csua.org/u/cqa -> www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6677
Certainly Is Not Switzerland: Trish Schuh Quotable The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freei ng its citizens from brutal oppression.
I'm going to swim against the tide , here, and against the expectations of my readers, by suggesting that t his investigation isn't about Rove and, furthermore, that Rove is a vict im, in an important sense, someone who was used and abused by the real c ulprits.
original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her maiden name? After all, most married women even in this era of Women's Liberation defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brie f moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe W ilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?
As the Washington Post reported wh en the Plame scandal broke: "A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday tha t every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visite d their country and to reconstruct her activities. The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, bu t also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matte r of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail senten ce and a fine this is a question of possible espionage. What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the clearance to get access to her name.
cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst worki ng at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally import ant overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentali zed and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize t hat they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the C IA.
says as much: "Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learn ed that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby an d made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had c reated for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the Pr esident and the Office of the Vice President. "The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was ob liged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: 'The president knows he wasn't involved.
publicly pillorying White House spok esman Scott McClellan: "QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott "(LAUGHTER) " because after the investigation began after the criminal investigation was under way you said, October 10th, 2003, 'I spoke with those individu als, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,' from that podium. Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect f or the sanctity of the criminal investigation. Reporters who heard McClellan's assurances back in October 2003 weren't b eing deceived so much as lulled to sleep, and that really didn't take mu ch of an effort on the part of the administration, now did it? They were basically asleep anyway, and weren't really listening to what was being said.
Joshua Marshall for one: "So, when McClellan was asked to be more clear, he opted for a meaningles sly vague statement and then fell back on the 'leaking of classified inf ormation' dodge.
Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now in the process of finding it a nd Rove is not his real quarry, although he and some others in the White House could wind up as collateral damage. By all indications, Bulldog's real target points more in the direction of the Office of the Vice Pres ident.
Scooter Libby or the vice presi dent but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter at which a decisi on was made to get a 'work-up' on me. That meant getting as much informa tion about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my fami ly. Then that information was pas sed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, an d at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, a fter my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times." "Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that acco mpanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration. Did thes e people run an intelligence operation against you?" "Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from wh at I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence ope ration against my family and me. That's what a work-up is to try to find everything you can about an American citizen." ", there was only one logical place for Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a d eep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation?
Richard Sal e, published last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Ha nnah as having played a key role in all this: "Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evi dence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer' s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. "According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lew is 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name su periors, one federal law-enforcement official said."
Hannah is a neoconservati ve and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Mid dle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Ha nnah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's suppor t for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involv ed in getting up the Iraq war."
In both c ases, which involve the unlawful dissemination of sensitive US secrets , the defense is claiming that "everyone does it" and that the classifie d information they're accused of leaking or, in AIPAC's case, directly h anding over to the Israeli government is supposedly "common knowledge."
Libby a nd Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the government.
annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (f or which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chal abi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA t o verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, wh ere he found the story to be ...
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