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Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting By Joe Strupp Published: November 16, 2005 12:45 PM ET NEW YORK Walter Pincus, the longtime Washington Post reporter and one of several journalists who testified in the Valerie Plame case, said he believed as far back as 2003 that Bob Woodward had some involvement in the case but he did not pursue the information because Woodward asked him not to. "He asked me to keep him out of the reporting and I agreed to do that," Pincus said today. His comments followed a Post story today about Woodward's...

I’ve been traveling and am just getting caught up on the latest developments in the flame-out of Chas Freeman, and am particularly enjoying Walter Pincus’s latest piece. Someone nominate this guy for coming up with the biggest dog-bites-man story of the year. Here’s the thing about stories on Arab reactions to Israel-related American political stories: there is almost never any doubt about what those Arab reactions are going to be. There are no “trends” here — there is utterly predictable, hackneyed conspiracy-theorizing about Jewish power and Israeli puppeteering.

The CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator...

NEW YORK Denis Collins, the juror in the Libby/CIA leak case who delivered a post-verdict commentary for the press, spent about a decade at The Washington Post. Today, after a night on cable TV shows, he re-appears with a massive recounting of his experience at the Huffington Post blog. His story is billed as "INSIDE THE JURY ROOM: WHAT THE JURY THOUGHT, DAY BY DAY, WITNESS BY WITNESS, AT THE SCOOTER LIBBY TRIAL" by Denis Collins, Juror #9. It calls it "unedited" impressions, memories and facts. Other jurors' names are changed. The New York Times today reports that he is...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified Monday as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson. Pincus said he learned her identity July 12, 2003 but did not immediately write about it. Plame was outed by syndicated columnist Robert Novak two days later. Pincus testified on behalf of Vice...

What a mess: A Feb. 9 front-page article about the 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 Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 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...

Porter J. Goss was forced to step down yesterday as CIA director, ending a turbulent 18-month tenure marked by an exodus of some of the agency's top talent and growing White House dissatisfaction with his leadership during a time of war. Seated next to President Bush in the Oval Office, Goss, a Republican congressman from Florida before he took over the CIA, said he was "stepping aside" but gave no reason for the departure. Bush, who did not name a successor, said he had accepted the resignation and thanked Goss for his service. "Porter's tenure at the CIA was one...

Doesn't the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee read? In a Washington Post article by Walter Pincus in Friday's edition, Representative Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), who has succeeded in pushing the Bush administration to start releasing some of the 2 million documents captured in Iraq, said,“Whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them, the most important thing is that we discover the truth of what was happening in the country prior to the war.”Conservatives and war-backers have been howling for the release of all these documents because they believe--or hope--that they...

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did...

Today's Washington Post page-one round-up disclosing a little new and summarizing a lot of previously reported "highly classified" national security information is by Dana Priest: "Covert CIA program withstands new furor." Here are the article's opening paragraphs: The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources. The broad-based effort, known...

WASHINGTON - A federal judge found Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus in contempt Wednesday, saying the journalist must reveal his government sources for stories about the criminal investigation of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer said that "in order to avoid a repetition of the Judith Miller imbroglio," Pincus must contact his sources to inform them of the court's order in case they wish to release him from his pledge of confidentiality. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, served 85 days in jail for contempt in the CIA leak investigation, agreeing to talk only after...

ON JUNE12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger. Wilson told Pincus that he had debunked Bush administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. He was specific and apparently seemed credible. And Pincus bought it all. He wrote: Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a...

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PLOT THICKENS [John Podhoretz] Time Magazine has a new story about the revelation of Valerie Plame's name -- a story that, despite Time's own bizarre spin, reinforces the claim that Karl Rove and others learned that Joseph Wilson was married to a CIA operative from the media. "As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration," writes Massimo Calabresi. Later, he...

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case. Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

The Washington Post yesterday said a quotation used in its lead Page One headline in Thursday's paper -- that the United States got it "almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- was not new and was incorrectly attributed to the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. In an article on Thursday, The Post identified Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration picked to complete a U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, as the source of that remark. The dispatch by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reported that Mr. Duelfer, chairman of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group,...

"How the White House Used Disputed Arms Intelligence" NYT 10/3/04

(snip)....U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan... unsealed an order that demands the "confinement" of Time reporter Matthew Cooper, who has refused to testify in the probe... ... Hogan also issued an Aug. 6 order confining Cooper "at a suitable place until such time as he is willing to comply with the grand jury subpoena," and ordered Time to be fined $1,000 a day. ... ... While NBC fought a subpoena issued May 21 and was included in the opinion, it avoided a contempt citation after Tim Russert, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," agreed to an interview over the...

Only on a panel sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future.Boston"ARE YOU ALL READY TO TAKE BACK AMERICA?" Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America's Future, asked on Wednesday, standing in front of an enthusiastic crowd at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. And the crowd sure was ready. They hooted and hollared. They roared and screamed. They nodded their heads vigorously. The day before, Michael Moore had stopped by. On Wednesday, Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, former senator Gary Hart, and Ambassador Joe Wilson took the stage.The occasion was a debate on the Iraq war, which may...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...