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Plamegate: 25 Lingering QuestionsBy Fedora (The first four questions and answers below were previously posted as Was Plame Covert? A Review of Isikoff and Corn's Hubris.) I recently finished reviewing Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) to see what it adds to the current state of knowledge in the Plamegate investigation. Here I will present my findings in the form of a list of questions and answers focusing on loose ends and other points of interest in the case. I will list the questions first so that individual readers may more easily scroll down to...

The president's political guru—and counselor Dan Bartlett—have been subpoenaed by Scooter Libby's lawyers. What it means for the most-watched trial in Washington—and who's next on the witness stand. - White House anxiety is mounting over the prospect that top officials—including deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and counselor Dan Bartlett-may be forced to provide potentially awkward testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. While that is...

The publication of Hubris is filled with irony for David Corn, Washington editor of the left-wing Nation magazine. He was present at the creation of the Valerie Plame "scandal," which the enemies of George W. Bush hoped could bring down a president. Nobody was more responsible for bloating this episode. Yet Corn is coauthor of a book that has had the effect of killing the story. Thanks to Corn's intrepid coauthor, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, Hubris definitively revealed then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as my source that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA and suggested her...

Was Plame Covert? A Review of Isikoff and Corn's HubrisBy Fedora I recently finished reviewing Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) to see what it adds to the current state of knowledge in the Plamegate investigation. Here I will present my findings in the form of a list of questions and answers: 1. What did Valerie Wilson aka Valerie Plame do at CIA?According to Isikoff and Corn (12-13, 283-286), after Plame graduated from the CIA’s training program, she began working with the CIA Directorate of Operations’ European Division in the Cyrus/Greece/Turkey area in the late...

Sept. 4, 2006 issue - In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Novak ...wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar...

Sunday Shows for 3/23/06This main post is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.Fox News Sunday (Chris Wallace) Meme: Hoekstra & Harman both don't like Negroponte, hurrah, hurrah!Panetta and Duberstein both don't like Bush's men, hurrah, hurrah!And Gilbert Arenas plays online poker at halftime....???? (that's the best I can figure as to why he's on) Topics: Reps. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harman on Iran's nuclear ambitionFormer Chiefs of Staff Leon Panetta and Ken Duberstein on White House shake-upWashington Wizards' star Gilbert...

Isikoff Strikes Again January 23, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Lying Mike Isikoff - of Quran flushing fame - is back again, this time writing in the January 30 issue of Newsweak about another "threat" that U.S. intelligence poses to U.S. civil liberties - "The Other Big Brother - The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far." Prissy Issy writes - "The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the...

It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA. Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes...

One of the two Newsweek journalists behind the retracted article alleging that interrogators at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Quran said he had underestimated the impact of the report and dropped the ball by not properly corroborating his anonymous source. Michael Isikoff, addressing the furor in an interview broadcast Monday night on "The Charlie Rose Show," said that he regretted the possibility that his article, which has been blamed for violent protests in Muslim countries, may have enflamed rioters. "It was terrible what happened," he told Rose. He said that the reporters had provided the article...

Newsweek magazine has announced that it will institute stricter guidelines on the use of unnamed sources after last week's retraction of a Quran-desecration story. But despite the tremendous uproar generated by the discredited story, the magazine says no staffers will lose their jobs. In a letter to readers in Newsweek's latest issue, chairman and editor in chief Richard M. Smith promises that "the cryptic phrase 'sources said' will never again be the sole attribution for a story in Newsweek." Two of the magazine's top editors will be assigned sole responsibility for approving the use of anonymous sources. "We got an...

Newsweek floundered in journalistic purgatory over the weekend, unable to confirm or completely retract the "Periscope" item from its May 9 issue that incensed rioters in Afghanistan and Pakistan; 16 people died in the melees. I wonder why Newsweek wasn't more skeptical about Quran-desecration charges. Muslims so venerate the Quran that they are outraged if anyone touches one without first washing their hands, let alone put it into a dung-hole. Compare the ubiquity of the toilet story with other kinds of Quran desecration. In my Nexis sifting I found only a handful of examples from the last 25 years: A...

* There are a couple of issues which attend to this Newsweek thing. First, there is the First Amendment to the Constitution. For those of us who haven't actually read the First Amendment since 8th Grade Social Studies, here it is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. * This is a pretty big bag of freedoms in one Amendment. Religion, speech,...

This Newsweek thing has me disagreeing with everybody, even the people who say everybody's wrong. First, the obvious: Newsweek messed up. Nobody disputes that, not even Newsweek. That in itself makes the Newsweek episode very different from the CBS "memogate" scandal. CBS stonewalled, whitewashed and distorted as much as it could at every turn. Dan Rather is still agnostic about whether those memos were real, and his former producer, Mary Mapes, is sticking to her guns like a marooned Japanese soldier looking to shoot down planes years after the war's over. Beyond the fact that Newsweek messed up, opinions fly...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

Will the Real News Fabricator Please Stand Up? May 19, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel The Detroit News and its star reporter, David Shepardson, got caught with their pants down. They ran a fake story. But no-one noticed. No-one, except me—which lead to Detroit News Editor and Publisher Mark Silverman and his minions racing to hush the story and bury it, looking for some silent way to cover-up their very large, very exposed rears. They printed Shepardson’s phony story about a terrorist, and I exposed it, last week. Shepardson ran with it, without even a modicum of fact-checking (easily done with...

Investigative reporters come in a couple of varieties. There are the quiet, scholarly types who troll the archives and pore over documents. And there are the gumshoes, obsessive and indefatigable, who tend to dress like Columbo, never let go of a story and seldom see eye to eye with their editors. Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who together with John Barry, a national security correspondent for the magazine, wrote a brief article referring to desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, is a charter member of this second club. He is rumpled, relentless and even abrasive at...

Investigative reporters come in a couple of varieties. There are the quiet, scholarly types who troll the archives and pore over documents. And there are the gumshoes, obsessive and indefatigable, who tend to dress like Columbo, never let go of a story and seldom see eye to eye with their editors. Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who together with John Barry, a national security correspondent for the magazine, wrote a brief article referring to desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, is a charter member of this second club. He is rumpled, relentless and even abrasive at...

In front of a class of High School students, Harry Reid called President Bush a loser. Then, he said he was sorry. Then, he took his apology back. But, it was alright because he’d already given his sham regret. CBS broadcast a bogus story with bogus documents about President Bush’s Military service. When the fakery of the story was brought to light, CBS finally…sort of…apologized. Now, Newsweek has published an article about our military men and women flushing the Muslim Quran (or portions thereof) down a toilet, in order to intimidate Islamic prisoners. However, the story was and is false!...

Having read Michael Isikoff and John Berry’s May 9 th article in Newsweek magazine I was forced to come to a conclusion: Cuban toilets were much better than those in the United States. But, with Newsweek’s retraction of Isikoff and Barry’s ‘Quran flushing story’ it would appear that Kohler is safe, at least for now. You may ask me how I could have possibly come to the conclusion that Cuban toilet artisans were superior to their American counterparts, what with the travel ban to Cuba and all. My conclusion was based in common sense and deductive reasoning. In Isikoff and...

Newsweek has blood on its hands. Sixteen Afghans have been killed and about 100 injured since violent anti-US protest erupted on Wednesday over a report in Newsweek magazine that U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba may have desecrated the Koran. Newsweek reported in its May 9 edition that military investigators had confirmed allegations by FBI agents on detainee abuse, including an incident in which at least one Koran was thrown into a toilet. Video footage of angry bearded mullahs brandishing posters saying "death to America'' and "punish the culprits'' was shown today on the Pakistani television. The footage...