"Having caught Miller committing perjury, Fitzgerald is now in a position

to, in effect, renege on his agreement to ask her only about her conversations with Libby. Under the terms of that agreement, Fitzgerald can't compel her to testify about conversations with other people, but she can of course do so voluntarily. And Fitzgerald can tell her lawyer that if she fails to volunteer, she may be looking at substantially more than 85 days behind bars on charges of perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice, being an accessory to Libby's violations of the Espionage Act, or being a co-conspirator with him and others in those violations. (This is perfectly acceptable prosecutorial conduct, not even close to any ethical line.)

Instead of a mere percipient witness, Miller is now a potential defendant, and Fitzgerald can try to "flip" her against all of her sources, not just Libby.

From Patrick Fitzgerald's Mouse Trap by Mark Kleiman on October 9, 2005

Much more at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/patrick-fitzgeralds-mous_b_8569.html

Want to know one reason why the CIA has been unable to recruit spies? Just reflect on how a potential recruit would react to the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operations officer.

The investigation into which administration officials compromised Plame, wife of former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, is nearing completion. Lost in the recent spurt of press reporting, however, is the fact that the outing of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day, her carefully cultivated network of spies) has done great damage to US clandestine operations - not to mention those she recruited over her distinguished career.

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Yes, I am suggesting that it may have been an inside job. Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby may well have had a hand in commissioning the forgery, as a way of manufacturing an intelligence report, with "mushroom cloud" written all over it - in order to deceive Congress into approving an unnecessary war. The more you look into the whole affair, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Why, for example, would Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) adamantly refuse to investigate the provenance of a forgery used to start a war?

And why did former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the UN on February 5, 2003, decide to delete from his very long laundry list of spurious charges against Iraq its alleged attempt to acquire uranium from Niger? Even though he himself had avoided repeating the famous "16 words" used by President Bush just five weeks before (see below), Powell was forced to listen stoically as Mohammed El-Baradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on worldwide TV that his own and outside experts had concluded that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." The White House left it to Powell to concede that El-Baradei was correct, and Powell eventually did so.

Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to shed light on some of this.

Link to an excellent annotated time-line and more analysis by Larry Johnson:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100905E.shtml

With friends like the Italians who needs enemies? If Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are indicted they can shift some of the blame to the Italians. If it were not for Italy, Joe Wilson probably never would have been sent to Africa to investigate the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and the ensuing chain of events to smear Wilson would not have happened. A careful review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (July 2004) shows very clearly that there was only one source claiming that Iraq was buying the uranium. Shades of Curveball! Except in this case the source was not an Iraqi linked to Ahmed Chalabi, but a foreign liaison service. Knowledgeable friends say it was the Italian Intelligence Service (SISME).

SISME provided the CIA with three separate intelligence reports that Iraq had reached an agreement with Niger to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium (October 15, 2001; February 5, 2002; and March 25, 2002). (See Expanded PlameGate Timeline below). The second report from February was the subsequent basis for a DIA analysis, which led Vice President Cheney to ask CIA for more information on the matter. That request led to the CIA asking Ambassador Joe Wilson to go check out the story in Niger.

Even in the much maligned October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the entire intelligence community remained split on the reliability of the Iraq/Niger claim. During briefings subsequent to the publication of the NIE, senior CIA officials repeatedly debunked the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. They also dismissed as unreliable reports from Great Britain, which also were derived from the faulty Italian intelligence reports.

Italy’s SISME also reportedly had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in early October 2003 that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neo-con with longstanding ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain, either SISME or someone with ties to SISME, helped forge and circulate those documents which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq.

Much more at the link:
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/10/mambo_italiano_.html

... get the criminals out of politics."



Someone like Bill Kristol doesn’t get information like this by accident. It’s being fed to him so, if there is an indictment, he can prepare the base. Towards the end of the segment, Kristol got started, saying, “I hate the criminalization of politics.”

Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/09/kristol-indictments

October 10, 2005

The Plame/CIA leak case is getting what all good scandals need: props.

We now have the "missing notebook" and the "missing email." The "missing notebook," as several news reports noted at the end of last week, belongs to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and reportedly contains notes of a conversation regarding former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that she had with Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on June 25, 2003. The date is intriguing, for this is weeks before Wilson published his now famous New York Times op-ed piece (in which he revealed that after traveling to Niger for the CIA he had concluded that the allegation that Iraq had been uranium shopping there was dubious). And, of course, this was weeks before Robert Novak wrote a column outing Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA officer. So why were the two discussing Wilson at that point? Why did this notebook go missing within the paper's Washington bureau? Who found it? Miller or someone else? Why won't the Times explain to its readers how it came to be discovered? What do the notes in this notebook say?

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More at the link:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=28125

Investigator of CIA leak seen as relentless

By Judy Keen, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — When defense attorney Ron Safer heard that Patrick Fitzgerald would lead an inquiry into the leak of a CIA operative's name, his first thought was that, from the Bush administration's perspective, "they could not have picked a worse person."

Safer, a Chicago lawyer who has watched Fitzgerald since he was named U.S. attorney there in 2001, says the prosecutor "will bring to this the same energy and aggression that he does to every other project he undertakes."

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Fitzgerald, 44, was born in Brooklyn. His Irish immigrant father, Patrick Sr., worked as a doorman at a building in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Fitzgerald went to Regis High School, a Jesuit preparatory school, then worked on its maintenance crew to pay his way through Amherst College. He majored in math and economics, then went to Harvard Law School.

He worked in a New York law firm before joining the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan in 1988. He stayed for 13 years, convicting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and indicting bin Laden in a conspiracy that included the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

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More at the link to one of the few articles with details about Fitzgerald:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-10-10-fitzgerald_x.htm

CNN records the latest spin from Karl Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin:



According to the transcripts, that’s not true.

Debunking at the link:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/10/rove-attorney-lies

Ah, Judy. Queen of the NY Social Scene. Martyr of journalistic integrity and principle. Writer of truths and well-researched factual tomes. Cough. WMDs. Cough. Curveball. Cough. Well, and except for that pesky notebook found in the Washington bureau of the NY Times full of notes or something indicating that she was meeting with Scooter Libby well before his testimony had said (and possibly her testimony). Ooops!

We've all been batting alternate history theories around of what really happened with Judy's testimony and notes.

..... Much more at the link:

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2005_10_09_firedoglake_archive.html#112895241980966212

... imaginable to avoid coming clean about this story... to avoid showing their work.

The right time to do so has long since passed. Now it's just a question of how much of the paper's credibility they can preserve. And whether, come next year's Association of National Advertisers conference, the Times masthead will still read the way it reads today.

From Clueless in Phoenix by Arianna Huffington on October 10, 2005

She begins with:

For the all-time example of a man whistling past the graveyard, check out Bill Keller's jaw dropping comments this past Friday at the Association of National Advertisers conference in Phoenix.

His paper finds itself in the midst of what may turn out to be the worst crisis in its history -- scooped on a daily basis on a story it should own, virtually eliminating itself from covering what could be the biggest scandal of the Bush administration, its credibility crumbling faster than Judy Miller's image as a selfless journalistic martyr -- and what did Keller have to say to a group of ad men and newspaper industry insiders?

Do read the entire essay at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/clueless-in-phoenix_b_8640.html