Posted on 02/12/2007 7:30:58 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Listening to the full Woodward tape of Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaking the news about Plame must be giving Fitzgerald nightmares. CNN has posted the full tape played at the trial and it is astounding. The part that got me was when Armitage said “His wife named him”, and Woodward asks, “Why doesn’t this get out?”. Then Armitage says, on June 13th 2003, basically what Andrea Mitchell would say months later when she was talking off the cuff on CNBC. Armitage laughingly says “Everyone knows”. In the words of Mitchell.
MURRAY And the second question is: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA?
MITCHELL: 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. But frankly I wasn’t aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.
But Armitage goes further and explains HOW everyone knew. Woodward repeats back incredulously “Everyone knew”? and Armitage provides the hard evidence of who was talking about Plame” .. because Joe Wilson has been calling everybody! He’s pissed off ’cause he’s looked at as some low level guy…”. I predicted long ago, and again just prior to the trial, it would come out that Joe and Valerie were both sources for Kristof and others. Armitage is not saying ‘everyone knows’ who Joe Wilson is (though they did).
(Excerpt) Read more at strata-sphere.com ...
It isn't about limp wrist Wilson, Plame, the reporters and talking heads. Its about Fitzgerald getting something whether its a conviction, or a plea agreement so he can walk out the front door of the courthouse, stand at the top of the steps and proclaim his great victory to an adoring DBM. The DBM can proclaim his greatness for bringing down this "Former Bush Administration Official". Democrat broadcasters Pris Matthews, smarmy Tim Russert et al can get miles out of this on their shows. People like Karl Lenin and Hairless Reid can look down their elitist noses at the rest of us as they reproclaim the culture of corruption. That's all this has come down to.
Exactly how many millions of dollars has Fitzgerald wasted on this witch hunt?
So this proves that Wilson was shooting off his big mouth to get some recognition. So much for the "They were out to get me" line. I hope the MSM chokes on this.
Becuase Fitz is the Mike Nifong of federal prosecutors.
&&&&&&
I see your sentence on a large banner Jon Carry-style as we finally have to have physical protest demonstrations in front of 'news' agency offices in the coming years..
That's what I think. The individuals appearing "on stage" in this "scandal" are actors. Wilson set up the story, but there's a producer, playwright, director and casting director yet to be exposed.
David Corn , Washington Editor of The Nation Magazine, is at the heart of this story.
THE NATION - On the far left, The Nation magazine and its Nation Institute have been supported by Soros’ OSI (Open Society Institute). http://www.aim.org/special_report/A2089_0_8_0_C/
REPORTERS’ NOTEBOOKS (David Corn Exposed Valerie Plame's "Covert" Status!) National Review Cliff May with correspondence with David Corn 7-16-05
The Rove Scandal: Now I'm Smeared as the Leaker (David Corn sez NOT contacted by Fitzgerald!) Corn's Website 7-16-05
The Nation's persistence in driving home the leak story and Wilson's truthfulness is illustrated here.
"A Little Literary Flair"
From the July 26, 2004 issue - Weekly Standard: Joe Wilson wasn't a truth-teller.
by Matthew Continetti"ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson . He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty weekly. Daniel Ellsberg was there. So was New Jersey senator Jon Corzine. Towards the end of lunch, plates of cold salad shunted aside, Wilson was invited onstage. Looking the part of a globetrotting former diplomat in his Zegna suit and trademark Hermès tie, he launched into a tirade against the Bush administration, which he claimed had ignored the findings of a trip he took to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had tried to acquire uranium there. His trip had disproved those claims, he continued, yet his findings were ignored. And when he went public with his story, the administration had tried to "silence" him by leaking to the press that his wife worked for the CIA.
There was much applause. And there was even more applause when Wilson then accepted the first-ever Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling, along with the award's $10,000 prize. (Ridenhour was the soldier who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969.)"
Also interesting is that the administration officials named in the Wilson/Plame suit are the same as those identified in Corn's article here:
The Leak and the 'Truth' 5-1-06
David Corn | "If President Bush wants to tell the truth to the American public, he can make Cheney, Rove and Libby come clean about their role in the Plame affair."
Corn's version of events in the trial yesterday:
Libby Trial: What Scooter Didn't Do David Corn 2-12-07
Have you seen this item from Taranto's Best of the Web yesterday (Feb 12)? The blatant way these 'reporters' defend their disregard for FACTS makes my scalp crawl. I have heard Kurtz say previous to this appearance, that reporting what is said by administration spokesmen is "acting as a conduit."
This is an admission that every single conservative (or supporter of the current Administration) should be made aware of, have imprinted on their brain and used as a filter when absorbing any "news" item, or when talking with others who still believe that 'news' is accurate.
URL for this article: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009658
Inside the Bubble
Yesterday's "Meet the Press" featured a fascinating discussion of the Scooter Libby trial, moderated by host Tim Russert, who left it to guest Howard Kurtz to disclose that Russert testified last week as a witness for the prosecution. Kurtz, the Washington Post's media reporter, and Post columnist David Broder showed that they've been in Washington way too long. First there was this comment from Kurtz:
When journalists get up there and testify . . . it looks to people . . . out there like we have become too cozy with senior Bush administration officials, not so we can ferret out information about national security, not so we can find out about corruption, but, in this particular case, in some cases, acting as a conduit for White House effort to put out negative information about Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband, a big critic of the pre-war intelligence. And I think that the people out there who don't follow this all that closely think that we have become part of the club, too much the insiders. And that is a problem for journalism.
The truth is that Libby wouldn't be on trial had journalists back in 2003 not served as a conduit for Wilson's misinformation, specifically his suggestion that Karl Rove had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "outing" his wife to Robert Novak. (In fact, it was Richard Armitage who identified her to Novak, and she was not a covert agent under the act's definition.) Kurtz flatters the press by suggesting it was misled by the White House rather than by a fourth-rate unemployed ambassador.
Then there's this exchange, in which Roger Simon of The Politico makes very good sense:
Simon: This is a nutty trial that nobody except the people involved in it and the people covering it care about. Once again we have a prosecutor who can't an indictment for the real crime--leaking the identity of a CIA agent--so he goes instead for the crime of, well, people didn't tell him the complete truth when they talked to him. I mean, there's no underlying crime here that anyone has been indicted for. This is just a show trial. . . .
Kurtz: But, Roger, it's a show trial that has put the spotlight on the Bush administration's attempt to make a case about prewar intelligence that turned out not to be true. That matters.
So Kurtz is endorsing show trials for the purpose of embarrassing the White House? Then there's Broder:
Russert: Judy Miller, Matt Cooper and myself, and now Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, Walter Pincus--you're going to have a significant number of journalists going before a court, which will be all covered. What does that do to journalism?
Broder: Well, it hurts. And it hurts because I think it opens up something that has been worrisome, I think, to many of us in the press, which is the way in which relationships between reporters and government officials can be used by those government officials to plant stories, in effect, that are damaging to their political enemies using the reporters, in effect, to carry out their political mission. And that's different from cultivating a source to get information that's of value to you as a journalist. Here you are being used by the government official to carry out their political work.
Broder has worked for the Post for more than 40 years, and has been in Washington even longer than that. Are we really supposed to believe that he's shocked, shocked to learn that anonymous sources often have an agenda other than public-spiritedness?
The Post may not be in quite the same league as the New York Times, but it has been making itself look awfully silly of late. This correction ran in Saturday's paper:
A Feb. 9 front-page article about a Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) in October 2004.
Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [intelligence community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration" were also from Levin's report.
The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith's office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general's report did not draw.
Other than that, though, the story was accurate!
If this were a case against the Dems, the headline would have been "Everyone Knows." Instead, the key phrases are hidden well inside the article.
The AP story in the Baltimore Sun keeps referring to Armitage as "an administration official." This is so infuriating as informed poeple know that most at the State Dept. have not worked to advance President Bush's agenda, to say the least. GWB's to-the-extreme nice guy personality has caused him and our country many problems.
Everybody knew according to an awful lot of people. Is Wilson in court at ALL listening to what an ass he's made of himself?"
Wilson better not be in court listening to other testimony if he is going to be called as a witness....
So you are saying that the jurors didn't hear that part??
But, that that part WAS in the original recording of their interview??
It was all about bringing down Cheney.
So if everyone knew, why is this trial still going??
Pray for W and Libby
Plame probably passed out her business cards with her name and position at the CIA.
I can guarantee you that every neighbor knew she worked for the CIA, if the agency still does its 2 year checks with neighbors and those who know you.
They had a couple of months of CIPA proceedings to determine what classified information could come in and what could not.
The judge doesn't have the authority to simply decide that classified information can be revealed in open court.
And, if you are going to say there was nothing classified about it, if that were the case it wouldn't have been the subject of CIPA proceedings.
Seriously, if I were a covert operative working for the gumint, I would be terrified at the thought that a few loose words from scum like joe wilson and his wife could get me killed. Democraps are a threat to the lives of these honorable people because their arrogance compels them to brag about what they know.
If Fitzyy ignores this, he should be tried and found guilty for pushing political crap instead of dismissing this trial.
It is time for us to make the world know what a petty politician Fitzyy is.
"2:15 WOODWARD: But it was Joe Wilson who was sent by
2:16 the agency. I mean that’s just —
2:17 ARMITAGE: His wife works in the agency.
2:18 WOODWARD: — Why doesn’t that come out? Why does —
2:19 ARMITAGE: Everyone knows it.
2:20 WOODWARD: —that have to be a big secret?
2:21 Everyone knows.
2:22 ARMITAGE: Yeah. And I know [ ] Joe Wilson’s
2:23 been calling everybody. He’s pissed off because he was
2:24 designated as a low-level guy, went out to look at it. So,
2:25 he’s all pissed off.
3:1 WOODWARD: But why would they send him?
3:2 ARMITAGE: Because his wife’s a [ ]
3 3:23 3:2 Woodward & Amitage Interview -
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