Posted on 09/30/2003 5:40:55 PM PDT by Brian S
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:44:09 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Media organizations prepared Tuesday to oppose any efforts by the Justice Department to subpoena journalists and their notes to learn who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak.
Subpoenas could be challenged on the basis of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of the press, said Bill Felber, editor of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury and freedom of information chairman for the Associated Press Managing Editors. But they could also be challenged, he said, if they were too broad or if the information could be obtained in other ways.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
"They certainly cannot call them first," Abrams said. "In fact, the law requires that they call them last, if at all."
But they can call the President and ask him questions under oath. They did that with Bush 41 over some kind of leak (I can't remember exactly what).
Just like Wesley Clark. The Clintons are going to have to get better at disguising their puppets if they want to succeed at ruling the world.
i.e. he will name the names of the reporters who were also contacted by the admin source who called him for background.
I think the media might actually get pissed at Wilson on this one. He is about to out the other 5.
Ray McGovern is a nutjob, but he really, really seems to hate Rumsfeld and anyone associated with him. One reason is probably this:
"In an attempt to unearth incriminating intelligence on Saddam Hussein, Mr Rumsfeld created last year the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit inside the Pentagon. This became a direct rival not only of the CIA, but of the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency.
Another reason is likely even greater- he has an affinity for the Iraqi regime, or simply despises the US enough to cleave even to enemies.
As the Freeper Shermy has noted, Ray's group "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" seems to be little more than a front of the familair leftist site counterpunch.org, or at the least counterpunch gave VIPS a mailing addy for its fans.
This might be why he seems so familiar, aside from him being mentioned in association with Wilson and the EPIC group; note that it is published in MAY, well before Novak's article - and best of all, look at these unnamed sources! :
Public was misled, claim ex-CIA men The Times (U.K.) ^ | 05/31/03 | Tim ReidHow hard would it be for a group like this to convince journalists they are real current administration employees? Who's to say some of them aren't, since our security clearances don't seem too good of late?(snip)
A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.
The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.
“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group is headed by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years. He said that people in the agency were totally demoralised, particularly over what they claim is the reliance by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and his Pentagon-based intelligence staff on the testimony of Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi emigré.
“The contribution of reporting from emigrés has been highly touted for months by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy), who seem unaware of Machiavelli’s warning that of all intelligence sources, exiles are the least reliable,” the letter says. Mr Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress and was the favourite among Washington’s hawks to lead a postwar Iraqi authority. The failure of coalition troops to uncover Iraq’s banned weapons is causing increased tensions between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees are to investigate in hearings this summer the claims of weapons stockpiles and the intelligence that led to them.
The former CIA officials were supported by a current official in the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, who told The New York Times yesterday: “The American people were manipulated.” Pentagon officials said that the claims of intelligence manipulation were nothing more than a campaign of sour grapes led by present and former CIA officials over their perceived marginalisation in the run-up to the war.
(* My note: given what we know of Ray McGovern and Wilson, I can see that there is a need for "marginalization." )
In an attempt to unearth incriminating intelligence on Saddam Hussein, Mr Rumsfeld created last year the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit inside the Pentagon. This became a direct rival not only of the CIA, but of the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency.
(/snip)
Now to make things more interesting, on the night Ray McGovern and Former Ambassador Wilson spoke, another individual also participated in the lecture series.
Guess who?
From EPIC's web site:
Glen Rangwala, PhD is a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, UK. He has been a coordinator of the Campaign against Sanctions on Iraq for the past five years. His work on the allegations made about Iraq's prohibited weapons have been covered by every major news outlet, most notably when he discovered that the "intelligence" dossier released by the British government had been plagiarized from a PhD student's thesis. He acts as an advisor to British parliamentarians on policy towards Iraq. He is beginning an in-depth academic study on Iraq's changing society from 1990 to the present day, and will be assessing the outcomes of the US-led reconstruction attempts.
Hmmmm. Note that he didn't prove the thesis wrong, and for all we know its author works in UK intel now anyway. I'm sure he's a very nice guy who didn't have a thing to do with driving Kelly to suicide, and I'm sure Iraq didn't pay him like they did Galloway and Ritter... and I'm sure its just a coincidence that he and McGovern and Wilson and others just happen to be kissing fools.
This investigation could be very fun. Isn't it interesting how inbred these folks are?
Of course they're against it now...they KNOW that this was a setup and that THEY are going to find out that no, I repeat... NO ...Republican, let alone a member of the Bush administration committed the leak.
Glen Rangwala trained as a political theorist in Cambridge, UK, switched to the study of international law, and then returned to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in political and legal rhetoric in the Arab Middle East. His specific interest is in Palestinian politics from 1967 to 1977, and the rhetorical relations between the West Bank resident population and the leadership of the Palestinian resistance movement in exile. He is also published on a number of other themes, including international humanitarian law, comparative human rights law, Iraq and nuclear weapons. In between the academic work, he helps run the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (based in Cambridge, UK) and Arab Media Watch.
He was the project director of the Movement for the Advancement of International Criminal Law (now dormant) during the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999. Some of his more mundane reference notes on the Middle East are also available on-line
http://middleeast.reference.users.btopenworld.com/
"Now all the sudden they think their sources are more important than all those operatives' lives that were supposedly endangered; their sources are more important than America itself?"
I wonder if a person like Wilson can get punished for blowing his own cover? That IS what he did if he really was sent to Niger by the CIA as he claims. (Tenet just said they sent an operative, but didn't say it was Wilson as far as I know.) Wilson's op ed blew his cover if he really did go on an official trip.
Oh come on, read the thread... it'll be fun.
In light of Newsweek's current credibility problem in the Wilson case, and in light of the fact that both the UK's Kelly suicide case and the Wilson Fib File ar part of one larger case revolving around Iraqi nuke shopping- Is some other party feeding info to journalists to disrupt the intelligence services of both the UK and US or to set one against another, anything to weaken them?
AUGUST 16, 2003 Saturday : ("UNNAMED SENIOR US GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS" ALLEGEDLY ACCUSE BBC OF RUINING FBI & RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE ATTEMPT TO INFILTRATE AL QAEDA) The FBI has accused the BBC of wrecking an elaborate operation that was designed to infiltrate al-Qaida. The BBC, regarded by some as institutionally anti-American, is said to have aborted the operation by broadcasting an "exclusive" report about the arrest of a British arms dealer last Tuesday. The arms dealer was allegedly attempting to purchase ground-to-air missiles for terrorist clients who were seeking to shoot down civilian airliners in the United States.
But what ... Hemant Lakhani did not know was that he was the subject of an elaborate, 18-month-long sting operation that involved Russian intelligence "suppliers" and FBI "customers." 68-year-old Hemant Lakhani was arrested when he arrived in Washington last week to take delivery of the missiles, which had been disabled before leaving Russia. First news of the arrest came in the BBC "exclusive," which led the network's main evening news program.
[Unnamed] Senior US government officials told Newsweek magazine that the ultimate aim of the sting was to arrest Lakhani and then turn him into an informant who might lead them to terrorists trying to buy weapons. This, however, was no longer possible after the BBC broke the story of Lakhani's arrest as the lead item in its main evening news program on Wednesday. Newsweek said sources at the US Justice Department were "fuming" that the BBC "may have blown a rare opportunity to penetrate al-Qaida's arms buying network."
A BBC spokesperson said the network had not received any complaint from any US authority about the story. "All the interested parties were alerted to the report before transmission and at no time registered their concerns," said the spokesperson. - "FBI accuses BBC of wrecking operation to infiltrate al-Qaida," by DOUGLAS DAVIS, JPost , Sat Aug 16, 2003
AUGUST 2003 : (BBC JOURNALIST & FRIEND OF THE LATE DAVID KELLY SAYS HE IS SUING NEWSWEEK OVER ITS ALLEGATIONS THAT HIS STORY RUINED US PLANS TO INFILTRATE AL QAEDA) The BBC journalist who broke the news that a British man [Hemant Lakhani] had been arrested for trying to sell a missile to terrorists is to sue an American magazine which claimed his scoop had ruined FBI plans to infiltrate al-Qa'ida. Tom Mangold - a friend of David Kelly who spoke on behalf of the weapons inspector's family after his death - has instructed the law firm Mishcon de Reya to begin legal action against Newsweek. The magazine claimed on Wednesday that officials in the US Justice Department believed the report had scuppered their plans to persuade the arms dealer to work for them.
Christopher Christie, the US attorney for New Jersey, said on American television that the report had not affected the outcome of the operation. "This investigation has gone on for 18 months and we executed the plan in almost exactly the way we laid it out," he said.
The sting began in Russia where an undercover FBI agent told the arms dealer they wanted to buy a missile to "shoot down a commercial plane". Mr [Tom] Mangold [a friend of David Kelly who spoke on behalf of the weapons inspector's family after his death] said the man bought the missile for about £50,000 through "corrupt middle management" at a Russian factory. It was also claimed the arms dealer said 50 Igla missiles could be obtained. A BBC spokeswoman said: "Obviously ... for Christopher Christie ... to say the news media in Britain did not compromise the investigation gave Tom Mangold [a friend of David Kelly who spoke on behalf of the weapons inspector's family after his death ] the confidence to go to Mishcon de Reya and ask them to start proceedings."
- "BBC journalist to sue US magazine over 'foiled FBI plan' story," By Andrew Johnson, The Independent, , 16 August 2003, Independent.co.uk
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