POIESIS

http://www.extremefunnyhumor.com/vids/breakdance.wmv !! mamerro or anyone know who this is and where i can see more... ??

not bad..only thing i'd say is it's kinda repetitive.

has anyone seen the machinist with christian bale? reputable sources tell me it's good. also i saw that there's a doc on jandek called 'jandek on corwood'... might be good if you dig weird music...

i don't have much to add other than every time i hear someone complain about indians it makes me cringe. it wasn't that long ago.

shit, this really is the 'ultimate' ugly tits thread. i'm calling bullshit on those top page old bag tittles...those can't be real. and those zulu tits are crazy, they look like they are dying from the bottom up. i haven't seen a pair of 'soup ladle tits' yet...hook it up process. they are rare, but threadworthy.

i need to get on that zinn tip, i have that as an audiobook narrated by...matt damon... yep...he's really good at sounding boring, not to mention the retention is puny-ass.

it's official: no fatalities and minimal, if any, serious injuries. anyhow, if i ever had to be in a plane crash, this one would be my choice... no casualties, everyone's good and a kick ass story/experience to boot.

clearly they are all guilty scumbags.. i hope this rots the admin from the inside out.

good, this place needs more 'lolz'.

"That must suck to get shot trying to catch the train going to work." he was dyin' to get there.

^ cool but creepy as shit.

this thread rules.

August 1, 2005 Novak Defends Reporting on C.I.A. Operative By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:06 p.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP)-- Columnist Robert Novak broke his silence Monday about his disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's identity, defending himself against a former agency official's account that he twice warned Novak not to publish the name. In his syndicated column, Novak did not dispute that former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told him he should not print the covert officer's name, Valerie Plame, during conversations they had prior to Novak's July 14, 2003 column. But Novak reasserted that no CIA official ever told him in advance ''that Valerie Plame Wilson's disclosure would endanger her or anybody else.'' Plame is the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent to Africa by the CIA in 2002 to evaluate intelligence that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear materials. More than a year later, with the U.S. government unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times, ''What I Didn't Find In Africa,'' and asked the question: ''Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion?'' Eight days later, Novak wrote an article in which he disclosed Plame's name and cited as sources two unidentified senior Bush administration officials. Novak wrote that the officials had told him Plame had suggested sending her husband to Niger. Wilson claims the leak was retribution for his article and criticism of the administration. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating whether government officials broke the law by disclosing Plame's name to Novak and other journalists. Harlow was interviewed recently by The Washington Post and acknowledged telling the grand jury investigating the case that he spoke to Novak at least three days before the column appeared. Harlow said he could not tell Novak that Plame was a covert officer because that information itself was classified. But in at least two telephone calls, Harlow told Novak that Plame had not authorized her husband's mission and that her name should not be used even if Novak went ahead with a story, according to the Post. Harlow declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press. Novak, whose role in the investigation is unknown, has been silent on the series of events he set in motion. But he wrote about it Monday, saying he was ignoring his lawyers' advice because Harlow's account is ''so patently incorrect and so abuses my integrity as a journalist.'' Novak said Harlow's admonition not to disclose Plame's name ''is meaningless. Once it was determined that Wilson's wife suggested the mission, she could be identified as 'Valerie Plame' by reading her husband's entry in 'Who's Who in America.''' The columnist said Harlow was ''just plain wrong'' in saying he had deliberately disregarded Harlow's comment that Plame had not authorized her husband's trip. ''There never was any question of me talking about Mrs. Wilson 'authorizing.' I was told she 'suggested' the mission, and that is what I asked Harlow,'' he wrote. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/A...agewanted=print

Iraq-Niger: Cheney and the Forgery http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/1026 July 25, 2005 By Ray McGovern By now it should be clear that the White House assault on former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife had much less to do with personalities than with the “particular lie” that Wilson exposed. I believe this helps to explain the highly unusual role Vice President Dick Cheney played regarding the forged “intelligence” about Iraq seeking to acquire uranium from Niger—the source of that particular lie. Our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) writings provide contemporaneous insight into the major flap that hit the White House two years ago, when it was discovered that the “intelligence” was based on a forgery. It was clear at that time that the first item on the White House list of talking points was: “It wasn’t Dick.” Plus ça change. Investigative journalist Robert Parry, writing yesterday in consortiumnews.com, has noted that atop the Republican National Committee’s current list of “Joe Wilson’s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements” sits this priority item: “Wilson insisted that the Vice President’s office sent him to Niger.” This is a deliberate distortion of what Wilson has said, but if we were to address all such distortions we would be here all day. Besides, the RNC would very much like us to focus on the distortions, and our media have allowed themselves to be led by the nose. So let’s leave this one aside for the moment. What strikes me more and more is the rather transparent two-year-old campaign to dissociate Cheney from L’Affaire Iraq-Niger. On July 14, 2003, the day of Robert Novak’s opening salvo against the Wilsons, VIPS issued a Memorandum for the President (http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0714-01.htm) with two main sections: “The Forgery Flap,” and “The Vice President’s Role.” In that memo, we also made an important recommendation, which may have seemed a bit extreme at the time. But it was already possible to discern what was going on: We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney “not guilty.” His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation. Protesting (or Protecting) Too Much We were all children once. Remember how, when you and your peers got caught in some mischief, the ringleader had to be protected? “Who decided to do this terrible thing?” was often the question. “Not Dick (or Tom or Harry)” was often the instinctive, immediate answer. Remember how, as a parent, that made you really wonder about Dick (or Tom or Harry)? In our memo of July 14, 2003, we warned President George W. Bush that the Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery was “a microcosm of a mischievous nexus of overarching problems” in his White House. We cited the remarks of then-presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer earlier that week, which set the tone for what has followed—right up to today. When asked about the forgery Fleischer noted—as if drawing on well memorized talking points—that the vice president was not guilty of anything. (The denial was gratuitous; the question asked did not even mention the vice president’s possible role.) And the liturgy of absolution continued on July 11, 2003, when then-director of the CIA, George Tenet, did his awkward best to absolve the vice president of responsibility. The “Particular Lie” and Forgery As noted earlier, the main motivation of the White House campaign to discredit the Wilsons had to do with the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration’s plans. The lie was that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that, despite Iraq’s inability to deliver such weapons on the U.S., this somehow posed a “grave and gathering” threat. The plans were to use that ominous specter—replete with the “mushroom cloud”—to deceive Congress into approving war on Iraq. The problem was that not even the obsequious George Tenet could come up with evidence that could withstand close scrutiny. U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence knew that Iraq’s nuclear program had been destroyed after the Gulf War and there was no persuasive evidence that Baghdad was moving to reconstitute it. Even the imagery analysts, whom former CIA director John Deutch gave away to the Pentagon in 1996, could not come up with the evidence needed, despite very strong incentive to please their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. What a welcome windfall, then, when a deus ex machina suddenly appeared in the form of a report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency on February 12, 2002. According to the exhaustive report of the Senate intelligence committee on U.S. intelligence performance on Iraq, the DIA report was based on information the CIA had included in a field report a week before from a “[foreign] government service.” Although State Department and other intelligence analysts had earlier labeled such reporting “highly suspect,” the DIA report of February 12, 2002 included no judgments regarding credibility. Cheney Highly Interested Oddly, the DIA report was flagged for Vice President Cheney. Why “oddly?” Because in more than two years of briefing then-Vice President George H. W. Bush every other morning, not once did he ask a question about a DIA report or even indicate that he had read one. That this particular report was given to Cheny almost certainly reflects the widespread practice of “cherry picking” intelligence—a practice honed to a fine art by the current administration—and suggests perhaps even more. It seems to me a safe bet that the DIA report was prepared in a response to a request from the vice president’s office to come up with something on the subject that could be shown to the president—something not burdened by caveats regarding source and content from troublesome substantive experts. Vice President Cheney immediately expressed interest in the report. According to the Senate intelligence committee, he asked his CIA morning briefer for CIA’s analysis of the issue. And this, of course, is what set in motion CIA’s hurried request of Joe Wilson that he go back to Niger to pursue the matter. When you receive a direct request from the vice president you leave no stone unturned. The Senate intelligence committee report includes this portion of the CIA immediate response to Cheney’s expression of interest: “Information on the alleged uranium contract between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a foreign government service report that lacks crucial details, and we are working to clarify the information and to determine whether it can be corroborated...Some of the information in the report contradicts reporting from the U.S. embassy in Niamey [Niger]. U.S. diplomats say the French government-led consortium that operates Niger’s two uranium mines maintains complete control over uranium mining and yellowcake production.” When the vice president of the United States expresses interest so keen that that an immediate interim response is deemed necessary, it is certain that the CIA will place considerable priority on reporting back to the vice president the results of its follow-up efforts—the more so, since in its initial response, the it said it was “working to clarify the information and determine whether it can be corroborated.” Thus, the pretense by administration officials that the vice president was never briefed on the results of former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s inquiries in Niamey stretches credulity well beyond the breaking point. Moreover, according to the Senate report, in bending over backwards to oblige the vice president, the agency sent a separate message to him naming the “foreign government service.” This raises the question as to why Cheney would be interested in such detail, since such is not normally provided absent a specific request. In any case, it is clear that Dick Cheney knows more about the forgery’s provenance than the rest of us do. Made to Order The information—dubious or no—that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger was made to order (perhaps literally, as I suggest below). Since Iraq had no other use for uranium, a closely coordinated White House-10 Downing Street spin machine went into high gear, playing up the report as proof that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. The intelligence analysts had to hold their noses—not only because of the dubious sourcing but because the substance of the report made little sense in view of the super-strict monitoring of uranium exports from Niger by the French-led consortium. To substantive analysts the report was spurious on its face; only later were they to learn that it was based on a crude forgery. Provenance and likelihood be damned. The White House now had a “report” that could be used effectively with Congress and our incredibly credulous press. Tenet could be counted on to keep his nose-holding professionals out of sight. And the nature of the source, which, according to the “[foreign] government service,” included the “verbatim text” of the Iraq-Niger agreement on uranium, could be kept from experts like those at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) until after the vote in Congress and after the juggernaut for war could not be stopped. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Africa canard assumed such prominent importance in the administration’s case for war that, even when it was forced to admit that a forgery was involved, the story simply could not be dropped altogether—either in Washington or in London. Both governments proceeded to blow still more smoke on the affair, claiming that London had the story from other sources as well. Thus, none of us in VIPS were in the least surprised to learn recently of the line taken by Karl Rove with Time reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. In an email that Cooper sent his bosses at Time, Cooper said Rove insisted that Wilson’s findings on Iraq-Niger were flawed. According to Cooper, Rove “implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger.” That was false. Neither British nor U.S. intelligence has come up with anything throwing the slightest doubt on Wilson’s conclusion that the whole thing was bogus. Who Did It? Who authored the forgery remains a mystery—but one that the Republican-controlled Congress has avoided trying to solve, even though many legislators expressed outrage at having been snookered into voting for war. Senate intelligence committee chair Pat Roberts, a devout White House loyalist, has demonstrated a curious lack of curiosity. And nothing that ranking minority member Jay Rockefeller did could persuade Roberts to ask the FBI to investigate. So those searching for answers are reduced to asking the obvious: Cui bono? Who stood to benefit from such a forgery? A no-brainer—those lusting for war on Iraq. And who might they be? Look up the “neo-conservative” writings on the website of the Project for the New American Century. There you will find information on people like Michael Ledeen, “Freedom Analyst” at the American Enterprise Institute and a key strategist among “neoconservative” hawks in and out of the Bush administration. Applauding the invasion of Iraq, Ledeen asserted—with equal enthusiasm—that the war could not be contained, and that “it may turn out to be a war to remake the world.” Beyond his geopolitical punditry, Ledeen’s curriculum vitae shows he is no stranger to rogue operations. A longtime Washington operative, he was fired as a “consultant” for the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan for running fool’s errands for Oliver North during the Iran-Contra subterfuge. One of Ledeen’s Iran-Contra partners in crime, so to speak, was Elliot Abrams, who was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra. Abrams was pardoned before jail time, however, by George H. W. Bush, and he is now George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser. Ledeen is said to enjoy easy entrée to the office of the vice president and the Pentagon, as well as to his friend Abrams. Made in the U.S.A? During a radio interview with Ian Masters on April 3, 2005, former CIA operative Vincent Cannistraro charged that the Iraq-Niger documents were forged in the United States. Drawing on earlier speculation regarding who forged the documents, Masters asked, “If I were to say the name Michael Ledeen to you, what would you say?” Cannistraro replied, “You’re very close.” Ledeen has denied having anything to do with the forgery. Yet the company he keeps with other prominent Iran-Contra convictees/pardonees/intelligence contractors suggests otherwise. Besides, Ledeen has had a longstanding association with the Italian intelligence service, which, according to most accounts, played an important role in disseminating the forged documents. Could Italian intelligence be the “[foreign] government service” mentioned repeatedly in the Senate intelligence committee report? If Ledeen and associates were involved, this might also help explain the amateurishness of the forged “verbatim texts.” These covert action veterans would have sorely missed the institutional expertise formerly at their beck and call. The Cover-up: the Best Defense Is..... It is a safe bet that Joseph Wilson suspected this kind of skullduggery. He nevertheless played it straight. After hearing the bogus Iraq-Niger story repeated in the president’s January 28, 2003 state-of-the-union address and ascertaining that it was based primarily on the original report, Wilson began to approach administration officials suggesting that they retract the story or he would in conscience be compelled to make public what had happened. He was told, in effect, Go ahead; who will believe you? So he did. Astonishingly, the administration and our domesticated “mainstream” press have succeeded to a large extent in making Wilson’s credibility the issue—witness, for example, last week’s frontal assault by fast-talking, no-holds-barred Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman. Joseph Wilson had been around long enough to know what to expect. Moreover, the White House apparently made it very clear that they would make him pay if he went public. Three weeks before The New York Times published Wilson’s op-ed “What I Did Not Find in Africa,” he and I shared keynoting duties at a conference on Iraq. It was the first time I met Wilson. He told me then that he was about to publish. I remember him adding, with considerable emphasis, “They are going to come after me big-time. I don’t know exactly how, but they are going to do it.” Well, now we know how; and why. Last week it became clear that Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was as active as Karl Rove in doing the job on the Wilsons. Surprise, surprise. We ended our July 14 Memorandum for the President from VIPS with this reminder: This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew to resign. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight. And that was two years ago.

coolio.. check this...sounds of the aurora: http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/mcgreevy/ irdial discs actually has a whole cd of this stuff; strictly audio fanatic shit.

flavor.

Rove's Nuclear Threats Jonathan Schell July 28, 2005 http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050728/...ear_threats.php Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books. This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com, will appear in the August 15th issue of The Nation magazine, and appears here by permission. Like every important government crisis, the outing of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame by the president's chief political adviser, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others, must be seen in many contexts at once. (As all the world knows, Rove's aim was to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly disproved the administration's claim that Iraq was buying uranium yellowcake from Niger—a key element in the administration's justifications for the Iraq War.) Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Sidney Blumenthal of Salon point to the broader story of Rove's habitual practice of defending his political clients by smearing their competitors and detractors. Blumenthal titles his piece "Rove's War" and Fineman speaks of "The World According to Rove." Frank Rich of The New York Times , on the other hand, suggests that the most important war to look at is the one in Iraq. He says that the injustice to the Wilsons and even to the CIA is secondary: "The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds." In other words, what's important is not the "war" but the war. Surely, they are all right. It's true that the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict, but it's also true that the resolution of the scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on American politics, and even on the American system of government. Perhaps the most important political question is whether the Bush administration is to be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete impunity and a free field of action to do whatever it likes—from waging war to designing and presiding over systems of torture to breaking domestic law. There are other contexts to consider, too. If Rich is right that the scandal is really about the Iraq War, then we have to ask what the war was about. The administration's chief answer is weapons of mass destruction and, more particularly, nuclear weapons. The atomic signature is scrawled all over the scandal. It is present, of course, in the uranium the President falsely said Iraq was seeking from Niger. And Plame, as it turns out, worked for the CIA on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To defend its nuclear lies, the administration destroyed a (possible) source of nuclear truth. The smear campaign thus did double damage in the nuclear-weapon field: It propped up, however briefly, the erroneous justification for the war while shutting down authentic information on the broader problem. The nuclear issue popped up again in a State Department memo Colin Powell brought with him on Air Force One shortly after Wilson's op-ed piece appeared. It is now famous because it disclosed Plame's identity as Wilson's wife. Less noticed is that the bulk of the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger uranium allegation. This must be one of the most rebutted claims in history. Before Wilson ever spoke up, it had been disproved by several government agencies; the director of the Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei; and, of course, the State Department. (As for Powell, in February 2003 he had told the UN Security Council, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.") Whatever else the scandal is, it is also an episode in the six-decade history of the nuclear age. In the wake of the cold war, many people imagined that nuclear danger had disappeared. A decade of utter neglect followed. Then, in 1998, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests launched the two countries on a nuclear arms race. Soon other countries, including North Korea and Iran, were knocking at the door of the nuclear club. But it wasn't until 9/11 that the neglected peril reared up again in the public mind -- and returned to the center of policy. The fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an American city was, of course, the chief justification for the war, but it was more than that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of preventive military strikes -- necessary, the President said, to forestall the hostile states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his words, "as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." At the root of the policy was a radical reconception of the way to stop proliferation. Hitherto, the policy had been to address it by negotiation and disarmament treaties. Now it was to be addressed by military force. The decade of neglect had led to the most severe collision of nuclear policy with nuclear reality since the Cuban missile crisis. The Iraq War was the result, though not the only one. While the U.S. military was looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing forward down the nuclear path. It's worth recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part the product of misguided nuclear strategy. Policy-makers, well aware that they could not win a nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the Central European theater, hoped instead to win a "limited war" with conventional arms on the "periphery." When it went wrong, the consequence was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters. That chain of reasoning died with the cold war, but nuclear danger lived on to produce new and possibly more dangerous illusions. The worst is that the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their associated technology and know-how can be stopped, or prevented in advance, by arms. Once that conclusion was accepted, mere hints of danger, wisps of fact and speculations became actionable, bomb-able. But if there is one thing in this world that cannot be bombed out of existence, it is an illusion. And illusions, when rigidly defended, breed encounters with the law. Thus did a mistaken revolution in nuclear policy, proceeding under the guise of the "war on terror," produce the lies that produced the war that produced the whistleblowing that produced the smears that produced the blown cover that produced the cover-up that produced the legal investigation that produced the political and legal crisis that now swirls around Karl Rove. Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

The FBI's review of WMD forgeries looks like a sham July 28, 2005 By Josh Marshall http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/...all/072805.html As long as the Rove/Plame/Wilson saga is now back on the front pages, let’s remember some loose threads that could still use some pulling. And not just ones about the legal particulars of what Karl Rove knew or when he did what — but the big story, the White House’s knowing use of phony intelligence about an Iraqi nuclear program to game the country into war. And behind even that, those pesky Niger uranium forgeries. Where did they come from? Who created them? And why? This may seem like ground that’s already been thoroughly plowed. In fact it remains largely virgin earth. Let’s review some of the details. It’s been known since just before the outbreak of the war, almost two and a half years ago, that the prime “evidence” at the center of administration claims about an Iraq nuclear program was the work of forgers. This was announced by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the eve of the war, and in reaction Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) called for an FBI investigation into the origins of the forgeries themselves. Ironically, though, that right-minded request became an excuse for not getting to the bottom of the mystery. As last year’s Senate intel report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction states in a footnote at bottom of Page 57, it was because of this FBI investigation that the Intelligence Committee walled off everything about the documents prior to their arrival at the U.S. Embassy in October 2002. So everything about how those forgeries came into being and why they ended up in the hands of the U.S. government remained beyond the purview of the committee. Committee investigators simply didn’t look into it. That might make sense if there were an active FBI investigation. But there’s every reason to think that the FBI’s investigation was a phantom probe from the start. When my colleagues and I started investigating the Niger forgeries in early 2004, the word we got from FBI sources was that the file the bureau had put together on the forgeries was embarrassingly thin. Sources can be wrong, of course. And one would expect the true details of such a sensitive inquiry to be held very tightly. So we didn’t put that much stock in those claims. But, as we began to investigate the story ourselves, the thought that our FBI sources might be right became more and more difficult to avoid. For instance, first we talked to Elisabetta Burba. She’s the reporter for Italy’s Panorama magazine who first brought the papers into the U.S. Embassy in Rome back in October 2002. The FBI had spoken to Burba. But Burba described an essentially cursory interview. One prime interest of the bureau was finding a way to make contact with the unnamed “security consultant” who had tried to sell her the documents. The agent who interviewed Burba suggested possible ways that they could communicate with this Mr. X while still maintaining his anonymity. She was asked to follow up with the man and see if any of the proposed means of communicating would be acceptable. She did that. But, according to Burba, the bureau’s agent never followed up. The next she heard from him was a courtesy call months later to tell her he was moving on to another assignment. That’s what Burba told us. Later, through Burba, we did make contact with Mr. X. His name is Rocco Martino, a former agent of Italian military intelligence. We even brought him to the United States to be interviewed — twice, in the summer of 2004. As we moved ahead with our reporting and found more clues tying the forgeries to Italian intelligence, Martino’s name was leaked to a number of European newspapers. Whatever Martino’s role was in the whole caper, by the time we brought him to New York for the second time — in late August 2004 — he had been identified by name in major papers across Europe as the seller of the documents. The revelation of Martino’s identity had created such a stir in Italy that for his second trip arrangements had to be made for him to leave the country before boarding a plane to the United States. Martino, of course, traveled to New York under his own name. And given that his name was now known and that several press accounts had suggested that he was himself the forger, my colleague and I had a friendly bet as to whether FBI agents might be waiting at customs to speak with him when he got off the plane in New York. Needless to say, no one was there. And I won the bet. Nor did the bureau make any attempt to contact him for the several days he remained in the United States or after he returned to Italy, despite the fact that I had by that time written publicly about our contacts with the man. Now, I can’t know what the FBI has done to get to the bottom of this mystery. And I haven’t been actively reporting on this story for more than six months. But it’s never made sense to me that the investigation can be that serious if little or no attempt has been made to question the man at the center of the mystery. Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: jmarshall@thehill.com

that post no bills thing cracked me up.

gnarley.

your subject matter is always fucking excellent...

nice little summary and use of vouchsafe. that book is now on my booklist.

enge." * * * The chronology will no doubt continue to expand in the days and weeks ahead. There may well be a ticking time-bomb in the Grand Jury investigation of the Plame leak that goes beyond anything we now envision. In earlier findings in cases of reporters refusing to testify, DC Circuit Judge, David Tatel, a distinguished jurist known for his devotion to civil liberties and especially press freedoms, had stoutly maintained a federal privilege for the media, shielding it from being compelled to testify except under the most exceptional conditions. But in then later joining his colleagues in ordering Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller to testify, Tatel reviewed extensive secret information from the prosecutor, devoted eight blacked-out pages of his judgment to the material, and concluded that the privilege he had upheld throughout his career as a lawyer and judge had to give way before "the gravity of the suspected crime." No other element of the scandal bodes so ill for the Bush regime. There is also the intriguing relationship between John Bolton, the regime's stymied appointee to the UN, and Judith Miller, the New York Times correspondent sent to jail for contempt in refusing to divulge her sources on Plame even for a story she never wrote. Bolton's close relationship to Miller, in which many suspect the right-wing lobbyist handed the reporter much of the fraudulent accounts of Iraqi weaponry that ended up on the front page of the Times, may well have encompassed as well the passing of information from the INR memo on Plame, which Bolton saw before Powell or even Rice. Then, too, as the Progressive Review's Sam Smith and Counterpunch's Alexander Cockburn have pointed out from their lonely perch of substance and perspective atop what's left of American journalism, there is, in the end, much less to the whole story than meets the eye. In their too obvious relish of celebrity, Wilson and Plame as heroes are as dubious as the Niger letters. The CIA, and the Presidents who used it as a private mafia, account for a more than half-century history far more catastrophic than a legion of seedy Roves and Libbys or even multiple Bush regimes. Relentlessly corrupt, inept, anachronistic, if ever an institution deserved to be "outed" and prosecuted in its numbers, it is our vastly bloodstained intelligence agency. But as so often in politics, we are left with the lesser, still needed reckoning at hand. And in that, of course, the larger issue beyond Plame is the Bush regime's Big Lie behind the invasion of Iraq, in which the phantom Nigerien yellowcake was an important malignant element. No government since World War II has more blatantly invented the pretext for waging a war of aggression. The Rove and Libby collusion only begins to peel away the layers of the crime. Rice is the next skein to be pulled. Her manifest failures in the fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal responsibilities of the National Security Advisor-the sheer incompetence and shallowness that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected or misunderstood-should have been enough to have run her from public office long ago, of course, were it not for her hold on this tragically flawed president, and her deplorable immunity amid the chronic political cowardice of both the Democrats and the media. Now, however, her role in the Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused. She alone among senior officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive stage of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud. She alone was the White House peer-and in national security matters the superior-to Rove and Libby, who never could have acted without her collusion in peddling Plame's identity. She as much as anyone had a stake in smearing Wilson by any and all means at hand. If Rove and Libby are to be held criminally or at least politically accountable for a breach of national security, our "mushroom cloud" secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them. (This article owes a primary debt to the ground-breaking research of Professor Gary Leupp of Tufts University in his "Faith-Based Intelligence," CounterPunch.org, July 26, 2003.) Roger Morris was Senior Staff on the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. Morris is the author of Partners in Power: the Clintons and Their America and with Sally Denton The Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas. He is completing Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US policy and covert interventions in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, forthcoming from Alfred Knopf. Morris can be reached at: rpmbook@gmail.com This article originally appeared on the Green Institute GP360 website, egp360.net http://counterpunch.org/morris07272005.html

Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal The Source Beyond Rove By ROGER MORRIS Former NSC staffer "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime's chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator's ties to Al Qaeda. Rice's demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson's now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration's immediate retaliatory "outing" of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President's supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak-altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely <caron>or deliberately ignored-in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, Condoleezza Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby. For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush's rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame's identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting. * * * The evidence of Rice's complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice's unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice's deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President's, Rice's, and the regime's inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity-in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all. * * * 1995: Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, in charge of Iraq's strategic weaponry, defects to the West. He tells CIA debriefers that at his command after the Gulf War, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." His claim is supported by continuing reports of UN inspectors and US intelligence, including sophisticated imagery analysis by both the CIA and Pentagon. 1999: The first rumors begin to circulate in Europe that the Iraqis may be trying to buy "yellow cake" weapons grade uranium from Niger, a poor West African country that earns more than half its export income from the strategic ore. Since Iraq is known to have used only amply available Iraqi uranium in nuclear research until its disbanding in 1991, and because Niger's yellow cake is produced solely at two mines owned by a French consortium and the entire output strictly controlled and committed to sale to France, European intelligence agencies and UN officials soon discount the story-though the rumors persist along with other alarming allegations by Iraqi exile groups long working to incite the US Government to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, American embassies and CIA stations in Europe routinely report the rumors in repeated, widely circulated cable traffic to Washington over the summer and fall of 1999. Among the recipients is the nuclear non-proliferation section of the Clinton Presidency's NSC staff, whose files on Iraq, a "red flag" country, are turned over to Rice and her staff when she assumes office eighteen months later January 2001: Parties unknown burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up offices are various valuables along with stationery and official seals, which the Italian police warn might be used to forge documents. February 24, 2001: "Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction," says Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." July 29, 2001: "We are able to keep his [saddam's] arms from him," NSC advisor Rice tells the media. "His military forces have not been rebuilt." August 2001: An African informant reportedly hands Italian intelligence what are purported to be official Nigerien documents of "great importance." Among them are letters apparently dealing with Niger's sale of uranium to Iraq, including an alleged transaction in 2000 for some 500 tons of uranium oxide, telltale in a weapons program. The Italians routinely pass the letters on through NATO channels to the US, where by the fall of 2001 both State Department and Department of Energy nuclear intelligence analysts doubt the genuineness of the documents, and duly report their findings to Rice's NSC staff. January 2002: In cables cleared by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, the first high-level reference to the subject after 9/11, Washington asks the US ambassador to Niger to uncover any possible Iraqi purchases of uranium. After talks with senior Nigerien officials and French executives in the uranium mining operations, along with a still wider investigation by the embassy, including the CIA, the ambassador reports back that there is no evidence of such dealings, and no reason to suspect them. February 2002: Vice President Cheney hears "about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger," according to what his chief of staff Libby later tells Time. In his daily intelligence briefing by the CIA, as Libby relates, Cheney asks about "the implication of the [Niger] report." CIA briefing officers tell Cheneyand Libby of the documents passed on months before by the Italians, including the State and Energy Department judgment that the papers are probable forgeries. A few days later, with the routine concurrence of Rice and her staff, Cheney through Libby asks the CIA to look into the matter further. The Agency has no ready experts in Niger suitable to assign the Vice President's requested inquiry. After routinely canvassing the relevant offices and relatively brief discussion, they seize on the suggestion of one of their operatives working on nuclear proliferation issues, a mid-level CIA veteran named Valerie Plame who has worked abroad and in Washington under "NOC" <caron>non-official cover in private business in contact with several foreign sources. Her pertinent if personal recommendation for the assignment is her husband, then-fifty-three year-old Joseph Wilson IV, a retired Foreign Service Officer who has served briefly as Charge d'Affairs in Baghdad in 1990 and then from 1992-1993 as US Ambassador to Gabon, a seasoned diplomat with experience in both Iraq and West Africa, and even some specialization in African strategic minerals. February 19, 2002: A meeting at the CIA discusses sending Wilson to Niger. Attending is an analyst from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research who says the trip is unnecessary, since the US embassy in Niger and European intelligence agencies have already disproved the story of an Iraqi purchase-and whose notes of the meeting, including the facts of Valerie Plame's CIA identity as an NOC operative on WMD and her role in recommending her husband, will be the basis for later crucial memos in the scandal. Despite State Department objection, the CIA decides to go ahead with the Wilson mission to satisfy the Vice President's request, and the former ambassador is "invited out [to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia] to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject," as he will remember it. Wilson is introduced to the gathering by his wife, who then leaves the room. In late February, with the concurrence of CIA Director George Tenet as well as Rice and Powell, Wilson flies to Niger. February 24, 2002: Meanwhile, to further emphasize the importance of the issue and with Washington's concurrence, the US Ambassador in Niger has invited to the capital of Niamey Marine four-star General Carlton Fulford, Jr., deputy commander of the US-European Command, which is responsible for military relations with sub-Saharan West Africa. Fulford meets with Niger's president and other senior officials on the 24th, and afterward confirms the Ambassador's earlier findings, as he later tells the Washington Post, that there is no evidence of the sale of yellow cake to Iraq, and that Niger's uranium supply is "secure." The General's report duly goes up through the chain of his command to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon and on to Rice at the NSC, Powell at State, the CIA, the Energy Department and other interested agencies. March 5, 2002: Having met with several Nigerien officials and sources over a ten-day visit and debriefed at length the US Embassy staff and Ambassador (who promptly cables a report on to Powell and Rice), Wilson returns from Niger and gives CIA officers, as they request, an oral report which is the basis for a CIA-written memo on his trip then forwarded to Rice and Powell, and for a further CIA debriefing for Cheney in response to his original request. Republicans will later dispute about how categorical or emphatic Wilson's report and its derivatives actually are at this point. He refers to "an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary" for Iraq who had approached Niger about sales of ore, though adds that Niger "ignored the request." But the essence of his conclusion is, once again, that there is no evidence of Iraq procuring uranium from Niger. In de facto acceptance of this finding, the several Washington agencies involved in the issue, including Rice and her NSC staff, make no other effort-beyond the US embassy investigation, General Fulford's trip, and the Wilson mission-to investigate the matter further in Niger or anywhere else. May-June 2002: With the Iraq-Niger uranium issue apparently laid to rest, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld establishes in the Pentagon, with the full knowledge of Rice, a new Office of Special Plans, under the direction of Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the cabal of neo-conservatives the Bush regime has assembled at the upper civilian reaches of the Defense Department. Believing the CIA, FBI and other agencies in myriad negative reports, including the Wilson mission, have simply "failed" to find existing evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz direct "Special Plans" to gather and interpret its own "intelligence" on Iraq. Meanwhile Rice takes over coordination of efforts to stymie ongoing arms inspections of Iraq by the United Nations. June 26, 2002: In a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior British officials at Ten Downing Street, Sir Richard Dearlove, "C," head of MI6 British intelligence, reports on what he found during recent Washington conversations at the highest levels of the CIA, White House and other US official quarters. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," as a summary records his words. "But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." July 2002: Concerned at the potential opposition to the war, and to coordinate policy and media relations for the coming attack on Iraq, a special White House Iraq Group (WHIG) is set up, chaired by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and composed of Rice, Rove, Libby, Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, and media strategists Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide, Mary Matalin and others. The WHIG is to plan and control carefully all high-level leaks and public statements on Iraq and related issues. "Everything, I mean everything, was run through them and came out of them," a ranking official will say of the group. "It was understood, of course, that Condi or Hadley would clear everything from a policy point of view, Rove and Libby would do the politics, and the rest would handle the spin." August 26, 2002: "Now we know," Vice President Cheney tells the VFW convention, "Saddam Hussein has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." Rice routinely clears this speech. September 2002: Several months earlier, the US and UN embargo of Iraq has seized a shipment of high strength aluminum tubes, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State and Energy Departments duly identify as designed solely for launch tubes for conventional artillery rockets. Despite those expert findings, Rice now claims publicly that the tubes are "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Apparently reflecting the original rumors of the Iraq-Niger deal and the subsequent dubious documents handed the Italians thirteen months before (copies of which have reportedly been given to MI6 British intelligence by an Italian journalist), a British Government White Paper on Iraq released in September mentions that Baghdad "had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Pressed on the issue by the CIA (on the basis of its now-several reports debunking the story) to drop that statement as inaccurate, the British claim they have sources for the assertion "aside from the discredited [Nigerien] letters," but never identify them. Rice is fully briefed on all these exchanges. (Eventually, British intelligence officials will admit the 2002 White Paper statement on uranium from Africa was "unfounded." Meanwhile, however, much of official Washington is aware of the CIA-MI6 squabble over the Niger uranium and questionable letters. "The Brits," a Congressional intelligence committee staffer will later tell the New Yorker's Sy Hersh in discussing the issue, "placed more stock in them than we did.") It's also that September, in answer to a question in a CNN interview about what evidence the White House has of Iraqi nuclear weapons, that Rice makes her infamous quip, a line first authored by Mary Matalin-"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." September 26, 2002: In closed-hearing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (with a transcript closely reviewed by Rice), Powell refers to "reports" of an Iraqi purchase of Nigerien uranium as "further proof" of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. October 2002: Seizing on the British White Paper, despite the documented disagreement of the CIA as well as the State and Energy Departments, the Office of Special Plans inserts in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, apparently one of the few documents Bush reads in this sequence, a reference to the British report of an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. Though the NIE at CIA insistence notes "different interpretations of the significance of the Niger documents," and that the State Department judges them "highly dubious," the reference to Nigerien uranium is listed among other reasons to conclude that Iraq poses a danger to American national security. "Facing clear evidence of peril," Bush says in a speech in Cincinnati that October, "we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Behind the scenes, an earlier draft of the October speech has also contained a reference to an Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium from Niger, the now-revived claim from the discredited documents of fifteen months before. CIA Director Tenet urges that the White House take out that reference, and though the Pentagon's Special Plans office is pushing for inclusion of the reference, Rice's deputy (and eventual successor) Stephen Hadley, after two memoranda and a phone call from Tenet, finally agrees to drop the passage. Rice is fully briefed on all this. December 19, 2002: As preparations are hurried for the attack on Iraq, a State Department "Fact Sheet," cleared by Rice, asks ominously, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" The assumption of the Niger-Iraq uranium connection now begins to appear regularly in the President's Daily Brief, the CIA intelligence briefing which is now also drafted under the influence of the Office of Special Plans. January 23, 2003: In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Why We Know Iraq is Lying," Rice refers prominently to "Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad." January 28, 2003: "The British government," Bush says in his State of the Union litany on the dangers of Iraq, "has [sic] learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Rice and her staff, of course, have as always laboriously worked and reworked the national security passages of the speech. In readying the address, Rice's NSC Staff assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley, a ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the "uranium from Africa" passage, which obviously refers to the old Niger issue. Foley says the CIA doubts the Niger letters and connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference. In typical bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it would be "technically accurate" to say that the British had in fact issued such a report on Iraq, however mistaken. With the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage stays, becoming a major piece of "evidence" in the case for war. February 5, 2003: In his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, a factor in silencing many potential dissenters in Congress, Powell pointedly omits any reference to the Nigerien uranium. The story "had not stood the test of time," he says later. That February, too, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as part of his own propaganda for war, issues a Ten Downing Street paper called "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," which includes a reference to the Nigerien uranium. Thought to be drawn from authoritative MI6 intelligence, the paper is soon widely ridiculed, eleven of its sixteen pages found to be copied verbatim from an old Israeli magazine. March 7, 2003: In response to a request four months before, the State Department finally hands over to the IAEA copies of the Niger letters, which UN experts promptly dismiss as "not authentic" and "blatant forgeries." "These documents are so bad," a senior IAEA official tells the press, "that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking." A former high-level intelligence official tells The New Yorker, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up." March 8, 2003: In reply to questions about the forgery, a State Department spokesman says the US Government "fell for it." "It was the information that we had. We provided it," Powell will say lamely on "Meet the Press." "If that information is inaccurate, fine." March 17, 2003: Bush, in a statement cleared by Rice, repeats that," Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." March 19, 2003: Bush orders the invasion of Iraq. March 21, 2003: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D. WVa) writes FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for an investigation of the Niger letters. "There is a possibility," Rockefeller says, "that the fabrication of these [Niger] documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq," May 6, 2003: In an anonymous interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Ambassador Wilson-identified none too subtly as "a former US Ambassador to [sic] Africa," says about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq: "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this [that Saddam had no nuclear program or weapons] for a year." June 10, 2003: Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman asks the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) for a briefing on the Niger uranium issue, and specifically the State Department's opposition to the continuing White House view that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake. The resulting memo is dated the same day, and drawn from notes on the February 19 meeting at the CIA on the Wilson mission and other sources. Befitting the sensitivity of the information, the memo is classified "Top Secret," and contains in one paragraph, separately marked '(S/NF)" for "Secret/No dissemination to foreign governments or intelligence agencies, " two sentences describing in passing Valerie "Wilson's" identity as a CIA operative and her role in the inception of the Wilson trip to Niger. This June 10 memo reportedly does not use her maiden name Plame. June 12, 2003: The Washington Post reports that an unnamed "former US ambassador" was sent to Niger to look into the uranium issue and found no evidence of any Iraqi purchase. At the State Department, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage asks INR to prepare a memorandum on the background of what the Post is reporting, and INR sends to Armitage that same day a copy of the June 10 memo to Grossman. The memo is also sent to Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security (and future UN Ambassador-designate) John Bolton. July 6, 2003: Outraged by continuing references to the Nigerien uranium, Wilson breaks his anonymity with a sensational New York Times op-ed disclosing his mission to Niger sixteen months before, and the fact that he found no evidence of an Iraqi purchase of ore. "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war," Wilson writes, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." He tells "Meet the Press," "Either the administration has information that it has not shared with the public or ... they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision that had already been made to go to war." Later in the day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage calls INR Assistant Secretary Carl W. Ford at home, and asks him to send a briefing memo to Powell about the Niger uranium issue. Ford simply pulls out the previous June 10 memo with its reference to Wilson's wife (her name now corrected from Wilson to Plame), addresses it to Powell, and forwards the memo to Rice to be passed on to Powell, who is due to leave the next day with the Presidential party on a trip to Africa. Meanwhile, the WHIG is also moving that Sunday to deal aggressively with the Wilson op-ed. They will no longer focus on the too obviously fraudulent claim of an Iraqi purchase of yellow cake-White House orthodoxy before the invasion-but will instead discount the issue, discredit Wilson, and shift blame for the now-embarrassing State of the Union reference. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer is to try to downplay and dismiss Wilson's article on-the-record at the next day's press briefing, while Rice and others begin to make off-the-record calls to the media to do the same. While pursuing their own contacts among right-wing reporters and columnists, Rove and Libby are also to work with CIA Director George Tenet in a statement by Tenet taking responsibility for any inaccuracy in the State of the Union passage. July 7, 2003: Under a barrage of questions at a 9:30 am press briefing, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says of the Wilson claims, "There is zero, nada, nothing new here,' adding that "Wilson's own report [shows] that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales." (A reference to the "Algerian-Nigerian intermediary" in Wilson's debriefings.) ("That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import asignificant quantity of uranium as the President alleged?" Wilson later that day replies to Fleischer. "These guys really need to get serious.") But as the briefing wears on, Fleischer's defense grows "murkier," as the New York Times reports, and he seems to "concede" that the State of the Union reference to Niger uranium "might have been flawed." That evening, with the White House scrambling to defend itself against Wilson's resonating charges, Bush leaves for a trip to Africa, accompanied by Rice and Powell. Before the party flies out of Andrews, Rice is in several meetings with Rove, Libby and other senior aides of the WHIG. The scene now shifts to the plush but still relatively close quarters of Air Force One, the specially configured 747 where the accompanying media are boarded through a rear door and funneled directly to their mid-level section closed off from the forward official compartment, and where Administration VIPs like Rice and Powell are in conference rooms and adjoining lounge chairs in closer and easier proximity and informality than in any other official venue. It is in this setting, soon after takeoff, as the New York Times will report two years later, that Powell is seen walking around carrying the INR June 12/July6 memo detailing Wilson's mission and Plame's identity and role in the "(S/NF)" paragraph. Powell discusses the memo with Rice and other presidential aides on board, including press secretary Ari Fleischer. Witnesses later see Fleischer "perusing" the memo. There are reports, too, of several calls between the plane and the White House discussing the Wilson affair. En route over the Atlantic, Rice and Fleischer both call contacts at the Washington Post and New York Times "to make it clear," the Times will report, "that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement about the uranium-the first such official concession on the sensitive issue of the intelligence that led to the war." It is in these hours of late July 7 and early July 8 that Rove, Libby and other officials get word of Plame's identity from Air Force One. Rove and Libby will hear of Plame in the drafting with Tenet of his mea culpa, but officials on the plane reading the INR memo cannot know or be sure of this, and the memo's passages on Wilson, including his wife, are now relayed back to Washington. Reporters later speculate that Powell might have called either Rove or Libby with such information, but as one concludes aptly, "That was above his pay grade." The President himself might have read the memo and called the two aides. But given Bush's style and grasp, that, too, is implausible, though he may well have been informed of the calls and given his approval. The only official on board Air Force One with the knowledge and authority-motive, means and opportunity-to instruct Rove and Libby and so betray Plame was Condoleezza Rice. July 7-8, 2003: Right-wing Columnist Robert Novak is called by thus far unidentified senior officials leaking to him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame (they use her maiden name), is a CIA operative who instigated her husband's trip to Niger. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Novak tells Newsweek of the leak. "They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it." July 9, 2003: Rove discusses the Wilson imbroglio, including the role of Wilson's CIA wife, with columnist Robert Novak, who identifies her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. July 11, 2003: Peppered by questions about Wilson's charges, Bush in a press conference in Uganda says, "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." That evening, aboard Air Force One flying over East Africa, Rice speaks at length with the media about the "clearances" of the President's speech. "Now I can tell you," she says, "if the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have gone without question." She says nothing about the actual maneuvering behind the now-troublesome passage, the Joseph-Foley exchange, the controversial British memorandum US intelligence has disputed, the shadowy history of the yellow cake fraud. July 11, 2003: Back in Washington, working to discredit Wilson, Rove leaks to Time's Matthew Cooper that "Wilson's wife" is, in fact, in the CIA "working on WMD" and has been behind his mission to Niger. Rove "implied strongly," Cooper later emails his editor, "there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger." After that conversation, in evidence of the central role of Rice and her staff in the betrayal of Plame's identity to discredit Wilson, Rove emails Rice's NSC deputy Hadley that he has "waved Cooper off" Wilson's claim, and that he (Rove) "didn't take the bait" when Cooper offered that Wilson's revelations had damaged the Administration. Hadley immediately relays this message to Rice in Africa. That same day, after extensive deliberations with Rove and Libby, CIA Director Tenet makes a public statement that the Nigerien uranium allegation should never have appeared in the Bush 2003 State of the Union. "This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches," he confesses, "and CIA should have ensured that it was removed," July 12, 2003: When asked by Cooper about Plame being CIA, Libby confirms the story to the Time reporter. That same day, in a talk with the Washington Post's Walt Pincus, an unidentified "senior administration official" brings up Plame's CIA identity, in what is now a widely authorized leak approved by Rice as well as Rove. July 14, 2003: Columnist Robert Novak, attributing the story to "two senior administration officials" -neither of which is Rove or Libby-identifies Plame as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction" who was behind her husband's mission to Niger. July 20, 2003: "Senior White House sources" call NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell to say, "the real story here is not the 16 words [bush's reference to Niger uranium in the State of the Union] but Wilson and his wife." July 21, 2003: On MSNBC, host Chris Mathews tells Wilson, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says, and I quote, 'Wilson's wife is fair game.'" July 30, 2003: Alarmed about the impact of the betrayal of Plame's identity on current and future agents and sources abroad, the CIA asks the Justice Department to investigate the leak, which leads to the naming of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a Special Prosecutor. September 2003: An unidentified "White House official" tells the Washington Post that "at least six reporters" had been told about Plame before Novak's column appeared. The disclosures, the source says, were "purely and simply out of rev

the topic is the US practice of kidnapping and outsourcing torture. i know you've got no love for the govt symbols, but rendition is some pretty fucking serious shit and the US govt's behaviour in this case, or any other domestic or international case, should never be treated with kid gloves. i'm ignorant to the whole salafi/dawood versus others soap opera, so maybe you're just irked with the onslaught of their arguments. regardless, practically every subject in crossfire revolves heavily around US global behaviour..so maybe if the mind numbing hypocrisy subsided, this(hatin' the US govt) would change.