Posted on 08/27/2006 12:41:01 AM PDT by tlb
Sept. 4, 2006 issue - In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,"
Novak ...wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."
Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role remained secret.
The disclosures about Armitage...underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.
Taft, the State Department lawyer, also felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source—possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum. He didn't mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president's lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more. Armitage's role thus remained that rarest of Washington phenomena: a hot secret that never leaked.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
So it's pretty clear it's Armitage who is Novak's Mr X and started this whole thing.
This whole thing was a huge waste of time.
I'm sure we'll see a formal apology to Karl Rove from the MSM now
/sarcasm
this has been speculated for a while. wonder if novak will come forward to finally confirm, or if the fitzgerald guy will even interview armitage in light of this.
Wasn't Armitage a retread from a previous administration?
That's why he let somebody else --including Cheney-- being investigated despite knowing that it's him that they're looking for. This guy has no heart nor conscience.
I have nothing against Armitage but it's hilarious to me how the MSM have always treated him with kid gloves, and they will continue to when this goes wide. The Plame scandal will completely drop at that point. There will even be MSM sources who suddenly say "Hey, enough with this," thus "proving" they are "balanced" when all they're doing is trying to take heat off of Armitage.
So, deep throat deux, is tricky dick armitage. Colby would be proud!
They've had *years* to make their case, and they failed.
NEWSWEEK: Richard Armitage is Said to Be Eying Donald Rumsfeld's Post
Prnewswire ^ | 3/6/05
NEW YORK, March 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Though by most accounts secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are friendly, the 72-year-old Defense chief may not be taking his partially eclipsed status very well. Though he has given no sign he might depart early, rumors have flown for weeks that Rumsfeld could leave after the quadrennial defense review expected by the end of 2005, report Senior Editor Michael Hirsh and Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman in the March 14 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, March 7). Among those said to be eying Rumsfeld's post is newly retired deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage, a bitter rival of Rumsfeld's....
He's already a foreign policy consultant to the McCain 2008 team.
That's another strike against him, as far as I'm concerned.
"Wasn't Armitage a retread from a previous administration?"
That's not my understanding. I think that he worked in some capacity in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations before coming to his most recent White House job.
Oops! Meant that first sentence in the affirmative (That's my understanding), not negative. Sorry.
Of course, it isn't like we needed this info to figure out McVain shouldn't be president.
It was POWELL as the original, not Armitage, is what I get out of this article.
It was POWELL as the original, not Armitage, is what I get out of this article......but Powell is UNTOUCHABLE.
Re-read....it was Powell who was the leaker and that's why Armitage was distressed!!
It's POWELL...please all re-read the forst paragraph!!
I'm not seeing it. Where do you get that Powell was the leaker?
I think you're misreading the first para.
Armitage was shaken. After reading the column he realized who the leaker was and he called Powell.
Re-read it....it's not as plain as the nose on your face because Spikey Mikey isn't a very good writer, but it's there...the leaker is Powell.
It's ARMITAGE...please you re-read the article. (Newsweek's subhead: "Richard Armitage's central role in the Valerie Plame leak."
And it' FIRST. ;)
"Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity. "I'm afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing," he later told Carl Ford Jr., State's intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had "slipped up" and told Novak more than he should have. "He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f---ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat," Ford recalls in "Hubris," to be published next week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine. As it turned out, Novak wasn't the only person Armitage talked to about Plame."
Where do you get that it's Powell?
I disagree. Armitage is a good man.
Taft, the State Department lawyer, also felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source—possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information about the case to Justice. He didn't mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president's lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more. Armitage's role thus remained that rarest of Washington phenomena: a hot secret that never leaked.
Translation: Bush and the White House did everything 100% properly, yet we're still trying to make it look like they did something wrong.
Novak had said it was REALLY hard to get an interview with this really importnat person.....Armitage doesn't fit that bill.
So we know this will be a completely fair, unbiased book!
Powell was afraid because HE'S the leaker!!!
Armitage is a POS....so is POWELL.
They (Taft) did try to tell the White House via the AG. The AG declined to hear it, I suppose, to protect the White House.
Good catch- as I recall Corn was the guy- not Novak- who labeled Plame a covert CIA operative.
No need to be hysterical this early on a Sunday morning.
So you believe Taft?? Who told this to Mikey..Taft, Powell or Armitage??
I dunno. No 'good man' would let somebody else take the fall when he knows the other person is 'innocent' and per his own admission, Armitage himself was aware that it's him that they're looking for. This, of course, based on assumption that the article is correct in identifying him as the main leaker.
Corn did write that, and hardly anyone covered it.
Wow, this is gonna be some honest, unbiased book. Why do I have the feeling there will be one quick paragraph, or a footnote, dispensing with Corn's column, brushing it off as no big deal, while there will be truckloads of Rove bashing?
I GET HYSTERICAL WHEN FREEPERS ARE THICK.
I've read the article and I'll take what has been said and wait for more information to come out, as it surely will.
Yes, I believe what has been written and I don't know how Isikoff got everything he knows. I don't need to know at this point.
He was ready to take the fall as I read it. He took it to his boss and it stopped at the AG.
THICK. ?
Talk about projection.
Corn's July 16 2003 comments [provided they haven't modified them]: http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=823
JULY 16, 2003 : (DAVID CORN WRITES IN THE NATION THAT PLAME WAS COVERT : HUNGRY FOR A BUSH SCANDAL, THE LEFT LEAPS) The first charge that the Bush administration "outed" Wilson's wife in order to "punish" him comes in a piece by David Corn in The Nation on July 16—a scant two days after Novak's piece appeared. Titled, "A White House Smear," the piece begins with a suitably inflammatory Leftist spin:
"Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security-and break the law-in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?...It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted."
Of course, Novak neither said nor implied any such thing, but pointing that out wouldn't suit Corn's purpose.
Instead, without a shred of evidence, Corn claims, "Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer." Corn then takes the Wilson statement about it "not being about me," and turns it into, "I will not answer questions about my wife. This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the President's statement in the state of the union speech." In quotes, no less. So was this a new quote directly from Wilson to Corn, or did Corn deliberately rephrase the original quote in Novak's piece to make it stronger from Corn's point of view? In other words, is Wilson embellishing his tale, or is Corn lying?
In a presumed attempt to write sympathetically of Mrs. Plame-Wilson, Corn then goes on to add insult to a presumed injury by bringing the couple's children into the story:
"So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife—who is the mother of three-year-old twins—works for the CIA. But let's assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it."
(How does Corn know they have three-year-old twins, by the way?)
Corn goes on to say, "The sources for Novak's assertion about Wilson's wife appear to be 'two senior administration officials.' If so, a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as "nonofficial cover" and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson's wife is such a person—and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her—her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration. (Assuming she did not tell friends and family about her real job, these Bush officials have also damaged her personal life.) Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, 'Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of...Aldrich Ames.' If she is not a CIA employee and Novak is reporting accurately, then the White House has wrongly branded a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA officer."
Corn "assumes" that she did not tell friends and family about her real job, so how does Corn know that she worked under "nonofficial cover?" How does he know what mission she had been assigned? If even the mention of her name and employment with the CIA is so damaging, why did Corn go further than Novak and reveal her cover type and mission? And good heavens, but he now has Wilson saying this is the stuff of Aldrich Ames!
Corn goes on:
"Novak tells me that he was indeed tipped off by government officials about Wilson's wife and had no reluctance about naming her. 'I figured if they gave it to me,' he says. 'They'd give it to others....I'm a reporter. Somebody gives me information and it's accurate. I generally use it.' And Wilson says Novak told him that his sources were administration officials."
So yet another curiosity pops up in this saga: In the 10/1/03 article discussing his role, Bob Novak's description of what happened contradicts what, in July, Corn said Novak told him. Was Corn lying then, or was Novak bragging to him then, or is Novak lying now?
In any case, Corn quotes Wilson again:
" 'Stories like this,' Wilson says, 'are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears.' "
Note how, between February and July, Wilson's story morphs from no mention during the Moyers interview, to a phone call to State to voice concern, then a statement indicating that he's OK with everything as long as the Administration admitted its SOUA mistake, to the above quote with its suggestion of danger to kids, to where we are today.
Corn ends with the theme we've heard from the Left ever since his article appeared:
"The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security."
"A thuggish act?" Evidence? "Put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk to settle a score?" Quite list of assertions, based as they are on zero evidence of any such thing. In fact, when looked at in the sequence above, Wilson seems to have been the person who set up the whole story.
- "Set up? Anatomy of the contrived Wilson "scandal", " FreeRepublic thread by Wolfstar, Multiple Sources & links in article , 10/2/03,
Stop it. Did you read the whole article. Something isn't right. It talks about how days BEFORE the article the Justice Dept. opened the investigation. Strange.
So this book by David Corn is coming out next WEEK, yet he's been on TV recently talking about Bush and Cheney being the LEAKERS!! When he knows full well that it was Armitage (I still think it's Powell)...which proves that Corn LIES!!
You nailed it. Plame caused her own demise. She would rather be a victim. That is so fashionable now.
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