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Democrats said that the outing of a CIA agent, personnel, whatever, was bad, and said that someone's head in the Bush Administration had to roll. Democrats wanted Cheney, but didn't get him. When the New York Times outs Karzai's brother as supposedly being paid by the CIA to do who knows what, Democrats act as if it is no big deal. What gives?

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...

A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release notes and summaries of former Vice President Dick Cheney's 2004 interview with Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, but is allowing the deletion of what may be some of the most interesting details in the documents. In a ruling issued Thursday morning, Judge Emmet Sullivan flatly rejected claims by both Bush and Obama appointees at DOJ that the entirety of the records should be withheld because their disclosure could discourage White House officials from cooperating in future investigations. The judge said the prospect of such inquiries was...

This one: Not this one: Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) appears to be a decent and honorable man. Part of his background includes military service (with four sons currently serving). His impassioned outburst during President Obama's healthcare speech may seem out of step with his character and his military discipline, but he vented/channeled what many frustrated Americans were shouting into their tv sets, while provoking a million-mob strong march to turn out in D.C.: You LIE. Not only is former ambassador Joe Wilson a liar; but the current president of the United States is one, too. Congressman Wilson broke decorum and...

Well turnabout is fair play.The CIA has found a way to strike back at Eric Holder's decision to investigate the CIA's handling of enhanced interrogation techniques, or at least the progressive Democrats that demanded the investigation. In July congress had a major fit about a secret Bush-era program that was revealed to them by CIA Director Leon Panetta: Congress originally authorized the CIA to develop the secret counterterrorism program that is now drawing fierce criticism from House Democrats who say they were kept in the dark all along, a former senior intelligence official told FOX News on Monday. The program,...

Early in Saturday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Jeff Glor reported: "Tonight there are new allegations of torture by the CIA. Newsweek magazine is reporting that a secret 2004 report reveals that interrogators used mock executions to intimidate prisoners." Glor went on to talk to Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball, who claimed: "And in the case of one detainee that we know about, somebody named Abdel-Rahman al Nashiri, who was an alleged architect of the USS Cole bombing, this report alleges that at some point CIA interrogators, whether contractors or CIA staff officers, brandished a gun in front of this guy in...

NEW YORK A lengthy Q and A with the ailing columnist Robert Novak-- who died today at age 78-- appeared last November in the Washingtonian. At the end, Barbara Matusow got around to asking about the CIA leak case and outed spy Valerie Plame Wilson. Novak replied: "From a personal point of view, I said in the book I probably should have ignored what I’d been told about Mrs. Wilson. "Now I’m much less ambivalent. I’d go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make...

A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations. The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial. *snip* He mentioned in...

The Supreme Court announced Monday it will not give further consideration to a lawsuit brought by a fired CIA agent and her husband against high ranking Bush administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney. The decision is a victory for Cheney and his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. They and nine unnamed co-defendants were sued by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband Joseph after her CIA cover was leaked to reporters.

As the curtain closes on the presidency of George W. Bush, the one loose end dangling is the pardon of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In 2007 Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Let us be clear about the Bush legacy. After September 11, not a year into Mr. Bush's term, his became a war presidency. George Bush's place in history will turn on what becomes of Iraq and al Qaeda. If Iraq fails, history will mark down the Bush presidency. If by fits and starts Iraq grows into the...

MAYBE BUSH IS NOT SUCH A BAD GUY AFTERALL. TOO BAD THE NEWS PEOPLE DON'T TELL THE TRUTH. This has been flying under the radar. Read the MSNBC article and check the truthorfiction.com site. The TorF version is shown below. This event is factual. I have an increased respect for President Bush. He has taken the heat of being called a liar and a war monger for 5 years while he kept his silence to protect the people of the world. This is truly a display of selfless honor. On July 5, 2008, the Associated Press (AP) released a story...

.........."There are mad bloggers who profess to take delight in my distress, but there's no need to pay them attention in the face of such an outpouring of good will for me. I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case. But Joe and Valerie Wilson, attempting to breathe life into the Valerie Plame "scandal," issued this statement: "We have long argued that responsible adults should take Novak's typewriter away. The time has arrived for them to also take away the keys...

The main reason I am writing this column is that many people have asked me how I first realized I was suffering from a brain tumor and what I have done about it. But I also want to relate the reaction to my disease, mostly compassionate, that belies Washington's reputation. The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office. I did not realize I had hit anyone until a shirt-sleeved young man on...

Valerie Plame was dealt another setback Tuesday when a U.S. court of appeals upheld a federal judge's decision to dismiss her lawsuit against members of the Bush administration. Given the media's fascination with this former CIA operative who has claimed for years she was illegally outed by the White House for political reasons, it will be interesting to see just how much attention this ruling gets in the next 48 hours.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday to turn over a copy of a FBI interview with Vice President Dick Cheney or face contempt charges. The document in question is an interview Cheney gave to the FBI in the investigation of the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent. “The arguments you have raised for withholding the interview report are not tenable,” Waxman wrote in a letter to Mukasey. “When the FBI interview with the Vice President was conducted, the Vice President knew that the information...

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Too bad, because an otherwise fascinating story about the scramble to build a counterterror apparatus after 9/11, the merits of coercive vs. non-coercive interrogation, and the stings that nailed Abu Zubaydah and KSM is going to be submerged in a debate over their decision to publish the lead interrogator’s name against his wishes and those of CIA chief Michael Hayden. Here’s the obligatory editor’s note justifying the decision. Quote: "After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for [the interrogrator], the newspaper declined the request, noting that [the interrogator] had never worked under cover and that others involved in the...

In this article detailing Scott ‘Wormtongue the Sellout’ McClellan’s moments of C-SPAN glory in front of a panel of partisan hacks on Capitol Hill today, the opening paragraph (which I won’t quote directly, you can read for yourselves) states that McClellan is claiming he was instructed to say that Cheney and Libby weren’t involved in the leakage of Valerie Plame’s employment status with the CIA, and then goes on to state that such an assertion (their lack of involvement) is false. Excuse me, AP reporter and fact transmogrifying reporter Laurie Kellman, but ever heard of someone named Richard Armitage? You...

Scott McClellan, the former Press Secretary to President Bush (now a puppet for the Left) has written a book named, "What Happened," (probably ghost-written by the tripartite efforts of Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Harry Reid) which suggests that: The president used propaganda at worst, or bogus intelligence at best, as a basis for the invasion of Iraq; that Scooter Libby, Vice president Cheney or Karl Rove leaked the name of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, and if the president didn't authorize it, he, at least, had knowledge of it. Here is what really happened: • In February, 2002, Joseph...

Former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told the FBI that it was "possible" that Vice President Cheney instructed him to disseminate information about CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press, according to a redacted FBI report recently examined by Congressional investigators. In part as a result of that revelation, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today reiterated its request for more Plame investigation documents -- including reports on the interviews investigators conducted with Cheney and President Bush. In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Committee Chairman Henry Waxman also writes that "[n]ew revelations by...

<p>A partisan Democratic mantra began earlier in the book. McClellan writes George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign "acquiesced to certain advisers, including Roger Ailes and the late Lee Atwater," who opposed Bush's "civility and decency." (McClellan, then 20 years old, played no part in that campaign.) McClellan contends that thanks to Rove in 2002, "the first cracks appeared in the facade of bipartisan comity."</p>

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The incidents that first left then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan "dismayed and disillusioned" about Washington involved the surreptitious release of classified information, McClellan said Thursday. The first of the "defining moments," McClellan told NBC's "Today" show, was when CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked to the media. The second, he said, was when he learned that President Bush had secretly declassified a report on Iraq so Vice President Dick Cheney and Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby could disclose it to reporters. "We had been out there talking about how seriously the president took the...

The former Bush administration pitchman making explosive election-year charges about how the White House handled the Valerie Plame case and built the case for invading Iraq said Thursday that he went to Washington to change it and became “disillusioned” when he realized he was just a pawn in the never-ending political game.

Former White House Aide's Revelations Make Out Case for Obstruction of Justice by Rove and Libby in Valerie Plame Case (Washington, DC) Today Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) called for former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to testify under oath regarding the devastating revelations made in his new book on the Bush Administration’s deliberate efforts to mislead the American people into the Iraq War. “The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby – and possibly Vice President Cheney...

Michelle Obama, speaking as her husband may have the Democratic presidential nomination within his grasp, told a Chicago luncheon crowd Friday that she's more convinced than ever he is ready for the office. "I'm particularly proud of my husband, who has handled himself with dignity and with strength and with grace," Obama said of the long campaign, as she addressed about 1,800 people, mostly women, at McCormick Place. Obama, offering brief remarks before featured speaker Valerie Plame Wilson took the podium, hit the main talking points of her husband's campaign. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the luncheon's sponsor, as...

WASHINGTON - Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity. A federal judge dismissed Plame's lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame's lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits. Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sued Vice President Dick Cheney; his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; former White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State...

The Prime Minister of Niger reported to the U.S. State Department in early 2002 that Iraq tried to buy uranium "yellow cake" (ore) -- a June 2003 Memo reveals. A declassified court exhibit introduced in the 2007 trial of Scooter Libbey proved that Saddam Hussein tried to get uranium ore from Niger -- covertly and under the table. This is clear evidence that Saddam Hussein was actively developing nuclear weapons. Iraq already had stockpiles of uranium "yellow cake" that it was not using -- but that uranium was being watched by UN inspectors. Iraq could have no reason for wanting...

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton used City Hall yesterday as the backdrop to renew her call to change tactics and withdraw troops from Iraq, saying money spent on the war could be better used to help the national mortgage crisis and this week's shutdown of part of Interstate 95 here. Clinton, D-N.Y., was joined by former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Plame's undercover identity was leaked to reporters by Bush administration staffers after her husband criticized the war in Iraq. Clinton's speech, coming a day before the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, was designed...

"Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., left, applauds former CIA officer Valerie Plame, right, as she speaks, prior to Clinton speaking about Iraq, Tuesday, March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia."

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in...

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets. The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency's investigation of the network. Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office. She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then...

When former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson got the redacted manuscript of her draft memoir back from the CIA Publications Review Board (PRB) earlier this year, her book publisher realized it had a problem. "We were looking at a manuscript where 20 percent of the author's story was deemed classified by her former employer [even though] much of the information was probably in the public domain," explains an editor at the publishing house, Simon & Schuster. "So the challenge was, if Valerie can't tell her own story because she is bound by her agreement, then how is this story going...

“BLOWBACK” is an intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Some in the intelligence community have been working with liberal journalists and Democrats on Capitol Hill to embarrass President Bush and to stymie his foreign policy initiatives. The most successful of these covert operations was the Valerie Plame affair, in which White House officials were falsely blamed for “outing” a CIA undercover officer who was not in fact undercover. (It was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is no longer appealing his conviction in the CIA leak case, a tacit recognition that continuing his legal fight might only make things worse. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury and obstruction but President Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence in July. As a convicted felon, Libby will lose his law license and, in some states, cannot vote. He might have had a chance to avoid those consequences had he won on appeal, but at a new trial his commutation...

Valerie Plame is used to being exposed. She was famously exposed as a CIA agent by columnist Bob Novak and she’s no stranger to media exposure, what with appearances in Vanity Fair magazine, on “The Daily Show,” “Meet the Press” and “Real Time with Bill Maher,” just to name a few. But there’s one place Plame won’t get exposed: Playboy magazine. We found this out Wednesday when Plame stopped by Nathans of Georgetown Thursday to take part in the Q&A Cafe interview series. Host Carol Joynt couldn’t get over the fact that Plame was, well, pretty hot and, since a...

Deja vu?  Remember a few weeks ago when that McClellan story came out in which he supposedly said he was lied to about the Plame affair?  I wrote then: Isn't it curious how the left constantly wailed about Scott McClellan allegedly lying during his press conferences, but now that he is saying something that smells like trash talk about Bush, he is suddenly a truth teller. And now when a new NIE is released to the public saying that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program, NOW the left believes our intelligence agencies.  For the last year the left has...

Though things have begun to turn around in Iraq and Bush's perseverance is in route to vindication, don't expect any mea culpas from the Bush bashers. Predictably, we're just witnessing new tactics in their seven years war to destroy him. They thought they'd hit the jackpot with the excerpts from the new book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan claims, "I had unknowingly passed along false information (about Scooter Libby and Karl Rove's role in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case). And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so:...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan says top administration officials -- including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney -- were involved in his "unknowingly" passing along false information about the leak of a CIA operative's identity. In October 2003, as controversy grew about the leak of Valerie Plame's name, McClellan stood at the White House podium and told reporters that Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, had not been involved. "There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes in his new book, "What Happened,"...

KING: Scott, were you lied to? MCCLELLAN: Well, Larry, I said what I believed to be true at the time. It was also what the president believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given.

Who by now doesn’t know the tangled, twisted story of Valerie Plame? In case you just came in from the cold, the former CIA agent’s cover was blown after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a blistering New York Times opinion piece charging the Bush administration with manipulating WMD intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Then came Scooter and Judith and Karl; the clarion calls for frog-marching; the double secret background e-mails; the turning of aspens and the rest. This month, the sexy ex-spy’s memoir, “Fair Game,” landed on bestseller lists. Earlier this year it was optioned for a...

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...

Q. Is it possible to get through an extended interview of Valerie Plame Wilson without mentioning Richard Armitage? A. Yes, if Joe Scarborough is the interviewer. The "Morning Joe" host conducted a 15-minute conversation with and about Plame today, much of which focused on her "outing" as a CIA operative. But the name of the State Department official who first disclosed her identity was never uttered. That wouldn't have fit the template that the disclosure was a nasty White House plot to punish Plame's husband Joe Wilson. Armitage, at State, was anything but a partisan GOP operative with an anti-Wilson...

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. --Outed spy Valerie Plame says she isn't going away, no matter what the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue want.

To flip through the first third of Valerie Plame Wilson's "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House" is to confront an optical maze of gray stripes interrupting juicy anecdotes and methodical musings. CIA censors blacked out 10 percent of the text in her memoir, leaving its narrative disjointed and sometimes hard to follow. "I believe the vast majority of what is blacked out in the book has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with diminishing me and Joe," she said. Agency censors also wouldn't allow Plame Wilson to acknowledge working...

Six Reasons the Plame Episode is a Farce 2007-02-03 -- In a syndicated newspaper column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame (aka Valerie E. Wilson) was identified as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction." Plame was married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had worked briefly for the CIA and had written a scathing editorial a week earlier in the New York Times accusing the Bush administration of "twisting," "manipulating," and "exaggerating" intelligence about Iraqi weapons programs "to justify an invasion." Bush's adversaries quickly concluded that he or someone close to him had illegally...

Valerie Plame Wilson chides President Bush for not firing anyone for the leaking of her covert CIA identity, which caused a national scandal and an investigation resulting in a perjury and obstruction of justice conviction against Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff. She also tells Katie Couric that she has learned of the damage that the leaking of her identity caused agents of the clandestine service and it is serious. Wilson speaks to Couric in her first interview for a 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. . . . Plame says the...

People are influenced by gossip about others, even when it contradicts what they see with their own eyes, suggests a new study. The new study, published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals individuals sometimes place so much stock in gossip that they accept it as true even if their own observations and experiences suggest otherwise. "Gossip has a strong manipulative potential that could be used by cheaters to change the reputation of others or even change their own," lead author Ralf Sommerfeld of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology and his colleagues write. "This...

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail. “He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said. Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said. Novak forcefully defended his handling of the column...

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail. “He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said. Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said. Novak forcefully defended his handling of the column...

Two high-profile backers of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned in Nevada on Thursday, avoiding attacks on each other's candidate and instead criticizing the Bush administration. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, supporting Obama, said in an interview that Democratic candidates for president as well as for Congress have an edge in the 2008 elections because “the American people believe even more that we're on the wrong track and we need a change.” Clinton backer Joe Wilson, a former ambassador and husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, said in a telephone interview that Republicans can't hold onto...