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*snip* Memory can be unreliable, and misstatements can happen despite pure intentions. It's only fair game to point this out. So say Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA case manager and Vanity Fair cover girl, and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Gabon and extravagant self-promoter. Too bad the Wilsons, a power-mad federal prosecutor, an officious federal judge, a confused jury and a badly misled president wouldn't apply those same common-sense considerations to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, wrongly convicted of perjury in the case stemming from State Department official Richard Armitage's public identification of Mrs. Wilson as a...

The only way we even know the name of Valerie Plame (and fame seeking hubby Joe Wilson) is that that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaked her name as a CIA officer to columnist Robert Novak. That is what set in motion the long drawn out Plamegate affair in which only Scooter Libby was convicted of something other than leaking her name. So you would figure that the supposedly biographical movie scheduled for a November USA release about Plame, Fair Game, would feature Armitage front and center as the principal villain. Right? Wrong. The fact is that "Fair...

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way. On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy. The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks...

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney told a special prosecutor in 2004 that he could not remember playing any role in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to FBI records released under court order Friday. In his May 8, 2004, interview with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Cheney said he could not recall when he learned that Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, worked for the CIA; could not recall telling his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, about Plame's employment; and could not recall telling Libby to disclose...

REDDING - Gary T. Armitage, a former Santa Rosa financial adviser accused of helping orchestrate a $200 million Ponzi scheme with a Redding businessman, pleaded not guilty Friday in Shasta County Superior Court. Jeffrey A. Guidi, his partner in the now-defunct Santa Rosa investment firm AGA Financial, appeared in court as well, but will not enter a plea until Monday. James S. Koenig, who owned Asset Real Estate Investment Co., the Redding-based property acquisition firm at the heart of the alleged scheme, has pleaded not guilty to 70 counts of securities fraud and residential burglary. He also appeared in court...

(CNN) — Mary Matalin, a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, sharply criticized former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage Sunday for his comments about the CIA's Bush-era interrogation techniques. In an interview with the English language service of Qatar-based network Al Jazeera last week, Armitage said: “I hope, had I known about it at the time I was serving, I would’ve had the courage to resign. But I don’t know. It’s in hindsight now.” In response, Matalin told CNN's John King on State of The Union: "If Richard Armitage, as the number two guy in the State Department,...

Richard Armitage, who served as chief deputy to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, says now that he would have resigned if he had known that the CIA was interrogating suspected terrorists with "water-boarding,'' that simulated drowning now banned in U.S. interrogations of detainees The Bush administration maintained that it did not condone "torture,'' but this ex-deputy secretary of state says water-boarding is exactly that. "As far as I'm concerned, that was torture,'' he said in an interview aired today by Al Jazeerah English. The CIA has acknowledged using water-boarding on three high-value detainees in 2002 and 2003 with the...

Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with atomic weapons, according to a newly released book. Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to Taliban [Images] headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was keen on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the book says. In fact, Mahmood was said to be more close to...

Defense officials are criticizing what they say is the failure to capture or kill top al Qaeda leaders because of timidity on the part of policy officials in the Pentagon, diplomats at the State Department and risk-averse bureaucrats within the intelligence community. Military special operations forces (SOF) commandos are frustrated by the lack of aggressiveness on the part of several policy and intelligence leaders in pursuing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen, who are thought to have hidden inside the tribal areas of Pakistan for the past 6½ years. The focus of the commandos' ire, the...

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Bush's War Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9 P.M. (check local listings) From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge-for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

The world is dissatisfied with American leadership. Shocked and frightened after 9/11, we put forward an angry face to the globe, not one that reflected the more traditional American values of hope and optimism, tolerance and opportunity. This fearful approach has hurt the United States' ability to bring allies to its cause, but it is not too late to change. The nation should embrace a smarter strategy that blends our "hard" and "soft" power -- our ability to attract and persuade, as well as our ability to use economic and military might. Whether it is ending the crisis in Pakistan,...

WASHINGTON - Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Sunday he was foolish to have revealed Valerie Plame's CIA identity. Armitage's acknowledgment came in response to comments by Plame, who said the former Bush administration official had no right to talk to a reporter about where she worked. A year ago, Armitage publicly apologized to Plame and her husband. The former No. 2 State Department official remains the only principal in the leak to have done so. At least three one-time administration officials in addition to Armitage discussed Plame's CIA status with reporters. They are former White House political...

Apparently one of the movie roles that Alec Baldwin won't be playing in the future is that of Sherlock Holmes. Baldwin writes an entire Huffington Post blog, Prosecuting Those Responsible For Outing Valerie Plame, without once mentioning the name of the leaker---Richard Armitage. Baldwin starts out with a fantasy about the things he would do if he were play-acting as president: The fifth thing that I would do is to prosecute whoever is responsible for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. At this point you would think that Baldwin would lash out at the leaker, Richard Armitage, or at...

As everybody knows by now, it was Richard L. Armitage, former deputy secretary of state, who was the original source of Robert Novak's now-famous column of July 14, 2003, in which Valerie Plame, wife of Joseph Wilson, was outed as a CIA operative. Novak implied that she was instrumental in getting her husband the mission to Niger to check out reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for his nuclear project. President Bush had mentioned this information in his message to Congress. But when Wilson returned, he wrote an article for the New York Times in which...

President George W. Bush has publicly acknowledged for the first time that someone in his administration likely leaked the identity of a CIA operative, but he said it's time to "move on." ...Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was the highest White House official convicted in a government scandal since the Iran-Contra affair. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/13670689/detail.html ******** For some reason the name William Jefferson Clinton rings a bell as another "white house offical" who was impeached for obstruction of justice? ...seems the MSM has blurred my memory.

When I went to my office Monday, July 7, 2003, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno's inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column. I wrote the Townsend column Tuesday morning because I had a busy schedule the rest of the day, including a 3 p.m. appointment with Richard...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court said Friday it would release some of the documents it reviewed when deciding to force journalists to testify in the CIA leak investigation. The ruling followed a request by The Associated Press and Dow Jones, which asked for the release of the sworn statements Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gave to justify subpoenas for New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in 2005. Fitzgerald wanted the reporters' help in his investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The news organizations argued...

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Deep in a violent and lawless slum just north of this coastal city, 12 men whose faces were shrouded by scarves drilled with Kalashnikovs. In unison, they lunged in one direction, turned and lunged in another. “Allah-u akbar,” the men shouted in praise to God as they fired their machine guns into a wall. The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Qaeda. He has...