Posted on 04/19/2005 3:12:31 PM PDT by stinkerpot65
Two reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about their sources lost another round in the courts today. The reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, now have only one appeal left, to the United States Supreme Court.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That's one question I have. Some reporters were probably taken in--for instance I think it likely Novak was set up and anticipated his article would be received differently than it was--but the whole thing seems like a planned psy-op done with the cooperation of media sources friendly to Wilson's political goals, and I'd think some of the key reporters sharing Wilson's political orientation such as Pincus and Seymour Hersh must've been in on it.
Very interesting. I would not be surprised if Wilson and Plame "leaked" the info to six friendly reporters themselves. I tend to think they used an intermediary to approach Novak, though, because Novak's description of his source as "no partisan gunslinger" doesn't seem to me to fit Wilson. Apparently there was more than one source spreading the information around. One of Novak's articles describing his source as "a senior administration official" also says that Clifford May had heard the same information from "a non-government source", which May's own article describes as "someone who formerly worked in the government".
That's a creative excuse!
He gave the glasses story to Talking Points Memo and Talon News. He even restated it in his Letter responding to the Senate Intel report.
His wife as a source of info is as much uncommented upon as Pincus' (supposedly) is.
Maybe, maybe not- remember the first media reports about Wilson? The early ones tried to paint Wilson as a conservative, a Bush voter.
Wilson formerly worked in the government - he was, at the time, a former US ambassador. There's also the CIA guy Beers in the mix somewhere.
Former Aide [Beers] Takes Aim at War on Terror , The Washington Post ^ | 6/16/03 | By Laura Blumenfeld, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/930141/posts
Scuse me- NSC guy Beers.
Beers also signed the democratsabroad.org letter by Kerry on Iran policy- with former Amb Wilson --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1074047/posts?page=151#151
His glasses story does sound like a rehearsed alibi--as does much of what Wilson says. When I was listening to his lecture I noticed him using some rhetorical strategies that have been developed by psychologists for application to marketing and sales. I think he is very calculating in scripting what he says.
The idea of his wife as a source of info is interesting.
They did try to paint him that way at first, but I'm thinking Novak would have not seen Wilson that way by the time he wrote the article where he used the "no partisan gunslinger" phrase, which is from an October 1, 2003 article.
John Kerry vs. the War on Terror: Candidate Kerry's Subversive Campaign
In May 2003 Kerry's foreign policy team was joined by Rand Beers, a career diplomat who had been appointed to senior positions in the National Security Council and State Department by Clinton and had stayed on into the Bush administration before suddenly resigning on the eve of the war in Iraq.6 Beers helped Kerry pull together the nucleus of his foreign policy team.7
6On Beers, see Cullen F. Thomas, “Beers, Rand", Current Biography, Volume 65, Issue 10, October 2004, 6; “Rand Beers: Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs", U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/biography/beers.html.
7"John Kerry's Campaign Staff and Advisers", The Progresssive Government, http://www.progressivegovernment.org/PresidentialCampaign/kerrystaff.cfm, archived at FReeper mtrott, “Drudge: Mystery Woman Dated Campaign Finance Chief", FreeRepublic.com, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f--news/1079203/posts, February 16, 2004, Post 40; Laura Flanders, "Not Quite a Dream Team", TomPaine.com, http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9966, February 17, 2004; Michael Crowley, “The Kerry Tribes: The seven factions fighting for control of his campaign and his presidency.", MSN.com, http://slate.msn.com/id/2098894/, April 15, 2004; Laura Blumenfeld, “Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror", The Washington Post, June 16, 2003, Page A01, online at washingtonpost.com, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp--dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A62941--2003Jun15¬Found=true; Bernard Gwertzman, “Beers: Kerry Would Restore Alliance, Stress Diplomacy if Elected President", Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/pub7237/bernard_gwertzman_rand_beers/beers_kerry_would_restore_alliances_stress_diplomacy_if_elected_president.php, August 5, 2004; Ronald Brownstein, “Kerry is shaping his foreign policy: His network of experts spans a range of opinions", deseretnews.com, deseretnews.com, http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595055360,00.html, April 11, 2004.
Good point- October was a little late to still swallow the spin.
I'm not sure when they first met. Beers is a friend and co-instructor with Richard Clarke as we know- and Beers supposedly drew Wilson into the Kerry camp, according to a blog I read a while back which cited the lib "daily kos."
Note the very brief interval of time in June when Gilligan, Thielman, Wilson, Pincus, Ray McGovern, Beers, Moveon.org , Win Without War, VIPS, etc all "come out" with the "lied us into war" spin- June was a very busy month:
MAY 2003 : (FORMER AMBASSADOR JOE WILSON JOINS THE JOHN KERRY CAMPAIGN)
MAY 29, 2003 : (UK DOSSIER/BBC SCANDALS : BBC'S GILLIGAN CLAIMS HIS UNNAMED SOURCE SAYS UK'S IRAQ DOSSIER WAS "SEXED UP") The row began on May 29, when Andrew Gilligan, defence correspondent for the Today radio programme, quoted "a British official who was involved in the preparation of the [intelligence] dossier" who claimed it was "transformed in the week before it was published, to make it sexier".
Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's communications director, was furious. He accused the BBC of branding Tony Blair a liar and suggesting the prime minister led the country to war on a false premise. In briefings, media interviews and parliamentary committees meetings, government ministers queued up to attack the BBC. The corporation, in turn, claimed Downing Street was deflecting attention its justification for going to war. Mr Kelly, whom the ministry of defence named as the likely source for the BBC stories, was caught between the two. - "Shaken BBC prepares to defend its reputation," by Tim Burt, Media Editor in London, Financial Times , July 20 2003
MAY 31, 2003 : (THE TIMES -UK- REPORTS THAT A GROUP CALLED "VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY" LED BY RAY MCGOVERN HAS WRITTEN A LETTER TO BUSH - IS THIS A KIND OF A REPLAY OF OLD JOHN KERRY JANE-FONDA/VVAW ACTIVIST GROUP IDEA? - THE GROUP HAS A DISLIKE OF CHALABI'S IRAQI NATIONAL CONGRESS) A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.
The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.
“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group is headed by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years. He said that people in the agency were totally demoralised, particularly over what they claim is the reliance by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and his Pentagon-based intelligence staff on the testimony of Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi emigré.
“The contribution of reporting from emigrés has been highly touted for months by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy), who seem unaware of Machiavelli’s warning that of all intelligence sources, exiles are the least reliable,” the letter says. Mr Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress and was the favourite among Washington’s hawks to lead a postwar Iraqi authority....
The former CIA officials were supported by a current official in the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, who told The New York Times yesterday: “The American people were manipulated.”
Pentagon officials said that the claims of intelligence manipulation were nothing more than a campaign of sour grapes led by present and former CIA officials over their perceived marginalisation in the run-up to the war.
In an attempt to unearth incriminating intelligence on Saddam Hussein, Mr Rumsfeld created last year the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit inside the Pentagon. This became a direct rival not only of the CIA, but of the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency. - "Public was misled, claim ex-CIA men ," Tim Reid, The Times (U.K.) , 05/31/03 *
See also: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity"
Here's an article from them.
http://www.counterpunch.org/vips03152003.html Members listed:
Richard Beske, San Diego
Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa Fe Patrick Eddington, Alexandria, VA
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA
Steering Committee Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
And finally:
The VIPS can be reached at: vips@counterpunch.org
-----So, VIPS is a Counterpunch.org front group??? 10 posted on 05/30/2003 4:53 PM PDT by Shermy
JUNE 1 2003? : (FORMER STATE DEPT DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC, PROLIFERATION AND MILITARY ISSUES OFFICE IN THE BUREAU OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH, GREG THIELMAN, TELLS AP THAT US DISTORTED EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY INVASION OF IRAQ) A retired intelligence analyst told the AP that the US used distorted evidence and conjecture to justify the invasion of Iraq. Until last September, Greg Thielmann was the director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He says that 'disingenous statements' came from 'the very top' of the government, and that these statement were the worst in the area of Iraq's possible nuclear weapons capability.
In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists. Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said. [...]
One example where officials took too far a leap from the facts, according to Thielmann: On Feb. 11, CIA Director Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq ``retains in violation of U.N. resolutions a small number of Scud missiles that it produced before the Gulf War.''
Intelligence analysts supposed Iraq may have had some missiles because they couldn't account for all the Scuds it had before the first Gulf War, Thielmann said. They could have been destroyed, dismantled, miscounted or still somewhere in Saddam's inventory. - "," AP via http://magpieblog.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_magpieblog_archive.html
JUNE 12, 2003 : (NIGER & IRAQ : WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE BY PINCUS SAYS THAT A 'RETIRED DIPLOMAT' GAVE THE CIA A NEGATIVE REPORT) ... reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. - FreeRepublic Freeper Shermy 13 posted on 10/03/2003 9:58 PM PDT by Shermy
JUNE 12, 2003 : (PINCUS ARTICLE SOURCED WILSON AS A "FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL") He [Wilson] talked about his Niger trip with reporters, provided they used the information on background... In a June 12, 2003, Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus, he [Wilson] is identified as a "former government official." . -- "The Rise and Decline of Joe Wilson," by Matthew Continetti, Weekly Standard, 05/17/2004
JUNE 13, 2003 : (GREG THIELMAN, FORMER STATE DEPT DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC, PROLIFERATION AND MILITARY ISSUES OFFICE IN THE BUREAU OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH, COMPLAINS ABOUT COLIN POWELL'S FEBRUARY 5, 2003 UN PRESENTATION ON PBS's 'NOW WITH BILL MOYERS' SHOW) - October 16, 2003 CyberAlert, via "60 Minutes II Re-Runs Ex-Official’s Attack on Powell’s UN Case," by Brent Baker, Media Research Center , 2-5-04
JUNE 14, 2003 Monday ? : (WASHINGTON, DC : EPIC IRAQ FORUM EVENING KEYNOTE LECTURE "A STATE OF THE MOVEMENT ADDRESS" BY MCGOVERN OF THE GROUP 'VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONS FOR SANITY' & FORMER AMBASSADOR WILSON) - source : EPIC's own web site.
JUNE 15, 2003 Tuesday? : (MOVEON.ORG CREATES WEB SITE MISLEADER.ORG) Organization: EliPariser, Registrant ; 452W57thSt , NewYork ,:NY , 10019, US , 646/326-6333; Email:eli.pariserATmoveon.org - source: whois.publicinterestregistry.net*
The Mislead is a new project of the increasingly influential liberal organization MoveOn.org, which claims to reach more than two million activists and recently received a donation of up to $5 million from philanthropist George Soros, who is working to prevent President Bush's re-election.
The Daily Mislead claims that it provides "an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of misrepresentations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration," but in most cases since its first issue on Sept. 15, it has done nothing of the kind. Instead, despite numerous examples of actual deception by the Bush administration, the Mislead has generally presented a series of partisan accusations of dishonesty based on nothing more than political disagreement. Like too many participants in the media bias debate, MoveOn is churning out a series of analyses designed to support a preconceived agenda--whether the facts fit the case or not.- "Who's Lying Now?," Opinion Journal via http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1037366/posts
JUNE 16, 2003 Monday : (RAND BEERS, FORMER WH ANTITERRORISM ADVISOR AND KERRY STAFFER, COMPLAINS ABOUT THE WAY THE WOT IS BEING CONDUCTED...) WASHINGTON (AFP) - A top White House anti-terrorism advisor who quit five days before the start of the Iraq war has accused President George W. Bush of not doing enough in the fight against terrorism. "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism," Rand Beers, a former special assistant to the president, told the Washington Post in an interview published Monday. [June 16, 2003]
After working at the National Security Council for 35 years, under presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Beers, 60, had been the main counter-terrorism advisor from August [2002] until his resignation in March [2003].
He has since joined the presidential campaign of Democratic Senator John Kerry.
Beers said the Bush administration was "making us less secure, not more secure." The government had concentrated on being offensive against terrorists without properly laying out the means to be defensive and prevent a repeat of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, he told the Post....
Beers also said that the war in Afghanistan was a job abandoned at the halfway point and not enough military resources have been put into the country. "Terrorists move around the country with ease. We don't even know what is going on. Osama bin Laden could be anywhere in Afghanistan," Beers was quoted as saying. He added that not enough pressure had been put on Saudi Arabia to deal with its terrorism problems.
The Central Intelligence Agency is doing a good job hunting al-Qaeda chiefs abroad but the new Department of Homeland Security, responsible for defending the United States, was underfunded, Beers said. Explaining his job at the White House, Beers said that each day he had to sift through and evaluate between 500 and 1,000 indications of terrorist threats.------- "Former security advisor says Bush failing to counter terror threat ," AFP via Yahoo, Mon Jun 16, 2003 2:36 PM ET via 10 posted on 06/16/2003 6:03:39 PM PDT by archy
JUNE 20, 2003 : (THE ANTIWAR ORGANIZATIONS 'WIN WITHOUT WAR' & MOVEON.ORG TAKE OUT A FULL-PAGE AD IN THE NY TIMES CLAIMING THE US WAS LED TO WAR BASED ON LIES) * Win Without War And Moveon.Org Took Out A Full Page Ad In The New York Times Attacking The President. The ad “labeled Bush a ‘misleader’ and demanded an independent commission to determine the truth about US intelligence on Iraq. ‘It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die for a lie,’ the ad concluded.” - (Robert Schlesinger, “Antiwar Groups Turn Their Focus To Bush,” The Boston Globe, 6/20/03) via - "SAY IT AIN’T SO JOES? Joe Lieberman & Joe Wilson Make Bold Assertions That Facts Don’t Support, "RNC Research, Republican National Committee, October 5, 2003 (* My note : Remember that Wilson already has an established relationship with 'Win Without War.")
JUNE 26, 2003 : (RAY MCGOVERN OF THE GROUP 'VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONS FOR SANITY' IS INTERVIEWED : MCGOVERN PREDICTS LEAKS WILL EMERGE WHICH WILL EMBARASS THE PRESIDENT - NOTE THIS INVOLVES W R. PITT OF TRUTHOUT & SCOTT RITTER FAME)To: seamole On June 26, I conducted an interview with 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern. McGovern served every President from Kennedy to Bush Sr., and delivered a wide spectrum of insight and data regarding both the September 11 attack and the second Iraq war. When I questioned McGovern on the impact these developments were having on the American intelligence community, McGovern made a prescient prediction:
".... In the coming weeks, we're going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration." June 26, 2003 - From liberalslant (no surprise here) by William Rivers Pitt. Ewww. ((William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter)..William is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant. He is on the writing staff at www.truthout.com where this article was published)) 9 posted on 10/01/2003 10:37 AM EDT by unsycophant , via "VANITY: Wilson Outed His Wife's Status.," Vanity , assembled by seamole w/unsycophant, October 2, 2003, Posted on 10/02/2003 11:49 PM PDT by seamole
JULY 2003 first three weeks of the month : (NIGER'S MINES MINISTER IS IN THE USA) Conveniently the mines minister has been out of contact in the United States during the past two weeks and is not expected back in Niger until the end of this week.
Whether he could add anything to what is already known about the source of the uranium reports is unclear. --- "Niger upset by uranium slur," BBC, Mon July 14, 2003, http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:UTvIb0XFTzkJ:news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3065165.stm+benin+uranium&hl=en
[Would this Minister of Mines be Rabiou Hussanne Yari?]
JULY 4, 2003 : (PARTY AT THE WILSON'S HOUSE INCLUDES REPORTER) In concluding their article, Leiby and Pincus [of the Washington Post] write [in an article on July 6] , "Last week, Wilson said of Hussein: 'I'm glad the tyrant is gone.' But he does not believe the war was ever about eliminating Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It was, he said, a political push to 'redraw the map of the Middle East.' While his family prepared for a Fourth of July dinner, he proudly showed a reporter photos of himself with Bush's parents."
Definitely. In fact I think VIPS modelled themselves on a group VVAW and IPS helped Philip Agee and Victor Marchetti found, the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5), which started the journal CounterSpy during the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence community.
BTW when I searched on Waxman in my Wilson file I found that in the course of writing an article for VIPS, McGovern referred to him in an interesting context:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: A Memorandum for the President
The unedifying dance by the various oversight committees of the Congress over recent weeks offers proof, if further proof were needed, that reliance on Congress to investigate in a non-partisan way is pie in the sky. One need only to recall that Sen. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to agree to ask the FBI to investigate the known forgery. Despite repeated attempts by others on his committee to get him to bring in the FBI, Roberts has branded such a move "inappropriate," without spelling out why. Rep. Porter Goss, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is a CIA alumnus and a passionate Republican and agency partisan. Goss was largely responsible for the failure of the joint congressional committee on 9/11, which he co-chaired last year. . .Henry Waxman's recent proposal to create yet another congressional investigatory committee, patterned on the latest commission looking into 9/11, likewise holds little promise. To state the obvious about Congress, politics is the nature of the beast. We have seen enough congressional inquiries into the performance of intelligence to conclude that they are usually as feckless as they are prolonged. And time cannot wait. As you are aware, Gen. Brent Scowcroft performed yeoman's service as National Security Adviser to your father and enjoys very wide respect. There are few, if any, with his breadth of experience with the issues and the institutions involved. In addition, he has avoided blind parroting of the positions of your administration and thus would be seen as relatively nonpartisan, even though serving at your pleasure. It seems a stroke of good luck that he now chairs your President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Some more material about Greg Thielman from Seymour Hersh - makes me wonder if Thielman was trying to sit on those Niger documents to keep them from the CIA, or if the docs really existed that long before the CIA was finally allowed to see them:
A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. “Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,” Thielmann said. “We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That’s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.”
----- "How conflicts between the Administration and the CIA marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons," Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 10/20/03, http:/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_factIt's interesting that Thielman believes he has some sacred to duty to withhold information from his superiors. That's remarkably arrogant of him. I would think that such a person would be obligated to forward information- albeit condensed- with his assessment of its value item by item, explanations for his conclusions, and a summary of what he believes is valuable and critical for his superiors to know at a glance. And he should be willing to show his bosses why he chose to include or not include certai info, as well as provide any info he has if requested to do so so his analysis can be better judged. Unless he thinks his job is covering his own rear and carrying out his own agenda.
What is worse, Thielmann also exposes his Napoleon complex by his word choice- here he is for all practical purposes saying that he was actually entitled to the information as if his boss wasn't. They weren't asking him to rubber stamp their conclusions- they were asking to see what he had analyzed. Thielman thinks he has some right to censor- to deny information even when he is specifically asked to present it so others could determine if his assessment of it was valid and supported by good reasoning.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.