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Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

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...

A London accountant has described how Pakistan's disgraced nuclear hero Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan visited the West African state of Mali on three occasions between 1998 and 2000. Abdul Ma'bood Siddiqui accompanied A.Q. Khan on three mystery trips  between 1998 and 2000. Their final destination was Timbuktu, a remote outpost in the desert that has always been a magnet for explorers and adventurers from around the world. The mystery behind the visits has deepened following recent revelations that Khan is also the owner of a small hotel in the town that he has named after Hendrina, his Dutch-born wife and...

Fitzgerald's Cover-Up It's time to hold the special prosecutor accountable. Wednesday, April 4, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT For a prosecutor who claims to be a truth-seeker, Patrick Fitzgerald sure can be secretive. Even now that the Scooter Libby trial is over and his "leak" investigation is all but closed, the unaccountable special counsel wants to keep his arguments for creating a Constitutional showdown over reporters and their sources under lock and key. Mr. Fitzgerald is fighting release of the affidavits he filed with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to justify compelling two reporters to testify about their conversations with...

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the...

March 26, 2007, 0:00 a.m. A GOP Congressman Asks Questions About Valerie Plame Wilson’s Testimony Georgia’s Lynn Westmoreland wants more details about the decision to send Joseph Wilson to Niger. By Byron York When Valerie Plame Wilson testified recently before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, just two Republicans — out of 17 on the committee — bothered to show up. Ranking Republican Rep. Tom Davis asked few questions and seemed largely uninterested in the matter. The only other Republican to appear, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, showed more interest but appeared not to have mastered the details...

When Valerie Plame Wilson testified recently before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, just two Republicans — out of 17 on the committee — bothered to show up. Ranking Republican Rep. Tom Davis asked few questions and seemed largely uninterested in the matter. The only other Republican to appear, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, showed more interest but appeared not to have mastered the details of the case. Now, however, Westmoreland wants to know more. In a letter to committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman Friday, he submitted more questions for Mrs. Wilson and requested that Waxman ask the...

It's really too bad that Karl Rove/Dick Cheney/Scooter Libby/Dick Armitage/whoever ruined Valerie Plame's life by destroying her priceless anonymity. Still, there's an upside: Now you can have lunch with Plame and her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson for the low, low current asking price of $950.00.The bill of fare: Includes lunch for two(2) with Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson and a signed book. We don't remember who told us, but you'll have lunch with Ambassador Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame at a "safehouse". Lost in the din of the leak scandal that has consumed Washington is the very personal impact...

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson demands that Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee set the record straight. July 16, 2004 | Editor's note: Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the U.S. intelligence community's prewar assessments on Iraq. An appendix discusses the role taken by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in determining whether Iraq had obtained uranium from Niger. The following is Wilson's letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee pointing to errors in the Republican senators' additional comments to the report and demanding corrections. The Hon. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence The Hon. Jay...

Some fascinating details on the CIA leak affair are coming out in the courtroom of the Lewis Libby trial. This morning, for example, we got a better picture of why former ambassador Joseph Wilson decided to go public with his story, publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in July 2003. Prior to that time, Wilson had been talking to reporters on background — his name had not been linked to the whole Niger/yellowcake/16 words affair. But Wilson has said in a number of interviews that after watching the appearance of then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on "Meet the...

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage originally leaked Plame's identity. Armitage says the leak was inadvertent, and he is not being prosecuted.......Federal prosecutors are trying to show that Libby lied to investigators about conversations he had with reporters regarding Plame. Libby has denied lying and says he has a faulty memory........ Former Cheney Chief of Staff on Trial for Allegedly Lying to a Grand Jury, Not Outing CIA Agent: .Jan. 16, 2007 — Jury selection begins today in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby is charged with...

A federal judge has rejected, for now, the effort by a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson IV, to escape testifying in the trial of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr. "Since Ambassador Wilson has yet to be actually called as a witness, he has not been inconvenienced, nor can he establish at this time that the subpoena is unreasonable or oppressive. Accordingly, his motion is premature," Judge Reggie Walton wrote in an order dated Tuesday.

An attorney for former ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Plame, is at the center of the Plamegate scandal in Washington, was raked over the coals by a judge Thursday for remarks she made the day before on MSNBC's Hardball. During an interview on the program, Melanie Sloan said that former administration official Scooter Libby could still be convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice even though he may not have been the first person to reveal that Plame was a CIA agent. In a stinging rebuke from the bench, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said that he "would not...

WASHINGTON -- A jury that includes four critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policies was seated Monday to try former White House aide "Scooter" Libby on charges of lying about what he told reporters concerning the wife of a prominent war opponent. The jury of nine women and three men was seated after a nearly hourlong court session that was as silent as a professional chess match. Prosecutors and defense attorneys consulted in whispers, then handed papers to the clerk to exercise their 20 unexplained strikes of potential jurors. The only sound was the clerk reading the number of each...

WASHINGTON - A federal judge strongly admonished an attorney for former ambassador Joseph Wilson for her appearance yesterday on MSNBC's program "Hardball" where she predicted a jury can find I Lewis "Scooter" Libby guilty of making false statements.

Inside the Beltway "Very odd," says our source. "They sat at a table in the back." Referring to the intriguing trio of Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, and his wife, Valerie Plame, of CIA-leak fame,

"Or maybe the case has no merit." So suggests the latest issue of the American Lawyer, citing one theory as to why Valerie Plame of CIA-leak fame suddenly parted ways with her attorney, Proskauer Rose partner Christopher Wolf -- her next-door neighbor, no less -- shortly after her civil action was filed against senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and White House aide Karl Rove. "The breakup was a shock," writes the magazine's Elizabeth Goldberg, given that Mr. Wolf had filed the suit only "a month earlier." Headlined "File and run," the article quotes lawyer Victoria Toensing,...

The publication of Hubris is filled with irony for David Corn, Washington editor of the left-wing Nation magazine. He was present at the creation of the Valerie Plame "scandal," which the enemies of George W. Bush hoped could bring down a president. Nobody was more responsible for bloating this episode. Yet Corn is coauthor of a book that has had the effect of killing the story. Thanks to Corn's intrepid coauthor, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, Hubris definitively revealed then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as my source that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA and suggested her...

Early this morning on JOM we went through the cached page blog and noticed something interesting. The cached pages we examined indicate that the mother of one of the pages, Robin Katsoros, mother of Christopher Katsoros a former Pelosi page, told the pages she was working on a screen production of the lives of pages. And she gathered information from them. She is a Conyers and Kerry supporter and he is a student at Georgetown now. It looks like the kids were trying to “sex” up their experiences to get her interested. Here are some bits of it. JOM has...