Posted on 08/28/2006 2:38:02 PM PDT by .cnI redruM
On October 3, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell talked to reporters after meeting with Laszlo Kovacs, the foreign minister of Hungary. The meeting went well, with nothing controversial to discuss. It went so well, in fact, that a reporter said to Powell, “Mr. Secretary, things are so smooth I thought I’d ask you about something else. The State Department is offering to help in the search for the person who leaked the CIA official’s name. Can you say something about that situation? How might the State Department help?”
“We have been asked by the Justice Department, those who are conducting this investigation, to make ourselves available for any purpose that they have,” Powell answered. Promising to cooperate fully, Powell added, “We are doing our searches in response to the letter we received yesterday, and make ourselves available. I’m not sure what they will be looking for or what they wish to contact us about, but we are anxious to be of all assistance to the inquiry.”
No one in the press corps knew it at the time, but if a newly published account of the CIA-leak case is accurate, Powell knew much, much more than he let on during that session with the press. Two days earlier, according to Hubris, the new book by the Nation’s David Corn and Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, Powell had been told by his top deputy and close friend Richard Armitage that he, Armitage, leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage had, in other words, set off the CIA-leak affair.
At the time, top administration officials, including President Bush, were vowing to “get to the bottom” of the matter. But Armitage was already there, and he told Powell, who told top State Department officials, who told the Justice Department. From the first week of October 2003, then, investigators knew who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity — the ostensible purpose of an investigation that still continues, a few months shy of three years after it began.
Justice Department officials also knew who else had spoken to Novak. In that same time period, October 2003, FBI investigators spoke to top White House aide Karl Rove, and Rove told them of a brief conversation with Novak in which Novak brought up learning of Plame’s place of employment and Rove said he had heard about that, too. So by October 2003 — more than two months before the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — the Justice Department knew who had told Novak about Plame.
ONE FRENZIED WEEK Given the most recent revelation about Armitage — no surprise to anyone watching the case — plus what was previously known about the leak, the question now is, why did the investigation go on? Why was it expanded, and why was Fitzgerald named, and why does it continue today? Some of the answers can be found in the events of a single, frenzied week at the end of September and beginning of October 2003.
Justice Department officials originally did not want to pursue the case. The CIA first contacted the Department about the Wilson leak shortly after Wilson’s identity was revealed in Novak’s column on July 14, 2003. Such referrals are often handled quickly by the Department, but it appears the Plame referral languished there for more than two months. And then, on Saturday and Sunday, September 27-28, all hell broke loose, when news leaked that George Tenet had written a letter to the Justice Department about the matter.
On Monday, September 29, 2003, the Washington Post reported that “The controversy erupted over the weekend, when administration officials reported that Tenet sent the Justice Department a letter raising questions about whether federal law was broken when the operative, Valerie Plame, was exposed. She was named in a column by Robert D. Novak that ran July 14 in The Post and other newspapers. CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week of the column’s publication. Tenet’s letter was delivered more recently.”
After the Tenet leak, Democrats in Congress, led by New York Sen. Charles Schumer, demanded an investigation. On September 30, 2003, the Post published a front-page story, “Bush Vows Action if Aides Had Role in Leak,” which reported that, “President Bush’s chief spokesman said yesterday that the allegation that administration officials leaked the name of a CIA operative is “a very serious matter” and vowed that Bush would fire anybody responsible for such actions.”
The furor prompted Novak to write another column on the Plame matter. “During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why [Joseph] Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger,” Novak wrote. “He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger.”
According to Hubris, Armitage had gone through the weekend of September 27-28, and then the continued furor on Monday and Tuesday — not to mention the previous three months — without realizing he was Novak’s source. It was only upon reading Novak’s “no partisan gunslinger” column, allegedly, that Armitage knew he was the source and got in touch with Powell.
In any event, the Justice Department moved quickly. In the next two weeks, DOJ investigators interviewed Armitage, Powell, Rove, Lewis Libby, and others. According to Hubris, Armitage told investigators about his talk with Novak, but did not tell them that he had also told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward about Plame. It appears that Armitage did not tell Fitzgerald about his Woodward conversation until November 2005, and then only after Woodward initiated the process.
TRAITORS? NEVER MIND Why did Armitage keep the information from Fitzgerald? In Hubris, Armitage’s allies hint at the same defense that Lewis Libby’s lawyers use to explain why he didn’t tell investigators everything: that Plame was a relatively inconsequential part of a big story and was not, as administration critics say, the focus of a White House conspiracy. “My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” State Department intelligence head told Corn and Isikoff, saying that Armitage had simply “f—-ked up.”
Whatever Armitage’s motives, the fact that he was the Novak leaker undermines — destroys, actually — the conspiracy theory of the CIA-leak case. According to Isikoff, in an excerpt of Hubris published in Newsweek: “The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone…”
It’s an extraordinary admission coming from Isikoff’s co-author Corn, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the CIA-leak case. “The Plame leak in Novak’s column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence,” Corn and Isikoff write. “The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.”
No, it doesn’t. Instead, Corn and Isikoff argue that after Armitage “got the ball rolling,” his actions “abetted” a White House that was already attempting to “undermining” Joseph Wilson. That’s a long way from the cries of “Traitor!” that came from the administration’s critics during the CIA-leak investigation.
WHY LIBBY — AND NOT ARMITAGE? Of course, investigators knew that all along. So why did the investigation continue? And why was Libby ultimately indicted, and not Armitage?
It appears that Libby’s early statements raised investigators’ suspicions. Early on, once the FBI started asking questions, Armitage told investigators he talked to Novak. Rove told investigators he talked to Novak. The CIA’s Bill Harlow told investigators he talked to Novak. Their stories, along with Novak’s description of how he learned about Plame (Novak talked to investigators at the same time, describing the process, but not naming sources), all lined up pretty well.
And then came Libby. During that same October time period, Libby — who was not Novak’s source — told investigators he learned about Plame from Tim Russert. According to the Libby indictment, Libby said that “Russert asked Libby if Libby was aware that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.” Although Libby wasn’t one of Novak’s sources, his story didn’t fit with the others, and that would most likely make investigators suspect that somebody wasn’t telling the truth. In this case, it probably appeared that person was Libby.
Ultimately, Libby was indicted on perjury and obstruction charges. But at the time Fitzgerald indicted Libby, at the end of October 2005, he did not know that Armitage had not told investigators about his, Armitage’s, conversation with Woodward. According to Hubris, Fitzgerald then re-investigated Armitage, finally deciding not to charge him with any crime.
Why? Certainly it appears that no one committed any crimes by revealing Plame’s identity, and one could argue that the Justice Department should not have gone forward with a wide-ranging investigation after it discovered Novak’s sources. But if Fitzgerald was going to indict Libby, then why not Armitage, too?
The answer may lie in the bitter conflict inside the administration over the war in Iraq that is the backdrop to the entire CIA-leak affair. Armitage’s allies have made it clear that they believe Armitage is a “good” leaker while Rove, Libby, and others in the White House are “bad” leakers. We do not know what CIA and State Department officials told Fitzgerald during the investigation, but we do know that fevered imaginings about the terrible acts of the neocon cabal were not the exclusive province of left-wing blogs; they were also present inside the State Department and CIA. Fitzgerald may have chosen the course that he did — appearing to premise his investigation on the conspiracy theorists’ accusations — because he was pointed in that direction by the White House’s enemies inside and outside the administration.
But now, after all the investigating, all the work, and the setting of terrible precedents for forcing reporters to testify in court or go to jail, the CIA-leak case hasn’t moved much beyond where it was in that frenzied week in October 2003. And unlike the old independent counsels, who were required by law to issue a report on their investigation, Fitzgerald has no obligation to explain his actions to anyone. Some questions that are unanswered now might well remain unanswered forever.
LOL.
Gee, I wonder how Billy Kristol will try to slither away from his good buddy Powell?
Sorry I missed it. I saw the trailer saying he was reporting from N.O. Rush said last week that there would be a 2-3 introspection of the Bush Administration (Not the Bianco Adminstration or Nagan) just to remind voters that Bush himself controlled a hurricane machine and he stuck it to Louisiana.
Oh, my...the member of that Aspen Group...I don't see ONE conservative .
Now..on the emeritus side...is Dick Cheney...but, that is only the emeritus side.
Like you said, feh.
So do they drop the charges before Libby goes to trial? which is when? I forget
Thank you for those posts from "history"...very interesting...
I think the only weapon of mass destruction that Plame was involved with was her husband.
Are you serious about Plame being the topic of a top secret memo. Why would she be the subject of a top secret memo? Or were you just kidding me?
The Aspen Institute:
That reminds me of an article I found on the web a long, long time ago :
The mullahs did not come to rule in Iran on the basis of their own power; they were placed in power by men more evil than they - who would use the depravity of backwardness for their own ends.In September 1975, the Aspen Institute held a symposium in Persepolis, Iran. The public side of the transactions was published years later under the title of Iran: Past, Present, and Future. In the behind-the-scenes discussion, the plans for reversing the Shah's industrialization program and for turning Iran into a model dark ages regime were mapped out. It is a bitter twist of history, that the Shah and his wife Empress Farah Diba witlessly provided huge amounts of funding to the Aspen project.
Attending the Persepolis symposium were at least a dozen members of the Club of Rome, including its chairman, Aureho Peccei; Sol Linowitz of Coudert Brothers law firm; Jacques Freymond of the Institute of International Studies in Geneva; and Robert 0. Anderson and Rarlan Cleveland, both Aspen Institute officials and associates of the Club of Rome in the United States. Other luminaries were also on hand: Charles Yost, Catherine Bateson, Richard Gardner, Theo Sommer, Daniel Yankelovitch, John Oakes of the New York Times, and the cream of Anglo-Amencan intelligence specialists on Iran, such as James Bill, Marvin Zonis, Leonard Binder, Rouhollah Ramazani, and Charles Issawi. The Aspen Institute session stressed a single theme: modernization and industry undermine the "spiritual, nonmaterial" values of ancient Iranian society, and these values must he preserved above all else. Ehsan Naraghi, a collaborator of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, told the conference:
"Universities and research centers in the West have all based their studies of development upon a linear, Westernizing conception of progress Human sciences, founded on rational objectivity, are today suffering setbacks and defeats. Is it not important that, having exalted rationality to ensure human happiness, we should now he induced to invent a special discipline-psycho-analysis-to cure the ills arising from an overrationally organized life that is deprived of its basic relationship with the nonrational?. . . Why should cultures like ours, in which man is considered in all his aspects, be deprived of their substance by following called rational course at the end of which lies the vast expanse of the non-rational?"He continued: "The people have needs and aspira.tions that are not merely material. . . . The intrusion of machines into the traditional system may well jeopardize this creative life." Naraghi's praise of the "nonrational" was followed by a similar outburst from Hormoz Fekrat of Teheran University. "America has hecome more and more aware of her exaggerated reliance on material values," he told Aspen's gathering. "Conscious movements have been made, during the past fifteen years, to refocus the aims of life to the spiritual. This consciousness has most prominently manifested itself in the attitude of young people toward life.
"Let us now focus our attention on what has been happening in Iran in terms of the point just raised. The country is going through an enormous social upheaval. . . . I believe that the current revolutionary state of the nation, when important far-reaching measures are effectively enacted, provides the right circumstances for a national resurgence in the direction of a moral uprising based on truth and justice."
Spoken three years before the rise of the Khomeini movement in 1978, these words were more than prophetic. They were the marching orders to the clique around Khomeini to charge the Shah with destroying the cultural values of Iran and its Shiite religion by developing industry and "materialist" values. From 1975 onward, the Aspen Institute developed closer and closer links to the Iranian ministry of education through well-placed agents like Manuchehr Ganji, who introduced both Marvin Zonis 'and the Aspen Institute itself to Iran. Catherine Bateson, of Damavand College in Teheran, was a critical participant in this strategy, sowing the seeds of "antimaterialist" rebellion among Iran's youth.
The word also went to Professor Ali Shariati to intensify his activity. More than anyone else, Shariati was the guiding light behind the Iranian students and intellectuals who brought about the Muslim Brotherhood revolution.
Shariati's special ability was to be able to cast the mystical, antiscience Sufi doctrines into terms that might be accepted by modern young people not trained in religious law. Iran's youth could not be won over directly to Khomeini 5 version of Shusm, so it was necessary to create Ali Shariati, who disguised the Sufi doctrines in a radical, almost Marxist cloak. Shariati is the originator of so-called Islamic Marxism.
So radically antimaterialist was Shariati that he saw a willing acceptance of death as the only legitimate "escape" from the material world! 'Do you not see how sweetly and peacefully a martyr dies?" he once wrote. "For those not fully accustomed to their everyday routine, death is an awesome tragedy, a horrendous cessation of all things; it is becoming lost in nothingness. But the one who intends to migrate from himself begins with death. How great are those men who have heeded this command and acted accordingly: 'Die before you die.'
Shariati's father was Aqa Muhammad Taqi Shariati, who had heen part of the British intelligence freemasonic movement and had started the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth in Mashad, Iran. Of his father, Shariati says, "He stayed in the city, and strove mightily to preserve himself with knowledge, love, and jihad in the midst of the swamp of urban life." The elder Shariati, he said, was "in the forefront of efforts to bring the modern-educated youth back to faith and Islam, delivering them from materialism, worship of the West, and hostility to religion." It was the battle cry of the Khomeini revolution.
Traveling often between Paris and Teheran, Shariati built up a cult following among the youth of Iran. He introduced Iranian students to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Jacques Berque, and Louis Massignon, all writers of the anticapitalist existentialist swamp, all funded and guided by the same Club of Rome networks that gathered at Persepolis.
Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, in which he argues for anarchy and revolution in the Third World directed against "the West" and violence for violence's sake, hecame Shariati's bible. "Come friends, let us abandon Europe," wrote Shariati. "Let us cease this nauseating, apish imitation of Europe. Let us leave behind this Europe that always speaks of humanity but destroys human heings wherever it finds them."
Through his writings and the publication of his Farsi journal, Shariati became something of a legend. In 1977, he was apparently murdered, and although his cult followers-like Ibrahim Yazdi-blamed the Shah for his death, it is more likely that he was killed by his backers in the Savak in order to create a martyr that would spark a movement around his figure. Were it not for Shariati, few students in Iran's universities would have followed ~ the mad Khomeini.
As the Aspen Institute and Shariati began agitating against the Shah, in early 1977 the Club of Rome's Peccei, Jacques Freymond, and others hegan to focus the Muslim Brotherhood in Western Europe around a new, synthetic, zero-growth version of Islam. Called "Islam and the West," this project held its first planning sessions at Cambridge University in England. Under the guidance of Peccei, Lord Caradon, and Muslim Brotherhood leader Maarouf Dawalibi, "Islam and the West" assembled a policy outline on science and technology for the subversion of Islam. The outline was published in 1979, and backed by the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Study, headed by Club of Rome member and NATO science adviser Alexander King.
Islam and the West declared: "We have to return to a more spiritual conception of life. . . . The first lesson of Islamic science is its insistence on the notion of a balanced equilibrium which would not destroy the ecological order of the environment, on which collective survival finally depends." This argument was used to attack "Western" science and technological progress in Europe and North America.
Peccei and the Club of Rome then moved into the Shah's court. At a November 1977 Lisbon conference sponsored by the Interreligious Peace Colloquium-an organization set up by Cyrus Vance and Sol Linowitz-Peccei conspired with several leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, particularly with the well-known Iranian "court philosopher" Seyyed Hossein Nasr of Teheran University, a personal friend of the Shah. Also in attendance at this event were Ismail Faruqi of Temple University in Philadelphia and Khurshid Ah-mad, former head of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, England, and now the minister of planning for Pakistan. Professor Nasr has been instrumental, along with Dr. Manucher Ganji, in obtaining money from the Shah's wife, Farah Diba, and others for a Club of Rome economic modeling project for Iran. According to Iranian sources, Nasr prevailed upon Teheran University Chancellor Hushang Nahavandi, an adviser to the Shahbanou, to funnel millions of dollars to the French Jesuitlinked theorist Roger Garaudy, for his Institute for the Dialogue of Civilizations.
The money was designated in part for the Club of Rome's Mesarovich-Pestel regional planning model for Iran, under the partial supervision of its French coordinator, Maurice Guernier. Thus, Guernier and Garaudy became de facto advisers on economic planning and "development strategy' to the Shah! One of the outlets they reportedly funded was the Institute for Mediterranean Research, set up in 1977 by Paul Veille, a radical Paris sociologist, and by Abolhassan Bani-Sadr.
And so, whether he knew it or not, the Shah himself was funding Bani-Sadr! Garaudy is an important figure in British intelligence operations. He is highly influential in post-revolutionary Iran and among the ultraleft in Algeria, as well as being one of the closest mentors to Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Garaudy is a former Communist Party theoretician converted to Roman Catholicism through the influence of Pere Lebret, a Jesuit authority on maintaining African social structures based on tribal witchcraft.
In 1977, Garaudy formed two institutions, the International Institute for the Dialogue of Civilizations and the University des Mutants in Senegal. In recent months, he has published a burst of articles in the French press describing nuclear energy as a "threat to the very existence of the planet" and castigating "capitalist growth" for "b'reaking the unity between man and nature." Garaudy also contributes to the journal Mediterranean Peoples, set up in 1977 as a control channel for British intelligence among Third World radical" networks. In June 1980, Garaudy attended the U.S.-Iran conference in Teheran arranged by Bani-Sadr, featuring former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.
Before leaving for Teheran with a European delegation of Bertrand Russell followers, Garaudy published an impassioned review praising Bani-Sadr's latest book, Which Revolution for Iran? Bani-Sadr's analysis, Garaudy wrote, is "valuable for its main lines not only for the entire developing sector, but even for our country, if we do not want to be late for the coming mutation." According to Garaudy, Bani-Sadr correctly locates the Iranian revolution as a "revolt of the people" against the "Western model of growth," and against the belief that the "primary task of governments in our modern world is the one of economic development, of growth and consumption, of progress, of education."
"We must thank President Bani-Sadr," Garaudy concludes, "for having, through his beautiful book, cast a new light on the future we can anticipate if, through nudear power, we take a route similar to the one Iran took through its oil: the route of technocratic despotism within, of dependence on foreign powers, and of the loss of our material wealth as well as our soul." Garaudy's influence over Bani-Sadr was one of many influences upon Iran's president during his exile in France~ Bani-Sadr himself is a product, neatly packaged, of the same individuals and institutions who created the environmentalist movements and the terrorist shock troops typified by Italy's Red Brigades.
Bani-Sadr's experience is not unique in this respect. Most of his colleagues presently in Teheran, and much of the advisory group to Khomeini, were trained, either like Bani-Sadr in France's sociology-anthropology nests, or in U.S. -based institutions promoting an "Aquarian -rehellion against industrial society, such as the Stanford-Berkeley complex in California or the Harvard-MIT complex in Massachusetts. In all these cases, the post Shah elite-to-be were indoctrinated in hatred of "Westem" ways. The simple equation, the Shah equals the West, became their motivating belief structure.
A slightly earlier "elite" was also trained at the same institutions, the Pol Pot-leng Sary butchers of Cambodia, whose genocidal "cultural revolution" became the model for what Bani-Sadr and his associates would do in Iran. Cambodia's president under Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, was trained in the same Sorbonne center that produced Bani Sadr.
Bani-Sadr's closest mentors and associates came from four overlapping institutions: the sociology-anthropology division of the Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), "Division Six" of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-6), and the National Institute for Agronomical Research. Of these, the most important is EPHE-6, which trained Bani-Sadr's thesis adviser, Professor George Balandier, a student of African tribal customs. EPHE-6 is the base for the ecology-antinuclear movement in France. While studying "agrarian reform" Maoism under Balandier, Bani-Sadr was influenced directly or indirectly by the following individuals: Paul Veille, "Marxist sociologist," CNRS, Institute for Mediterranean Research. Re'ne' Dumont, a radical agronomist at the CNRS, who is honorary president of the Friends of the Earth, and a founder of Ecoropa, the European environmentalist umbrella organization. Dumont, a World Bank adviser, has been expelled from both Cuba and Algeria for heing a CIA agent.
In 1976, Dumont led an expedition to Iran to investigate the agricultural system there, and has since hecome an adviser to Khomeini. Miche Crozier, an EPHE-6 theorist from Tavistock Institute at Britain's Sussex University, who helped to coordinate the 1968 destabilization of the Charles de Gaulle government. -Jean-Pierre Vigier, a radical scientist at CNRS who ran the 1968 secretive "Command Center of the Revolution" against de Gaulle. Other individuals who worked with Bani-Sadr, and all of whom participated in the British and Israeli intelligence destabilization of de Gaulle and France during the 1960s and 197Os, include Michel Foucault, Jacques Soustelle, Charles Bettelheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the late Henri Corbin.
It is these gentlemen, backed by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, the Leho Basso Foundation, the Transnational Institute, and the Ramsey Clarks and Richard Falks of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, whom we have to thank for the current horror in Iran called-by Bani-Sadr-" Cambodianization by persuasion."
--------- comments by Robert Dreyfus in: Hostage to Khomeini, ( pp 106 - 108 ) published by: New Benjamin Franklin House, New York 1980 - ISBN 0-933488-4
Brian Williams seems to be getting a reputation for saying "dumb" stuff...and although I didn't see it...I can imagine his Katrina coverage..
Good grief, could these news anchors get any more maudlin, morose, or dramatic???
Off the beaten track, but since you mentioned the Aspen Institute :
Groups fund Durbin's trips to exotic places
BY DORI MEINERT
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON - In January 2004, Sen. Dick Durbin and his wife spent six days in Honolulu at the expense of the privately funded Aspen Institute think tank where he attended a conference on U.S.-China relations.
Durbin and his wife, Loretta, traveled to Venice, Italy, where they spent 14 days in August of the same year [2004] for a conference on U.S.-Russia relations, also paid for by the Aspen Institute.
The Illinois Democrat also visited South Africa on the tab of other private groups last year [2004], according to his personal financial disclosure statement released Tuesday. Durbin also traveled to India and Bangladesh in February 2004 in a trip that was mistakenly left off the report, his staff said. He planned to file an amendment later Tuesday.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., requested a 30-day extension on his filing deadline.
While such privately funded trips are legal, members of Congress have found their free travel increasingly criticized in light of the recent controversy surrounding trips by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay that allegedly were paid for by lobbyists.
Durbin favors trips by the nonpartisan public policy group, Aspen Institute, because each trip has an in-depth focus and lawmakers can concentrate on issues without being lobbied, Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker said.
"These trips have enriched my understanding of key issues and made me a more engaged legislator," said Durbin in a statement issued by his office. "Were it not for travel, I probably would have an interest in these things, but not a passion for them."
It's an added bonus if his wife is allowed to travel with him.
32 posted on 06/16/2005 4:11:57 PM PDT by Grampa Dave
This is only speculation on the parts of two people who are hoping to sell their wares at the political flea market.
Fitzgerald is not obligated to explain himself or drop any charges-it seems pretty clear that he's got some kind of agenda against Libby with a manufactured case against Libby from start to finish (as even the above-referenced writers point out, the prosecutor clearly believed Powell and/or Armitage were involved).
The bigger issue is why didn't Armitage come forward and take responsibility for his part, rather than let the investigation go on and on? Has he ever publicly admitted to anything? I don't know.
Yikes. Talk about your tangled web...makes my head spin.
Amazing.
That's another great thing the internet's done: it's removed the patina and pedestals from the so-called elites ... bull puckey!!
OMG....that is amazing...scary, amazing.
I can't believe you have that after all of these years..
I wonder what the members of today's Aspen Institute may be up to???
Do you remember that when Kerry became the dem POTUS, he sent an e-mail or something to Iran..to let them know?
Obama has been in Africa for 2 weeks...being treated like a king...Aspen Institute??
(* Freepnote: May went on to say today that it was a democrat who told him Plame's employer in order to convince him that Wilson isn't as far left as May thought. May said this democrat told him before Novak's column was written. )
I watched that part of Special Report. Did you *see* the smoke practically coming out of Brit's ears. He was furious as he talked about this. As well many of us are!
If I ping you to the ME LIVE thread...could you do me a favor and repost that article about the Aspen Institute and Iran back in the 70's??
Please?
There are some people that hang on that thread that I would like to read what I just did.
An oldie but a goodie. (Not as good or as old as piasa's!)
It appears that John Bolton and Aspen Armitage have bumped heads in the past.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/10/bolton.armitage/index.html
"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage often clashed with President Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, according to a close aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Armitage also restricted John R. Bolton's public speaking unless his comments were personally cleared by him, Larry Wilkerson told the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."
Read it all.
I heart John Bolton.
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