It was Karl. What a surprise...
It appears as though it was Karl Rove who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative, in order to punish her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson for taking a public stance against certain Administration policies. Specifically, Mr. Wilson publicly stated, after being sent to Niger to investigate the President's intelligence about Saddam Hussein attempting to purchase uranium from Africa, that it was "highly unlikely" to be true.
For those who forget, Mr. Wilson went public with this information at a time when the Administration was denying there was any reason to suspect the veracity of said intelligence, proving that there was, in fact, EVERY reason to suspect said intelligence. This was one of the early pieces of proven falsehood that led many such as myself to a long standing belief that the Administration lied its way into this war.
Anyway, it appears that Karl Rove was the leaker, even though the name in reporter Matt Cooper's notes has not yet been released. After about two years worth of silence on the topic, this weekend Mr. Rove's attorney came out and said that his client "never knowingly disclosed clsasified information".
As has been pointed out by others, the key word in that sentence, the word which sets up the basis for a legal defense, is "knowingly". Leaking the names is only treason if the leak was done knowingly.
Watch what unfolds in the next few days and weeks. Either this will be swept under the rug like so many other things that don't smell quite right with this Administration, or charges will be filed and the defense will be that Rove "didn't know" that she was a covert operative.
Karl Rove is many things, but one thing he is NOT is stupid. He could not have been so highly placed in the Administration as to be aware of Ms. Plame's position, and yet so uninformed to be unaware that she sometimes worked undercover. And the release of the information wasn't done accidentally, the fact that it happened to come out just days after Wilson exposed the Administration in a lie to the American people is not coincidental. Also, Robert Novak originally credited "two senior administration officials" as his source. Even assuming it was possible for ONE senior administration official to completely forget that Ms. Plame was a CIA operative, or that exposing her would be illegal, it becomes harder to swallow that TWO administration officials BOTH had the information and yet both just HAPPENED to reveal it to a pro-Administration reporter at a time when such revelation would most damage a political enemy.
Let's see how this plays out.
Liam.
posted by Liam at 7/04/2005 03:21:00 PM
16 Comments:
I need to be refreshed on two things. One is your reference to her working undercover; I never heard that. Two is what lie did Wilson expose?
Monday, July 04, 2005 10:45:00 PM
She didn't work undercover in the sense of James Bond, infiltrating governments. But she certainly was involved in some foreign efforts in which her affiliation with the CIA would have compromised her ability to effectively do her job. At a time when the U.S. was worried about a global threat of terrorism and WMDs, how much sense did it make identify one of the tools in our tool chest, thus rendering it inoperable?
And the administration lie was that two days before Wilson publicly announced that it was "very unlikely" that Hussein was buying uranium from Niger, Condi Rice (not to diminish her, I can't spell the full name) gave a speech in which she said that there was no reason of which the upper levels of the administration were aware for doubting that Hussein was buying the Uranium.
On the other hand, when Wilson came out with his public announcement, it was announcing what he had already told the White House as part of his investigation, an investigation they sent him on.
So basically their guy on the ground comes back and tells them "it ain't so", and they ignore this and blatently tell the U.S. population that there's no reason to doubt the intelligence.
Liam
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 7:49:00 AM
If my memory serves me right Wilson's report was not taken seriously because he had an axe to grind due to his perception of being mistreated or maybe his perseption of his wife's mistreatment by superiors in the CIA. Also, he did not follow protocol of contacting agents living in the area, but reached his conlusions without their input. Also, proof of Sadam's purchases came out after that announcement of his proving that Condi Rice's (I have trouble with her spelling also) announcement was correct.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:15:00 PM
OK, that doesn't comport with my memory. I was under the impression that those allegations eventually proved to be FALSE.
Do you have a reference otherwise, indicating that there is proof that the purchases actually happened?
(I'm being sincere, here. If I am operating on wrong information, I want to know it.)
Liam
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:35:00 PM
I just did some searches on Google, and the closest I could find was a site which indicated that there is proof that Niger has traffic'd in illicit sales of uranium to Libya and North Korea, said site then went on to say "So is it that difficult to believe that Saddam may have attempted to purchase from them as well?"
That's hardly conclusive. Virtually every site that I've found has shown that the original source turned out to be a forgery and completely false. I found no evidence that Saddam had purchased uranium from anywhere.
However, as I said, if you have a good source of information showing differently, I'd be interested in looking at it.
Believe it or not, my mind is actually open to new information.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:44:00 PM
Finally, the fact is that Condi Rice's statement was that the administration was aware of no credible reason to doubt the intelligence, which was clearly false, they had the report of Mr. Wilson. If, as you say, they didn't trust him because he had an axe to grind, why would they send him to be their intelligence gatherer? That doesn't ring true, this administration has shown time and again that it only deals with the truly loyal.
Note the loyalty oaths people attending Bush campaign speeches were required to sign. They don't truck with those they disagree with, why would they have sent someone they didn't believe or trust to do this important work?
Regardless, whether they liked him or not, information about a CIA operative should not have been leaked to the public. If they had reason to suspect HER of something, they could have called her back, reassigned her, taken her off of the case. Outing her publicly while she was still working for the CIA has several effects:
1) It ruins her effectiveness on any CIA cases she's working on.
2) Notifies everyone she'd previously been working with (spying on?) that the CIA is on to them, making the job harder for her replacement.
3) Effectively ruins her career with the CIA, as she can hardly be an effective agent when everyone knows who she is.
In other words, without any charges against her, without any disciplinary action, without any reason to justify removing her from her work, a tool in the CIAs intelligence gathering employ was rendered useless and a person's career was ended, and since it was a leak of secret information that accomplished this, punishment needs to be meted out.
This has to have been retaliatory. This White House is too sly to have "accidentally" leaked this information just at a time when such a leak would serve well as a warning to others who might cross them.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 3:03:00 PM
it was this morning -- on Fox and Friends on the Fox News Channel, E. D. Hill was interviewing Kit Bond, a senator from Missouri and she said, "You know, the British intelligence investigation report comes out, it confirms some of the things the president said, but he took a lot of heat for them. Who do you think owes him an apology?"
BOND: I think a lot of Democrats owe him an apology. Ambassador (to Gabon) Wilson, who said that there was no effort by Iraq to get uranium from Africa. The Butler report in Great Britain confirmed what we had seen in the Senate intelligence report, and that is, #1, Ambassador Wilson did not do a good job of trying to find out whether Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium in Africa, and the Butler report said that the president's statement in the state of the union that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa was well founded.
Liam, the above is a reprint from an interview with Senator Kit Bond concerning Wilson, the Senate Intellegence Report and the Butler Report from Great Britain, as posted on Rush Limbaugh's web page. I know you don't like Rush, but it is a word for word copy of the interview that took place on Fox news as stated.
I think it makes my point about why this administration ignored Wilson's report.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 9:49:00 PM
If Rove Leaked, We'd Have Known in '04
July 5, 2005
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT (concerning if Karl Rove is the leaker or not, Rush, in the following transcript says it best)
RUSH: Let me say one thing about this Karl Rove business. Let me tell you how I know. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rove is not the leaker. If Karl Rove were the leaker to Matthew Cooper of TIME Magazine, do you think they'd have kept that news private during the 2004 presidential campaign? This leak occurred in 2003. If Karl Rove engaged in criminal activity, do you not think that the media -- who claimed to know it all now -- would have not released that information during the campaign, given it to John Kerry or something and made it a huge campaign issue that the president's chief political advisor is a criminal?
We have all kinds of stuff leaked all over newspapers, folks. The war plan for Iraq was leaked for the New York Times and the Washington Post. We had all kinds of things leaked during the first term of the Bush administration. All kinds of secrets were let go that were intended to harm Bush. We had forged documents from CBS that were intended to affect the outcome of the election. Do you think if they really had proof that it was Rove that was the leaker of Valerie Plame's name, that the press would have kept that secret during the 2004 campaign? I don't. Why keep that secret? Why go to the trouble of making up and forging documents when you've got the one story here that could really rally people, maybe? Maybe it can't. I don't know how many people really care about this, that Valerie Plame's name was leaked, and I don't know how many people actually consider it a crime, but that was just my first reaction.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 10:15:00 PM
I am not as used as you to looking up quotes on internet sites, but given time I will find them and show the facts as represented by them. I always try to quote someone (like Senator Bond) who is knowledgeable on the subject because of their position on a committee that has access to the info.
In this case, I quote Rush's opinion stated it quite clearly as being his opinion but that I agree with it. I have found him to be a bit more thoughtful on many of the subjects than I.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 10:19:00 PM
Liam, let me show you a bit deeper into the Sadam thing as compared to your concern over the Williams thing... this taken from the "Thunderer" an English newspaper on 3/18/03 whose author is the Labour MP for Cynon Valley.
March 18, 2003
See men shredded, then say you don't back war
By Ann Clwyd
“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”
This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict — the organisation I chair — to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: “Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.”
The accounts Indict has heard over the past six years are disgusting and horrifying. Our task is not merely passively to record what we are told but to challenge it as well, so that the evidence we produce is of the highest quality. All witnesses swear that their statements are true and sign them.
For these humanitarian reasons alone, it is essential to liberate the people of Iraq from the regime of Saddam. The 17 UN resolutions passed since 1991 on Iraq include Resolution 688, which calls for an end to repression of Iraqi civilians. It has been ignored. Torture, execution and ethnic-cleansing are everyday life in Saddam’s Iraq.
Were it not for the no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq — which some people still claim are illegal — the Kurds and the Shia would no doubt still be attacked by Iraqi helicopter gunships.
For more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which I witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.
Many Iraqis wonder why the world applauded the military intervention that eventually rescued the Cambodians from Pol Pot and the Ugandans from Idi Amin when these took place without UN help. They ask why the world has ignored the crimes against them?
All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US, Kuwaiti, British, Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. I have said incessantly that I would have preferred such a tribunal to war. But the time for offering Saddam incentives and more time is over.
I do not have a monopoly on wisdom or morality. But I know one thing. This evil, fascist regime must come to an end. With or without the help of the Security Council, and with or without the backing of the Labour Party in the House of Commons tonight.
The author is Labour MP for Cynon Valley.
or Cynon Valley.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 10:41:00 PM
OK, let me take these one at a time. First, the one about the uranium...
If, in fact, there was a report that he actually DID try to buy uranium, why can't I find any reference to it, except (as you say) on Rush Limbaugh's page?
The internet is a wide place, even if I were to assume that the American media is as left wing as Rush and company would like us to believe (conveniently ignoring that they, and Fox News, are also media), there is no reason for other countries' news sites to be partisan in our political sphere.
The only credible reports I have is that in 1999, Iraqi agents did talk to Niger, and it may be reasonable to believe at that point it was about obtaining Uranium, but in 2003, when the President made that statement, it was four years old, and he presented it as a new development. It was presented as something which was happening at present, like there was every reason to believe Hussein would be taking shipment any day now.
And the White House itself admitted, later, that the intelligence on which it based it's report was faulty and the line should not have been included in the speach. Hardly something they would have done if the intelligence supported their position, it's hard enough to get this White House to admit culpability when they HAVE done something wrong.
But really, all of this is a side matter. Even if Wilson was 100% wrong, there was still NO justification for punishing him, certainly not by leaking the name of a CIA agent, possibly risking her life, certainly ending her career, and ruining whatever intelligence she might have gathered in the war on terror.
That remains a treasonous act, regardless of whether her husband is a brave speaker of truth to power or a partisan weanie out to make the President look bad, or somewhere in between.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:14:00 PM
Now, as to Rush's assertion. I don't believe that either. Look, if either of the reporters in question had caved and ratted out their source, I might believe Rush's assertion that it would have been leaked to the press. But the fact is, protecting sources is part of the life-blood of any journalist. It's something you HAVE to do, if you ever want to get an inside scoop. And it doesn't matter if you failed to protect the source by giving them up to an investigator or by leaking them out to the media, once it gets out, the word gets around that you're not a reporter who can be trusted, and so the next "Deep Throat" goes to someone else and gives THEM the big scoop.
The fact is, these reporters are willing to go to PRISON rather than roll over on their sources. Now, personally, it doesn't matter how partisan I may be, I'm going to take the threat of time in prison a lot more seriously than I'm going to take the possibility that I MIGHT affect the election. And truth be told, it probably wouldn't have, anyway. Because if they'd leaked it, it would have been an unsubstantiated report, and Rove and company would just have pointed to it and said "Look, see the level to which they're willing to sink?" Unless they were willing to give him up to an investigator (which they weren't), all they had was an unfounded accusation.
Look, Newsweek got into trouble for a *FOUNDED* report that was subsequently recanted by what they describe as someone they had reason to believe was a credible source. Odds are good that that whole thing was orchestrated by Rove to make the media look bad again. Have someone highly placed leak something false that sounds close to true, wait until it hits print, and then take it back. Leave Newsweek hanging out to dry.
Why would anyone risk the election on what could only be an UN-SOURCED report?
Rush wants to protect his guy, but Rove's own behavior since Time rolled over doesn't indicate innocence. After all, he had previously told the investigator AND (if Scott McClellan is to be believed) the White House that although he'd talked to Cooper, it was not until after the whole leak story broke, and Coopers own notes and e-mails prove otherwise, there were e-mails with Rove prior to Novak's report. So even if Rove was not the source of the Plame information, he's certainly guilty of perjury.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:24:00 PM
Regarding your opinion of Rush's opinion, I am told that Rush has become a bit more concerned with facts than he used to be, but I have a very hard time separating him from the Rush of the 90s, the one who would report any wild and crazy theory about Clinton, without substantiation or credible evidence.
You may not like Al Franken (I don't particularly, either), but he does do a pretty good job of proving the extent to which Rush did NOT engage in Fact Checking during the Clinton years in "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot".
Now, it's possible that he's gotten better, but even if so, he was reporting his OPINION, and he's proven time and again that his opinion is always that the Right can do no wrong and the Left is never right. This is a level of partisanship that makes him (like Michael Moore on the other side) very hard to take seriously. If one is never willing to admit to anything that the other side did right, nor anything that your side did wrong, it's hard to take one seriously as a source of hard information.
(Which is part of why I like not HAVING a side. I dislike both sides pretty equally on the whole, with this particular President being a singularly odious example on the Right.)
I also try to quote sources when I can. Sometimes, I can't remember them off the top of my head, and I have to go back later and find them, and possibly correct what they said, if I mis-remembered (which doesn't happen all that often). Occasionally I'll go back and still can't find it, or forget that I promised to go back and look. But I agree we're better off quoting our sources than simply flinging statistics and "facts" around.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:30:00 PM
With regard to your last comment, I don't dispute that Saddam Hussein was an evil man, horrible to his people. I don't dispute that his torture outstrips that we reportedly have on our hands (if not at Guantanamo then in other countries to whom the CIA has reportedly handed some prisoners, to do the interogations for us, so that we don't do the torturing ourselves).
And I don't dispute that for those reasons he deserved to be taken out of power. But, I'll say again:
1) That wasn't any of the top reasons we were given for this war.
2) There are a lot of other places that make Iraq look tame (just look up "ethnic cleansing" in google, to read about what's going on in Darfur or Kosovo or Chechnya for some good examples).
3) In all of these cases, if our reason for going in is human rights abuses, then we really need to make sure that we don't act more or less unilaterally, with the majority of the world condemning our attack. If our real reason for going in there was human rights abuses, it should have been very easy to convince the world that those abuses were worthy of taking him out, and getting the world on our side. Again, this sort of regime change is not supposed to be one country over another, or else what's to keep China from deciding that something that WE do violates THEIR standards of behavior and invading US?
IF we had gone into Iraq on purely humanitarian reasons, with the support (or at least approval) of a large number of other countries, then I would have supported it. But, to have gone in on purely those grounds would have been done *AFTER* we had completed the more important (to the security of our nation) work of finding Osama bin Laden and finishing the job in Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? We never finished up there. Note that just a couple of days ago, Taliban members shot down a helicopter and killed 12 of our troops.
Once we were done with that, and al Qaeda had been completely eradicated and bin Laden was rotting away in a jail somewhere or his head was on a pike, *THEN* we could start talking about what a bastard Hussein was to his people, or how horrible the Janjaweed are in Darfur, and started building support for wars on human rights grounds.
The long and the short of my argument is that the ends do not justify the means. We had other, more important fish to fry, and we could have gone into Iraq with world support and without turning it into a focal point for anti-American hatred among Moslems and a recruiting campaign for al Qaeda, but for the lies about Iraqi involvement in 9/11 and WMDs. Lying to the American public and to Congress in order to justify a war doesn't become OKAY just because there was a truthful argument you could have given that would probably have been worthy of that support. Give the truth the both the public and the Congress and let them make up their own minds. If they're with you, great. If not, try to convince them. But lying to them in order to get what you want, and then retroactively finding whatever good may have come out of your actions and pointing at that and saying "See? This was worth doing!" doesn't change the fact that you lied.
Liam.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:50:00 PM
Liam, this will be my last comment on this subject, but I have enjoyed the conversation. I typed in "Iraq Uranium" on Google and the lst page had ten items on it referencing newspaper articles from that time in history. 9 items talked about the proof of their attempts and succeses at buying uranium and proving the point, and 1 discussed the opposite. If you are unable to find these in your sources try using Google. I have found it to be quite neutral.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005 9:09:00 AM
That's essentially what I did as well, but there are two reasons why I may have gotten different results than you did:
1) My reading on your earlier comment was that there was proof that Hussein had PURCHASED uranium, not that there was some indication that he might, 4 years earlier, have been looking for it.
2) I tend to skip over sites that I don't recognize, because as often as not they are blog sites, citing things without reference. Thus, if it's not on MSNBC or Fox News or CNN or Yahoo's AP News Wire, I usually won't use it for proof.
3) The first such site that comes up is MSNBC, which in my opinion doesn't confirm anything. It says that the case may be stronger that what Bush said was true than it initially appeared, but it is by no means a slam dunk. Republican Senator Pat Roberts is quoted as saying that initially she(?) thought the White House was right to repudiate the claim, and now she's unsure. I wouldn't classify "unsure" as proof.
4) The next article in the search list, from USA Today ("The Nations Largest School Newspaper"), is titled "Conflicting Reports Leave Uranium Case Open". It cites one report that says yes, the Uranium citationw as true, and another which says it wasn't. Again, hardly proof of the case.
Meanwhile, however, I think my points are still valid. They are:
1) It was a lie to say that they knew of no reason to suspect their source in the Uranium statement. It might not have been a lie to say that after reviewing all of the evidence, this seemed the most credible. But to state outright (as Condi Rice did) that there WAS no dissenting information was clearly a lie.
2) Again, hindsight is wonderful, and sometimes it gives you benefits that you didn't have at the time of your decision, sometimes it kicks you in the private bits. In this case, hindsight may be lending more credence to the intelligence. But at the time, the intelligence was far from certain (and appears to be even today), which is why the President was wrong to include that in his State of the Union message.
If I pick someone at random and accuse him or her of murder, the fact that it may someday turn out to be that they actually HAD committed murder doesn't change the fact that I didn't know that, so my statement was morally a lie.
3) Finally, again, even if the uranium case had been iron clad indisputable and Wilson had just been out to make the administration look bad, two wrongs don't make a right. Outing his wife as a CIA agent is still a felony and possibly treasonous. It sounds a little bit better if it was in revenge for lying about the President rather than in retaliation for publicizing a truth the Administration wanted hidden (that is to say, the motives sound a little bit better), but it was still an illegal act. Whoever orchestrated that leak, whatever their motive for doing it, has violated the law and very probably committed treason, and should be brought down for it.
But I agree, it's been a great debate! Thanks for taking part in it with me!
Liam
Wednesday, July 06, 2005 10:48:00 AM
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