|
While we are
waiting for the political storm to hit, I’ve highlighted 3 items that provide
good background and details in addition to a full news story, below. These
items are included in the forthcoming Casey Reports without my comments. kwc PLAMEGATE Updates Fitzgerald Website http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/index.html Cover up seen as
focus in leak probe http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/politics/21leak.html Leak prosecutor is called exacting and
apolitical: Katy
J. Harriger, a political scientist at Wake Forest University who has studied
special prosecutors, said that Mr. Fitzgerald had some advantages over his
predecessors. He has essentially all the powers of the attorney general to
chase evidence, question witnesses and seek charges. Unlike Mr. Walsh and Mr. Starr, both former
judges, Mr. Fitzgerald is a career prosecutor. And as a Bush administration appointee,
he is less vulnerable to attack from the White House. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/politics/22fitzgerald.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1129993751-REM63gaaQ0GAEWcMdy9ctg Joe Conason: Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102105N.shtml Newsweek: Prelude to a Leak http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102200186.html John Dean: The big question is whether Cheney is a target http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051021.html Walter Pincus: Letter shows
authority to expand CIA leak probe was given in 2004: indicates Fitzgerald found something
significant early http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102201113.html?nav=hcmodule David Sanger: The
Washington Secret often isn’t http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/weekinreview/23sanger.html By the way, the WaPo confirms
today that Robert Novak cooperated early with the prosecutor and stayed out of the
focus that way.
See Inquiry as exacting as the special counsel is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/23/AR2005102301028_2.html?nav=hcmodule Legal beagle Jerralyn
Merritt of Talk Left speculates that Rove is in negotiations, and provides
these links for your files:
The Republican talking
points were already test marketed this weekend: that the special counsel is
overzealous, that this is a waste of taxpayer money, and that perjury is a
technicality. Of course, everyone is pouncing on the hypocrisy of that line of
defense, given the cost of the Starr Report and widespread GOP sanctimony about
perjury and trust when Clinton lied about consensual sex. As the bumper sticker says, “No one died
when Clinton lied.“
Note the title for the
author below. Once again, the link between the forged Niger documents and AIPAC
are mentioned. Italians are named.
Walker's World: Bush
at bay
By Martin Walker, UPI Editor, October 23, 2005 WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens
senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on
African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence
sources. This suggests the inquiry
by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of
undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the
broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush
administration. Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and
despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his
decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges. Two
facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the
deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's
senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis
"Scooter" Libby. The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained
from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak
itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by
witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate
scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than
the crime. The
second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that
Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the
forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has
been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary
inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained
documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to
supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim,
which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January,
2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by
the White House. This opens the door to what has always
been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush
administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case
for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same
charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed
up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There can be few more
serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or
having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.
And since no WMD were
found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N.
inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated
both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the
Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet. The reply of both the
Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's
WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies
like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq
retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological
basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs. It is this central issue of good faith
that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw
uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of
vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA
and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt
with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson,
a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger
and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that
the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York
Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public. But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi)
had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that
"proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than
pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S.
Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later
detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who
had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents
were supposedly written. Nonetheless, the
forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and
to discredit Wilson. The
origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between
the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost
certainly criminal. The letterheads and
official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from
a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into
conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian
go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not
yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in
these murky waters. There is one line of
inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it
difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and
defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges
of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea
bargain with his prosecutor, Paul
McNulty,
and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their
inquiries connected. Where all this leads
will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur
this week when the term of his grand jury expires. If Fitzgerald issues
indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere
will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries
included,
will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and
Mrs. America can see it. If Fitzgerald issues
no indictments, the
matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the
new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith
Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush
administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the
ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target. Then there is a
separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the
Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the
ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing
Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for
war. And last week,
Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to
require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents
relating to the so-called White
House Iraq Group.
Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 -- seven
months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged
"with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq." The group included:
Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley
(now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into
dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched
its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably
spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly
explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view,
you don't introduce new products in August." The marketing is over but the war goes on.
The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the
White House is demoralized and braced for disaster. http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051023-104217-9679r |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
