Posted on 02/13/2007 5:15:19 AM PST by IrishMike
WASHINGTON — The jury in the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who served as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, has heard powerful evidence that two other officials were responsible for disclosing the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame.
Over a prosecution objection, the defense played an audio recording yesterday of a profanity-laden rant in which a former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, told a prominent journalist, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, about Ms. Plame's ties to Langley a month before she was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert Novak. Mr. Novak also testified yesterday, recounting to jurors how Mr. Armitage's identification of Ms. Plame, and a subsequent confirmation from President Bush's top political aide, Karl Rove, resulted in the July 14, 2003, article that prompted the investigation that ultimately snared Mr. Libby.
Another Post reporter who joined the parade of press witnesses, Walter Pincus, added more drama to the session by declaring that he was told about Ms. Plame's CIA connection by the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, two days before Mr. Novak's column appeared. That aspect of Mr. Fleischer's role in the saga had not been made public previously.
Mr. Woodward testified that the disclosure from Mr. Armitage came in a June 13, 2003, interview as the pair discussed news reports that a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson IV, had traveled to Africa at the CIA's request to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Mr. Wilson later complained to reporters that the White House ignored his report that such a deal was impossible and deliberately inserted misleading language into President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
and she was not covered by any laws that would make it a crime to say she worked for the CIA....CASE CLOSED!
The conversations you so casually dismiss have been testified to in court and discussed ad nausem over the past several years on TV and talk radio. They are what started this whole mess.
Here is another reference to ol' Joe saying the he was sent at the request of the Vice President's Office.
This May 6, 2003 column is hardly ever referenced, but it clearly sets out Joe Wilson's talking points (it is known that Wilson met with Kristof May 3-4). The whole controversy was kicked off in the terms set out (below) by Kristof channeling Wilson, and if anyone believes that Wilson did not tell Kristof just about verbatim what is reproduced in Kristof's column, well I've got a lovely bridge to sell them.....
[KRISTOF: "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger"] [Nicholas Kristof channeling Joe Wilson, May 6, 2003]: New York Times column posted at: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0506missing.htm
Kristof also wrote about the forged document that was supposed to entrap Bush et al.
"Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.
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