Heeeeeere's Motive

The LA Times reports:

Top aides to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were intensely focused on discrediting former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in the days after he wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times suggesting the administration manipulated intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq, federal investigators have been told.

Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.


Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: "He's a Democrat." Rove then cited Wilson's campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said...

A White House spokesman, David Almacy, declined to comment Sunday. "This is an ongoing investigation, and we will be happy to talk about this once it is completed, but not until then," he said.

Prosecutors' intense questioning of witnesses about Rove and Libby casts doubt on assertions that the president's longtime political guru was not — at least at some point — in Fitzgerald's sights.

Meanwhile, Bush flip-flops on national security:

President Bush changed his stance today on his close adviser Karl Rove, stopping well short of promising that anyone in his administration who helped to unmask a C.I.A. officer would be fired.

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said in response to a question, after declaring, "I don't know all the facts; I want to know all the facts."

For months, Mr. Bush and his spokesmen have said that anyone involved in the disclosure of the C.I.A. officer's identity would be dismissed. The president's apparent raising of the bar for dismissal today, to specific criminal conduct, comes amid mounting evidence that, at the very least, Mr. Rove provided backhanded confirmation of the C.I.A. officer's identity.

Are these 2 things connnected? Would Bush make a statement like that if Rove wasn't involved in something that should result in his dismissal from the White House?

Also: Read McClellan's futile attempts at trying to "explain" Bush's flip-flopping.

Rep. Henry Waxman has the last word for today:

Under the executive order, the White House has an affirmative obligation to investigate and take remedial action separate and apart from any ongoing criminal investigation. The executive order specifically provides that when a breach occurs, each agency must “take appropriate and prompt corrective action.”⁸ This includes a determination of whether individual employees improperly disseminated or obtained access to classified information.
The executive order further provides that sanctions for violations are not optional. The executive order expressly provides: “Officers and employees of the United States Government … shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently … disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified.”⁹
There is no evidence that the White House complied with these requirements.

Update: fixed links. Read the footnotes. Ouch. There goes Rove.

Further update: Here's the NDA Rove should have signed. Look at all those titles of laws that might have been broken - not just the "covert agent" thingy.

Further update: Kevin Drum says in essence, "It was the potential damage to the narrative of the threat of nukes that made Joe Wilson and his wife 'fair game.'"

Speaking of fictional metaphors for treasongate

Frank Rich is loaded with them today.

So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

...But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

What has been obvious is this pattern of trying to trash all critics who brought out the uncomfortable facts that destroyed the Bush regime's war propaganda.

In fact, I think people like Clarke, and the Wilsons, ought to be able to sue the principals involved to be compensated for having their good names dragged through the mud.

I think there is sufficent evidence of criminal activity.

I think the Bush regime suspects this too, and that's why Bush and McClellan have clammed up recently regarding their support for Rove.

Although it's been said (and not completely true) that Democrats can't get elected and Republicans can't govern, I think a large segment of voters who thought "Bush would protect us" are going to abandon the Republican party in droves, when they realize that in the Bush world, "protect" really means "recklessly endanger national security with irrelevant adventures."

Fantasy of the weekend...

With apologies to Quentin Tarantino...

Karl Rove, I'd like to introduce my friend, the Patrick Fitzgerald. Patrick Fitzgerald? This is Karl Rove. You know after the wheels of justice picked that little fella up, I looked him up on the internet. Fascinating creature, Patrick Fitzgerald. Listen to this: "In politics being caught with a dead intern or a live boy can kill your career, and a Patrick Fitzgerald can kill your career.' But only with Patrick Fitzgerald --and this has been true in Washington since after the right went crazy over Clinton--is career death sure. Hence its handle--'death incarnate.'" Pretty cool, huh? "Its determination is one of nature's most effective career killer, acting on the nervous system of perjurors and felons causing paralysis. The prosecutorial power of a Patrick Fitzgerald can kill a politicians career in four hours if, say, subpoenaed for simple fraud. However, a violating the espionage act can bring career death from paralysis within 20 minutes." Now you should listen to this, 'cause this concerns you. "The weight of a federal prosecutor like Fitzpatrick that can be brought to bear against a slimeball like you, Rove can be gargantuan." You know I've always liked that word gargantuan? I so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence. "If not treated quickly with a guilty plea, Fitzgerald's indictments can be fatal to a politician's career. However, Patrick Fitzgerald might refusea plea deal."

Now... in these last agonizing minutes of your career you have left, let me answer that question you asked earlier more thoroughly. Right at this moment, the biggest "R" I feel is regret. Regret that maybe the greatest politicians I have ever known, met their end at the hands of a bush-whackin', scrub, elky piece-of-shit like you. They deserved better.

Maybe it won't happen, but remember, there's another act, where the progressive politicians come back... and you know the rest.

Judith Miller should testify

Vladimir Pozner, former Radio Moscow personality, who may be the kind of media person Judith Miller aspired to be.



Atrios is going in the right direction on Judith Miller. See here, and here.

She's most likely not testifying not out of some grand journalistic ethic, but more likely that she could no longer continue her role as scribe for the administration's official propaganda, which has been like Vladimir Pozner was in the 80's on Radio Moscow, even echoing some of the authoritarianness of the regime.

But let's face it: rather than actually investigating and reporting, Miller was basically a journalism-school educated version of Jeff Gannon, without all the feigned outright conservative agitprop. She basically functioned as a mouthpiece for Chalabi, and for the "unnamed sources" who made deliberate "leaks that weren't really leaks" in the Bush administiration.

Now, evidently, prosecutors may be interested in criminal contempt charges against her, which, I suspect, if it yields what the prosecutors want, might make Judy Miller a worse Times scandal than Jayson Blair by a factor of ten or so.


The Times would do well to get Miller to testify. It's good for the conscience, and would actually help her re-establish her credibility as a reporter, because then she'd actually have to do more than just parrot the officials of the Bush regime to get stories.

The latest silly appologia for the Iraq crowd & Rove is already moot

This, the latest salvo from the right, mindlessly echoed by people who should know better (it's amusing how they try), attempts to pin the blame on David Corn, for referring to Plame for a covert operative, but that dog won't not only hunt, it's stuffed and gathering dust in a corner. Why?

Simply put a) even moi could have figured out Plame was a covert operative from Novak's column (then again, maybe I'm the only one who reads my blog who's ever actually had a security clearance or been directly involved with agencies where the personnel are nod identified as working for that agency), b) as already stated, the agency is pretty certain that divulging the identiy of Plame as employed by the CIA was itself tantamount to divulging classfied information, and c) read today's Times about "the memo."


Drip, drip, drip.

The idea that they'd try to pin this on Powell- or Rice- is ludicrous; this is an administration that tightly controls the information it sends in and out.

Bush is starting to act like a perp

I love that word, "perp," and I so rarely get a chance to use it when blogging.

But today's treasongate coverage of Rove seems to show that Bush is still being mum on his support for Rove...makes you wonder why the moonbats on the right drank the Kool-Aid:

On the tarmac in North Carolina, your pool was able to walk briefly alongside the president and ask if he still had faith in Karl Rove. The question was met with a stare straight ahead, silence and a quick brush-off motion of Bush's left hand, as if the president were Swatting away an insect.

In other news on treasongate:

• Evidently Novak sang like a canary.
  
  

  Did Robert Novak rat on New York Times reporter Judith Miller? While some have suggested Miller—who never wrote a word about CIA spook Valerie Plame—was dragged into the leak probe when her name turned up on a White House call log, several beltway insiders close to the investigation say special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald learned of Miller’s involvement from Novak himself.
  
  Though the GOP hatchetman claims he’s never spoken to the grand jury about the column, a well-known Democratic pundit tells Radar, “Novak is the media’s Joseph Valachi,” referring to the 1960’s mafia capo who was the first mobster to testify against La Cosa Nostra. “There’s no question he rolled over.” According to our sources, Miller shared Plame’s identity with her perfidious fellow neocon after deciding not to publish it herself; Novak then called his two White House sources for confirmation and wrote the July 14, 2003 column that blew Plame’s cover

  
  
  
  
  
• Ari Fleischer may be in trouble too.
  
  
• The Rove camp's latest leak is debunked (yes, another America blog link) here. And finally,...
  
  
• (No, not another Americablog link) Is Bush guilty of obstruction of justice?
  
  
• I'll give Kevin Drum the last word here (and it is replete reasonableness) about the "Rove revelation that Novak told him the name":
  
  

  This story has obviously been so carefully leaked that it's hard to know if there's any actual truth value to it. You can make up your own mind about that, I suppose.

  
  
  
  
  

This is getting to be great fun watching it unfold, and watching as the moonbats keep trying to justify what appears to be felonies.

But evidently all this hoopla hasn't stopped Fitzgerald.

Bush can always fire him, I guess, but he'd have to wait til January, like Nixon did.

Hoist by their own petard?

John Dean, a man who's got experience in this area, envisions a storm of feceses bearing down on Rove of biblical proportions:

I am referring to the prosecution and conviction of Jonathan Randel. Randel was a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst, a PhD in history, working in the Atlanta office of the DEA. Randel was convinced that British Lord Michael Ashcroft (a major contributor to Britain's Conservative Party, as well as American conservative causes) was being ignored by DEA, and its investigation of money laundering. (Lord Ashcroft is based in South Florida and the off-shore tax haven of Belize.)

Randel leaked the fact that Lord Ashcroft's name was in the DEA files, and this fact soon surfaced in the London news media. Ashcroft sued, and learned the source of the information was Randel. Using his clout, soon Ashcroft had the U.S. Attorney in pursuit of Randel for his leak.

By late February 2002, the Department of Justice indicted Randel for his leaking of Lord Ashcroft's name. It was an eighteen count "kitchen sink" indictment; they threw everything they could think of at Randel. Most relevant for Karl Rove's situation, Court One of Randel's indictment alleged a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. This is a law that prohibits theft (or conversion for one's own use) of government records and information for non-governmental purposes. But its broad language covers leaks, and it has now been used to cover just such actions.

Randel, faced with a life sentence (actually, 500 years) if convicted on all counts, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to violating Section 641. On January 9, 2003, Randel was sentenced to a year in a federal prison, followed by three years probation. This sentence prompted the U.S. Attorney to boast that the conviction of Randel made a good example of how the Bush Administration would handle leakers.

The Randel Precedent -- If Followed -- Bodes Ill For Rove

Karl Rove may be able to claim that he did not know he was leaking "classified information" about a "covert agent," but there can be no question he understood that what he was leaking was "sensitive information." The very fact that Matt Cooper called it "double super secret background" information suggests Rove knew of its sensitivity, if he did not know it was classified information (which by definition is sensitive).

United States District Court Judge Richard Story's statement to Jonathan Randel, at the time of sentencing, might have an unpleasant ring for Karl Rove. Judge Story told Randel that he surely must have appreciated the risks in leaking DEA information. "Anything that would affect the security of officers and of the operations of the agency would be of tremendous concern, I think, to any law-abiding citizen in this country," the judge observed. Judge Story concluded this leak of sensitive information was "a very serious crime."

"In my view," he explained, "it is a very serious offense because of the risk that comes with it, and part of that risk is because of the position" that Randel held in DEA. But the risk posed by the information Rove leaked is multiplied many times over; it occurred at a time when the nation was considering going to war over weapons of mass destruction. And Rove was risking the identity of, in attempting to discredit, a WMD proliferation expert, Valerie Plame Wilson.

It's clear- based on the jailing of Miller, and the pit-bull discipline that Fitzgerald's been exercising (unlike Ken Starr, not even a trace of leakiness), that there is some serious karmic consequences headed Karl Rove's way.

We don't even know yet what Rove will be charged with, but the recent hubub about "she wasn't a covert agent" doesn't even begin to exonerate Rove.

Before this is over, we could have a Democratic House and an impeached and convicted Bush.

Birds of a feather...

What more to say?

What exactly did Ali Al Timimi say and when?

Link

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 13 - An influential Muslim scholar, whom prosecutors called a "purveyor of hate and war," was ordered on Wednesday to spend the rest of his life in prison for inciting his young followers in Northern Virginia to wage war against the United States in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The scholar, Ali al-Timimi, was defiant to the end, telling a federal judge as he was about to be sentenced that he considered himself a "prisoner of conscience" who was being persecuted for his strong Muslim beliefs.

"I will not admit guilt nor seek the court's mercy," Mr. Timimi told a hushed courtroom filled with more than two dozen Muslims who have rallied around him. "I do this simply because I am innocent."...

Mr. Timimi, an Iraqi-American cancer researcher who lectured at a mosque in Northern Virginia and circulated his religious writings on the Internet, is the most prominent Muslim prosecuted in connection with what federal prosecutors have labeled the Virginia jihad network.

Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Timimi as a spiritual and intellectual leader of the young men in the network, as they traveled to foreign training camps and prepared to wage a holy war in defense of Islam by playing paintball and gathering weapons and explosives.

Gordon Kromberg, the lead prosecutor in the case for the Justice Department, called Mr. Timimi "a purveyor of hate and war" in court on Wednesday.

"Al-Timimi hates the United States and calls for its destruction," Mr. Kromberg said in urging lifelong imprisonment. "He's allowed to do that in this country. He's not allowed to solicit treason. That's what he did. He deserves every day of the time he will serve."

At one dinner meeting on Sept. 16, 2001, Mr. Timimi told some of the men in the group that it was their Muslim duty to fight for Islam overseas and to defend the Taliban in Afghanistan against American forces, according to testimony at his trial. And in an Internet message in 2003, he described the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia as a "good omen" for Muslims in an apocalyptic conflict with the West.

I have not found the quotes the Feds used in their trial against him, and, in fact, I lean fairly heavily on the side of free speech. I tend to think the decisions making illegal only the advocacy of the violent overthrow the United States are wrongly decided (to actually engage in a conspiracy to take an action or to incite actual acts of violence are other matters entirely). But, this case is a good example of why religious intolerance can blow-back.

This guy does seem to be an Islamic version of the worst kind of Christian fundamentalist; he's a militant exclusivist, who did, in fact, recommend violence in defense of "muslim lands."

But I did find he seemed to have problems with the 9/11 hijacking, the Iran hostage taking, and the Egyptian tourist massacres. But geez, in reading the above, I'm most troubled by the fact that his thought processes lead him to this position only after trying to figure out what his scripture says about it. I mean, if this is not already in the marrow of one's being, there's a problem, whatever the religion, ideology or lack thereof. His thoughts against 9/11 seem to be somewhat akin to James Dobson's "condemnation" to the extent that there is any- by Christian terrorists like Kopp.

Here are some audio tapes of the guy, for anyone who has the time to kill to wade through it.

One of the odd things about al Timimi's lectures: the use of scripture quoting here is even more cumbersome than when, say, Jack van Impe does it; I think it's because of the back and forth from Arabic to English.

But, if you have the time and stomach for it, here, al Timimi in a rather meandering way, seems to be justifying the destruction of Buddhist "idols" in Afghanistan, and to advocate preventing the worship of anything other than Allah. (It seems he's also claiming that some statues are possessed by demons...really strange).

It's not surprising, then, in the wake of 9/11 that a guy like this might be targetted, fairly or unfairly according to the law, by the Feds. Quite simply: it's not his business, or his co-religionists what anybody else practices as a religion or how.

Also, he doesn't get that extremist iconoclasm is itself the antithesis of being an iconoclast.

I'm not sure the guy deserves a life sentence (again, I don't know the evidence the Feds used). And if this guy was actually aiding and abetting people who would act violently against Americans in a time of war, well, he's toast legally. But this shows what happens when somebody's stridency is perceived as going beyond the pale.

More on breath and zazen

From here:

１回の呼吸が１０～１５秒程度です。これで用意万端です。
次に、雑念に振り回されないため、呼吸の数を数えると良いでしょう。
線香１本の燃える時間２０～２５分を一炷（いっしゅ）といい、坐禅の時間単位です。

1 complete breath [inhalation and exhalation] takes 10-15 seconds. This [along with correct posture] is sufficient preparation. Next, in order to have idle thoughts not fly about, counting breaths is a good idea. For about the time it takes one incense stick to burn (20-25 minutes) one should sit in zazen.

Now the above breath rhythm is good for other breath practices as well, and when combined with the breath instructions below is a good overview of what you want your body to do when in zazen.

It takes years to get it right for a sustained period, but once done, is very useful.

From Mumon Roshi's instructions on zen...

I haven't posted anything in a while on zen, and thought this would be a useful thing to record:

To regulate breath is very important in zazen. The ancients knew that any person can understand breathing, so that teaching the control of breathing is extremely important.

　Concerning the breath, there are four ways of meditation explained in the Tendai texts. They are fu, zen, ki, soku. Fu implies snorting breath. This is not good. Zen means purring breath which is also not good. Ki means disordered breath, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow. Lastly, soku means the most perfect breath which is continuous and quiet as if it were faint breath. We have to shape our breathing into such long deep breaths. The ancients made a strenuous effort to practice such breathing. Some of them even placed feathers on their noses while meditating. For correct breathing : exhaling, pull in your abdomen; when you've exhaled all your air completely, you will naturally inhale; air will flow in and your abdomen will expand. While exhaling, include the counting of your breaths. Continue this ring of consciousness, repeating the counting without any pause at all. If a pause occurs at this time, illusions and mirages will come into your zazen at once. If even one illusion is raised, cut it immediately with your concentrated breathing.

　With the physical posture and breath controlled, start zazen in a relaxed way by naturally concentrating your strength in your abdomen. We must now control the mind or, as the text states it, "Think not of good and evil." It is, however, unimaginably difficult to control the mind. The Buddha said, "The mind is like a venomous serpent, a wild animal, or a sworn enemy." You might think that while sitting in such quiet circumstances nothing arises to disturb the mind, but it is not so. The quieter the circumstances become, the more disordered the mind may grow. Many things may appear, one after the other. Even the great Hakuin Zenji confessed that while he was doing zazen, he remembered such a small event as the lending of a few bowls of rice and beans many years before to the next door neighbor. It is strange that we remember the things we do not usually even consider. In the meditation hall only the sound of the bell and wooden clappers enter through our senses, but many things arise in the mind to be considered. We come to realize how much man thinks about the unnecessary ; how corrupted man's mind is. Our mind is polluted like a muddy ditch from which marsh gas constantly springs. We cannot imagine what will appear or spring up. Buddhism calls this dirt encrusted mind alaya, which means an accumulation of subconscious images. To cut away this mass of delusion with the sword of prajna-wisdom, so that we may discover the bright mind of the real self, is called the controlling of mind.

　As the text says, we should not think good or evil, advantage or disadvantage, love or hate. This no mind state where nothing exists is the correct posture of the mind. Dogen Zenji says, "Don't think anything." He recommends controlling the mind, pointing to the real self which is the mind of nonthinking. Since illusion and delusion, like mist, have no substance, they will disappear if we do not focus on them. In Zen Buddhism we also throw away all illusions by concentrating our mind on the problem the koan suggests. Therefore, the text says, "Be aware of illusions, then they will disappear." Cut all illusions. Concentrate your whole mind on the koan, day and night, without any dualistic consciousness. Then, naturally, the inward and outer worlds, self and universe, subject and object, become one. In due time, the event we have sought is realized, yet it cannot be explained. At that moment we experience the inexpressible comfort of spiritual freedom, and the unique flavor of zazen springs up from the deep.

　This experience is not yet satori-awakening ; it is not yet "seeing one's true nature" or "becoming Buddha." In the Mumonkan an old Zen text called the "Gateless Gate," it is said,

Once breaking through [the mass of great doubt] as if with the sword of General Kwan¹, one gains the great freedom at the juncture of life and death to kill the Buddha when he meets him, to kill the Patriarch when he meets the Patriarch and so receives the freedom of enjoying the situation wherever he may stand.

　We must have such a breakthrough experience where we realize real subjectivity and real freedom. There man becomes the master of the world and there evolves his life of negating and creating freely.

　Zazen is, in this way, more than control of posture, breath and mind, but also, on a wider scale, circumstances, family and, fially, society. Therefore, zazen is not easily accomplished.

Indeed, it takes years to do this to the point where such freedom is achieved. But without such freedom, how can anyone live a life that is conciously directed anywhere with any likelihood of going to where one would want to go?

Practice makes perfect; if one does not develop a discipline to have the body and mind do what needs to be done, than quite simply, what needs to be done will only be done in a haphazard, ad hoc, suboptimal way if at all.



1. "Kwan" actually means "barrier" here.

Who is this Joe Wilson guy anyway?

Well, go to Wikipedia:

Joseph C. Wilson IV (born November 6, 1949) was a United States career foreign service officer and later a diplomat between 1976 and 1998. He served as ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe under President George H. W. Bush, and helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. He was hailed as "truly inspiring" and "courageous" by George H. W. Bush after sheltering more than a hundred Americans at the US embassy in Baghdad, and mocking Saddam Hussein's threats to execute anyone who refused to hand over foreigners. As a result, in 1990, he also became the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein (Wilson, 2003).

Wilson achieved wide notoriety due to his involvement in the verification of intelligence regarding Iraq. In 2002 he was sent to Niger to investigate the possibility that uranium-enriched yellowcake had been sold to Iraq. Wilson concluded that since yellowcake mining is managed by an international consortium and supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, this was unlikely (Wilson, 2003).

Controversy ensued when the British government issued a white paper asserting an imminent threat from Iraq, on the basis of intelligence that later proved to be a forgery. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush referred to attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa. The Bush Administration explicitly affirmed (Fleischer, 2003) this was based on a reference to Niger, but the later Butler Report confirmed the existence of what they found to be credible intelligence that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger, see Yellowcake Forgery, and less certain intelligence that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from the Democratic Republic of Congo...

Whatever one can say about Wilson, one cannot say that Wilson's detractors have anything that approaches the courage that Wilson showed in Baghdad.

Nor can one say that he was chosen for the Niger mission purely out of "nepotism." If so, it'd be a reverse nepotism to be sure- who'd want to go to Niger?

It's really easy to use the "chickenhawk" term here, especially since the folks who are smearing Wilson, and who are making tortured apologias for Rove aren't the kind of people who personally do brave acts, really brave acts, that involve life or death. Those people are entitled to their opinion, but those of us who are reality based might be forgiven for considering the character and integrity of Wilson's detractors.

What a colleague of Ms. Plame's thinks of Rove's betrayal

Link

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.


A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her...

...The Republicans insist on the lie that Val got her husband the job. She did not. She was not a division director, instead she was the equivalent of an Army major. Yes it is true she recommended her husband to do the job that needed to be done but the decision to send Joe Wilson on this mission was made by her bosses.

At the end of the day, Joe Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush Administration that pushed that lie and because of that lie Americans are dying. Shame on those who continue to slander Joe Wilson while giving Bush and his pack of liars a pass. That's the true outrage.

I can't but agree. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would try to defend Rove's behavior here; the idea that somebody would jeopardize the National Security interests of the United States of America for purely political purposes is the very antithesis of patriotism.

"Steep" Rise in Tax Revenues? Read the fine print...

Get prepared for a barrage of Repub propaganda to distract from Rove's approximate alleged treason:

WASHINGTON, July 12 - For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion...

The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be "significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion."

The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.

Most of the increase in individual tax receipts appears to have come from higher stock market gains and the business income of relatively wealthy taxpayers. The biggest jump was not from taxes withheld from salaries but from quarterly payments on investment gains and business earnings, which were up 20 percent this year...

And now for the fine print:

In addition, while a lot of the increase in tax revenue flows from the improving economy and higher incomes, part of the jump stemmed from a special factor: the expiration of a temporary tax break that allowed companies to write off their investment in new equipment much more rapidly than normal.

That tax break reduced revenue by about $61 billion in 2004, but it merely postponed taxes that companies would have to pay once their equipment was fully depreciated.

Other financial hurdles may be down the road. Mr. Bush's intention to extend his tax cuts indefinitely, and to add new ones, would drain more than $1.4 trillion from government coffers over the next 10 years.

So while the economy improved somewhat, we're still on a collision course.

Expect oil prices to go up more.

More damning information on Rove

This is flying fast and furious- the weak defenses that "Rove didn't know what he was doing," or "it's not clear she was covert" are evaporating as the morning dew on a hot summer day...

Josh Marshall posted here, pointing to this old Washington Post story, which pretty much kills the "it's not clear she was covert" defense:

The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company's identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame's employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA. Plame's name was first published July 14 in a newspaper column by Robert D. Novak that quoted two senior administration officials. They were critical of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his handling of a CIA mission that undercut President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger for possible use in developing nuclear weapons.

The Justice Department began a formal criminal investigation of the leak Sept. 26.

The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.

A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities.

"That's why the agency is so sensitive about just publishing her name," the former diplomat said.

Next up: the Repub party tries vainly to smear people who want Rove to face justice for his actions, but the folks at TPM Cafe smack Mehlman down:

I don't want to be the first one to NOT follow directions, but let me point out one GIGANTIC problem with that press release. Its all about Joe Wilson. The crime, if one is determined to have taken place, is the exposure of Valerie Plame as a covert operative. What on earth does that have to do with her politics, his politics, or what happened before, during or after the trip to Niger. All that is provides is the reasoning for Karl Rove to have done what he allegedly did.

The question remains, did Karl Rove use his position to expose a covert CIA operative? You might add 'in efforts to discredit Joe Wilson', but honestly, is it relavent? Is it relavent why he would have done what he did? Maybe to Republicans, but not to the law.

It shouldn't matter if Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed calling Bush an alien from Mars. Its not a crime to lie (excepting perjury), if you believe that Joe Wilson was lying, how is it still NOT a crime to expose his wife?

By talking Mehlman's bait, the discussion turns to the merits of Wilson's case and not to the crime itself.

And increasingly, a crime is what it appears to be, and a serious one at that.

If this is the best "defense" the Repubs can make (read the whole TPM Cafe thread for the lie-by-lie of Mehlman's piece), then Rove really will be frog-marched, and pronto.

Update This from NRO (!) is pretty damning all by its lonesome:

Luskin also addressed the question of whether Rove is a "subject" of the investigation. Luskin says Fitzgerald has told Rove he is not a "target" of the investigation, but, according to Luskin, Fitzgerald has also made it clear that virtually anyone whose conduct falls within the scope of the investigation, including Rove, is considered a "subject" of the probe. "'Target' is something we all understand, a very alarming term," Luskin says. On the other hand, Fitzgerald "has indicated to us that he takes a very broad view of what a subject is."

Finally, Luskin conceded that Rove is legally free to publicly discuss his actions, including his grand-jury testimony. Rove has not spoken publicly, Luskin says, because Fitzgerald specifically asked him not to.

I don't know about the last sentence (yeah,right, Rove's being real kind to Fitzgerald 'cause deep down he's just a puddy-tat), but it's pretty clear that "subject" might just mean "target" here.

Further Update:
For those who just can't accept the above information, and why the prosecutor, Fitzgerald is so interested in Rove, Transparent Grid explains it all for you:

Section 421, like many crimes, is all about definitions. Who is a “covert
agent” and what is a knowing disclosure? Freepers have been calling into liberal
talk radio today rasing the canard that Valerie Wilson/Plame was really not
covert. They glom on to Fox News propogranda that “everyone” in Washington knew
Plame was C.I.A. Well, apparently her longtime neighbors didn’t even know. The
Tillotsons thought she was a soccer mom according to the New
York Times. But who cares what the freepers believe, it is the law that
counts and the definition of “covert agent” in § 426(4) is straightforward - it
is an employee of an intelligence agency “whose identity as such an officer,
employee, or member is classified information” and has served outside the U.S.
in the last five years. Hence, whether or not people in the know in D.C. knew
but kept their mouth shut is of no moment, what matters is if the C.I.A.
considered her covert...

The gravaman of the legal analysis comes down to whether Karl made a
knowing disclosure. The disclosure element is defined in §426(3), “The term
‘disclose’ means to communicate, provide, impart, transmit, transfer, convey,
publish, or otherwise make available.”

...The question is whether Rove knew that Plame was a “covert agent.” Here
is where one can conclude that Rove is in trouble. One with general common
knowledge would assume that Plame was an employee of Brewster, Jennings. It is
only by virtue of either someone having disclosed the classified details that
she was an agency employee to Rove or by Rove’s own access to the classified
information that he would have been in a position to know what her true role
was.
Knowledge, like any required mental state in criminal law, can be proven
by circumstantial evidence. The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically ruled that
“knowledge” can be proven by establishing a “high probability” that the
defendant knew the true circumstances of the fact...

Rove was in a unique position to know Plame’s true role as a CIA employee.
First off, keep the chronology in mind. Wilson’s New York Times column, “What I Didn’t Find in
Africa,” was a bombshell, because he was the first insider to directly
challenge a major premise of the justification for war. The publication date was
July 6, 2003. The Robert Novak column which outed Valerie Plame as an operative
was published on July 14th. It was on July 11th, though, that Cooper sent the
e-mail detailing his talk with Rove. This would mean that a decision was made to
use the Plame information as a tool to discredit Wilson at some point between
the 6th and the 11th. We also know that not only Rove disclosed such
information, but so did Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
(See The
Plame Game at the Village Voice.)
Now this is why Rove had access to
such sensitive information. As Pacific Views has pointed out, Libby and Rove were part of the 8 person White House Iraq
Group which also included Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Stephen Hadley and
Condoleeza Rice. As you can note, these are not military strategists. Their role
was to create the environment that made war inevitable. The Iraq Group spun the
propoganda that created the climate of fear which led to war. The Pacific Views
piece cites the study by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner who traces the orgins of the Iraq Group and how it manufactured the Iraq
crisis. These were the individuals who were the most invested in the WMD fiction
and would have wanted to respond aggressively to Joe Wilson’s efforts to expose
at least part of the fraud which had appeared in Bush’s January State of the
Union speech.
Where this leads us is where this piece began. The focus of
most reporting has been on whether the language in Cooper’s e-mail is sufficient
to charge Rove with violating §421. That question hardly matters. What counts is
what Rove actually said to Cooper. When Cooper writes that Wilson’s wife
“apparently” works for the agency. Was “apparently” his characterization or
Rove’s? What I sense is that Cooper wasn’t laying out every detail in his
e-mail, which is common. More importantly, the focus on the content of the
e-mail misses the point of where I believe the nature of the crime actually
lies....

What I think we have here is a conspiracy to disclose Plame’s covert role
to burn Wilson. If that is the case, it may not matter if Rove didn’t say all
the magic words to meet every requirement of §421. Title 18, Section 371 defines
and provides punishment for conspiracy to commit any offense against the United
States where “one or more persons do any act to effect the object of the
conspiracy.” If found guilty, punishment is for up to five years in prison. A
conspiracy does not have to completed. The law requires that two or more people
agree to commit the offensive act and that at least one of those people commits
an act to move the conspiracy along. So, for example, in a narco case, three
guys may agree to ship a kilo of cocaine into Arizona. As soon as one of them
rents the plane, the conspiracy charge can be brought against all three. Merely
talking about it is not enough.
Here we have both Libby and Rove disclosing
most of what Novak published. We don’t know how Novak got her name, but radio
host Randi Rhodes said today that Plame’s name was in Wilson bio on the Internet
at the time of his July 6th op-ed piece. So it could be that Libby, Rove or
someone else told Novak or he figured it out on his own. That detail may not
matter if members in the Iraq Group had already set out to burn Wilson. Once one
of the men or women who agreed to out Plame picked up the phone the conspiracy
was ripe.

What is increasingly evident is that a) this is worse than Watergate, and b) it's like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers rolled into one.

Because what it shows is the reason for going into war was so bogus that they had to basically compromise the security of the United States of America, and possibly jeopardize the lives of operatives to get their glorious little war.

Frogmarching Rove? It is my opinion that that would not be a sufficient deterrent.

For those still in denial about Valerie Plame's status...

Atrios clears it up for you here and here.

Valerie Plame's name was not secret. The fact that she was married to Wilson was not secret. The fact that she worked for the CIA was.

And the fact that apparently the National Security Advisor didn't have a need to know about who was recommending Wilson to go to Niger, and why, but she did know that it was at a level in the agency that was apparently classified should tell folks something.

Overlooked in all the Rove Hoopla.

This articule in the Nation (evidently subscription only) shows just what a disaster Bush's policy has been to keep us safe from "bioterror."

Avian flu is coming - it's not if but when- and there is no infrastructure set up to deal with it.

This is the sort of thing that could make 9/11 look like a stubbed toe by comparision.

And Bush is doing nothing about it.

Joe Tierney doesn't get karma...

Link

Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.

He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.

The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.

One thing I like about Buddhism is its creativity in depicting bliss and torment; I think a Buddhist version of Richard Reid's karma would be Reid going through and endless procession of security barriers at airports, taking his shoes off, putting them back on as he fumbles with his luggage. Of course, Bush probably awaits a similar fate.

This is not a horrible sacrifice, actually, it's just the way it's done in America is rather unmerciful.

So maybe they could improve the situation by giving everyone who goes through security a small prize on the other end; a chocolate, or a trinket of some sort.

But really we should be trying to get people from avoiding such hellish existences.

It's Rove all over...

He's not ready to have a fork stuck in him, but Salon puts the pieces together to explain even to righties why Rove must go:

There are still plenty of questions about Karl Rove's involvement in the
Valerie Plame case, and we trust that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will
eventually get to the bottom of them. But given what we know today, the very
best that anyone can say of Karl Rove is that, on July 11, 2003, he broke the
cover of a CIA analyst in order to discredit criticism of the way George W. Bush
used intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.
That's not partisan hyperbole; incredibly, it is Karl Rove's defense.
In order to show that Rove and his colleagues in the White House weren't engaged in a conspiracy to reveal Plame's identity, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, says that Rove had another goal in mind when he told Time's Matthew Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA analyst: It was all about politics.
When Cooper called Rove on July 11, 2003, Wilson had just written an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times in which he said that his investigation into the allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger had left him with "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Cooper asked Rove about the Wilson report at the end of their telephone conversation. Rove's response? According to Cooper's e-mail message to his editor, Rove warned Cooper "not to get too far out" on Wilson's allegations because the source wasn't credible. Rove said that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor CIA Director George Tenet had assigned Wilson to the Niger investigation. Rather, he said, the job came from Wilson's own wife, who was, Rove told Cooper, a CIA analyst working on WMD issues.
So you see, Luskin tells the New York Times, "A fair reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which the conversation took place makes it clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity." Rather, Luskin tells the Washington Post: "What [Rove] was doing was
discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."
.... But none of that can change the fact that Karl Rove revealed the identity of a CIA agent in order to discredit criticism of the president's use of intelligence in the run-up to a war that has now claimed the lives of at least 1,755 Americans.

And that's what we know so far.

Even if no laws were broken, this is still not the sort of thing that people would stay employed for if they were average, everyday people: if I had a security clearance and I left a classified document on my desk unattended- even accidentally- I'd be fired, and wouldn't be very likely to get a clearance again.

So it should be with Rove.

Even if you claim he didn't knowingly broke the law, there is no way a claim can be made that Rove did not provide aid and comfort to our enemies by releasing classified information- even inadvertantly.

Rove must go.

But I woudn't be surprised to see an indictment or two at this point, either, given the way McClellan's behaving.

Scotty McClellan longs for the days of Jeff Gannon and Les Kinsolving

It seems the DC press corps has finally figured out that a) Karl Rove's legal problems are a real story, and b) McClellan's acting, well, kind of the way a guilty person (guilty of what I don't know) would act.