Posted on 09/02/2006 9:23:27 AM PDT by the Real fifi
In an article shamelessly ignoring its role in the Wilson hoax and solicitous of the leaker, the New York Times finally, on a holiday weekend Saturday, mentions that Richard Armitage was the source of the leak of Plame’s identity. It focuses on whether Fitzgerald was right to continue the prosecution after he knew Novak didn’t learn about Plame from Rove or Libby, the people the paper railed against from the moment Nicholas Kristof megaphoned Ambassador Munchausen’s fabulous tale of his Mission to Niger more three years ago:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Ray Donoavan redux.
I thank God every day that the liberal Democrat "mainstream" newsrooms are dying. I just wish they would hurry up and die dead forever.
Also good reading on this subject from an article posted here earlier by Fred Barnes:
The Plamegate Hall of Shame
The Weekly Standard ^ | 09/11/2006, Volume 011, Issue 48 | Fred Barnes
Posted on 09/02/2006 10:23:23 AM EDT by Laverne
The rogues' gallery of those who acted badly in the CIA "leak" case turns out to be different from what the media led us to expect. Note that we put the word "leak" in quotation marks, because it's clear now there was no leak at all, just idle talk, and certainly no smear campaign against Joseph Wilson for criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy. It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country--by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was. Let's start at the top of the rogues' list:
* Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, was the first to reveal that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee. He blabbed carelessly to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, then to columnist Robert Novak, who mentioned it in a July 2003 column. Armitage, after admitting this to the FBI in October 2003, stood by silently year after year as Vice President Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and other White House officials were blamed for what he had done, and President Bush suffered politically. Loyalty is not Armitage's strong suit.
* Colin Powell, Bush's friend and secretary of state in the first Bush term, knew what Armitage had done and never let on. He met with Bush countless times as the White House was being pummeled in the media and by Demo crats for outing a CIA agent to take revenge on her husband. Bush called publicly for the leaker to be identified. Powell knew the identity, but remained silent. Some friend.
* Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the "leak" case, was aware of the source of Novak's story when he began his still-ongoing investigation in December 2003. Yet finding that source was supposedly the object of his probe. Now working with a second grand jury, Fitzgerald surely knows the supposed conspiracy to defame Wilson is (and always was) a fantasy. Still he won't let go. Fitzgerald has proved once more why naming a special prosecutor is a colossal mistake.
* The Ashcroft Justice Department. Armitage brought his story to investigators after the CIA requested an investigation when the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, appeared in Novak's column. So when the department decided weeks later to appoint a special prosecutor, it already knew who had "leaked" Plame's name. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself, leaving the decision to his deputy, James Comey. Rather than face a torrent of partisan recriminations for dropping the case, Comey passed the buck to Fitzgerald. There were no profiles in courage at Justice.
* Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush I administrations, sparked the "leak" controversy in the first place by writing in the New York Times that Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that point, and he claimed to have debunked it. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own trip to Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud. "It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously," the Washington Post editorialized sorrowfully last week.
* The media--especially the Washington Post and New York Times--relied heavily on Wilson's reckless and unfounded charges to wage journalistic jihad against the White House and Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Reporters and columnists, based on little more than Joe Wilson's harrumphing, bought the line that the White House "leaked" Plame's name to discredit her husband. In an editorial last January, the New York Times said the issue in the case "was whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion, and in doing so violated a federal law against unmasking a covert operative." The paper's answer was yes.
So instead of Cheney or Rove or Libby, the perennial targets of media wrath, the Plamegate Hall of Shame consists of favorites of the Washington elite and the mainstream press. The reaction, therefore, has been zero outrage and minimal coverage. The appropriate step for the press would be to investigate and then report in detail how it got the story so wrong, just as the New York Times and other media did when they reported incorrectly that WMD were in Saddam's arsenal in Iraq. Don't hold your breath for this.
Not everyone got the story wrong. The Senate Intelligence Committee questioned Wilson under oath. It found that, contrary to his claims, his wife had indeed arranged for the CIA to send him to Niger in 2002. It found that his findings had not, contrary to Wilson's claim, circulated at the highest levels of the administration. And Bush's 16 words in the State of the Union to the effect that British intelligence believed Saddam had sought uranium in Africa--words Wilson insisted were fictitious--had been twice confirmed as true by none other than the British government.
Worse, Wilson failed in the single reason for his trip to Niger: to ferret out the truth about whether Iraq had sought uranium there. Wilson said no, dismissing a visit by Iraqis in 1999. But journalist Christopher Hitchens learned the trade mission was led by an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat. And uranium, of course, was the only thing Niger had to trade.
The fascination in Washington with the idea of a White House conspiracy to ruin Plame's career and punish Wilson never made sense. If there had been one, it had to be the most passive conspiracy in history. The suspected mastermind was Rove, the Bush political adviser. But all Rove did was to acknowledge off-handedly to two reporters that he'd heard that Wilson's wife, whose name he didn't know, was a CIA employee. And the two reporters were more likely to agree with Wilson about the war in Iraq than with the Bush administration. The conspiracy charge, the Post rightly concluded, was "untrue."
A few diehards in the media have tried to keep the conspiracy notion alive. Michael Isikoff of Newsweek asserts that what Armitage did and what Rove did were separate, and thus a White House smear campaign could still have gone on. Yes, but it didn't. Jeff Greenfield of CNN recalled a Post story in September 2003 that said "two top White House officials" had contacted six reporters "and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife." But the Post itself has in effect repudiated this dubious story.
What's left to do? Fitzgerald, in decency, should terminate his probe immediately. And he should abandon the perjury prosecution of Libby, the former Cheney aide. Libby's foggy memory was no worse than that of Armitage, who forgot for two years to tell Fitzgerald he'd talked to the Post's Woodward but isn't being prosecuted. Last but not least, a few apologies are called for, notably by Powell and Armitage, but also by the press. A correction--perhaps the longest and most overdue in the history of journalism--is in order.
Very nice work.
An excellent piece by Clarice, as usual. Hits all the key points. What a travesty this whole thing has been. If this doesn't turn the public against the media, then nothing will. All involved should be hanging their heads in shame, but apparently, the do not understand the meaning of that word.
Then when Cooper interviewed Libby the next day, Libby was so brutal and crafty that he never raised the subject of Ms. Plame, but offered something like “I heard that, too” when Cooper asked him about her.
But it’s worse than that. In pretrial disovery the judge found that the documents in Time’s possession showed that however Cooper testified, his testimony would be impeachable at trial. Let me clarify what this means. It means Time has had in its possession from the outset evidence that Cooper said one thing in the newsroom and another to the grand jury. What else can this mean?
Bull! Ole Joe & big mouth Val outed her at various DC parties. Sheesh! Personally, I'd like to know what she contributed to the safety of the US in her so-called role as an CIA agent that everyone in DC knew she worked at Langley, CIA HQ. She just fed off the public trough while sitting on her fingers and rearing back on her thumb.
A must read. She's done a great job on this article.
I gave to his defense fund, just for general principle.
Isn't it interesting that "State Department officials" didn't want Armitage's "role in the leak" disclosed?
These were obviously the same "State Department officials" who had conspired on the election-fixing smear job with their rogue counterparts in the CIA (a conspiracy epitomized by the Wilson - Plame connection). At the time, the main thing was to get past the election - - a Kerry victory would kill any possibility of Armitage getting nailed, and the whole thing would "go away". Ooops. Things didn't quite work out the way they hoped.
And now, Bush BETTER make people pay.
Armitage is a dishonorable, despicable, coward of a man. He allowed the President he served to be attacked, distracted and slandered without so much as peep. He allowed others to be persecuted and prosecuted for his sins without so much as a peep. He allowed blatant lies to distract an entire branch of government without so much as a peep. I hope he gets what he deserves someday...
Har! As a matter of fact, Armitage is a shameless coward.
Ironically, according to reports , he regularly disparaged people in the Administration like Libby because they had not served in conditions where they heard bullets whizzing past their ears.
Mr. Armitage had prepared a resignation letter, his associates said. But he stayed on the job because State Department officials advised that his sudden departure could lead to the disclosure of his role in the leak, the people aware of his actions said.
This drives me nuts. Clearly the communist State Department, working with rogue elements at the CIA, was working for a Kerry victory and knew that when Kerry won, all this subterfuge could be covered up and Armitage would never be revealed as the leaker.
I sure hope Bush's people are wreaking hell on these scumbags.
Hunch:For the rat papers to be allowing this disclosure and admission there must be something on the horizon that is even worse than this complicity coming next.
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