The blame game on PLAME

July 8, 2005

http://www.12ozprophet.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64380

Originally posted by casekonly@Jul 5 2005, 02:45 AM
c'mon, KB, we all know if was Rove.

pretty much in the basket, the big

question is: is the bush white house

going down for this?

Quoted post

I hate the man, I hate the republicans, but the truth is that in reading about this I doubt Rove himself was the immeadiate source. After all, he has pretty much said that anyone he spoke to can testify about it. MY feelings are that the info was likely offered at the behest of the white house by lesser known figures, but that in this modern climate we will never know. What really sickens me is that the media is so behind it as a case of there own integrity, they fail to see the government pawn status they have acceived...

Fairs stance:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1830

FAIR Calls for Revealing Sources in Plame, Lee Cases

Courts should respect anonymity of genuine whistle-blowers

8/19/04

FAIR, the national media watch group, encourages the reporters and news outlets who have been asked to reveal their sources in the Valerie Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases to cooperate with investigators. Protecting the identities of confidential sources is a journalistic right that should be recognized by the courts, but only when it protects genuine whistle-blowers, not when it shields government wrongdoing.

Plame is the covert CIA officer whose identity was apparently leaked after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, charged the Bush administration with misuse of intelligence. Lee was a scientist falsely charged by the Clinton administration with being a Chinese spy, and officials seem to have leaked selective information about him in an effort to discredit him in the press.

Reporters in both cases are being told by investigators to reveal the specific members of the government who transmitted information. FAIR believes that attorneys' attempts to discover these sources are legitimate, and the ethical journalistic choice is to assist their efforts.

The ability to protect confidential sources who reveal government wrongdoing is an important journalistic protection that deserves judicial respect. In both the Plame and Lee cases, however, the journalist's sources were not revealing government wrongdoing, but committing government wrongdoing .

In both cases, the alleged crime was the act of revealing protected information to journalists in order to harm the government's enemies. Given that the alleged criminal acts apparently involved oral conversations between government officials and journalists, it is likely that no evidence of these purported acts would exist except for the journalists' potential testimony.

Unless one believes that the government ought to be able to surreptitiously use its enormous information-gathering powers to attack opponents with impunity, investigators must have the ability to ask journalists for their sources in such cases, and to compel them if necessary.

Some have presented these cases as government assaults against the freedom of the press. "Journalists should not have to face the prospect of imprisonment for doing nothing more than aggressively seeking to report on the government's actions," declared Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (8/13/04), whose reporters have been subpoenaed in both cases. But in neither case were reporters reporting on governmental activities; rather, they were taking part in a governmental activity, namely the selective and illegitimate revelation of information to damage an individual.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told AP (8/18/04): "All this has to do with secrecy. The government is trying to keep more and more secrets all the time, and journalists are working harder to uncover those secrets." Dalglish misses the larger context, which is that the government's misuse of the power of information involves both concealing and revealing information as it suits its purposes.

The reporters who revealed protected information about Wen Ho Lee were not exposing government secrets, but violating an individual's privacy. And the journalists who are protecting the identity of the officials who outed Valerie Plame are actually participating in a cover-up of official wrongdoing.

The motive and effect of government leaks are the critical questions, and courts can and should make a distinction between legitimate whistleblowing and illegitimate governmental attempts to use information as a weapon. If Valerie Plame's name had been leaked to expose an illegal covert operation, it would be an entirely different matter and should be treated as such by the legal system. The First Amendment exists so that the press can be a check on government abuse of power, not a handmaiden to it.

July 8, 2005

This woman is not that cool...

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcas...oks6jul06.story

The Judy Miller Media Hug-Fest

ROSA BROOKS

In the midst of the media's love-fest for Judith Miller, 1st Amendment Martyr, it's easy to forget that Miller's questionable journalistic ethics left her in the doghouse only a year ago. Indeed, when it came to leaks, the only people busier than White House staffers last year were the denizens of the New York Times' newsroom, who fell all over themselves to excoriate Miller to competing publications.

According to a June 2004 story in New York magazine, for instance, one anonymous co-worker said: "When I see her coming, my instinct is to go the other way." By many accounts, Miller is rude, competitive and heartless, willing to pursue a hot story at any price. In at least one instance, she reportedly used the name of a source who had provided information only on condition that her name not appear.

It was Miller, more than any other reporter, who helped the White House sell its WMD-in-Iraq hokum to the American public. Relying on the repeatedly discredited Ahmad Chalabi and her carefully cultivated administration contacts, Miller wrote story after story on the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Only problem: Her scoops relied on information provided by the very folks who were also cooking the books. But because Miller hid behind confidential sources most of the time, there was little her readers could use to evaluate their credibility. You know: "a high-level official with access to classified data." Ultimately, even the Times' "public editor" conceded the paper's coverage of Iraq had often consisted of "breathless stories built on unsubstantiated 'revelations' that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests."

That's what makes the Judy Miller Media Hug-Fest so astonishing. Miller's refusal to testify to the grand jury investigating the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name has catapulted her back into favor. Ironically, as it becomes ever more likely that she'll be jailed for contempt of court, the very affection for anonymous sources that landed Miller in hot water last year has become her route to journalistic rehabilitation. The Houston Chronicle rhapsodizes that "reporters such as Miller … are the front line in the struggle to maintain a free and independent press." Back at the New York Times, Miller's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., assures us that everyone is busy "supporting her in this difficult time."

I'm as big of fan of the 1st Amendment as anybody, but I don't buy the new Miller-as-heroine story. When Judge David Tatel concurred in the D.C. Circuit's refusal to find any absolute journalist privilege shielding Miller from testifying, he noted, sensibly, that "just as attorney-client communications 'made for the purpose of getting advice for the commission of a fraud or crime' serve no public interest and receive no privilege … neither should courts protect sources whose leaks harm national security while providing minimal benefit to public debate." Few legal privileges are absolute, and it's appropriate for the courts to decide in cases such as this whether the harm of requiring a journalist to divulge confidential information is outweighed by the public interest in prosecuting a crime.

Reasonable people can disagree on the appropriate scope of journalistic privilege. But we should keep the legal question — when should journalists be compelled by law to divulge their sources? — distinct from the ethical question: Is a journalist ever ethically permitted to break a promise and divulge a source? However we answer the first question, the answer to the second must be a resounding yes.

Should Miller have refused to offer anonymity to all those "high-level" sources who sold us a bill of goods on Iraq? Yes.

If it becomes apparent to a journalist that a source lied to him on a matter crucial to the public good, should he be ethically permitted to expose the lie and the liar, despite any prior promises of confidentiality? Yes.

If a source with a clear political motivation passes along classified information that has no value for public debate but would endanger the career, and possibly the life, of a covert agent, is a journalist ethically permitted to "out" the no-good sneak? You bet. And if the knowledge that they can't always hide behind anonymity has a "chilling effect" on political hacks who are eager to manipulate the media in furtherance of their vested interests, that's OK with me.

But Miller still won't testify. Even though, ethically, there should be no obligation to go to jail to cover for a sleazeball.

It's possible (though not likely) that Miller is covering for a genuine whistle-blower who fears retaliation for fingering, gee, Karl Rove, for instance, as the real source of the leak.

But I have another theory. Miller's no fool; she understood the lesson of the Martha Stewart case: When you find yourself covered with mud, there's nothing like a brief stint in a minimum-security prison to restore your old luster.

July 8, 2005

The non op-ed piece story...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8445696/site/newsweek/

The Rove Factor?

Time magazine talked to Bush's guru for Plame story.

July 11 issue - Its legal appeals exhausted, Time magazine agreed

last week to turn over reporter Matthew Cooper's e-mails and computer notes to a special prosecutor investigating the leak of an undercover CIA agent's identity. The case has been the subject of press controversy for two years. Saying "we are not above the law," Time Inc. Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine decided to comply with a grand-jury subpoena to turn over documents related to the leak. But Cooper (and a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller) is still refusing to testify and faces jail this week.

At issue is the story of a CIA-sponsored trip taken by former ambassador (and White House critic) Joseph Wilson to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. "Some government officials have noted to Time in interviews... that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," said Cooper's July 2003 Time online article.

Now the story may be about to take another turn. The e-mails surrendered by Time Inc., which are largely between Cooper and his editors, show that one of Cooper's sources was White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to two lawyers who asked not to be identified because they are representing witnesses sympathetic to the White House. Cooper and a Time spokeswoman declined to comment. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove had been interviewed by Cooper for the article. It is unclear, however, what passed between Cooper and Rove.

The controversy began three days before the Time piece appeared, when columnist Robert Novak, writing about Wilson's trip, reported that Wilson had been sent at the suggestion of his wife, who was identified by name as a CIA operative. The leak to Novak, apparently intended to discredit Wilson's mission, caused a furor when it turned out that Plame was an undercover agent. It is a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA official. A special prosecutor was appointed and began subpoenaing reporters to find the source of the leak.

Novak appears to have made some kind of arrangement with the special prosecutor, and other journalists who reported on the Plame story have talked to prosecutors with the permission of their sources. Cooper agreed to discuss his contact with Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, after Libby gave him permission to do so. But Cooper drew the line when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked about other sources.

Initially, Fitzgerald's focus was on Novak's sourcing, since Novak was the first to out Plame. But according to Luskin, Rove's lawyer, Rove spoke to Cooper three or four days before Novak's column appeared. Luskin told NEWSWEEK that Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA." Luskin declined, however, to discuss any other details. He did say that Rove himself had testified before the grand jury "two or three times" and signed a waiver authorizing reporters to testify about their conversations with him. "He has answered every question that has been put to him about his conversations with Cooper and anybody else," Luskin said. But one of the two lawyers representing a witness sympathetic to the White House told NEWSWEEK that there was growing "concern" in the White House that the prosecutor is interested in Rove. Fitzgerald declined to comment.

In early October 2003, NEWSWEEK reported that immediately after Novak's column appeared in July, Rove called MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews and told him that Wilson's wife was "fair game." But White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters at the time that any suggestion that Rove had played a role in outing Plame was "totally ridiculous." On Oct. 10, McClellan was asked directly if Rove and two other White House aides had ever discussed Valerie Plame with any reporters. McClellan said he had spoken with all three, and "those individuals assured me they were not involved in this."

Dick Quickwood · July 10, 2005

it was rove

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050710/pl_af...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

villain · July 10, 2005

Originally posted by ARCEL@Jul 10 2005, 06:08 PM
it was rove

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050710/pl_af...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Quoted post

Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

The story or page you were trying to access may have expired.

If you are having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo! News, try visiting the Yahoo! News home page or browse through the News site index. Also, you may find what you're looking for if you try searching below.

Dick Quickwood · July 11, 2005

it's going to be weird if i can't find another version of that article

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...itics_leak_dc_5

July 11, 2005

Originally posted by casekonly@Jul 11 2005, 02:29 AM
newsweek released a story sunday naming carl rove as the source.

the end is nigh for him.

Quoted post

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/11/cia...s.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For two years, the White House has insisted that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA officer's identity. And President Bush said the leaker would be fired.

But Bush's spokesman wouldn't repeat any of those assertions Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer saying his client spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified in a newspaper column.

Rove described the woman to a reporter as someone who "apparently works" at the CIA, according to an e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to discuss the matter at two news briefings Monday. He said he would not comment because the leak is the focus of a federal criminal investigation.

"The prosecutors overseeing the investigation had expressed a preference to us that one way to help the investigation is not to be commenting on it from this podium," McClellan said in response to a barrage of questions about Rove and the previous White House denials.

"I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said," McClellan said. "And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time." He said the appropriate time would be when the investigation is completed.

casekonly · July 11, 2005

thanks, KB. this needs to be discussed.

http://www.dailyoutrage.org/

from yahoo news

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Top White House aide Karl Rove discussed a former US ambassador and his

CIA agent wife with a Time magazine reporter, according to a report.

The Newsweek weekly quoted Rove lawyer Robert Luskin as confirming that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality, and last week released him to testify about that conversation to a grand jury.

Cooper had been ordered by a US federal judge to testify before the grand jury investigating whether the agent's identity was illegally leaked.

Rove,

President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame.

And Luskin told Newsweek last week that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

Plame's was first published in a column by veteran reporter Robert Novak in 2003, which cited senior administration officials.

Wilson claimed she was outed as punishment for his contradiction of Bush's assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that

Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Miller researched the story, but didn't write it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing.

imported_dowmagik · July 12, 2005

did anybody else feel the dire need to throat-chop scott this morning? that smug fuck makes me wants to destroy.

casekonly · July 12, 2005

^^yep

!@#$% · July 12, 2005

wow, the white house has done a fantastic job of defending him

until a few days ago, when it suddenly no longer wanted to comment on an ongoing investigation (though it has been commenting on it all along)

more bullshit? who's surprised.

you need boots and a fucking shovel to listen to a gov't official talk these days

Poop Man Bob · July 13, 2005

Tonight's Daily Show was perfect. Jon nailed the topic, as he always does.

nomadawhat · July 13, 2005

^^agreed... first daliy show i've gotten the chance to watch in forever. one of teh few reason i miss cable.

next up....chief justice karl rove.

casekonly · July 13, 2005

i flipped to faux news this morning while imus was

on a break. they happened to be talking about rove

(i was hoping that would be the case) and the fuckers

made it sound like he had been given a parking ticket.

i distrust those people. i also hate them, but i distrust them

first and foremost.

POIESIS · July 14, 2005

MR. ROVE AND THE ACCESS OF EVIL

Tell us your "source," Judy

Not published in The New York Times

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

By Greg Palast

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=444&row=0

The only thing more evil, small-minded and treasonous than the Bush Administration's jailing Judith Miller for a crime the Bush Administration committed, is Judith Miller covering up her Bush Administration "source."

Judy, Karl Rove ain't no "source." A confidential source -- and I've worked with many -- is an insider ready to put himself on the line to blow the whistle on an official lie or hidden danger. I would protect a source's name with my life and fortune as would any journalist who's not a craven jerk (the Managing Editor of Time Magazine comes to mind).

But the weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear was no source. Whether it was Karl Rove or some other Rove-tron inside the Bush regime (and no one outside Bush's band would have had this information), this was an official using his official info to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning our President's mythological premise for war in Iraq.

New York Times reporter Miller and her paper would rather she go to prison for four months than identify their "source." Why?

Part of her oddball defense is that The Times never ran the story about Wilson's wife. They get no points for that. The Times should have run the story with the headline: BUSH OPERATIVE COMMITS FELONY TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWER. The lead paragraph should have been, "Today, Mr. K--- R--- [or other slime ball as appropriate] attempted to plant sensitive intelligence information on The New York Times, a felony offense, in an attempt to harm former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who challenged the President's claim regarding Iraq's nuclear program."

A Karl Rove or Rove-like creature peddling a back-door smear doesn't make him a source. Miller's real crime is not concealing a source, but burying the story. A reporter should never, ever give notes to a grand jury, but this information is something The Times owes the public, not the prosecutors.

Why didn't The Times run this story? Why not now? Who are they covering for and why?

Maybe the problem for The Times is that this is the same "source" that used Miller to promote, as fact, her ersatz report before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam truly had nukes and bugs and chemicals he could launch at Los Angeles. That "source" too needs publication, Judy.

Every rule has an exception. My mama always told me to compliment the chef at dinner. But that doesn't apply when the chef pees in your soup. Likewise, there's an exception to the rule of source protection. When officialdom uses "you-can't-use-my- name" to cover a lie, the official is not a source, but a disinformation propagandist -- and Miller and The Times have been all too willing to play Izvestia to the Bush's Kremlinesque prevarications.

And that is what Miller is protecting: the evil called "access."

The great poison in the corpus of American journalism is the lust for tidbits of supposedly "inside" information which is more often than not inside misinformation parading as hot news.

And thus we have Miller sucking on the steaming sewage pipe of White House lies about Iraq and spitting it out in the pages of The Times as "investigative reporting," for which The Times has apologized. Likewise, we had the embarrassment of Bob Woodward's special access to the Oval Office after the September 11 attacks when Woodward reported the exclusive news that the President was a flawless commander in chief in the war on terror -- for which Woodward has yet to apologize.

While reporting from the Potemkin village of decision-making set up for him at the White House, Woodward missed the real story that, in the words of the Downing Street memo, our leaders were losing track of Osama while they spent their time "fixing the intelligence" on Iraq. Even if Woodward learned of it, would he have reported it at the risk of losing his access to evil?

As Karl Rove chuckles and Judy does time, we are left to ask, What are Miller and The New York Times doing: protecting the name of a source or covering up their conduit to the Bush gang's machinery of deception?

One can only be sympathetic to Miller for choosing jail over bending to the power of the State. But as T.S. Eliot said,

"The last temptation is the greatest treason,

To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

POIESIS · July 14, 2005

wilson says: fire that bitch rove

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/14...s.ap/index.html

imported_dowmagik · July 15, 2005

last night on fox news, the news scroller (ticker?) at the bottom said that plame wasnt undercover when rove outted her.

god bless fox news. her status in the cia WAS CLASSIFIED.

nomadawhat · July 15, 2005

all the pieces for a nice cover up are nowing showing up. Plame wasn't undercover, a reporter was the one who told Rove about Wilsons wife being an agent.. blah, blah, blah.

Nothings going to happen to Rove. no surprise.

Stereotype V.001 · July 15, 2005

Rove is a shitbird. And shitbirds flock together. Don't expect Bush to follow through with his promise to fire the leak.

POIESIS · July 19, 2005

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8605680/

Giving a first-person account of his role in a case that nearly landed him in jail, Cooper recalled that Rove told him, “I’ve already said too much” after revealing that the wife of the former ambassador apparently was with the CIA.

Cooper speculated in the piece, released Sunday, that Rove could have been “worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else.”

“I don’t know, but that signoff has been in my memory for two years,” Cooper wrote. The White House and Rove’s lawyer have stressed that Rove never mentioned Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife, by name.

some peripheral from tpm:

(July 18, 2005 -- 04:28 PM EST // link // print)

This point is admittedly very deep in the weeds. But if you're playing the Rove/Plame/Niger sleuth game like many of the rest of us, it's a significant point.

Much now turns, you'll remember, on this classified State Department memo, which seems

Advertisement

likely to have been the source of the information about Joe Wilson and his wife that was circulating between reporters and White House staffers in early July 2003.

A couple days ago the Times reported that "the memorandum was dated June 10, 2003." That squares with what we know about the administration's concerns (or 'interest' if you're the gullible type) dating more than a month before his Times oped.

Today, however, Bloomberg reports that it was "prepared by the State Department on July 7, 2003."

Big difference.

Now, I guess you could say that a document needn't be prepared at the time it was dated. But had the memo been backdated a month I assume we'd have heard about this already, since that would be pretty big news in itself.

Bloomberg follows up with these grafs ...

On the same day the memo was prepared, White House phone logs show Novak placed a call to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, according to lawyers familiar with the case and a witness who has testified before the grand jury. Those people say it is not clear whether Fleischer returned the call, and Fleischer has refused to comment.

The Novak call may loom large in the investigation because Fleischer was among a group of administration officials who left Washington later that day on a presidential trip to Africa. On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip.

At first I assumed that the discrepancy was simply the result of an editorial error from the Times or Bloomberg. But as you can see, both articles hang a significant theory of the case on the date. So it seems unlikely that June has simply been transposed for July, or vice versa.

The answer comes down deep in the Bloomberg article ...

The July 7 memo was largely a reproduction of an earlier State Department report prepared around June 12. Another key question that Fitzgerald is interested in, according to the grand jury witness and the lawyers familiar with the case, is whether Rove or Libby learned of this earlier report and, if so, shared its content with reporters.

Now, presumably, this second version of the memo is what is referenced in this portion of the article in the Times ...

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

I suppose this is where I venture some theory as to what it all means. But I'm not sure what it does mean. Let me add a few more details though and ask a couple questions.

The Bloomberg article says that Novak put in a call to Ari Fleischer on the same day (July 7th) the second memo was prepared at the State Department, and that Fleischer did see the second memo.

My question is about the point in the Times graf above about Carl Ford. And it's not a rhetorical question. Does an assistant secretary of State send a document to the White House if he's trying to send it to the Secretary? Even if the Secretary is about to leave on a foreign trip with the president? Perhaps that's how it would be done. I don't know.

Secondly, where at State did the first memo originate? Bloomberg seems clear that the second memo was prepared at INR, State's in-house intel bureau. But they're less clear on whether the first one came from there.

It's certainly possible that the difference between these two memos is little more than the difference between xeroxing it or slapping another date at the top. But as long as we're all blind men feeling one part of the elephant, let's try to cover as much of the animal as possible.

-- Josh Marshall

POIESIS · July 19, 2005

and another little bit linked from tpm pal kevin drum:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/...5_07/006746.php

July 18, 2005

NUKES AND THE BASE....Step back from Plamegate for a moment and ask yourself a broader question: why did the White House react so violently to Joe Wilson's suggestion that the story about Saddam Hussein trying to procure uranium from Niger was false? After all, as conservative apologists never tire of pointing out, Wilson didn't really debunk George Bush's words in the 2003 State of the Union address. Bush said only that Saddam "sought" uranium from Africa, while Wilson merely provided evidence that no uranium ever changed hands. The fact is, Wilson's report didn't invalidate Bush's statement.

So why did the White House go nuts? What were they so scared of that they went into full-blown smear-and-destroy mode?

One of the advantages of living in Orange County is that I have plenty of centrist and conservative acquaintances, and one thing I've learned from them is that even among Bush's own supporters it was the possibility of Saddam getting hold of nukes that really scared them. Chemical and biological weapons were a bit of a yawn. Without nukes, even Bush sympathizers were skeptical about the whole Iraq adventure.

Since Karl Rove has much more sophisticated means of gauging public opinion than my occasional lunches with friends, he obviously knew this full well. And that means that he was hellbent on making a case in the SOTU that Saddam had an active nuke program. The problem is that even after sifting through every available rumor, analysis, and unconfirmed report, they were only able to come up with two meager pieces of evidence:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

That's it. Uranium from Africa and aluminum tubes. It was pretty thin stuff.

But it turned out to be even thinner. Although conservatives insist with bilious disdain that the CIA was staffed by do-nothing bureaucrats afraid to follow the Iraqi WMD evidence where it led, the exact opposite was true. Although it's unclear how much of this was due to CIA culture and how much to White House pressure, the reality is that the CIA was far more bullish about Saddam's WMD programs than it should have been. They continued to report the uranium connection long after State Department analysts had made it clear that it was based on forged documents, and they continued to insist that the aluminum tubes were designed for centrifuges long after Department of Energy experts had conclusively debunked it.

Without those two things, there was no evidence left that Iraq was reconsituting its nuclear program aside from the procurement of a bit of dual use equipment and some hazy reporting of personnel movements. As the SSCI report concluded last year, "the judgment...that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, was not supported by the intelligence."

In other words, the White House political operation wasn't lashing out just because of Joe Wilson. They were lashing out because they believed their political lives depended on their own supporters continuing to believe that Saddam had been actively working on a nuke program. Without that belief, they'd lose support within their own base even if they eventually found evidence of chem and bio programs.

In Karl Rove's world, the base is sacred, and nukes were the key to their support. Joe Wilson threatened to open a crack in that support, and that's why he had to be destroyed.

Smart · July 20, 2005

Rove is possibly the dirtiest motherfucker in all of Washington. Seriously.

Dick Quickwood · July 20, 2005

bush suddenly makes his supreme court nomination while this is happening, hmm

July 20, 2005

Originally posted by ARCEL@Jul 20 2005, 02:56 AM
bush suddenly makes his supreme court nomination while this is happening, hmm

Quoted post

Actually, thats a good call...didn't think of that but it makes a lot of sense.

July 21, 2005

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8598301/site/newsweek/

Why the Leak Probe Matters

For all the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, this story is about how easy it was to get into Iraq, and how hard it will be to get out.

July 25 issue - Like a lot of President Bush's critics, I supported the Iraq war at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it's possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq war helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn't fully democratize it.

But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, and not just because most historians, as Richard Nixon liked to say, are liberals. Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn't plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn't pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn't tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he'd better make certain there's no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.

Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.

We got in because we "cooked" the intelligence, then hyped it. That's why the "Downing Street Memo" is not a smoking gun but a big "duh." For two years we've known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, "fix" the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would "fix" him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Was Plame "fair game," as Karl Rove told Chris Matthews? George H.W. Bush didn't think so. Even after Wilson embarrassed the president publicly, Bush Sr. wrote Wilson—whom he had appointed to various ambassadorial posts—to congratulate him for his service and sympathize with him over the outing of his wife. The old man was head of the CIA in the 1970s and knows the consequences of blowing the identities of covert operatives.

But does his son? A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like "I don't want to prejudge." Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct—talking casually to two reporters without security clearances about a CIA operative—was dangerous and wrong. As GOP congressman turned talk-show host Joe Scarborough puts it, if someone in his old congressional office did what Rove unquestionably did, that someone would have been promptly fired, just as the president promised in this case. Scarborough, no longer obligated to toe the pathetic Republican Party line, says it's totally irrelevant if Joe Wilson is a preening partisan who misled investigators about the role his wife played in recommending his Niger trip. The frantic efforts of the GOP attack machine to change the subject to Wilson shows how scared Republicans are that the master of their universe will be held accountable for Rove's destructive carelessness.

To get an idea of how destructive, I talked to Melissa Mahle, a former CIA covert operative turned author whose career parallels Plame's. She explained what happens when someone's cover is blown. It isn't pretty, especially when, like Plame, you have been under "nonofficial cover" (working for a phony front company or nonprofit), which is more sensitive than "official cover" (pretending to work for another government agency). The GOP's spinners are making it seem that because Plame had a desk job in Langley at the time she was outed, she wasn't truly undercover. As Mahle says, that reflects a total ignorance about the way the CIA works. Being outed doesn't just waste millions of taxpayer dollars; it compromises hundreds of other people in the field you may have worked with in the past.

If Bush isn't a hypocrite on national security, he needs, at a minimum, to yank Rove's security clearance. "Whether you do it [discuss the identity of CIA operatives] intentionally or unintentionally, you have not met the requirements of that security clearance," Mahle told me.

The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA's ability to develop essential "humint" (human intelligence). Here's where the Iraq war comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just another weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.

POIESIS · July 22, 2005

and..

There's another Joe Wilson–related investigation that needs answers: Who forged the Niger memos in the first place?

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10015

By Matthew Yglesias

Web Exclusive: 07.19.05

Print Friendly | Email Article

As intriguing as the prospect of seeing Karl Rove sent to the pokey is, I must admit that on one level I don't really care who the guilty parties in the Plame leak case are. Whoever did the deed ought to be found out and punished, because that's what you do, but it will make little difference. My opinion that Rove is a scumbag won't be altered by his possible vindication, nor appreciably strengthened by his possible conviction. The basic case for scumbaggery, grounded in the public record, is simply far too strong to be altered one way or another by anything related to this matter. At the same time, I doubt that removing the wrongdoers from office will do any good. There are a lot of scumbags out there, and as recent coverage of the College Republicans' annual conference has made clear, the right churns them out assembly-line style. President Bush will have no trouble replacing anyone he may lose with someone just as bad.

Lurking in the neighborhood of this case, however, is something I would genuinely like to know. Joseph Wilson went to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had made significant progress toward acquiring uranium yellowcake there -- reports grounded in a memo indicating that such a deal had gone down several years previously. This memo was a forgery.

The GOP and its hack reporter friends have attempted to obscure this reality by citing the report undertaken by Lord Butler at Tony Blair's request, which found that British assertions of Iraqi efforts to acquire Nigerian uranium were well-founded. This theory ignores several inconvenient facts. First and foremost, it's now clear that whatever Iraq may or may not have tried to do in 1999, it didn't actually get anywhere near building a nuclear bomb. Second, given the actual state of Iraq's nuclear program at the time, there's no reason to think uranium yellowcake would have been useful for doing anything, as Iraq had no capacity to transform it into a usable weapon. Third, the Iraq Survey Group, appointed by the president to review Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs stated last year that it had "not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material." Fourth, the International Atomic Energy Agency responded to the Butler report by asking the British government to provide it with the non-forgery-based evidence for the story, which the Brits have failed to do. Indeed, it seems that the only British sources were the forgery, and reports from other intelligence services that were, in turn, based on the same forgery.

All that aside, no officials anywhere, including the authors of the Butler report, deny the basic point that the Niger uranium memo was forged. What's more, the forgery was not especially hard to detect because there was not one forgery but two, the second of which was especially crude. As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) report concluded:

The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document -- a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium -- mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as being "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst though that all of the documents were likely suspect.

Upon further examination, those suspicions proved well-founded. The uranium document was not properly formatted as a Nigerian government document, and there were inconsistencies regarding names and dates. It's worth underscoring, moreover, exactly how absurd this second document was. It reads, in part:

Le groupement dirigé par les Ambassadeur de Niger, Soudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libye, Iran ont décidé que le "Global Support" qui est composé de spécialistes provenant de différents corps militaires des pays alliés sera actif dans l'immédiat. Nous sommes convençus que l'haute profession des militaires appartenants au "Global Support" soient dotes d'expériences considérables et très diversifiés dans le secteur de la défense et de la sécurité et sans aucun doute ils sont résponsables des charges qui seront leur assignées.

Suggestively, this is not grammatical French. Moreover, as a rough translation shows, it's completely ridiculous:

The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have [plural in original] decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately. We are convinçed [sic] that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are [subjunctive plural in original] qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defense and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.

That something so absurd could have formed the basis for an important line in a presidential speech says a lot about the degree of unseriousness with which the Bush administration went about building its case for war. That aside, it raises a couple of pretty obvious questions: Who produced these documents, and why? I don't even have a "gotcha" speculation to offer -- I'd genuinely like to know. What we do know is that according to a footnote in the SSCI report, "in March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator [Jay] Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, [clause redacted], the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI's investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues."

The FBI, so far, seems to have come up with, well, with nothing[..and hey..what about that little anthrax investigation?-P]. What we do know about the documents is that they were brought to the U.S. Embassy in Rome by Elizabetta Burba, an Italian journalist. According to European press reports, she got the documents from Rocco Martino, a former Italian military-intelligence official turned businessman with some kind of ties to French intelligence services. Martino has been to the United States at least twice since being publicly identified as the source of the documents, and the FBI didn't bother to interview him.

It seems clear that some powerful elements in Washington don't want to know the truth, which should raise suspicions. This, after all, would seem to be an important matter. Somebody went to some lengths to do this. He or she must have had some purpose in mind, and it's hard to see how that purpose could have been anything but nefarious. Republicans don't seem interested in finding out, perhaps because further scrutiny of the matter would simply reveal how willfully gullible the White House was, or perhaps for some deeper reason. Democrats' reticence to ask what happened to the FBI investigation is more puzzling, but someone ought to get on the case. That there's a partisan payoff at the end of this particular rainbow is far from clear, but unlike in the Plame case, knowing the truth might actually change how we think about a thing or two.

casekonly · July 25, 2005

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100...id=aBsQ1ErWEsAk

Rove, Libby Accounts on Plame Differ With Reporters' (Update3)

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before Fitzgerald that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according to a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame's name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

These discrepancies may be important because Fitzgerald is investigating whether Libby, Rove or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether anyone violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a covert intelligence agent.

`Twisted' Intelligence

The CIA requested the inquiry after Novak reported in a July 14, 2003, column that Plame recommended her husband for a 2002 mission to check into reports Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Wilson, in a July 6, 2003, article in the New York Times, had said President George W. Bush's administration ``twisted'' some of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons to justify the war.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said yesterday that Rove told the grand jury ``he had not heard her name before he heard it from Bob Novak.'' He declined in an interview to comment on whether Novak's account of their conversation differed from Rove's.

There also is a discrepancy between accounts given by Rove and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The White House aide mentioned Wilson's wife -- though not by name -- in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Cooper, the reporter said. Rove, 55, says that Cooper called him to talk about welfare reform and the Wilson connection was mentioned later, in passing.

Cooper wrote in Time magazine last week that he told the grand jury he never discussed welfare reform with Rove in that call.

Miller in Jail

One reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, has been jailed on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify before the grand jury about her reporting on the Plame case.

Cooper testified only after Time Inc. said it would comply with Fitzgerald's demands for Cooper's notes and reporting on the Plame matter, particularly regarding his dealings with Rove.

Libby, 54, didn't return a phone call seeking comment.

The varying accounts of conversations between Rove, Libby and reporters come as new details emerge about a classified State Department memorandum that's also at the center of Fitzgerald's probe.

A memo by the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research included Plame's name in a paragraph marked ``(S)'' for ``Secret,'' a designation that indicated to anyone who read it that the information was classified, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

State Department Memo

The memo, prepared July 7, 2003, for Secretary of State Colin Powell, is a focus of Fitzgerald's interest, according to individuals who have testified before the grand jury and attorneys familiar with the case.

The three-page document said that Wilson had been recommended for a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa by his wife, who worked on the CIA's counter-proliferations desk.

Bush had said in his State of the Union message in January 2003 that Iraq was trying to purchase nuclear materials in Africa. Wilson said in his article that there was no basis to conclude that was the case and the administration had exaggerated the evidence.

At the time that Rove and Libby were talking with reporters, the two aides also were working together to determine whether Bush's allegation was correct, the New York Times reported today, citing people who have been briefed on the case. Days after Wilson's article appeared, the White House acknowledged that the assertion shouldn't have been included in Bush's speech.

Africa Trip

The memo summarizing the Plame-Wilson connection was provided to Powell as he left with Bush on a five-day trip to Africa. Fitzgerald is exploring whether other White House officials on the trip may have gained access to the memo and shared its contents with officials back in Washington. Rove and Libby didn't accompany Bush to Africa.

One key to the inquiry is when White House aides knew of Wilson's connection to Plame and whether they learned about it through this memo or other classified information.

Potential spy recruits overseas are less likely to sign on as operatives if they believe the Bush administration would reveal an agent's identity, Colonel Patrick Lang, a retired director of the Defense Human Intelligence Service, said. ``The word goes around the world, `The Americans can't be trusted,''' he told a hearing convened today by congressional Democrats.

Some Bush allies hope that the Fitzgerald investigation, which dominated the news in Washington for the first part of July, will subside as attention shifts to Bush's nomination of Judge John Roberts to fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

Fitzgerald's term of service lasts until October, which is also the length of time remaining for the grand jury hearing evidence in the case.

To contact the reporter on this story:

Richard Keil in Washington at dkeil@bloomberg.net.

POIESIS · July 29, 2005

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

POIESIS · July 29, 2005

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

POIESIS · July 30, 2005

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

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