Newsweek
7-30-10
After spending years trying to thwart the nuclear black market, a former CIA spy says the only way to prevent terrorists from getting the bomb is to eliminate all of the world’s nukes.
The smoke was still drifting off the World Trade Center when the CIA discovered that Osama bin Laden had secretly met just a few days before the attack with a top Pakistani nuclear scientist, seeking help in building a nuclear bomb. Immediately, nuclear terrorism jumped to the top of the list of urgent threats to the civilized world. My clandestine work as a CIA operations officer became laser-focused on counterproliferation as we mobilized to prevent a nuclear 9/11. We knew that the horror of a nuclear bomb detonated in a major city would dwarf any catastrophe previously suffered by our country—the death toll would be in the hundreds of thousands and the economic and social devastation sudden and catastrophic.
Nine years later, who is winning this contest of wills between the civilized world and terrorist groups trying to buy, build, or steal a nuclear bomb? I would like to believe the bad guys are losing, but, in fact, time favors them as long as nuclear-bomb-grade materials and weapons exist in the world. A valiant team effort by the CIA and our many partners around the globe has prevented an attack thus far. But my experience as part of that effort tells me that the only way to end this danger is to lock down all nuclear materials and eliminate nuclear weapons in all countries.
I am now dedicated to achieving this urgent goal as a leader of the Global Zero movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons. To help deliver a wake-up call to the public and policymakers, I recently participated in a chilling documentary that’s in theaters now, Countdown to Zero, produced by Lawrence Bender and Participant Media—the team that made An Inconvenient Truth. This extraordinary film explains why living in a world with nuclear weapons and materials is simply not a viable option. Our only hope of survival is to drain the swamp as soon as we possibly can. The alternative is for nuclear weapons to spread around the world and, sooner or later, for terrorists to incinerate the heart of a major city.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there have been at least 25 incidents of lost or stolen nuclear explosive material. If we estimate that the amount of recovered material represents 10 to 30 percent of the total amount that’s made it onto the black market over the years, that translates into sufficient material to build two to five nuclear weapons. The CIA is trying to ensure that none of this falls into the hands of terrorists, but it’s an uphill battle if the leakage of materials continues.
We may not precisely know the scale of the illicit trafficking in fissile materials, but we do know that rogue salesmen are peddling nuclear technology on the black market. The enterprising father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan, hawked his wares for years before my group at the CIA caught him red-handed and put him out of business for selling a nuclear bomb to Libya in late 2003.
If terrorists get their hands on highly enriched uranium (a grapefruit-size quantity would be sufficient), they could smuggle it into a targeted city and detonate it on site. A hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium could fit in a shoebox—and 100,000 shipping containers come into the U.S. every day. Existing radiation sensors at the docks stand little chance: there are simply not enough of them, and it’s easy to hide highly enriched uranium in common materials that also give off a slight radioactive signature, like kitty litter. And building a bomb is no longer a well-guarded secret. Graduate students at U.S. scientific laboratories routinely design nuclear weapons (minus the fissile material) using off-the-shelf commercial equipment.
Countdown to Zero looks at other nuclear threats in addition to terrorism, and there are many. The spread of the bomb to more nations is especially worrisome. If Iran acquires a nuclear-weapons capability, its rivals in the region will likely follow suit in short order, and the chances of nuclear catastrophe resulting from an accident, miscalculation, or madness will rise exponentially. As the movie shows, even the well-disciplined and professional U.S. military has made very serious mistakes with nuclear weapons. The nuclear superpowers—who remain on launch-ready alert to this day—have come close to accidental nuclear war on numerous occasions. U.S. and Soviet bombers and submarines with nuclear weapons on board have crashed or sunk.
After spending years in the nuclear underworld, working to block the proliferation of nuclear weapons and material to other nations or to terrorist groups, I believe we are losing ground and that bold action is needed. The only way to avert a disaster is to put all nuclear-bomb-grade materials and nuclear weapons in all countries under ironclad control as soon as possible (as President Obama advocated during his Nuclear Security Summit earlier this year), and then to eliminate the stockpiles completely. This cannot be done overnight or unilaterally. It will require years of hard work. The United States and Russia—which together possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons—must reduce their Cold War stockpiles. Then, along with other major powers, including China, they must lead an international effort to reduce arsenals worldwide and make the elimination of nuclear weapons a global imperative, allowing no exceptions, whether Iran or Israel.
We will need to strengthen the monitoring of nuclear activities to verify compliance and root out any black market-eering. International inspectors must be able to investigate any facility in the world without restrictions. There is a strong track record to build on—since 1945 no nation has produced enough nuclear material to build a bomb without being detected by foreign intelligence agencies.
Getting to global zero will be arduous, but it can be done. Many who supported nuclear weapons as a deterrent during the Cold War now recognize that the threat today is not nuclear war with Russia or China, but proliferation and the risk of nuclear terrorism. Eliminating these present-day threats outweighs any benefits we might gain from retaining our nuclear arsenal.
The world’s nuclear stockpile has already been cut by more than half over the past 20 years—from its Cold War peak of about 70,000 warheads to today’s 23,000. And a political consensus is building in support of eliminating the rest. Presidents Obama and Medvedev have jointly declared their commitment to the goal of global zero and taken the initial step toward it by negotiating a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—the first significant agreement to cut nuclear arms in decades. The United Nations Security Council has declared its unanimous support for the goal.
In the previous century, America led the world and defined the age—defeating Hitler, rebuilding Europe through the Marshall Plan, promoting civil rights for all people, sending men to the moon. Now we must again lead the world to conquer the gravest danger of this young century—nuclear terrorism.
As a former covert CIA operations officer, Plame Wilson worked to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She is the author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, soon to be a movie starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
Showing posts with label Valerie Plame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valerie Plame. Show all posts
Friday, August 6, 2010
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Questions remain about Rove's CIA leak email
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2995.shtml
Questions remain about Rove's CIA leak email
By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 26, 2008
It's been nearly five years since former White House political adviser Karl Rove sent an incriminating email to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley indicating that Rove had a candid conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence.
Rove had insisted publicly and privately that he was not the source for a story Cooper wrote that unmasked Plame's affiliation with the CIA in July 2003 nor, Rove said, was he the source who provided syndicated columnist Robert Novak with the same information for a column that was published a few days before Cooper's. The email Rove sent to Hadley on July 11, 2003, just three months before the start of a federal probe into the leak clearly contradicted Rove's account.
Questions about Rove's email to Hadley resurfaced after the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) revealed last April that thousands of emails Rove sent over a four-year period via an email account maintained by the Republican National Committee might have been destroyed. Many of the emails Rove sent using his RNC account pertained to White House business and the fact that it was not archived is said to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
Additionally, CREW said it conducted an investigation that discovered the White House lost as many as 10 million emails. The White House said in a court document that it erased backup tapes containing the email archives, some of which relate to a wide-range of administration scandals, including the role of White House officials in the Plame leak.
In late September 2003, three months after he told Hadley in an email that he spoke with Cooper, Rove and about 1,000 other White House staffers were ordered to turn over all email correspondence that contained references to Plame and Wilson to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales when the leak of Plame's undercover status was referred to federal investigators.
But the Hadley email was never turned over to Gonzales during the early stages of the Plame investigation.
Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, had long maintained that the email was never found during the initial search because the right "search words" weren't used. Some reporters and bloggers have opined the Rove/Hadley email did not turn up because Rove sent it using his Republican National Committee account. But according to a little known story published in The Washington Post in December 2005, Rove used his government account when he sent Hadley an email describing his conversation with Time's Matthew Cooper.
In an email exchange a couple of weeks ago requesting that he clarify his position, Luskin said he "speculated that the [Hadley] email was overlooked because of a gap in search terms, but I have no direct knowledge." That contradicts his previous statements to Newsweek in which Luskin stated unequivocally that the email was not found because the wrong search terms were used.
"Neither Mr. Rove nor I was involved in any manner in the collection of emails or other electronic documents in response to subpoenas from the Special Counsel [Patrick Fitzgerald]," Luskin said. "Mr. Fitzgerald's staff worked directly with the White House counsel and the IT folks from the White House. However, Mr. Fitzgerald did advise me that Mr. Rove had absolutely no responsibility for the oversight and that he has never regarded the failure to turn over the [Hadley] email as 'culpable' by anyone."
That statement, or at least part of it, does not appear to be entirely accurate. In a May 10, 2007, deposition before investigators working for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rove's former assistant, Susan Ralston, testified that during the leak investigation she and Rove were instructed "to go and do keyword searches based on the subpoena that we got, and search all of his folders for keywords." Ralston said during her deposition that there were "six or seven" subpoenas Rove received from Fitzgerald for documents in the Plame leak. Any documents that were found were turned over to Gonzales. Yet the email Rove sent to Hadley was never turned over to Fitzgerald.
Luskin would not provide a copy of that email, which has never been released publicly. He said the contents of the exchange have been "widely reported." Luskin added that he had no interest in providing either the Hadley email "or any other documents," including a copy of a letter Fitzgerald sent Luskin that purportedly cleared Rove of criminal exposure in the leak case, to me because of a story I reported two years ago that stated Rove was indicted by Fitzgerald. Luskin added that I "played a despicable role in circulating false allegations concerning an indictment of Mr. Rove and persisted with the story even after it was demonstrated to be false" and he, therefore, would not provide documentary evidence that could demonstrate his client's innocence.
Fair enough. But Luskin also refused to voluntarily provide Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the Hadley email and other electronic messages that Rove and Luskin turned over to Fitzgerald. Last May, Leahy issued a subpoena to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the documents.
The subpoena covered a wide range of emails Rove sent over four years, some of which related to congressional investigations into the firings of nine US attorneys two years ago that Rove is widely believed to have played a hands-on role in.
Gonzales never met Leahy's May 15, 2007 deadline to turn over the emails. So on May 24, 2007, Leahy wrote to Luskin asking if he would forfeit the emails to his committee Luskin and Rove turned over to Fitzgerald. Luskin politely refused, according to a copy of a June 4, 2007, letter he sent to Leahy, obtained by this reporter.
"As you are aware, Mr. Rove cooperated fully with the investigation by the Special Counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the disclosure of the identity of a CIA employee. As part of that cooperation, in April 2004, Mr. Rove made available to Mr. Fitzgerald two personal computers, a Blackberry, and a computer furnished to Mr. Rove by the Republican National Committee," Luskin wrote. "Mr. Fitzgerald arranged for the FBI to image all of the data on these computers. Without any constraint by Mr. Rove, Mr. Fitzgerald reviewed all of this data and made and retained copies of any information relevant to his investigation. Because the computers also contained confidential personal information and attorney client communications, Mr. Fitzgerald returned to me for safekeeping the imaged copies made by the FBI."
"The electronic copies made by the FBI, which I retain in their sealed form, only contain information created before early April 2004, when the FBI made the copies," Luskin added. "I have reviewed the documents and testimony made publicly available by this and other congressional committees investigating the termination of the United States Attorneys. I am unaware of any evidence suggesting that Mr. Rove may have played any role whatsoever in this matter before April 2004. Accordingly, I have no reason to believe that the materials in my possession contain any information relevant to this Committee's inquiry."
So what happened? And why didn't investigators, who searched Rove's emails and computers during the early days of the leak probe, find a copy of the email Rove sent Hadley?
A fascinating new book provides some possible answers.
David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor, a former product management director for Symantec who also held the title of "Godfather" at Apple Computer, Inc., and has written more than 600 articles about email, is the author of "Where Have All the Emails Gone?," the definitive account about the circumstances that led to the loss of administration emails. A detective story that reads like a "Dummies" book for the technically challenged, "Where Have All The Emails Gone?" relied upon good old fashioned shoe-leather reporting to tell the story of the missing emails and using the public record in attempting to solve the mystery.
In an interview, Gewirtz said the one possibility that the Rove/Hadley email never surfaced was that it was sent during a time when the White House had switched its email over from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, an issue in and of itself the author finds suspicious. The Rove/Hadley email may have been lost during the transition to the new email system.
"Why did they migrate at this time? The country was getting ready for war," noted Gewirtz, who said he has been speaking with Senate and House staffers probing the loss of White House emails. "It doesn't make sense that you would want to yank out your communications structure when you're building up toward war. It's crucial for our government to have qualified communications at a critical juncture. It's just mind bogglingly questionable that the White House would change its communication structure at that time period. Why did they need to do it then? It certainly provides a lot of plausible deniability for when emails are scrutinized."
"Another plausible reason, and this is the conspiracy theory, if you yank out an email system there goes your compliance with the Presidential Records act and there's the 'my dog ate it' excuse," Gewirtz said. "There's really no net loss other than a PR loss."
Gewirtz said his biggest concern about the loss of White House emails is the national security implications.
"There's a separate server for political activity. The server is not located or managed by security experts," Gewirtz said. "Emails are sent by White House staffers using an unsecured server. Hundreds of millions of emails are sent through the open Internet. An email message sent by a low level political employee says where the president is traveling. That can be seen by anyone and can put the president at risk. It's something of a disturbing experience talking to Washington politicians. Technical issue takes a back seat based on what the political goal is. The potential loss through homeland security is pretty profound."
In addressing Luskin's explanation that the Hadley email did not turn up because the wrong search terms were used, Gewirtz said that it's a possibility, but a poor excuse for not locating an email.
"You can type search terms that should but won't pick things up directly," he said. "You can choose to spell something wrong. Especially if there is no record of what you are searching."
Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been trying to unravel these complicated technical issues for the past seven months. Last July, Waxman wrote Fitzgerald seeking "transcripts, reports, notes, and other documents relating to any interviews outside the presence of the grand jury of" Rove, Hadley, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other former White House officials.
In addition to his search for documents and questions surrounding the Plame leak, Waxman is also investigating how the White House lost millions of emails and why steps were not taken to preserve the electronic messages earlier . . . His committee is scheduled to hold a hearing this morning on the matter.
Gewirtz says that if congressional investigators are serious about tracking down missing White House emails, particularly emails related to the US attorney purge, then they need to start looking in the right place.
"There is a vast amount of email that has gone through the Republican National Committee," Gewirtz said. "If they're looking for a smoking gun on the firing of US attorneys, then its most likely [White House officials who played a role in the dismissals] sent the emails through the RNC system and not the EOP [Executive Office of the President] system. Meanwhile, everyone is looking for emails on the EOP sever because it's sexier. I think they are looking in the wrong place. If I were a betting man, I would say it's in the RNC system."
Still, Waxman said in an interview at his office in late December that he is determined to get answers to some of the lingering questions about Rove's role in the Plame leak, why the Hadley email never turned up, and whether there is a direct connection between that and the loss of millions of White House emails.
In the first of two letters Waxman sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey in December, the congressman said, "Fitzgerald and his staff have cooperated with the Committee’s investigation and have produced a number of responsive documents to the Committee. Among the documents that Mr. Fitzgerald has produced to the Committee are 'FBI 302 reports' of interviews with CIA and State Department officials and other individuals. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee."
I met with Waxman in late December during an interview conducted by Truthout Executive Director Marc Ash at Waxman's West Los Angeles office. Waxman said two of the key documents his staff had been trying to obtain were a copy of the letter Fitzgerald sent to Luskin that apparently indicated that Rove was no longer under investigation, as well as the email Rove sent to Hadley. At the time of our meeting, Waxman had already sent Mukasey a second letter because the attorney general never responded to his first request. Waxman set a deadline of January 8 for the Plame investigation documents to be turned over to his committee.
The documents have yet to be handed over, but an aide to Waxman said the congressman has been "working" with Attorney General Mukasey over the past several weeks in hopes that an agreement may be reached.
Questions remain about Rove's CIA leak email
By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 26, 2008
It's been nearly five years since former White House political adviser Karl Rove sent an incriminating email to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley indicating that Rove had a candid conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence.
Rove had insisted publicly and privately that he was not the source for a story Cooper wrote that unmasked Plame's affiliation with the CIA in July 2003 nor, Rove said, was he the source who provided syndicated columnist Robert Novak with the same information for a column that was published a few days before Cooper's. The email Rove sent to Hadley on July 11, 2003, just three months before the start of a federal probe into the leak clearly contradicted Rove's account.
Questions about Rove's email to Hadley resurfaced after the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) revealed last April that thousands of emails Rove sent over a four-year period via an email account maintained by the Republican National Committee might have been destroyed. Many of the emails Rove sent using his RNC account pertained to White House business and the fact that it was not archived is said to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
Additionally, CREW said it conducted an investigation that discovered the White House lost as many as 10 million emails. The White House said in a court document that it erased backup tapes containing the email archives, some of which relate to a wide-range of administration scandals, including the role of White House officials in the Plame leak.
In late September 2003, three months after he told Hadley in an email that he spoke with Cooper, Rove and about 1,000 other White House staffers were ordered to turn over all email correspondence that contained references to Plame and Wilson to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales when the leak of Plame's undercover status was referred to federal investigators.
But the Hadley email was never turned over to Gonzales during the early stages of the Plame investigation.
Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, had long maintained that the email was never found during the initial search because the right "search words" weren't used. Some reporters and bloggers have opined the Rove/Hadley email did not turn up because Rove sent it using his Republican National Committee account. But according to a little known story published in The Washington Post in December 2005, Rove used his government account when he sent Hadley an email describing his conversation with Time's Matthew Cooper.
In an email exchange a couple of weeks ago requesting that he clarify his position, Luskin said he "speculated that the [Hadley] email was overlooked because of a gap in search terms, but I have no direct knowledge." That contradicts his previous statements to Newsweek in which Luskin stated unequivocally that the email was not found because the wrong search terms were used.
"Neither Mr. Rove nor I was involved in any manner in the collection of emails or other electronic documents in response to subpoenas from the Special Counsel [Patrick Fitzgerald]," Luskin said. "Mr. Fitzgerald's staff worked directly with the White House counsel and the IT folks from the White House. However, Mr. Fitzgerald did advise me that Mr. Rove had absolutely no responsibility for the oversight and that he has never regarded the failure to turn over the [Hadley] email as 'culpable' by anyone."
That statement, or at least part of it, does not appear to be entirely accurate. In a May 10, 2007, deposition before investigators working for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rove's former assistant, Susan Ralston, testified that during the leak investigation she and Rove were instructed "to go and do keyword searches based on the subpoena that we got, and search all of his folders for keywords." Ralston said during her deposition that there were "six or seven" subpoenas Rove received from Fitzgerald for documents in the Plame leak. Any documents that were found were turned over to Gonzales. Yet the email Rove sent to Hadley was never turned over to Fitzgerald.
Luskin would not provide a copy of that email, which has never been released publicly. He said the contents of the exchange have been "widely reported." Luskin added that he had no interest in providing either the Hadley email "or any other documents," including a copy of a letter Fitzgerald sent Luskin that purportedly cleared Rove of criminal exposure in the leak case, to me because of a story I reported two years ago that stated Rove was indicted by Fitzgerald. Luskin added that I "played a despicable role in circulating false allegations concerning an indictment of Mr. Rove and persisted with the story even after it was demonstrated to be false" and he, therefore, would not provide documentary evidence that could demonstrate his client's innocence.
Fair enough. But Luskin also refused to voluntarily provide Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the Hadley email and other electronic messages that Rove and Luskin turned over to Fitzgerald. Last May, Leahy issued a subpoena to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the documents.
The subpoena covered a wide range of emails Rove sent over four years, some of which related to congressional investigations into the firings of nine US attorneys two years ago that Rove is widely believed to have played a hands-on role in.
Gonzales never met Leahy's May 15, 2007 deadline to turn over the emails. So on May 24, 2007, Leahy wrote to Luskin asking if he would forfeit the emails to his committee Luskin and Rove turned over to Fitzgerald. Luskin politely refused, according to a copy of a June 4, 2007, letter he sent to Leahy, obtained by this reporter.
"As you are aware, Mr. Rove cooperated fully with the investigation by the Special Counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the disclosure of the identity of a CIA employee. As part of that cooperation, in April 2004, Mr. Rove made available to Mr. Fitzgerald two personal computers, a Blackberry, and a computer furnished to Mr. Rove by the Republican National Committee," Luskin wrote. "Mr. Fitzgerald arranged for the FBI to image all of the data on these computers. Without any constraint by Mr. Rove, Mr. Fitzgerald reviewed all of this data and made and retained copies of any information relevant to his investigation. Because the computers also contained confidential personal information and attorney client communications, Mr. Fitzgerald returned to me for safekeeping the imaged copies made by the FBI."
"The electronic copies made by the FBI, which I retain in their sealed form, only contain information created before early April 2004, when the FBI made the copies," Luskin added. "I have reviewed the documents and testimony made publicly available by this and other congressional committees investigating the termination of the United States Attorneys. I am unaware of any evidence suggesting that Mr. Rove may have played any role whatsoever in this matter before April 2004. Accordingly, I have no reason to believe that the materials in my possession contain any information relevant to this Committee's inquiry."
So what happened? And why didn't investigators, who searched Rove's emails and computers during the early days of the leak probe, find a copy of the email Rove sent Hadley?
A fascinating new book provides some possible answers.
David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor, a former product management director for Symantec who also held the title of "Godfather" at Apple Computer, Inc., and has written more than 600 articles about email, is the author of "Where Have All the Emails Gone?," the definitive account about the circumstances that led to the loss of administration emails. A detective story that reads like a "Dummies" book for the technically challenged, "Where Have All The Emails Gone?" relied upon good old fashioned shoe-leather reporting to tell the story of the missing emails and using the public record in attempting to solve the mystery.
In an interview, Gewirtz said the one possibility that the Rove/Hadley email never surfaced was that it was sent during a time when the White House had switched its email over from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, an issue in and of itself the author finds suspicious. The Rove/Hadley email may have been lost during the transition to the new email system.
"Why did they migrate at this time? The country was getting ready for war," noted Gewirtz, who said he has been speaking with Senate and House staffers probing the loss of White House emails. "It doesn't make sense that you would want to yank out your communications structure when you're building up toward war. It's crucial for our government to have qualified communications at a critical juncture. It's just mind bogglingly questionable that the White House would change its communication structure at that time period. Why did they need to do it then? It certainly provides a lot of plausible deniability for when emails are scrutinized."
"Another plausible reason, and this is the conspiracy theory, if you yank out an email system there goes your compliance with the Presidential Records act and there's the 'my dog ate it' excuse," Gewirtz said. "There's really no net loss other than a PR loss."
Gewirtz said his biggest concern about the loss of White House emails is the national security implications.
"There's a separate server for political activity. The server is not located or managed by security experts," Gewirtz said. "Emails are sent by White House staffers using an unsecured server. Hundreds of millions of emails are sent through the open Internet. An email message sent by a low level political employee says where the president is traveling. That can be seen by anyone and can put the president at risk. It's something of a disturbing experience talking to Washington politicians. Technical issue takes a back seat based on what the political goal is. The potential loss through homeland security is pretty profound."
In addressing Luskin's explanation that the Hadley email did not turn up because the wrong search terms were used, Gewirtz said that it's a possibility, but a poor excuse for not locating an email.
"You can type search terms that should but won't pick things up directly," he said. "You can choose to spell something wrong. Especially if there is no record of what you are searching."
Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been trying to unravel these complicated technical issues for the past seven months. Last July, Waxman wrote Fitzgerald seeking "transcripts, reports, notes, and other documents relating to any interviews outside the presence of the grand jury of" Rove, Hadley, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other former White House officials.
In addition to his search for documents and questions surrounding the Plame leak, Waxman is also investigating how the White House lost millions of emails and why steps were not taken to preserve the electronic messages earlier . . . His committee is scheduled to hold a hearing this morning on the matter.
Gewirtz says that if congressional investigators are serious about tracking down missing White House emails, particularly emails related to the US attorney purge, then they need to start looking in the right place.
"There is a vast amount of email that has gone through the Republican National Committee," Gewirtz said. "If they're looking for a smoking gun on the firing of US attorneys, then its most likely [White House officials who played a role in the dismissals] sent the emails through the RNC system and not the EOP [Executive Office of the President] system. Meanwhile, everyone is looking for emails on the EOP sever because it's sexier. I think they are looking in the wrong place. If I were a betting man, I would say it's in the RNC system."
Still, Waxman said in an interview at his office in late December that he is determined to get answers to some of the lingering questions about Rove's role in the Plame leak, why the Hadley email never turned up, and whether there is a direct connection between that and the loss of millions of White House emails.
In the first of two letters Waxman sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey in December, the congressman said, "Fitzgerald and his staff have cooperated with the Committee’s investigation and have produced a number of responsive documents to the Committee. Among the documents that Mr. Fitzgerald has produced to the Committee are 'FBI 302 reports' of interviews with CIA and State Department officials and other individuals. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee."
I met with Waxman in late December during an interview conducted by Truthout Executive Director Marc Ash at Waxman's West Los Angeles office. Waxman said two of the key documents his staff had been trying to obtain were a copy of the letter Fitzgerald sent to Luskin that apparently indicated that Rove was no longer under investigation, as well as the email Rove sent to Hadley. At the time of our meeting, Waxman had already sent Mukasey a second letter because the attorney general never responded to his first request. Waxman set a deadline of January 8 for the Plame investigation documents to be turned over to his committee.
The documents have yet to be handed over, but an aide to Waxman said the congressman has been "working" with Attorney General Mukasey over the past several weeks in hopes that an agreement may be reached.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Whaddup, Steamshovel?
Whaddup, Steamshovel?
by Kenn Thomas
SteamshovelPress.com
Good news! The new Steamshovel-related book, Conspiracy Files, is now available in Australia. The publishers plan US and UK editions some time in the near future, but anxious readers who want to check it out right way, go to www.murdochbooks.com.au/conspiracy.htm and have it shipped.
The book has a slick, color, nice interior graphics, hardback design.
It presents a gamut of historical conspiracy information useful to the novice and at the same time a wealth of arcane detail that will satisfy even veteran conspiracy watchers that they came away learning something new. Kinda like an issue of Steamshovel.
That leads to the bad news. As many readers have noticed, the Steamshovel has stalled for some time now. It has no advertising revenue streams and the subscription money it brings in has been barely enough over the years to get its motor to turn over.
For many months it has survived only on the well wishes of its considerable and devoted audience. Alas, with the last round of postal and printer increases, even that no longer makes it possible to continue to produce the hard copy magazine for the present time.
This conclusion fell upon Steamshovel with one issue left under production, and this in turn led to a survival strategy. Steamshovel Press #23 is now available electronically, as a PDF file. For subscribers, this means that they need only supply their e-mail address to have it sent. Newbies can receive it for $10, payable the standard way (via money order or check payable to "Kenn Thomas" at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121), or via Steamshovel's new PayPal account.
It may be possible to salvage Steamshovel from the junk yard of conspiracy zines past if this new electronic form of the magazine sells well, with the goal of bringing back the hard copy. Steamshovel can produce a new hard copy for as little as a thousand dollars, and in this era of niche marketing that's not such a large amount.
In addition, however, finally moving all the way into electronic publishing may push the operation into new realms. If this works, Steamshovel has plans to make available a wide range of materials from its archives through electronic format, including PDFs of many classic Steamshovel books; other arcane an underground literature; and DVDs of things taken from the airwaves and public events that shed new light on the parapolitical environs.
The first of this new product line: the lecture I gave at Conspiracy Con in San Jose earlier this year. This hour-long DVD costs $10, post paid. Its title: "Parapolitics On the Planet Earth", and in it I explore the changing meaning of the JFK assassination in the popular culture, replete with video of the Zapruder film; Abraham Zapruder himself just in from the "shoot"; and the film's first TV airing-all of it leading to a discussion of the most currently relevant assassinations, centering on Alexander Litvinenko. Plus I cover the history of pop culture's falling out with the covert world, from the 1970s defections of the likes of John Stockwell and Phillip Agee to the Valerie Plame affair, connected as they are to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So it's a nice little trot over current affairs seen through the JFK prism.
None of that is a hard sell, just "what it is" in the parlance. Steamshovelpress.com remains the magazine presence on the web, and I still pop around on various conspiracy discussion lists with various insights and footnotes placing current and historical events into the perspective of the conspiracy minded reading public. Gasp, a Steamshovel blog may yet appear. The pathway back to actually producing the magazine, however, will be this electronic one, and I hope readers are willing to follow along with it.
by Kenn Thomas
SteamshovelPress.com
Good news! The new Steamshovel-related book, Conspiracy Files, is now available in Australia. The publishers plan US and UK editions some time in the near future, but anxious readers who want to check it out right way, go to www.murdochbooks.com.au/conspiracy.htm and have it shipped.
The book has a slick, color, nice interior graphics, hardback design.
It presents a gamut of historical conspiracy information useful to the novice and at the same time a wealth of arcane detail that will satisfy even veteran conspiracy watchers that they came away learning something new. Kinda like an issue of Steamshovel.
That leads to the bad news. As many readers have noticed, the Steamshovel has stalled for some time now. It has no advertising revenue streams and the subscription money it brings in has been barely enough over the years to get its motor to turn over.
For many months it has survived only on the well wishes of its considerable and devoted audience. Alas, with the last round of postal and printer increases, even that no longer makes it possible to continue to produce the hard copy magazine for the present time.
This conclusion fell upon Steamshovel with one issue left under production, and this in turn led to a survival strategy. Steamshovel Press #23 is now available electronically, as a PDF file. For subscribers, this means that they need only supply their e-mail address to have it sent. Newbies can receive it for $10, payable the standard way (via money order or check payable to "Kenn Thomas" at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121), or via Steamshovel's new PayPal account.
It may be possible to salvage Steamshovel from the junk yard of conspiracy zines past if this new electronic form of the magazine sells well, with the goal of bringing back the hard copy. Steamshovel can produce a new hard copy for as little as a thousand dollars, and in this era of niche marketing that's not such a large amount.
In addition, however, finally moving all the way into electronic publishing may push the operation into new realms. If this works, Steamshovel has plans to make available a wide range of materials from its archives through electronic format, including PDFs of many classic Steamshovel books; other arcane an underground literature; and DVDs of things taken from the airwaves and public events that shed new light on the parapolitical environs.
The first of this new product line: the lecture I gave at Conspiracy Con in San Jose earlier this year. This hour-long DVD costs $10, post paid. Its title: "Parapolitics On the Planet Earth", and in it I explore the changing meaning of the JFK assassination in the popular culture, replete with video of the Zapruder film; Abraham Zapruder himself just in from the "shoot"; and the film's first TV airing-all of it leading to a discussion of the most currently relevant assassinations, centering on Alexander Litvinenko. Plus I cover the history of pop culture's falling out with the covert world, from the 1970s defections of the likes of John Stockwell and Phillip Agee to the Valerie Plame affair, connected as they are to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So it's a nice little trot over current affairs seen through the JFK prism.
None of that is a hard sell, just "what it is" in the parlance. Steamshovelpress.com remains the magazine presence on the web, and I still pop around on various conspiracy discussion lists with various insights and footnotes placing current and historical events into the perspective of the conspiracy minded reading public. Gasp, a Steamshovel blog may yet appear. The pathway back to actually producing the magazine, however, will be this electronic one, and I hope readers are willing to follow along with it.
Friday, July 6, 2007
The Libby Cover-up Completed
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/070307.html
The Libby Cover-up Completed
By Robert Parry
July 3, 2007
President George W. Bush’s decision to spare former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby from jail marks the final act of a crime and cover-up that began four years ago when Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials launched a campaign to discredit a critic of the Iraq War.
That campaign started with the leaking of sensitive classified information, the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, destroying her career and jeopardizing the lives of her agents in other countries. That was followed by White House lies being told to both investigators and the public in order to shield the President from dangerous political fallout.
By commuting Libby’s 30-month jail sentence on July 2 – and dangling the possibility of a full pardon later – Bush has moved to ensure that Cheney’s former chief of staff keeps his mouth shut and that the full story is never told.
The Plame/Libby cover-up also demonstrates the modern techniques available at least to a Republican president who wants to minimize damage from embarrassing or incriminating information. Bush was able to tap into the ideologically committed right-wing news media to confuse the issue and create political space for his final decision.
Ever since July 2003 – when Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, revealed that he had conducted a fact-finding trip for the CIA which helped debunk allegations that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa – the right-wing media has kept up a steady assault on Wilson.
Wilson received this treatment because his findings contradicted Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union Address that Iraq’s supposed search for uranium suggested that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear bomb, a key argument for invading Iraq.
Wilson’s public statements – in a New York Times op-ed and later on TV news shows – represented the first challenge to Bush’s case for war from a government insider. At the time, with Bush near the peak of his popularity, Wilson looked like easy prey.
So, instead of showing gratitude to an American citizen who undertook a difficult assignment at no pay, the Bush administration – aided by congressional Republicans, the right-wing media and some pro-war mainstream pundits – sought to tear down Wilson’s reputation and mislead the public on the facts of the case.
Talking Points
The original White House talking points – given to about a half dozen journalists – included that Wilson’s wife, Plame, worked in the CIA office that sent Wilson to Africa, thus suggesting that the trip was a case of nepotism.
One White House official later told a Washington Post reporter that the administration had informed at least six reporters about Plame “purely and simply out of revenge” against Wilson.
Libby was one of the leakers, briefing two journalists – Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time – but neither ran with Plame’s identity. Libby also brought White House press secretary Ari Fleischer in on the leak operation.
Two other leakers, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, White House political adviser Karl Rove, finally managed to get right-wing columnist Robert Novak to run a story about Plame’s identity.
Novak’s column destroyed Plame’s career and put at risk the lives of her overseas contacts who had helped the United States keep on an eye on proliferation of dangerous weapons in the Middle East.
But the Plame leak backfired on the White House when the CIA sought a criminal investigation into the illegal disclosure of a covert officer’s identity.
In September and October 2003, the Bush administration’s next line of defense was simply to lie. For his part, Bush pretended that he knew nothing about the anti-Wilson leaks, even though he had authorized release of some intelligence information meant to bolster the White House position on the uranium issue and undercut Wilson.
Bush disingenuously urged his subordinates to say what they knew. “I want to know the truth,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”
However, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. Rove issued a false statement through the White House press office denying any involvement.
That prompted Libby to seek help from Cheney. As Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells disclosed at his client’s trial, Libby’s complaint was that “they’re trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb.”
In response to Libby’s complaint, Cheney penned a message to the press secretary demanding equal treatment for Libby. “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others,” Cheney wrote to press secretary Scott McClellan.
In the note, Cheney initially ascribed Libby’s sacrifice to Bush but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in a passive tense. Complying with Cheney’s wishes on Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”
Twin Conspiracies
So, the evidence is that not only was there a high-level administration conspiracy to leak Plame’s identity but there was an equally high-level conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Libby got nailed because he failed to shift away from the cover stories when the investigation grew serious following the appointment of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor in December 2003.
But the cover-up never ended. Republican senators and the Republican National Committee issued harsh attacks on Wilson, making him out to be a liar when the reality was that his fact-finding trip had helped the U.S. intelligence community correctly raise pre-war doubts about Iraq’s supposed pursuit of uranium for nuclear weapons.
As Libby faced trial in early 2007, other right-wingers, such as attorney Victoria Toensing, released other red herrings to confuse the public. Toensing, for instance, began insisting that Plame was not a “covert” officer because she was “stationed” at CIA headquarters in Langley, Viriginia.
Toensing’s argument was based on her assertion that a 25-year-old law protecting the identities of U.S. intelligence officers from exposure required that the person “reside” or be “stationed” overseas in the previous five years.
However, Toensing misstated the law, which actually refers to intelligence officers having “served” abroad in the previous five years, which Plame later testified that she had done by traveling on overseas assignments for the CIA.
In other words, the law would protect the identity of a CIA officer based at Langley who went on missions overseas or, say, a special operations officer who was stationed at Ft. Bragg and resided in Fayetteville, N.C., but who still “served” on dangerous missions overseas.
But many in the right-wing news media and even at prestige newspapers like the Washington Post have adopted Toensing’s word games as reality. It’s now an article of faith in some political circles that Plame was not a “covert” officer and that therefore there was “no underlying crime.”
After Libby was found guilty for perjury and obstruction of justice and received a 30-month jail sentence, the cover-up entered a new phase with a new ferocity. His neoconservative allies, the right-wing press and some mainstream pundits joined in a clamor for his pardon.
This phase of the cover-up created political space for Bush to commute Libby’s sentence and to hold open the possibility of a full pardon.
So, rather than Libby cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald and laying out the full story, Cheney’s former chief of staff has a very strong incentive to stay mum. Not only won't he go to jail, but he has reason to hope that Bush will eventually wipe out the felony convictions with a full pardon.
Barring some unforeseen development, the Libby cover-up appears to have succeeded.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
The Libby Cover-up Completed
By Robert Parry
July 3, 2007
President George W. Bush’s decision to spare former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby from jail marks the final act of a crime and cover-up that began four years ago when Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials launched a campaign to discredit a critic of the Iraq War.
That campaign started with the leaking of sensitive classified information, the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, destroying her career and jeopardizing the lives of her agents in other countries. That was followed by White House lies being told to both investigators and the public in order to shield the President from dangerous political fallout.
By commuting Libby’s 30-month jail sentence on July 2 – and dangling the possibility of a full pardon later – Bush has moved to ensure that Cheney’s former chief of staff keeps his mouth shut and that the full story is never told.
The Plame/Libby cover-up also demonstrates the modern techniques available at least to a Republican president who wants to minimize damage from embarrassing or incriminating information. Bush was able to tap into the ideologically committed right-wing news media to confuse the issue and create political space for his final decision.
Ever since July 2003 – when Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, revealed that he had conducted a fact-finding trip for the CIA which helped debunk allegations that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa – the right-wing media has kept up a steady assault on Wilson.
Wilson received this treatment because his findings contradicted Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union Address that Iraq’s supposed search for uranium suggested that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear bomb, a key argument for invading Iraq.
Wilson’s public statements – in a New York Times op-ed and later on TV news shows – represented the first challenge to Bush’s case for war from a government insider. At the time, with Bush near the peak of his popularity, Wilson looked like easy prey.
So, instead of showing gratitude to an American citizen who undertook a difficult assignment at no pay, the Bush administration – aided by congressional Republicans, the right-wing media and some pro-war mainstream pundits – sought to tear down Wilson’s reputation and mislead the public on the facts of the case.
Talking Points
The original White House talking points – given to about a half dozen journalists – included that Wilson’s wife, Plame, worked in the CIA office that sent Wilson to Africa, thus suggesting that the trip was a case of nepotism.
One White House official later told a Washington Post reporter that the administration had informed at least six reporters about Plame “purely and simply out of revenge” against Wilson.
Libby was one of the leakers, briefing two journalists – Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time – but neither ran with Plame’s identity. Libby also brought White House press secretary Ari Fleischer in on the leak operation.
Two other leakers, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, White House political adviser Karl Rove, finally managed to get right-wing columnist Robert Novak to run a story about Plame’s identity.
Novak’s column destroyed Plame’s career and put at risk the lives of her overseas contacts who had helped the United States keep on an eye on proliferation of dangerous weapons in the Middle East.
But the Plame leak backfired on the White House when the CIA sought a criminal investigation into the illegal disclosure of a covert officer’s identity.
In September and October 2003, the Bush administration’s next line of defense was simply to lie. For his part, Bush pretended that he knew nothing about the anti-Wilson leaks, even though he had authorized release of some intelligence information meant to bolster the White House position on the uranium issue and undercut Wilson.
Bush disingenuously urged his subordinates to say what they knew. “I want to know the truth,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”
However, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. Rove issued a false statement through the White House press office denying any involvement.
That prompted Libby to seek help from Cheney. As Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells disclosed at his client’s trial, Libby’s complaint was that “they’re trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb.”
In response to Libby’s complaint, Cheney penned a message to the press secretary demanding equal treatment for Libby. “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others,” Cheney wrote to press secretary Scott McClellan.
In the note, Cheney initially ascribed Libby’s sacrifice to Bush but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in a passive tense. Complying with Cheney’s wishes on Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”
Twin Conspiracies
So, the evidence is that not only was there a high-level administration conspiracy to leak Plame’s identity but there was an equally high-level conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Libby got nailed because he failed to shift away from the cover stories when the investigation grew serious following the appointment of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor in December 2003.
But the cover-up never ended. Republican senators and the Republican National Committee issued harsh attacks on Wilson, making him out to be a liar when the reality was that his fact-finding trip had helped the U.S. intelligence community correctly raise pre-war doubts about Iraq’s supposed pursuit of uranium for nuclear weapons.
As Libby faced trial in early 2007, other right-wingers, such as attorney Victoria Toensing, released other red herrings to confuse the public. Toensing, for instance, began insisting that Plame was not a “covert” officer because she was “stationed” at CIA headquarters in Langley, Viriginia.
Toensing’s argument was based on her assertion that a 25-year-old law protecting the identities of U.S. intelligence officers from exposure required that the person “reside” or be “stationed” overseas in the previous five years.
However, Toensing misstated the law, which actually refers to intelligence officers having “served” abroad in the previous five years, which Plame later testified that she had done by traveling on overseas assignments for the CIA.
In other words, the law would protect the identity of a CIA officer based at Langley who went on missions overseas or, say, a special operations officer who was stationed at Ft. Bragg and resided in Fayetteville, N.C., but who still “served” on dangerous missions overseas.
But many in the right-wing news media and even at prestige newspapers like the Washington Post have adopted Toensing’s word games as reality. It’s now an article of faith in some political circles that Plame was not a “covert” officer and that therefore there was “no underlying crime.”
After Libby was found guilty for perjury and obstruction of justice and received a 30-month jail sentence, the cover-up entered a new phase with a new ferocity. His neoconservative allies, the right-wing press and some mainstream pundits joined in a clamor for his pardon.
This phase of the cover-up created political space for Bush to commute Libby’s sentence and to hold open the possibility of a full pardon.
So, rather than Libby cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald and laying out the full story, Cheney’s former chief of staff has a very strong incentive to stay mum. Not only won't he go to jail, but he has reason to hope that Bush will eventually wipe out the felony convictions with a full pardon.
Barring some unforeseen development, the Libby cover-up appears to have succeeded.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Sunday, July 1, 2007
The Washington Post weeps for Scooter Libby
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200706260003
The Washington Post weeps for Scooter Libby
Eric Boehlert
Tuesday June 26, 2007
Summary:
If it weren't for the soothing tones of The Washington Post's opinion pages, I'm not sure how I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby would sustain himself in his hour of need. The paper's editorialists have been instrumental in bucking Libby up, reassuring him time and again that his conviction in connection with the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation was a wild miscarriage of justice and the result of an out-of-control prosecutor.
Post columnist Richard Cohen became the latest to rush to Libby's wounded side, calming the convicted felon, insisting he had been hit by a "runaway train," engineered by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
As Libby and his bevy of attorneys now scramble to avoid a go-to-jail date for perjury, obstructing justice, and lying to federal investigators, it's clear Libby, an architect of the Iraq war, has achieved martyrdom status on the Post's editorial and opinion pages. (And yes, both Cohen and the Post editorial page backed the war with Iraq.)
Indeed, with his column, Cohen simply joined the Post's long-running Libby procession, attacking the investigation, demanding a halt to Libby's persecution, and confidently predicting his complete acquittal.
Note the choice words and phrases used by Post columnists, editorial writers, and contributors to describe Fitzgerald's pursuit of Libby:
"train wreck"
"silliness"
"A game"
"overblown"
"Tempest in a teapot"
"sideshow"
"an injustice"
"remarkable for its lack of substance"
"a huge, dangerous waste of time"
"nuts"
"bankrupt"
"farce"
"excessive"
" should not have been conducted in the first place"
"an injustice"
"misguided"
"Fitzgerald's Folly"
I'm nervous Post opinion writers are this close to organizing noisy sidewalk protests on Libby's behalf.
Meanwhile, searching through the Nexis news database going back more than 40 months, I cannot find a single outside contributor who was invited by the newspaper to write a piece that included sustained criticism of Libby during the scandal. Since the Plame story broke big in September 2003, the Post has likely published more than 1,000 guest columns on all sorts of topics. None, however, was built around criticizing Libby or cheering Fitzgerald's investigation. Not one.
By contrast, the newspaper has employed something of an open-door policy for outside contributors who want to use the paper's opinion pages to belittle the Fitzgerald investigation, wallow in pity for Libby, and purposefully misstate the facts of the case. (More on that later.)
Not that the Post is alone. Conservative opinion outlets have been wailing about the unjust fate Libby has suffered, how unprincipled Fitzgerald is, and how the Republican-appointed federal judge, Reggie Walton, botched the case. Some have even compared Libby, who assiduously avoided military service himself, with being a "fallen comrade," whom President George Bush cannot leave behind on the battlefield. (For some reason, Libby's sob mob won't attack the citizen jurists who, after hearing the evidence for weeks, promptly found Libby guilty. Also unmentioned is the fact that nearly 70 percent of Americans don't think Libby should receive a presidential pardon. That nugget gets in the way of the rogue prosecutor talking points.)
But why? Why has the Post gone all-in on a loser of a case like Libby's? Why the waving of the arms, the name-calling, and the almost comical rhetoric in defense of a relatively straightforward white-collar crime? I think the uproar is more cultural than political (or even legal). It's a class thing. The Washington Establishment, which the Post has dutifully represented for generations, identifies with Libby -- empathizes with him -- and is aghast at the idea that he might have to serve jail time for merely practicing the "dark art of politics," as Cohen described it.
As Glenn Greenwald noted at Salon last week:
The real injustice is that prison is simply not the place for the most powerful and entrenched members of the Beltway royal court, no matter how many crimes they commit. There is a grave indignity to watching our brave Republican elite be dragged before such lowly venues as a criminal court and be threatened with prison, as though they are common criminals or something. How disruptive and disrespectful and demeaning it all is.
Yet what's absolutely essential to note here is that during the previous Democratic administration, the same Washington Establishment, led by the apoplectic Post, turned on President Clinton when he was caught practicing his own version of the "dark art of politics" (i.e. lying about his sex life).
At the time, the Post's society reporter Sally Quinn famously (and sympathetically) documented how Beltway insiders resented, in starkly personal terms, Clinton's rogue behavior. "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place," Post columnist David Broder told Quinn. The article stressed it was the lying that most offended the Establishment members.
To date, I have not read an extended exegesis in the Post about how the D.C. Establishment players -- pundits, diplomats, attorneys, and lobbyists -- feel betrayed by the multitude of lies Bush told prior to invading Iraq. In fact, it's been just the opposite, with the Post ferociously defending Libby, despite his conviction for repeatedly telling war-related lies.
The hypocrisy -- the glaring double standard -- simply highlights the intellectual bankruptcy at play. And perhaps nowhere has that factual impoverishment been more apparent than in the opinion pages of the Post. (Sadly, the behavior on the opinion pages has overshadowed some of the insightful work the Post's news team has produced while covering the Plame story.)
For instance, back on April 9, 2006, the editorial page aggressively defended Bush's decision in 2003 to declassify parts of the National Intelligence Estimate in order to explain to reporters why the administration believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) prior to the war. It was Libby who was given the task of then huddling with a friendly reporter (paging Judith Miller) to spin the administration's explanation for war. The Post editorial, under the headline, "A Good Leak," assured readers, "There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that."
Not true. According to a Fitzgerald court filing, Libby himself told investigators that he could not recall a single other instance during his entire career in public service "when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the President's authorization that it be declassified."
In a June 10 Post column, David S. Broder claimed that Libby was charged for "denying to the FBI and the grand jury that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters."
Not true. Libby admitted in his FBI interviews and in grand jury testimony that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters.
Post columnist and knee-jerk White House defender Charles Krauthammer this year wrote that Bush should have pardoned Libby "long before this egregious case came to trial." A presidential pardon granted before a verdict is returned? Now that's creative -- pardons are not supposed to be considered until five years after the date of conviction. But Krauthammer's ignorance of federal pardon guidelines simply represented the level of legal debate taking place on the pages of the Post regarding the Libby case.
The Post's hacktacular Victoria Toensing
I mean, just look at what Victoria Toensing has been writing. A hyper-Republican partisan who served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and who overstayed her green room welcome during the 1990s as she relentlessly campaigned, via cable news channels, to run President Clinton out of office for lying about his sex life, Toensing became the Post's go-to Libby expert. Not once but twice the Post turned to Toensing as a legal expert, oblivious to the fact that she simply created her own sets of Libby trial facts.
For instance, Toensing's February 18 essay this year about the Libby case should never have been published by a serious newspaper. The piece was painfully unserious -- hacktacular, really. From the very opening, Toensing deliberately misstated the facts, which was the only way the subsequent 2,200 words could have even stayed afloat.
Her angle was that since Libby was on trial for his role in the Plame scandal, then lots of other players should be as well: "If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby?" For instance, Toensing wanted Fitzgerald "indicted" for granting former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer immunity. She wanted the media "indicted" for hypocrisy. She wanted the CIA "indicted" for allegedly writing up a "boilerplate" referral to the Justice Department for the initial Plame leak investigation.
Indict the media for hypocrisy? Keep in mind that the Post published Toensing's under the auspice that she was a legal expert.
When readers complained about the purposefully misleading essay that was dressed up as legal brief, Post editors harrumphed. Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman, asked associate editor Robert Kaiser about the piece. His condescending contempt for readers was hard to miss:
After 43 years at The Post, I know that many of our readers want us to do our jobs with the solemnity of monks and the propriety of Supreme Court justices, but I've never gotten the knack of either. I think good journalism should be provocative and fun.
Worse, Howell announced that Kaiser considered Toensing's piece to be a "huge success" because of "the many comments to [the ombudsman] that it provoked," as well as all the reader comments posted on the newspaper's website. That's right, a senior Post editor cheered that Toensing's piece was a "huge success" because lots of people wrote letters to the ombudsman and posted comments online. The fact that most of the correspondence filled up 40 pages of online comments detailing the falsehoods in Toensing's essay was of little interest to the Post hierarchy.
Toensing's foolery simply matched the standard she had set for herself in 2005 when she co-wrote an earlier Post op-ed, which of course attacked the Libby prosecution. Toensing's brash claim then was that no crime had been committed by outing the CIA agent because, at the time, Plame did not meet the strict specifications of being classified as an undercover agent when her name was first published in Robert Novak's syndicated column in July 2003. And Toensing should have know because she helped write the legislation that defined who was a covert agent was. The key specification for being considered covert, according to Toensing, was that "she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years."
So, had Plame been assigned to duty outside the United States five years prior to being outed? The truth is Toensing had no idea.
Well, now we do know. In a May court filing, Fitzgerald confirmed that at the time of the first White House leak in the summer of 2003, Plame "was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States." To this day, the Post editorial page has not acknowledged that central point, despite the fact it published several columns claiming, incorrectly, that Plame was not undercover.
Toensing actually earned bonus points for egregious flip-flopping. Remember, in January 2005 Toensing told Post readers no crime had been committed in the leak case because Plame was not "undercover." But in a January 2, 2004, Post news article, Toensing was quoted as saying no crime had been committed in the leak case because despite "the fact that she was undercover," her administration leakers might have not known it, which technically meant it was not against the law. [Emphasis added.] It seems obvious that opinion editors at the paper were oblivious to Toensing's bold flip-flop. Then again, the factual standards on the paper's opinion page seem rather low lately. The Post recently published a column by conservative Andrew Ferguson that mocked Al Gore's new book, Assault on Reason, because it does not have footnotes. In fact, the book contains 20 pages of endnotes.
Meanwhile, let's not forget the work of Post favorite Bruce Sanford, the Washington, D.C., attorney who was also tapped twice by opinion page editors to illuminate readers about the Libby case. Or, mislead readers, as the case may be. First, it was Sanford who teamed up with Toensing in 2005 to push the theory that Plame was not a covert agent, which meant the leak of her identity was not a crime. Sanford and Toensing were flat wrong there.
Post editors invited him back in 2006 to pontificate some more about the Libby case. On June 20, 2006, Sanford wrote, unequivocally, that Libby would be acquitted of all charges against him: "The futility will be evident in the acquittal next year of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice."
It got worse when Sanford detailed how it would be unfeasible for Fitzgerald to win a guilty verdict on charges of perjury:
It will be virtually impossible for the government to prove otherwise -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- when such a plausible defense exists and no conclusive evidence has emerged showing that his recollections of his contacts with journalists were intentionally false.
Oops.
Then during the trial, the Post invited conservative Byron York of the conservative National Review to write a piece -- echoing GOP talking points -- about how utterly confused he was that the trial wasn't actually about Plame's covert status. Of course, Fitzgerald had, more than a year before, patiently explained that the case was a straightforward prosecution of perjury and obstruction of justice. But York pretended to still be thoroughly baffled, and Post editorial editors were only too happy to print the misinformation.
And then there's Novak, whose syndicated column still appears in the Post. Newsweek confirmed that before Novak printed his infamous Plame column, he sent an advanced copy to longtime GOP lobbyist and Beltway insider Richard Hohlt, who then faxed it over to Karl Rove, "thereby giving the White House a heads up on the bombshell to come." A tip-off like that -- collusion, really -- would normally be a firing offense for most big-time newspaper columnists, or at least grounds for dropping that columnist's syndicated work. Yet the Post has taken no action against Novak.
When it comes to the Plame case, the Post, like Libby, remains in denial.
The Washington Post weeps for Scooter Libby
Eric Boehlert
Tuesday June 26, 2007
Summary:
If it weren't for the soothing tones of The Washington Post's opinion pages, I'm not sure how I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby would sustain himself in his hour of need. The paper's editorialists have been instrumental in bucking Libby up, reassuring him time and again that his conviction in connection with the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation was a wild miscarriage of justice and the result of an out-of-control prosecutor.
Post columnist Richard Cohen became the latest to rush to Libby's wounded side, calming the convicted felon, insisting he had been hit by a "runaway train," engineered by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
As Libby and his bevy of attorneys now scramble to avoid a go-to-jail date for perjury, obstructing justice, and lying to federal investigators, it's clear Libby, an architect of the Iraq war, has achieved martyrdom status on the Post's editorial and opinion pages. (And yes, both Cohen and the Post editorial page backed the war with Iraq.)
Indeed, with his column, Cohen simply joined the Post's long-running Libby procession, attacking the investigation, demanding a halt to Libby's persecution, and confidently predicting his complete acquittal.
Note the choice words and phrases used by Post columnists, editorial writers, and contributors to describe Fitzgerald's pursuit of Libby:
"train wreck"
"silliness"
"A game"
"overblown"
"Tempest in a teapot"
"sideshow"
"an injustice"
"remarkable for its lack of substance"
"a huge, dangerous waste of time"
"nuts"
"bankrupt"
"farce"
"excessive"
" should not have been conducted in the first place"
"an injustice"
"misguided"
"Fitzgerald's Folly"
I'm nervous Post opinion writers are this close to organizing noisy sidewalk protests on Libby's behalf.
Meanwhile, searching through the Nexis news database going back more than 40 months, I cannot find a single outside contributor who was invited by the newspaper to write a piece that included sustained criticism of Libby during the scandal. Since the Plame story broke big in September 2003, the Post has likely published more than 1,000 guest columns on all sorts of topics. None, however, was built around criticizing Libby or cheering Fitzgerald's investigation. Not one.
By contrast, the newspaper has employed something of an open-door policy for outside contributors who want to use the paper's opinion pages to belittle the Fitzgerald investigation, wallow in pity for Libby, and purposefully misstate the facts of the case. (More on that later.)
Not that the Post is alone. Conservative opinion outlets have been wailing about the unjust fate Libby has suffered, how unprincipled Fitzgerald is, and how the Republican-appointed federal judge, Reggie Walton, botched the case. Some have even compared Libby, who assiduously avoided military service himself, with being a "fallen comrade," whom President George Bush cannot leave behind on the battlefield. (For some reason, Libby's sob mob won't attack the citizen jurists who, after hearing the evidence for weeks, promptly found Libby guilty. Also unmentioned is the fact that nearly 70 percent of Americans don't think Libby should receive a presidential pardon. That nugget gets in the way of the rogue prosecutor talking points.)
But why? Why has the Post gone all-in on a loser of a case like Libby's? Why the waving of the arms, the name-calling, and the almost comical rhetoric in defense of a relatively straightforward white-collar crime? I think the uproar is more cultural than political (or even legal). It's a class thing. The Washington Establishment, which the Post has dutifully represented for generations, identifies with Libby -- empathizes with him -- and is aghast at the idea that he might have to serve jail time for merely practicing the "dark art of politics," as Cohen described it.
As Glenn Greenwald noted at Salon last week:
The real injustice is that prison is simply not the place for the most powerful and entrenched members of the Beltway royal court, no matter how many crimes they commit. There is a grave indignity to watching our brave Republican elite be dragged before such lowly venues as a criminal court and be threatened with prison, as though they are common criminals or something. How disruptive and disrespectful and demeaning it all is.
Yet what's absolutely essential to note here is that during the previous Democratic administration, the same Washington Establishment, led by the apoplectic Post, turned on President Clinton when he was caught practicing his own version of the "dark art of politics" (i.e. lying about his sex life).
At the time, the Post's society reporter Sally Quinn famously (and sympathetically) documented how Beltway insiders resented, in starkly personal terms, Clinton's rogue behavior. "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place," Post columnist David Broder told Quinn. The article stressed it was the lying that most offended the Establishment members.
To date, I have not read an extended exegesis in the Post about how the D.C. Establishment players -- pundits, diplomats, attorneys, and lobbyists -- feel betrayed by the multitude of lies Bush told prior to invading Iraq. In fact, it's been just the opposite, with the Post ferociously defending Libby, despite his conviction for repeatedly telling war-related lies.
The hypocrisy -- the glaring double standard -- simply highlights the intellectual bankruptcy at play. And perhaps nowhere has that factual impoverishment been more apparent than in the opinion pages of the Post. (Sadly, the behavior on the opinion pages has overshadowed some of the insightful work the Post's news team has produced while covering the Plame story.)
For instance, back on April 9, 2006, the editorial page aggressively defended Bush's decision in 2003 to declassify parts of the National Intelligence Estimate in order to explain to reporters why the administration believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) prior to the war. It was Libby who was given the task of then huddling with a friendly reporter (paging Judith Miller) to spin the administration's explanation for war. The Post editorial, under the headline, "A Good Leak," assured readers, "There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that."
Not true. According to a Fitzgerald court filing, Libby himself told investigators that he could not recall a single other instance during his entire career in public service "when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the President's authorization that it be declassified."
In a June 10 Post column, David S. Broder claimed that Libby was charged for "denying to the FBI and the grand jury that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters."
Not true. Libby admitted in his FBI interviews and in grand jury testimony that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters.
Post columnist and knee-jerk White House defender Charles Krauthammer this year wrote that Bush should have pardoned Libby "long before this egregious case came to trial." A presidential pardon granted before a verdict is returned? Now that's creative -- pardons are not supposed to be considered until five years after the date of conviction. But Krauthammer's ignorance of federal pardon guidelines simply represented the level of legal debate taking place on the pages of the Post regarding the Libby case.
The Post's hacktacular Victoria Toensing
I mean, just look at what Victoria Toensing has been writing. A hyper-Republican partisan who served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and who overstayed her green room welcome during the 1990s as she relentlessly campaigned, via cable news channels, to run President Clinton out of office for lying about his sex life, Toensing became the Post's go-to Libby expert. Not once but twice the Post turned to Toensing as a legal expert, oblivious to the fact that she simply created her own sets of Libby trial facts.
For instance, Toensing's February 18 essay this year about the Libby case should never have been published by a serious newspaper. The piece was painfully unserious -- hacktacular, really. From the very opening, Toensing deliberately misstated the facts, which was the only way the subsequent 2,200 words could have even stayed afloat.
Her angle was that since Libby was on trial for his role in the Plame scandal, then lots of other players should be as well: "If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby?" For instance, Toensing wanted Fitzgerald "indicted" for granting former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer immunity. She wanted the media "indicted" for hypocrisy. She wanted the CIA "indicted" for allegedly writing up a "boilerplate" referral to the Justice Department for the initial Plame leak investigation.
Indict the media for hypocrisy? Keep in mind that the Post published Toensing's under the auspice that she was a legal expert.
When readers complained about the purposefully misleading essay that was dressed up as legal brief, Post editors harrumphed. Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman, asked associate editor Robert Kaiser about the piece. His condescending contempt for readers was hard to miss:
After 43 years at The Post, I know that many of our readers want us to do our jobs with the solemnity of monks and the propriety of Supreme Court justices, but I've never gotten the knack of either. I think good journalism should be provocative and fun.
Worse, Howell announced that Kaiser considered Toensing's piece to be a "huge success" because of "the many comments to [the ombudsman] that it provoked," as well as all the reader comments posted on the newspaper's website. That's right, a senior Post editor cheered that Toensing's piece was a "huge success" because lots of people wrote letters to the ombudsman and posted comments online. The fact that most of the correspondence filled up 40 pages of online comments detailing the falsehoods in Toensing's essay was of little interest to the Post hierarchy.
Toensing's foolery simply matched the standard she had set for herself in 2005 when she co-wrote an earlier Post op-ed, which of course attacked the Libby prosecution. Toensing's brash claim then was that no crime had been committed by outing the CIA agent because, at the time, Plame did not meet the strict specifications of being classified as an undercover agent when her name was first published in Robert Novak's syndicated column in July 2003. And Toensing should have know because she helped write the legislation that defined who was a covert agent was. The key specification for being considered covert, according to Toensing, was that "she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years."
So, had Plame been assigned to duty outside the United States five years prior to being outed? The truth is Toensing had no idea.
Well, now we do know. In a May court filing, Fitzgerald confirmed that at the time of the first White House leak in the summer of 2003, Plame "was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States." To this day, the Post editorial page has not acknowledged that central point, despite the fact it published several columns claiming, incorrectly, that Plame was not undercover.
Toensing actually earned bonus points for egregious flip-flopping. Remember, in January 2005 Toensing told Post readers no crime had been committed in the leak case because Plame was not "undercover." But in a January 2, 2004, Post news article, Toensing was quoted as saying no crime had been committed in the leak case because despite "the fact that she was undercover," her administration leakers might have not known it, which technically meant it was not against the law. [Emphasis added.] It seems obvious that opinion editors at the paper were oblivious to Toensing's bold flip-flop. Then again, the factual standards on the paper's opinion page seem rather low lately. The Post recently published a column by conservative Andrew Ferguson that mocked Al Gore's new book, Assault on Reason, because it does not have footnotes. In fact, the book contains 20 pages of endnotes.
Meanwhile, let's not forget the work of Post favorite Bruce Sanford, the Washington, D.C., attorney who was also tapped twice by opinion page editors to illuminate readers about the Libby case. Or, mislead readers, as the case may be. First, it was Sanford who teamed up with Toensing in 2005 to push the theory that Plame was not a covert agent, which meant the leak of her identity was not a crime. Sanford and Toensing were flat wrong there.
Post editors invited him back in 2006 to pontificate some more about the Libby case. On June 20, 2006, Sanford wrote, unequivocally, that Libby would be acquitted of all charges against him: "The futility will be evident in the acquittal next year of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice."
It got worse when Sanford detailed how it would be unfeasible for Fitzgerald to win a guilty verdict on charges of perjury:
It will be virtually impossible for the government to prove otherwise -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- when such a plausible defense exists and no conclusive evidence has emerged showing that his recollections of his contacts with journalists were intentionally false.
Oops.
Then during the trial, the Post invited conservative Byron York of the conservative National Review to write a piece -- echoing GOP talking points -- about how utterly confused he was that the trial wasn't actually about Plame's covert status. Of course, Fitzgerald had, more than a year before, patiently explained that the case was a straightforward prosecution of perjury and obstruction of justice. But York pretended to still be thoroughly baffled, and Post editorial editors were only too happy to print the misinformation.
And then there's Novak, whose syndicated column still appears in the Post. Newsweek confirmed that before Novak printed his infamous Plame column, he sent an advanced copy to longtime GOP lobbyist and Beltway insider Richard Hohlt, who then faxed it over to Karl Rove, "thereby giving the White House a heads up on the bombshell to come." A tip-off like that -- collusion, really -- would normally be a firing offense for most big-time newspaper columnists, or at least grounds for dropping that columnist's syndicated work. Yet the Post has taken no action against Novak.
When it comes to the Plame case, the Post, like Libby, remains in denial.
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