Posted on 07/17/2005 12:41:48 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Accusations obscuring facts in Washington leak
Scandal circles around Karl Rove, Joseph Wilson, and who said what
WASHINGTON - The escalating calls by Democrats and some liberal commentators for Karl Rove to resign, and the countercharges by conservatives that Rove is the victim of a political witch hunt, have obscured many of the facts in a tangled Washington story.
President Bush unwittingly touched off the controversy during his State of the Union address in January 2003, when, in making the case for war with Iraq, he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Those 16 words became the target of a New York Times op-ed piece in July of that year, after the United States had invaded Iraq, written by an obscure career foreign service officer named Joseph Wilson who had worked for both Bush's father and President Clinton.
Claims of uranium
Wilson described going to Niger to check into the claim that Saddam was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger or other African countries in early 2002 — almost a year before Bush's speech.
Wilson described himself as a whistle-blower whose findings contradicted the notion Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa. He said Bush's claim "was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
But Wilson's version of events turned out to be off the mark.
His article implied he had been dispatched to Africa at least indirectly by Vice President Dick Cheney.
What actually happened is that Wilson had gotten the job to go to Africa after his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA official, suggested he be sent.
Nor did any of Wilson's findings directly influence the administration's position on whether Saddam was trying to buy African uranium, according to a detailed Senate report.
In a line buried deep in his New York Times article, Wilson conceded, "I did not file a written report" on the African trip. Instead he theorizes that his findings would have bubbled up from oral briefings he gave to intelligence officials.
That was a groundless assumption, Senate investigators said.
Still, Wilson's charges became a rallying cry for anti-war groups and for Democrats opposed to Bush. Wilson later went to work for Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry.
Wilson seemed to be at least partially vindicated when top Bush officials, including Condoleezza Rice, said in the summer of 2003 that Bush's staff should have edited the words from his speech because the CIA had not been able to independently confirm British findings.
But since then, Wilson's original assertions have been severely tested.
Finding 'well-founded'
One year after Wilson's article, in July 2004, the Butler commission in Britain found that Bush's original claim that Saddam was seeking African uranium was "well-founded."
That report said, "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium."
Wilson's credibility took a more serious blow when a bipartisan Senate panel released its massive report that same month. The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the Iraq-Niger uranium matter exhaustively, and found many of Wilson's assumptions and claims in error.
The Senate report concluded that Cheney had never been briefed on Wilson's findings because the CIA considered them of marginal value. The official CIA assessment of Wilson's trip was that it "did not provide substantial new information."
Wilson had made one finding that intrigued the CIA but it was not in his New York Times article. Wilson described a meeting with a Nigerian official during his visit who told him that an Iraqi delegation had visited Nigeria and Niger in the late 1990s. In Nigeria at least, the Iraqis had made inquiries about buying uranium, Wilson was told.
The Senate Intelligence Committee stated, "The report (based on Wilson's information) did not change any analyst's assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal." For most CIA analysts, in fact, Wilson's findings "lent more credibility" to the idea that Saddam sought African uranium, according to intelligence officials who testified to Senate investigators.
A dramatic turn
Whatever the merits of Wilson's original article, the dispute between him and the Bush White House took a radically different direction when syndicated columnist Robert Novak identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee just days after Wilson's New York Times piece.
In an online story three days later, Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper also suggested that the Bush administration had declared war on Wilson and noted that government officials had said that his wife was a CIA official.
The reports drew criticism from Wilson, who fingered Rove as the leaker and said he wanted to see "whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
The CIA also raised objections, noting that federal law prohibited officials from intentionally disclosing the identity of a covert agent.
The CIA referred its complaint to the Justice Department, where the FBI commenced an investigation that included interviewing more than three dozen administration officials, including Bush's top political adviser, Rove.
At the time, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, stressing that he had spoken with Rove, denied that the political adviser or other top administration officials were involved in the leak.
In a CNN interview last year during the GOP convention, Rove said, "I don't know her name and didn't leak her name."
Under pressure from Democrats to appoint an independent investigator, the Justice Department in December of 2003 named Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for Northern Illinois, as a special counsel.
Fitzgerald mounted an aggressive probe that included issuing subpoenas to journalists to testify about the possible leak.
The White House, meanwhile, directed officials to sign waivers releasing journalists from any confidentiality pledge they had made in conversations concerning Plame.
Novak, along with Tim Russert, the host of NBC's Meet the Press, and Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, worked out agreements to provide limited testimony.
However, Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had investigated the Plame issue but had never written a story, balked at revealing their sources and appealed their case to the Supreme Court, which in June refused to quash the subpoenas.
Cooper, saying his source had given him a last-minute reprieve from his confidentiality pledge, agreed to testify before a grand jury last week. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has disputed Cooper's account, saying he merely reiterated the confidentiality waiver that Rove signed at the outset of the investigation. Miller refused to cooperate and was ordered to jail by U.S. District Court judge Thomas Hogan.
Meanwhile, the source for Cooper's story was revealed by rival Newsweek magazine, which obtained a copy of an e-mail sent by Cooper to his bureau chief that said he had spoken to Rove about Plame "on double super secret background."
The e-mail regarding the conversation, which occurred before Novak had published his column, did not indicate that Rove used Plame's name or suggest she was a covert agent.
Not under investigation
On Friday, published reports indicated that Rove was one of two senior administration officials who had spoken with Novak about Plame.
The reports said that Rove had told investigators that he did not supply Novak with Plame's name, but he confirmed that he had heard that she worked for the CIA.
Rove's lawyer has repeatedly said that the political strategist has not broken the law and noted that Rove has not been told that he is the "target" of an investigation. Prosecutors generally warn individuals if they may be facing prosecution.
Analysts have said that it will be difficult for Fitzgerald to prosecute any official for violating the 1982 law regarding disclosure of covert agents.
The law requires the prosecutor to prove that the disclosure was made by someone with access to classified information and who intentionally revealed the name of a covert agent who has served outside the United States in the last five years.
However, even if Rove is not prosecuted under that law, it is not clear whether Fitzgerald is looking at other charges such as perjury or obstruction of justice. Questions remain as to who the other senior administration official was who spoke to Novak or who Miller's sources were.
michael.hedges@chron.com
bennett.roth@chron.com
hanks. I am but a humble striver! :-)
I'll tell you another fundamental question that has not been addressed: What role did someone at the CIA have in all this?
The CIA was responsible (perhaps under prodding by press?)for filing a criminal complaint under the 1982 law. From everything available so far, it's pretty clear that Plame was merely on NOC status because noone bothered to change it. She was working at a desk and hadn't been involved in covert ops overseas for six years while she began the "mommy track."
No worry, most people just buy the comical to get the coupons.
Do they pay NOC's extra for the increased risk of the duties?
As an aside let me say in light of Wilson's rather questionable personal business dealings and qualifications for going to Niger on behalf of the CIA in the first place, along with the fact that he never filed an official report upon his return, there is the distinct possibility that he could be guilty of much more than simply obstructing justice or perjuring himself. Links to individuals involved with the Oil for Food Scandal along with suspect uranium dealings could very well be much bigger fish to fry.
Perhaps Mrs. Matt Cooper, aka dem operative Mandy Grunwald? Washington seems to be a very close circle of friends.
A little known fact. This means that anyone who worked in the White House gave journalists permission to publicly out them as sources on the Plame deal. That means Rove was not a source or they would have outed him at his request.
The only source could be someone who did not work at the White House. It's obviously Wilson who outted his own wife.
We'll find out what kind of a special prosecutor this is.
Is he fair or is he a politcal hack?
The very idea that Wilson's lawyer tried to make it look like Rove had just released him from any confidentiality, when he had it all along (a blanket one according to your report and again when the investigation began and then a reminder to Wilson's lawyer after the judge's ruling) is all one has to know.
They needed to smear Rove, Bush and the Administration and the facts were in the way.
I hear he's fair and tough. I don't know that Ashcroft appointe him as SP.
I screwed that post all up. What I meant was I've heard he's fair and tough. And he was appointed special prosecutor by John Ashcroft.
The fact that the msm is bending over backward to tell me how fair he is (you were very even handed), makes me question his position.
We hand things to our enemies and they never give up anything unless forced to.
You're right. I recall how fair Kenneth Starr was when he first took over that investigation. Then the MSM got it's marching orders for Klinton and that was that.
Exactly.
And march they did.
And then there's this .. just hilarious ..
"AMBASSADOR WILSON: Well, I know Tariq Aziz, of course. And what I can say is that it may be in fact true that Saddam Hussein is in charge, but not because Tariq Aziz has said so. Tariq Aziz is very articulate and very erudite, but the bottom line on him from my perspective is, would you buy a used car from that man? And I wouldn't. He has lied to me on many occasions on issues pertaining to the lives and the welfare of American citizens being held hostage in Iraq during the Gulf War, and also just being forbidden from traveling outside of the war zone at that time.
So, I don't trust a thing that Tariq Aziz has to say."
(snip)
"AMBASSADOR WILSON: Well, this is actually one area where I might believe Tariq Aziz, because he told me quite emphatically in 1988-89, in a meeting dealing with the Iran-Iraq War, that the Iraqis reserve the right to use every weapon and any weapon in their arsenal when they were invaded. Now, they clearly are calling the American action, the coalition action, an invasion. And when he says they reserve the right to use every weapon in their arsenal, I assume that to mean chemical and biological weapons, if they have them and can use them. So, our military planners ought to be anticipating that they will, if they can, use chemical weapons and/or biological weapons."
Wilson-Iraq ======================================================
They could sell this as a new reality show ... "Fun With Joe + Val, The Spies Next Door."
Love the t-Shirt!
Is it for sale?
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