Posted on 11/06/2005 9:05:21 AM PST by doug from upland
Edited on 11/06/2005 9:47:26 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
GET ON THE PHONE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461
It seems that the the only republican with "stones" is Delay. Until the majority leadership starts responding effectively to the attacks by the dummocrats and stops considering their lies and vile filled invectives against Bush, Cheney, Rove and Libby as "breeches of etiquette" rather than the power-hungry attacks which they are, taking the 'high-road' to civility will lead us straight to ground zero again. Frist is absolutely worthless.
Yeah, the set is called William Kristol. Kristol gave Bush the go ahead to defend himself this morning on Fox News Sunday.
Brit Hume was a little disingenuous when he said that his source confirmed that the WH will defend itself because his source essentially gave the okay this morning on the show.
Do you really think Kristol has that much influence??
Kristol is not the source and didn't give the go-ahead. Brit said the info came from the White House.
The Democrat children squabbling and banging their spoons has become so much the stereotype of "Democrats", why take their bait?
I never wondered why there wasn't a massive amount of reportage about all the evidence against Saddam Hussein. And never wondered why SecDef Rumsfeld didn't just keep bringing it up. Discovering the "axis of terror" takes time; and usually best done without a ton of spotlights showing where one's evidence is leading towards (countries, players, legislations, etc.).
Did it bother me that my pals in Iraq and Afghanistan were being maligned by liberals and Democrats? Of course. Absolutely. But what I did know? My pals were able to see clearly connections they'd never seen before. That the Democrats were aiding and abetting matters. My pals knew their mission, and believe in their mission. And therefore, most didn't give a holy rat's patooty what some seditious airheads were nattering about them. My pals were clear about winning the mission, and the liberation and grounding in democracy for Iraqis and Afghani's. My pals stayed on focus. And their mission is just begun to bloom and prosper.
500 tons is 1 million pounds. What does the "1.8 million tons" refer to? Enriched uranium?
It's a typo. There was slightly under 2 tons of enriched uranium found. It was shipped to Oak Ridge, TN.
I asked my lib sister this question. answer: Bush was mad at Saddam because he threatened his daddy.
We've given the Dems enough rope to hang themselves with by now. They have been allowed to make false accusations and downright lies long enough without the Whitehouse or MSM seriously confronting them. It is now time to open the gallow doors, haul them up kicking and screaming, for all the world to see. Put a loop in the rope and let 'em fall.
Typo has been corrected.
The indictment against DeLay is now so obviously a fraud and will clearly be thrown out in the coming month, and when that happens, the liberal attempt to criminalize conservatism will have failed. That coupled with the next election in Iraq, electing the full legislature, and them promptly asking America to stay and use it's military to help defeat the foreign terrorist and radical hussein loyalists, will squash liberal opposition to the war and show it as nothing but partisan oppostion that they wouldn't be voicing if a democrat were in charge. Democrats have no ideas, no suggestions, no agenda. They're still the party of NO just like in 04, and 03, and 2000 and just being an opposition does not win elections. The democrats have NOTHING to look forward to. Gas prices are tumbling below $2 per gallon, we WILL drill in ANWAR to reduce dependency on foreign oil, which will lower them further, since we'll be buying less of the double priced opec oil, that will drop prices too. And a couple months ago the Congressional Budget Office had to admit that there is an extra $100+ BILLION dollars in revenue by the government that they can't account for, don't know where it came from. Well, it's called BUSH TAX CUTS. Further undeniable evidence that tax cuts across the board increase revenue to the government. And now Republicans are buckling down and trimming the budget, cutting pork, and Bush will sign it.
There just isn't anything that the democrats are jumping on that will be any good for them in a few months. The truth ALWAYS makes itself known in time, and the democrats keep picking BAD issues ot fight conservatives on. Iraq, economy, taxes, gas, and trying to make conservatives criminals just because they're conservative. The Republicans will gain seats in the House and Senate next year, and the democrats will have only themselves to blame. The majority of the American people are sick of having lies packaged as the truth, and anytime you see a democrat talking, you can see a faint hint of smoke coming out of their pants. It won't work now just like didn't work the past eight years.
He was too busy leading bipartisan raids on the treasury as part of his "new tone in Washington."
Thank you both for all of this information and your work to gather it!
You'll have to keep waiting for a number of more years, too. Bush has no intention of EVER cracking down on illegal immigration.
It's time for the President to be... Presidential.
Grab that bullhorn Mr. President; we're ready!
America's most contentious war is being freely evoked to explain the "quagmire" we are supposedly now in. Vietnam is an obvious comparison given the frustration of asymmetrical warfare and savage enemies who escape our conventional power. But make no mistake, Iraq is not like Vietnam, and it must not end like Vietnam. Despite our tragic lapses, leaving now would be a monumental mistake -- and one that we would all too soon come to regret.
If we fled precipitously, moderates in the Middle East could never again believe American assurances of support for reform and would have to retreat into the shadows -- or find themselves at the mercy of fascist killers. Jihadists would swell their ranks as they hyped their defeat of the American infidels. Our forward strategy of hitting terrorists hard abroad would be discredited and replaced by a return to the pre-9/11 tactics of a few cruise missiles and writs. And loyal allies in Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, along with new friends in India and the former Soviet republics, would find themselves leaderless in the global struggle against Islamic radicalism.
The specter of Vietnam will also turn on those who embrace it. Iraq is not a surrogate theater of the Cold War, where national liberationists, fueled by the romance of radical egalitarianism, are fortified by nearby Marxist nuclear patrons. The jihadists have an 8th-century agenda of gender apartheid, religious intolerance and theocracy. For all its pyrotechnics, the call for a glorious return to the Dark Ages has found no broad constituency.
Nor is our army in Iraq conscript, but volunteer and professional. The Iraqi constitutional debate is already light-years ahead of anything that emerged in Saigon. And there is an exit strategy, not mission creep -- we will consider withdrawal as the evolution to a legitimate government continues and the Iraqi security forces grow.
But the comparison to Vietnam may be instructive regarding another aspect -- the aftershocks of a premature American departure. Leaving Vietnam to the communists did not make anyone safer. The flight of the mid-1970s energized U.S. enemies in Iran, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Central America, while tearing our own country apart for nearly a quarter-century. Today, most Americans are indeed very troubled over the war in Iraq -- but mostly they are angry about not winning quickly, rather than resigned to losing amid recriminations.
We forget that once war breaks out, things usually get far worse before they get better. We should remember that 1943, after we had entered World War II, was a far bloodier year than 1938, when the world left Hitler alone. Similarly, 2005 may have brought more open violence in Iraq than was visible during Saddam's less publicized killings of 2002. So it is when extremists are confronted rather than appeased. But unlike the time before the invasion, when we patrolled Iraq's skies while Saddam butchered his own with impunity below, there is now a hopeful future for Iraq.
It is true that foreign terrorists are flocking into the country, the way they earlier crossed the Pakistani border into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, and that this makes the short-term task of securing the country far more difficult. But again, just as there were more Nazis and fascists out in the open in 1941 than before the war, so too there were almost none left by 1946. If we continue to defeat the jihadists in Iraq -- and the untold story of this war is that the U.S. military has performed brilliantly in killing and jailing tens of thousands of them -- their cause will be discredited by the stick of military defeat and the carrot of genuine political freedom.
All this is not wishful thinking. The United States has an impressive record of military reconstruction and democratization following the defeat of our enemies -- vs. the abject chaos that followed when we failed to help fragile postwar societies.
After World War II, Germany, Italy and Japan (American troops are still posted in all three) proved to be success stories. In contrast, an unstable post-WWI Weimar Germany soon led to something worse than Kaiser Wilhelm.
After the Korean War, South Korea survived and evolved. South Vietnam, by contrast, ended up with a Stalinist government, and the world watched the unfolding tragedy of the boat people, reeducation camps and a Southeast Asian holocaust.
Present-day Kabul has the most enlightened constitution in the Middle East. Post-Soviet Afghanistan -- after we ceased our involvement with the mujaheddin resistance -- was an Islamic nightmare.
So we fool ourselves if we think that peace is the natural order of things, and that it follows organically from the cessation of hostilities. It does not. Leave Iraq and expect far worse tribal chaos and Islamic terrorism than in Mogadishu or Lebanon; finish the task and there is the real chance for something like present-day Turkey or the current calm of federated Kurdistan.
Have we forgotten that Iraq before the invasion was not just another frightening Middle East autocracy like Syria or Libya, but a country in shambles -- not, as some will say, because of international sanctions, but thanks to one of the worst regimes on the planet, with a horrific record of genocide at home and regional aggression abroad? As the heart of the ancient caliphate, Iraq symbolized the worst aspects of pan-Arab nationalism and posed the most daunting obstacle for any change in the Middle East. Thus al Qaedists and ex-Baathists alike are desperate to drive us out. They grasp that should a democratic Iraq emerge, then the era of both Islamic theocracies and fascist autocracies elsewhere in the region may also be doomed.
Our presence in Iraq is one of the most principled efforts in a sometimes checkered history of U.S. foreign policy. Yes, there is infighting among the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but this is precisely because Saddam Hussein pitted the sects against each other for 30 years in order to subjugate them, while we are now trying to unite them so that they might govern themselves. The United States has elevated the formerly despised and exploited Shiites and Kurds to equal status with the Sunnis, their former rulers. And from our own history we know that such massive structural reform is always messy, dangerous -- and humane.
So, too, with other changes. It is hard to imagine that Syria would have withdrawn from Lebanon without American resolve in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor would either Pakistan's A.Q. Khan or Libya's Moammar Gaddafi have given up on plans to nuclearize the Middle East. Saddam's demise put pressure on HosniMubarak to entertain the possibility of democratic reform in Egypt. These upheavals are, in the short term, controversial and volatile developments whose ultimate success hinges only on continued American resolve in Iraq.
There is no other solution to either Islamic terrorism of the sort that hit us on Sept. 11, 2001, nor the sort of state fascism that caused the first Gulf War, than the Bush administration's easily caricatured effort to work for a third democratic choice beyond either dictatorship or theocracy. We know that not because of pre-9/11 neocon pipedreams of "remaking the Middle East," but because for decades we tried almost everything else in vain -- from backing monarchs in the Gulf who pumped oil and dictators in Pakistan and Egypt who promised order, to "containing" murderous autocrats like Saddam and ignoring tyrannous theocrats like the Taliban.
Yes, the administration must account to the American people for the radically humanitarian sacrifices of American lives we are making on behalf of the freedom of Kurds and Shiites. It must remind us that we are engaging murderers of a sort not seen since the Waffen SS and the suicide killers off Okinawa. And it must tell us that victory is our only option and explain in detail how and why we are winning.
The New York Times recently deplored the public's ignorance of American heroes in Iraq. In fact, there are thousands of them. But in their eagerness to view Iraq through the fogged lens of Vietnam, the media themselves are largely responsible for the public's shameful lack of interest.
A few days ago, while the networks were transfixed by Cindy Sheehan (or was it Aruba?), the United States military, in conjunction with Iraqi forces, was driving out jihadists from Mosul -- where the terrorists are being arrested and killed in droves. Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, who had worked for months to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding on the city's streets, was severely wounded as he led his men to clear out a terrorist hideaway. The jihadist who shot him -- who had recently been released from Abu Ghraib -- was not killed, but arrested and given medical care by U.S. surgeons.
Not long before he was wounded, Lt. Col. Kurilla had delivered a eulogy for three of his own fallen men. Posted on a military Web site, it showed that he, far better than most of us, knows why America is there:
"You see -- there are 26 million people in Iraq whose freedom we are fighting for, against terrorists and insurgents that want a return to power and oppression, or worse, a state of fundamentalist tyranny. Some of whom we fight are international terrorists who hate the fact that in our way of life we can choose who will govern us, the method in which we worship, and the myriad other freedoms we have. We are fighting so that these fanatical terrorists do not enter the sacred ground of our country and we have to fight them in our own backyard."
Amen. Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of the forthcoming "A War Like No Other" (Random House). Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Joe Wilson: Lying About Iraqi Uranium
Special from Hawaii Free Press
By Andrew Walden, 11/3/2005 11:49:46 AM
Iraqi voters are once more dealing a sharp blow to al-Qaeda’s war on America and the parallel war on Bush being waged by the Democrat Party and the Democrat media. Al-Qaeda is waging war by continuing to bomb Iraqi civilians. Democrats are trying to fight with a battle plan based on the delusion that Iraq is Vietnam, Bush is Nixon and Watergate must be there somewhere.
Feeling if they turn over enough rocks they will find the one labeled “impeachment,” on Oct. 28 Democrats hailed the indictment of White House aide Scooter Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury. The grand jury did not charge anyone for “outing” Valerie Plame the CIA analyst who connived to get her Kerry-supporter husband assigned to investigate Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Niger, Africa. This may be due to the fact that she was not a secret agent and therefore revealing her name to the media is not a crime. Her identity has been known to the Cubans and even was discovered by the Soviets. That is why she was at a desk job instead of being in the field. Libby apparently faces charges for not testifying: “I did it. It is not a crime. I am proud of it.”
The real Iraq scandal is the lies being told by Democrats, with Plame's husband Joe Wilson leading the way, in an effort to “get Bush” without regard for their effect on our troops in combat and al-Qaeda’s perception that Americans are “weak and decadent infidels.” According to a July 10, 2004, Washington Post article on the Senate Intelligence Committee findings about Wilson's investigatory trip to Niger, Africa, unanimously agreed by all committee senators, including Democrats, “The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.”
Anti-American war protesters chant “Bush lied—thousands died.” But the real liar is self-described “child of the ‘60s,” Joe Wilson, who falsely claims his trip to Niger proves wrong Bush’s “16 words” in the January, 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Missing from the media frenzy is a simple fact. Bush’s words are true today and they were true then. The British government still stands by its assessment that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium oxide in Niger. That assessment was first made public in a September, 2002 dossier about which the BBC reported, “Britain’ s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction says that Saddam Hussein tried to get “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
As British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on July 14, 2004 in response to the Butler Inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence, “This is now the fourth exhaustive inquiry that has dealt with this issue. This report, like the Hutton inquiry, like the report of the ISC before it and of the FAC before that, has found the same thing. No-one lied. No-one made up the intelligence. No-one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services.”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in the eyes of CIA analysts, Joe Wilson’s own debriefing report upon returning from Niger backs this up as well.
In March, 2003, when U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq, 500 tons of yellow cake uranium was found at the Iraqi nuclear research center of al-Tuwaitha. This included 1.8 tons of partly enriched uranium. On June 23, 2004, the U.S. military, working with the U.S. Department of Energy removed this material to the US where is held at an unnamed Department of Energy facility.
As U.S. Marine Lt General James Conway says in the October Proceedings magazine: “The insurgents realize full well the only chance they have of defeating the U.S. military is to weaken the will of the American population ... .”
This al-Qaeda goal corresponds completely with techniques being used by Democrats who still want to avenge Al Gore’s 2000 loss.
That is why the simple facts contained in this article are so difficult to find anywhere in the media.
Plame outed in 90s to Soviets, Cubans http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=2515203898428&lang=en-US&FORM=CVRE
Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html?referrer=emailarticle
Uranium removed from Iraq: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3872201.stm
BBC on Iraq Uranium Dossier: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2278019.stm
Tony Blair 7-14-04 http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6109.asp
Proccedings Lt Gen Conway http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/procurrenttoc.htm
One of the lies that was never combated was that the war was all about WMDs. It has been repeated so much and is so taken for granted that even people here have bought it. It is not true.
I don't know what happened to people's memories but mine still works. I recall the press complaining that Bush had *too many* reasons for going to war. (Because people are idiots you know, and couldn't deal with more than one reason.)
The WMD issue became the main issue at the United Nations when Bush decided to allow Collin Powell to go there to drum up support. They knew the UN would only respond to that arguement, if any, so that's the one they used at the UN.
It is not the only reason, or even the main reason. Having allowed that notion to become a now almost unquestioned "fact" was the hight of idiocy.
"My fellow Americans. When I came to Washington five years ago, I said I would work with Democrats to do what was best for this nation, and work together for all Americans. The past five years, it has become evident beyond any argument that Democrat party is not interresting in working together for the common good, no matter how many times or how sincerely I reach out and try. They have thwarted my efforts and conspired to defame my character, and slander myself and those in my administration. Therefore, I no longer see any reason to continue wasting my efforts in trying to work with those who's priority and singular desire is for slandering their opponants, and regaining control of the Congress and White House at all costs, no matter if it is based on the truth or lies, fact or disinformation, proof or slander, even while we have brave men and women fighting to defend the country and destroy terrorism. From this day forward, my efforts will be focused on putting forward the conservative Republican agenda, and I will no longer attempt to reach across the aisle as I have for five years, only to draw back a hand soaked with blood and scarred with bite marks all over it. The tax cuts will be made permanent. The courts will be made less activist. The economy will be grown, and the budget cut. Border control will be increased. And new domestic drilling will cause the price of gas to be decreased. Thank you, may God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America."
Of course that should also include an investigation into the CIA and the State Department.
Bush vs. the Beltway : How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror by Laurie Mylroie http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060580127/104-4220677-8910314?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
There is abundant evidence that America has enemies within both organizations who tried to stop the War on Terror and it appears that since they weren't able to stop it, they've been trying to succeed with a political coup (if not worse) against Bush ever since.
Investigate the CIA - It was the CIA's bizarre conduct that led inexorably to Ms. Plame's unveiling Wall Street Journal ^ | November 3, 2005 | By VICTORIA TOENSING
Posted on 11/03/2005 1:51:17 AM EST by Jim Robinson
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1514680/posts
CIA Leak Will Blow Up in Democrat Faces (time to investigate Wilson) Rush Limbaugh .com ^ | 11/03/05 | The Maha Posted on 11/03/2005 7:51:21 PM EST by Libloather
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1515283/posts
RUSH: As many of you know, I have been suspicious of this whole Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Niger CIA story for a long time, and I wouldn't be surprised -- I can't make the allegation but I wouldn't be surprised -- if before this is all over we learn that the whole thing was an attempted coup, if you will, to send this guy Wilson over to Niger to purposely undermine the Bush war on terror and the Bush administration and hopefully have an effect on the 2004 elections.
There are many reasons to suspect this, not the least of which is that the president has ideological enemies in the CIA and the State Department and he's trying to clean both of these places up.
Now, Victoria Toensing who wrote the law that was the subject of the original investigation by the independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has written a piece today in the Wall Street Journal entitled, "Investigate the CIA – In a surprise, closed-door debate, Senate Democrats demanded an investigation of pre-Iraq War intelligence. Here's an issue for them: Assess the validity of the claim that Valerie Plame's status was 'covert,' or even properly classified, given the wretched tradecraft by the Central Intelligence Agency throughout the entire episode.
It was, after all, the CIA that requested the 'leak' investigation, alleging that one of its agents had been outed in Bob Novak's July 14, 2003, column.
"Yet it was the CIA's bizarre conduct that led inexorably to Ms. Plame's unveiling. When the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was being negotiated, Senate Select Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater was adamant: If the CIA desired a law making it illegal to expose one of its deep cover employees, then the agency must do a much better job of protecting their cover.
That is why a criterion for any prosecution under the act is that the government was taking 'affirmative measures' to conceal the protected person's relationship to the intelligence agency. Two decades later, the CIA, either purposely or with gross negligence, made a series of decisions that led to Ms. Plame becoming a household name.
First: The CIA sent her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.
"Second: Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or who represent CIA clients," yet he didn't have to. If he didn't have a confidentiality agreement, he was free to come back and say whatever he wanted to say about it!
"Third: When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. If this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the 'missionary,' if for no other reason than to establish a record to refute any subsequent misrepresentation of that assessment? Because it was the vice president who initially inquired about Niger and the yellowcake (although he had nothing to do with Mr. Wilson being sent), it is curious that neither his office nor the president's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report," and we know this is true.
Cheney did ask the CIA to find out about this, and Wilson gets the trip. Wilson comes back without a confidentiality agreement, submits no written report -- and Cheney and Bush are not told anything about his report, and then he started lying about it all over the place as well! There's a little bit more here to this piece and I want to touch on a couple elements of the piece at the AmericanThinker.com on the same subject today. [break for commercial]
RUSH: Anyway, back to this Joe Wilson thing, Victoria Toensing and the fourth point here that would raise eyebrows:
"Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times.
For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing."
She's being polite. He told two different stories!
"For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.
Fifth: More important than the inaccuracies is the fact that, if the CIA truly, truly, truly had wanted Ms. Plame's identity to be secret, it never would have permitted her spouse to write the op-ed. Did no one at Langley think that her identity could be compromised if her spouse wrote a piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her expertise [weapons of mass destruction]? The obvious question a sophisticated journalist such as Mr. Novak asked after 'Why did the CIA send Wilson?' was 'Who is Wilson?'" Why did they send him and who is he!
"After being told by a still-unnamed administration source that Mr. Wilson's 'wife' suggested him for the assignment, Mr. Novak went to Who's Who, which reveals 'Valerie Plame' as Mr. Wilson's spouse." It's In Who's Who! He was just a curious journalist. The CIA sends this guy. "Well, who is this guy? Who is this guy, and why did they send him?" and then you find out in asking those questions, "Oh, his wife works for the CIA? His wife arranged for him to go. Who is she? Why would she do it? Oh, she works on weapons of mass destruction? He never has; she does? She's not covert, hasn't been covert for six years, but she works at the WMD desk? She gets her husband sent over there on a trip for something he's not shown any expertise in at all?"
Sixth Point: "CIA incompetence did not end there. When Mr. Novak called the agency to verify Ms. Plame's employment, it not only [verified her employment], but failed to go beyond the perfunctory request not to publish!" They didn't ask Novak, "Hey, don't publish this." They told him: Yup, she works here. Yup, she's Wilson's wife. Yup, you ahead and print it if you want. " Every experienced Washington journalist knows that when the CIA really does not want something public, there are serious requests from the top, usually the director. Only the press office talked to Mr. Novak," and if they don't want something public the odds are it won't be made public, unless somebody in there leaks it or wants it leaked.
"Seventh: Although high-ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA had no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name 'Wilson, Valerie E.,' information publicly available at the FEC," and she did so in the name of the CIA front company she worked for! She made political contributions for Al Gore and Americans Coming Together.
"The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft. It is up to Congress to decide which."
That means it's up on the Republicans, and that's why I said yesterday: If Dingy Harry wants to act like a spoiled little kid and rehash stuff that's already been investigated and we already have the answers to, somebody at the Senate -- somebody, just one time -- stand up and say, "All right, you want to play it this way? What we're going to do, we're going to find out who Joe Wilson is. We're going to find out how he went on this trip and we're going to explore the lies that he has told about this and we're going to find out what the CIA's involvement in this is and what the CIA's purpose was." I guess Republicans just don't play that game, but it's time -- and you would think that if they're going to get irritated and agitated, that it would be about now with all that's happened.
Now, there's another similar piece today, coincidentally, at the AmericanThinker.com, and it's by Clarice Feldman, who is an attorney in Washington, DC. "Senate Democrats employed a stealthy maneuver the other day to reinforce their demand into an affair they like to call Plamegate. They're right that an investigation is required, but they've gotten the subject matter wrong. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the real scandal is the genesis, not the unmasking of the irregular and highly questionable mission: the Wilson gambit. It's time for serious examination, equipped with the tools of subpoena and testimony under oath into the genesis and conduct of this anomalous operation."
That's damn right. It's time to. We don't know that anybody's put Wilson under oath, but it's about damn time and Congress could do it. He's out there running his mouth off and creating all these new realities and telling lies and so forth, and the Democrats have glommed onto him. He is the guy they're basing their whole procedure on. So bring him in and find out who he is and hut him under oath.
"The mainstream media, of course, is entirely uninterested in determining why the Wilson gambit was undertaken. Once upon a time the New York Times and the rest of the American liberal establishment worried about CIA dirty tricks aimed at influencing domestic politics. The more effervescent leftists fulminated about a 'secret government.' They muttered darkly about a 'threat to democracy itself' emanating from Langley. How times and the New York Times have changed. Today, the darlings of the American left and its house organic are a CIA employee and her husband who set up and implemented a highly irregular operation, which if not explicitly designed to do so, has had the net effect of discrediting an elected leader and his foreign policy. The Wilson gambit was a stealth operation undertaken outside normal procedures and supervision used as a political weapon, complete with lies, spread by a cooperative media establishment interested in bringing down a leader and his policies which they detest. Former Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, a man of enormous stature, has done the nation a great service in publicly raising questions about the intent behind the Wilson gambit. This was what Zell Miller wrote in his piece that I saw yesterday. He said:
"'It's like a spy thriller. Institutional rivalries and political loyalties have fostered an intelligence officer's resentment against the government.' This would be Plame. 'Suddenly, an opportunity appears for the agent -- Plame -- to undercut the national leadership. A vital question of intelligence forms the core justification for controversial military actions by the current leaders, Bush. If this agent, Plame, can get in the middle after question, distort that information, and then make it public, the agent, Plame, might foster regime change in the upcoming election. But the rules on agents are clear. They can't purposely distort gathered intelligence; they cannot go public with secret information; or they cannot use their position or information to manipulate domestic elections or matters without risking their job or jail. But their spouse can. Joe Wilson can.'"
What Zell Miller is saying here is the focus needs to be on her. She's at the weapons of mass destruction desk. She's had her identity outed and the CIA did very little to keep her identity secret. She is the one who recommended her husband; she is the one contributing to Gore and Americans Coming Together, as working at the weapons of mass destruction desk.
She's no fan of the president. That's obviously by her political affiliations. Here comes this bit of news about yellow cake from Niger (Africa). Bush puts it in the State of the Union speech, says that the British say that the Iraqis "tried" to buy -- and all of a sudden we get a guy who's not got any experience whatsoever in this kind of thing being sent over there.
His wife engineers the trip; he comes back. He doesn't have to sign a confidentiality agreement, is allowed to write an op-ed by the CIA. He doesn't have to file a written report. The people who are interested in this whole story, the president and vice president, are never told of what he has told the CIA, Wilson, when he comes back.
This guy is allowed to totally distort, in the New York Times, and tell a different story there from what he told the CIA.
The story is that when he told the CIA his original oral report that pretty much confirmed what everybody thought, that there had been an attempt to purchase this stuff. Just an "attempt."
Nobody ever said that they actually made the buy; they were just looking around. The intelligence that Wilson brought back, "Yeah, looked like it might have happened," but when he wrote the New York Times op-ed and it was a 180 from what his oral report was, but there was no way to check because he was not required to fill out or write a report.
Then it all blows up when people say, "Who is this guy? Who is Joe Wilson?" They find out: "Ooooh, his wife works in the CIA," and, by the way, our buddies at Newsmax today have an interesting story. They've gone back in the past, and they have found a transcript of Andrea Mitchell of NBC News -- I'll find this in the stack here during the break -- saying in the 2003 that among all the reporters covering the intelligence community was widely known that Valerie Plame, Valerie Wilson, worked at the CIA, among reporters.
I'll make you another prediction: By the time this Libby case gets to trial, if it does, you're going to see a bunch of reporters being called by his defense lawyers, and that's going to be fun, folks, because the trial, if it happens -- we may really ferret out how all this did start. We will see.
I'm telling you that this whole sordid tale involving Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson. These two people have gotten away with being prepared as injured patriots, damaged, great, courageous patriots when they may in fact being the people who originated this scam along with people in the CIA who are opposed to President Bush and they had as their express purpose to undermine the war in Iraq and thus the Bush presidency, and it's at least worthy of official investigation.
If we're going to look for two years -- an independent counsel investigation for two years! -- that turns up no evidence that anybody outed a covert agent, and now we've got an indictment of offenses that occurred during the investigation, I think an investigation into where this all started and who it really may be at the genesis of it is clearly justified. I think Victoria Toensing is right, and I think that Clarice Feldman is as well. [break for commercial]
RUSH: Here's the Newsmax story from today. They posted it at about ten o'clock this morning. "NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert told Leakgate probers that he had no idea Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA employee before her name surfaced in Robert Novak's fateful July 14, 2003 column, and that he was stunned upon learning that Lewis 'Scooter' Libby claimed he got that information from him [Russert]. [] But an account by senior NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell raises questions... On Oct. 3, 2003, Mitchell was a guest on CNBC's now-defunct 'Capital Report,' where she was asked by host Alan Murray: 'Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?' Mitchell replied: 'It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that.' Mitchell's 'widely known' characterization flatly contradicts assertions last Friday by Leakgate Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who repeatedly insisted that Plame's association with the CIA 'was not widely known.'" So, Andrea Mitchell covers the State Department. She covers national security issues, and she said, yes! "It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the Foreign Service community was the envoy to Niger."
That would be Joe Wilson. (paraphrased) "Yeah, we knew she worked there, and then we found out Wilson went. Oh, yeah, we knew." This is, again, October of 2003. Novak's piece was July 14th of 2003. So the point here in all of this, folks, to me is that this indictment of Scooter Libby -- and I'm not denying that perjury and all that, that's bad stuff, and you don't want to ever do that, and it is very, very problematic. But I'm telling you, we're not getting at the real source of this. Whatever we get here with the lies that Scooter Libby told the media, which is basically what this is about, is not going to get us anywhere near what we really need to know about this, and that's how Wilson got sent over there, who told Novak her name, and what involvement did she have in all of this? Because there's too much of this that occurs without the usual CIA policies in effect -- such as a confidentiality agreement. He didn't have one. He was allowed to write an op-ed. He didn't have to file a written report, so there was no way that anybody could go back and say he was changing his story. You know, the words vanish into the ether. Everything about this is a huge, huge question mark -- and I'll tell you, during this whole two years of the special counsel investigation we weren't getting any leaks, and I kept hearing about how upstanding and brilliant Fitzgerald was. I kept telling myself, "Okay, then he reads the papers, too. He's a smart guy. He's got to know there's something odd, here. He's got to know that Joe Wilson's not this man, a paragon of virtue and neither is his wife." But yet they survive in all this as the aggrieved, damaged, brave, courageous patriots who gave everything -- including risking their lives for their country!
And I'm sorry, folks, but I'm not buying that. ~ Rush
Links to the articles Rush referred to is here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1515283/posts?page=66#66
See Grampa Dave's post here (it's a riot): http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1515283/posts?page=56#56
Awesome! Thank you!
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