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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...

If Valerie Plame's memoir was intended to lay to rest the conflicting accounts of how she came to be outed as a covert CIA agent, it fails. Instead, she paints herself as a naïve, whinging victim of circumstance married to an angry, obstreperous egotist who volunteered to involve himself in a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA over how President Bush came to make untrue statements in a State of the Union speech. Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (Simon and Schuster, $26) shows how mistaken her husband's judgment was....

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...

Still spreading the lies and stumping for dollars for Democrats: From: "Ambassador Joe Wilson" {dccc@dccc.org}Subject: Why It MattersDate: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:15:49 -0400 Dear Lew, In 2003 when I spoke out against the lies in George Bush's State of the Union address justifying his disastrous and irresponsible war in Iraq, I never imagined the White House would take revenge against me by compromising the national security of the country, not to mention the safety of my family by outing my wife's identity as a covert CIA officer. Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove knew they could get away...

Is Plame to Blame? by: Bethany Stotts, August 16, 2007 The Valerie Plame Affair, which resulted in the conviction of White House aide Louis “Scooter” Libby, serves as rallying point for many opponents of the Bush Administration. However, some conservatives remain skeptical of Plame’s alleged victim status. While her job description was listed on the CIA rolls as an agent with “no official cover” (NOC), Plame had in reality had been performing administrative duties at Langley for at least five years. She remains willing to pose for the cameras as a starlet ex-agent, and continues participating in high-level lawsuits. Rowan...

Reporting on the resignation of presidential political adviser Karl Rove, ABC's World News on Monday night absurdly blamed Karl Rove for the ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and featured John Kerry's condemnation of Rove as all three broadcast network evening shows castigated Rove for his criticism of how Democrats want to coddle terrorists and highlighted his “leaking” of Valerie Plame's name.

Democrats have to be worried that when Karl Rive exits the White House in August, he'll take a month off and end up at the virtual elbow of Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, or Senator Thompson. They should be worried. Of course that's what he (and Ken Mehlman) will be doing. All-stars whose franchise can't play for the title often show up in the heat of the hunt. Politics is like sports in many ways. And Rove is the Tiger Woods of politics. (That would almost make Bob Shrum Greg Norman, but Norman won two majors. I need a better analogy...

Rod Lurie will next direct his script "Nothing but the Truth," a drama about a D.C.-based female newspaper reporter who outs a CIA agent and is imprisoned for refusing to reveal her source. Cast is mobilizing for an October production start. Talks are under way for Kate Beckinsale to play the journalist, Matt Dillon the prosecutor, Vera Farmiga the CIA agent, Edie Falco (in her first role since "The Sopranos") the editor of the newspaper that published the story and Alan Alda the attorney who tries to free the reporter from jail. Marc Frydman will produce and the Yari Film...

Sean Hannity shows you the secret CIA documents that reveal the truth about Joe and Valerie Wilso. Sunday, August 12 at 9 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney thinks his former chief of staff shouldn't have been convicted in the CIA leak case and that President Bush did right by commuting the jail sentence instead of issuing a pardon. "I thought the president handled it right," Cheney said in an interview Monday with Mark Knoller of CBS Radio. "I supported his decision." However, asked if he disagreed with the guilty verdict for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney said, "I did." Libby was convicted of lying and obstructing justice in a probe into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. The former...

The hypocritical braying that has greeted George W. Bush's commutation of White House aide "Scooter" Libby's (pictured) prison sentence continues. "The president's critics are contrasting his leniency for Libby with his overall advocacy of stiff sentences," writes the San Francisco Chronicle this week. I think the scandal isn't the President's lenience for Libby, but that Libby was prosecuted in the first place. Here are the facts. A former ambassador named Joseph Wilson wrote an article in 2003, suggesting that the President had played fast and loose with intelligence to justify his invasion of Iraq. The piece appeared in The New...

<p>Judge dismisses Valerie Plame's lawsuit accusing members of the Bush administration of leaking her identity... Developing..</p>

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame's lawsuit against members of the Bush administration in the CIA leak scandal.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday. Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity."There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against...

From Aspen we get this report of a talk by Karl Rove and a comment from the audience by former Secretary of State Powell: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell stood up in the audience during the question-and-answer period to say that it was his deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, who sparked the CIA leak case. Powell said that Armitage responded to a question by Novak about Wilson, saying "I think she works for the CIA..." Powell said that Armitage later called him and told him he had been the one who had talked to Novak about Wilson. Powell...

"Look, I make no apologies," Rove said in response to a question from the audience about whether he felt personally responsible for the war. "It was the right thing to do. The world is better off with him gone," he said, referring to Saddam Hussein. "We all thought he had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world did. He didn't." Rove said that Hussein had the intent to develop new weapons, and he tied the war in Iraq to the administration's global "war on terror." "In the aftermath of the removal of the regime, al-Qaida decided to make its stand...

With supporters running away from him -- on his immigration policy, on Iraq -- with his popularity plummeting, as Republican politicians seek safe harbor, with critics sniping, there are qualities to admire about President Bush. Almost alone, stubbornly, he stands with our allies, including Israel, refusing to back down from Islamic terrorists working American public opinion in Iraq. He continues to pressure Iran on its pursuit of an Islamic theocratic nuclear nightmare in the Middle East. He stands for life, opposed to the popular drumbeat from those who would use some human lives to benefit other, more powerful lives through...

Prospective Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson and a few others on the extreme fringe of the lawless right have complained that George Bush was insufficiently generous to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby when the president commuted the 30-month prison sentence of the convicted felon who had served as his counselor and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Not to worry. Bush says he may have more favors in the works for Libby, whose deep involvement in the plotting to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson by outing his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as a CIA operative continues to make him a...

President Bush, a recent story in the Washington Post tells us, is obsessed with the question of how history will view him. He has done himself no favors on that count by commuting the prison term of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In Bush's statement explaining his decision, he said he was sparing Libby from prison because the 30-month sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton was "excessive." In the president's view, the court-imposed fine of $250,000 and the damage to Libby's reputation are punishment enough for the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice. If this were a...

IN COMMUTING the sentence of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, President Bush sent the message that perjury and obstruction of justice in the service of the president of the United States are not serious crimes. Never mind the president's words about our system of justice relying on "people telling the truth" -- and that those who don't "must be held accountable." His bottom-line action speaks louder than all the platitudes and caveats in the president's statement. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison after being convicted by a jury for his part in trying to stymie an...