmed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Time for Fitzgerald to get off the public payroll. What a waste of time and money. And why isn't the media incensed about this out of control prosecutor going after journalists? Would they have been so sanguine if Ken Starr had done so? I REALLY doubt it.
Beginning with the brilliant title - it was concise and clever.
Great post!
sp
(cont)
So when Rove, in an e-mail sent to Time magazine's Matt Cooper in July 2003, said Wilson's trip to Niger for the CIA was arranged by "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency," without providing her actual name, he was not exposing Plame as an agent.
He was exposing her husband as a prevaricator, in effect warning Cooper and others not to take his claims seriously.
While Wilson was found to have lied repeatedly, an independent British investigative committee on WMD intelligence headed by Lord Butler in its report (butlerreview.org.uk ) found "the intelligence was credible" and Bush's statement was "well-founded."
Rove is said to have blown a CIA operative's cover. But didn't Wilson, who was hired as a consultant by the CIA, and presumably signed the routine CIA confidentiality agreement, blow his own cover by afterwards writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times?
Plame's name was certainly no secret, appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who In America" entry. Nor were her political affiliations and those of her husband. It could be argued that Mrs. Wilson blew her own cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her CIA cover company as her employer in the FEC filing.
The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Rove is accused of violating, was designed to protect the CIA from subversion and treason by those who wished harm upon the agency and the United States. It wasn't designed to protect the identities of desk jockeys and their spouses who willingly inject themselves into a national political debate.
If Karl Rove is a criminal, exactly what was the crime?
There is no crime, according to attorney Victoria Toensing, who drafted the legislation in her role as chief counsel for the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She says that under the statute the "outed" agent must have operated outside the U.S. within the previous five years, and Plame had given up her role as a covert agent in favor of a desk job in Langley, Va., nine years before the Rove interview, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
The usual suspects who got even with Newt Gingrich for electing a Republican Congress, and who are pursuing Tom DeLay for pushing the Republican agenda, are now trying to settle the score with the man who got George W. Bush elected twice.
As we've noted, this isn't the first time an attempt has been made to criminalize political differences or to get even with GOP gurus for their political prowess and success. It is somewhat disheartening to see the administration Rove has served so well not mount a passionate defense of this innocent man, saying merely that anyone found guilty of leaking a CIA agent's name would be fired.
This is an attempt to use — or rather, misuse — the law to achieve what Democrats could not at the polls: the neutering of the Republican revolution. As columnist Ann Coulter points out, the only person to have demonstrably lied and possibly broken the law is Joseph Wilson. We can only hope it will not succeed.
end
I wonder if he was called before the Grand Jury. And if so, they could set him up for the easy question of...were you lying then? Or are you lying now?
I'd love to hear his answer to that, but we never will because the media is just ignoring it.
"It is somewhat disheartening to see the administration Rove has served so well not mount a passionate defense of this innocent man, saying merely that anyone found guilty of leaking a CIA agent's name would be fired."
(the most underwhelming statement of the article)
As for the possible perjury, no lawyer in the Country would advise his client to lie about something that wasn't a crime. There was no outing because she wasn't a spy and any lawyer would have found that out before he testified. The ACME Grand Jury is about to explode once again on the DNCoyote and PravdABDNCBS
The real skunk in the works is Wilson.
Pray for W and Our Victorious Troops
In a more just world, this would have been on the front pages of every newspaper in the country.
This is where I think they are wrong:
Jacqueline, (his previous wife), was a French diplomat and may have provided the connections for Wilson to see the forged documents that were supplied by the French through the Italians. In other words it is possible that Wilson knew that the docs were forged because he was privy to the information that French wanted to discredit the British info on Saddam shopping for yellowcake and that Wilson's objective was the same. The French just happen to manage the yellowcake production in Niger.
IOW, he didn't lie...he saw them.
sorry for the double.
May 2003: Wilson joins Kerry campaign.
July 6, 2003 Joe writes his article.
July 2003-2004: Kerry lives off Wilson's Niger story AND the Plame outing in an anti-Bush campaign.
July 9, 2004: Senate Intelligence Report
Late July: Berger fired
Later in July: Wilson fired.
I think I remember that Berger first burgled on June 28, 2003 but would have to look it up. It was kept silent for one whole year and then "leaked" according to Berger's attorney.
The EXPLANATION: Sandy Berger is covering up Bill Clinton’s GREATEST CRIME
You mean he accidently told the truth about the "forged" documents. The Dems were just "forging" ahead toward the Whitehouse.
Not only that but wouldn't any Judge in the country refuse to entertain a case that had absolutely no basis? It's not like her actual status as a CIA employee has been kept a secret. What's up with this Grand Jury? How much has this investigation of a completely baseless charge cost the taxpayer?
It's a minor point but I have to disagree with the author on that. Two men got George W. Bush elected twice.
Algore and John F'n Kerry.
For you point that's th the key set of points, but for an overall timeline, the earlier editorial that Wilson wrote proclaiming how dangerous Iraq was should be included.
< snip >
Since it is now also known that French intelligence was trying to push Martino’s forgeries on US and British intelligence, as simultaneously the Democratic National Committee was planning to discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy by accusing his administration of manufacturing evidence against Hussein’s regime, heightened suspicion is cast on Wilson’s use of the Niger investigation to discredit the Bush administration’s case for war.
More at:
What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa: Joseph Wilson's Silent Partners
Hat tip to Fedora for this info.
great article, as usual from IVBD
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