The New York Daily News says that Prosecutor Fitzerald’s charges of making false statements against former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby may be based on the testimony of CIA officers Robert Grenier and Craig Schmall.

Grenier was CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, worked on operational plans for invading Iraq, and was recently CIA Counterterrorist Center chief.

But Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said Grenier lost his job over his “concerns about aggressive interrogations [of terrorist detainees] at secret sites.”

Grenier is reported to have testified that Libby asked him on June 11, 2003 why the agency had sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger. And Grenier replied that Valerie Plame was “believed responsible” for arranging her husband’s trip.

Stephen Hayes thinks that Porter Goss’s resignation as CIA Director and the pending appointment of Stephen Kappes, a prominent member of William Safire’s “flock of pouting spooks” that exited Langley in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in November of 2004, as Deputy Director signals the Bush Administration’s defeat by liberal mandarins in the CIA establishment.

PORTER GOSS’S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle—Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes—have been promoted. And the old guard is happy.

“The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss’s leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure,” wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington in the Washington Post. Yet Goss had taken to the CIA the high expectations of many top Washington policymakers who work on intelligence issues.

“Porter Goss’s confirmation . . . represents perhaps the most important changing of the guard for our intelligence community since 1947,” the year the CIA was created, said Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, on the day Goss was confirmed. “He will be the first director of central intelligence in a new, and hopefully better, intelligence community.”

And now he’s gone. So what happened?...

The White House took on the Agency. And the Agency won.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day—except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Jed Babbin wonders whether, seen in the light of the anti-Bush Intelligence Operations, today’s CIA has not come to resemble the Praetorians of Ancient Rome:

Rome’s Praetorian Guards began as a small elite imperial guard that grew into a force unto themselves. Independent of the army and the Senate they were the emperor’s own, and utterly loyal to him. Until they were not. Over three centuries, as their wealth and power increased, the scope of their loyalty shrank so that they were not even loyal among themselves. Their end came when they scrupled at nothing. They murdered emperors and anointed imperial successors and were finally disbanded for disloyalty.

The left’s big story of the day was reported by The Raw Story:

On Chris Matthews’ Hardball Monday evening, just moments ago, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster confirmed what RAW STORY first reported in February: that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on Iran at the time she was outed.

RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna broke the story earlier this year, which went unnoticed by the mainstream media (Read our full story).

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Reports Shuster in this rush transcript: “INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON’S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION’S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL.

My goodness! That sounds terrible.

The problem is this report seems to be conflating Valerie Plame’s working as a Non-Official Cover (NOC) agent, as we discussed ourselves previously here, in Europe pre-1997, with her later domestic employment at CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) Counterproliferation Division (CPD), mentioned here.

It doesn’t seem plausible that Valerie Plame could have working under non-official cover domestically within the CIA itself, does it?
——————————
Larry Johnson, whose word I’d be reluctant to take that water is wet, asserted back in 2005:

Then there is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person “served” overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

How exactly does democrat party partisan Larry Johnson (who left the CIA in 1989, and the State Department in 1993) know that? If he really knew any of this to be true, Fitzgerald could be indicting somebody for leaking to him.

If Valerie Plame merely went overseas to the Non-Proliferation Studies Convention in 2002, I’m afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald will have a very hard time persuading anyone who is not an anti-Bush partisan that such a junket rises to the level referred to in the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Mr Fitzgerald ought to put his cards on the table already, and quit leaving this legally key issue open to gossip and wild-eyed speculation.

Robin has compiled a link collection, which may be helpful for those trying to connect the dots.

MacRanger, I think, calls it right. The exposure of Mary O. McCarthy is just the beginning. The MSM is wasting all the ink it’s spilling this morning trying to establish a whistleblower defense. Ms. McCarthy is probably not going to jail. She has most likely already made a deal. It’s her associates in the Pouting Spooks Conspiracy who will be going up the river, with her testifyng against them.

..Mary’s discovery definitely came as a part of a tip, most likely on the promise of immunity, which I find most intriguing and amusing. Imagine a mole on the inside who is now spilling the beans on those leakers – such as Mary – who have been leaking stories over the last three years. Its going to be fun to watch the rats devour one another to save their own hides.

As we all know – or should know – since before and especially during the 2004 election cycle leaks were coming out at a fast and furious pace. It was if the State Department and the CIA had suddenly become a 24 hour news service, leaking information specifically designed to undermine the Bush administration, the war effort, and ulitmately was intended to defeat the President’s reelection effort.

We now know that McCarthy was a hire of Sandy Burglar, a Clintonista, and a heavy contributor to failed Presidential candidate John Kerry. In addition she worked out of the IG’s office of the CIA who would have directly worked on the referral to the JD of the Valerie Plame Game. As the Agency is a small sorority, I immediately wonder just how close she was and is to Valerie Plame.

As I noted from the beginning of the Plame Game, the story was never about Joe Wilson’s boondoggle to Niger per-se, but about an elaborate coup by a group of rogue ops to undermine the President of the United States in war time. This is much more than just the leak of CIA prisons – a story which in itself is false, but about the oldest type of war waged and which the CIA is expert at. That being toppling Governments by misinformation propaganda designed to sow discord among the people. Thus the Plame Game was and continues to be a ruse – a paper tiger- a fact that Fitzgerald and his bungling prosecution continually reminds us of.

Pofarmer asks over on Tom Maguire’s JOM:

The Fitzgerald investigation has been handled as an ivestigation of the administration and not like a “leak” investigation from the get go. Ergo, we know who the leaker is, but there’s no charges.

Fitz is from Chicago, which is highly Democratic.

So, what I want to know.

Who reccommended Fitz at the beginning of the chain?

Is Fitz just a useful idiot, or is something a little more/less sinister involved.

On October 3, 2003, George W. Bush nominated James Comey, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to the post of Deputy Attorney General. Comey was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on December 9, 2003.

New York Magazine profile of Comey.

George W. Bush chose one of the worst grandstanding prosecutors in the country, a Reinhold Niebuhr-quoting, statist liberal, who had recently sent Martha Stewart to prison “for lying” about a crime which was never proven to have occurred, to the Number 2 position in his Justice Department.

This unsound and unprincipled appointment would have the gravest consequences. The failure of the Bush Administration to safeguard the rights of Martha Stewart, and other victims of Comey’s over-reaching, opportunistic, and bullying prosecutions, would ultimately backfire on the administration itself.

It is known that by March 2004 Comey was quarreling with the White House over surveillance. Here is one leftwing account, describing the circumstances of one policy battle, and the application by Bush of an uncomplimentary nickname to Comey:

In March 2004, John Ashcroft was in the hospital with a serious pancreatic condition. At Justice, Comey, Ashcroft’s No. 2, was acting as attorney general…. (Jack) Goldsmith (head of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel) raised with Comey serious questions about the secret eavesdropping program, according to two sources familiar with the episode. He was joined by a former OLC lawyer, Patrick Philbin, who had become national-security aide to the deputy attorney general. Comey backed them up. The White House was told: no reauthorization.

The angry reaction bubbled up all the way to the Oval Office. President Bush, with his penchant for put-down nicknames, had begun referring to Comey as “Cuomey” or “Cuomo,” apparently after former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who was notorious for his Hamlet-like indecision over whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s. A high-level delegation—White House Counsel Gonzales and chief of staff Andy Card—visited Ashcroft in the hospital to appeal Comey’s refusal. In pain and on medication, Ashcroft stood by his No. 2.

But, even before he was confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Comey had taken advantage of John Ashcroft’s remarkably scrupulous personal recusal to appoint as Special Council, Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Fitzgerald would, of course, prove to be a prosecutor strongly reminiscent of Comey himself, preening for an admiring press, while lodging perjury charges against a trophy-class target based on contradictory witness accounts, having found no evidence to support the theory that any crime was ever committed in the first place.

Relations between Comey and the White House worsened after June 2004, when Comey (with Justice department associates Goldsmith and Philbin) held a not-for-attribution background press briefing to announce that the Justice Department was disavowing the August 2002 so-called “Torture memo” written by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. Wrangling over new definitions of permissible forms of interrogation continued through December.

A leftwing view of conflicts between Justice Department liberals and the White House appeared in Newsweek.

In April 2005, James Comey announced that he would be resigning later that year. He was quickly hired as General Counsel and a Senior Vice President by Lockheed Martin.

Holy Mackerel! The Washington Post defends George W. Bush’s declassifying information in order to defend policy, and comes pretty darn close to calling Joe Wilson a liar. I certainly wish this one was a signed editorial; I’d like to keep an eye out for the author.

Rick Moran starts by commenting on the above piece, but turns to noting the absence of coverage by the Press in connection with L’Affaire Plame of the highly newsworthy story of the Pouting Spooks war on George W. Bush. Much of the MSM has for many months studiously failed to notice:

the knife sticking out of the back of the Bush Administration; a knife planted by a group of leakers — organized or not — at the CIA who, unelected though they were, took it upon themselves to first try and prevent the execution of United States policy they were sworn to carry out, and failing that, trying to destroy in the most blatantly partisan manner an Administration with which they had a policy disagreement…

..by failing to illuminate this story by placing all the revelations in the context of the continuing war by the CIA against the Bush Administration, an enormous disservice is done to the American people. Because in the end, in order to find the truth of the matter, you have to understand the motivating factors of both sides. And the way writers are approaching the story now, that just isn’t happening.

Newsbusters story. video

They not only let these actors vote; they let them drive!

Article II, Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. —Constitution of the United States .———————————————-

I’m not going to repeat the big news story of the day, except to note that documents released today, in a filing by the defense in the I. Lewis Libby case, indicate that Scooter Libby had the president’s permission to release to the press information contained in a certain previously classified National Intelligence Estimate.

The Left was jumping for joy today. The ebullient Andrew Sullivan ran the story under the headline, BUSH NAILED.

One so hates to spoil the little rascals’ fun, but the left’s joy, and fondly imagined hope for future legal havoc based on all of this, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the US Constitution.

There is no such thing as classified information which the President of the United States could potentially be prosecuted for publishing on the front page of the New York Times.

The president is the chief executive, the head of the entire Executive Branch. The Executive Branch of the US Government has no power to do anything, but by the will of the president. If any document or information is classified, it is classified by presidential authority extended down a chain of command.

The only purpose for information to be classified is to assist the president in defending the United States and in implementing his own policies. In a circumstance in which it were to the advantage of the president to declassify some document, or piece of information, in order to defend his policies in domestic political debate, it is completely within the competence of the president to classify or declassify either at will. And it would not be in the least surprising, if a president delegated the same authority on some occasions, at least, to the vice president, or even to the vice president’s chief of staff.

Clarice Feldman has a new article on American Thinker, in which she demonstrates a pattern of protecting the reputation of Patrick Fitzgerald by such representatives of the establishment media as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Ms. Feldman also reviews the arguments in Lewis Libby’s Motion to Dismiss identifying the core argument:

The decision whether to continue the Special Counsel’s investigation long after the acts regarding the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s occupation were established required a careful balancing of the interests. On the one hand, there is a law enforcement interest in investigating potential false-statement and perjury offenses. On the other hand, there is a public interest in avoiding confrontations that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation and prosecution continue to entail. There is also a public interest in avoiding continued distraction of our nation’s highest officials well after it has become apparent that the alleged crime that was the intended focus of the investigation did not in fact occur. Those competing interests should have been weighed by properly appointed principal officers of the United States. Because the Special Counsel was given the power to operate without any supervision of direction in contravention of the Appointments Clause, that did not happen in this case.

On which basis, she concludes:

I think that Libby has made a persuasive hard-to-answer argument that the Prosecutor was improperly appointed and granted powers in a way that violates the Statute and the Constitution, and that the indictment should be dismissed.

Special Prosecutor Patrick’s Fitzgerald’s latest filing contains a paragraph referring to a “transcript of the conversation” between the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, columnist Robert Novak (who started the whole thing), and an official whose name was redacted. Editor & Publisher infers that this may imply that Woodward taped the conversation, or (at the very least) that he made a very detailed set of notes.

Leftblogger emptywheel took that transcript, converted it to an MS WORD document, and went to work counting spaces in the redacted portion.

Using one inch margins and Times New Roman, I recreated the passages at paragraph 43 and paragraph 52 that name Woodward’s (and Rove’s) source. Richard Armitage fits at paragraph 53, and Armitage fits in both spaces at paragraph 43. Cheney, Bush, Hadley, Rice, Joseph, Bolton … none of those alternatives fit. The one other possibility I can think of (it is slightly shorter than Armitage, but with the non-justified pages, it’s hard to tell) is Fleischer. Update: I think Rumsfeld is an outside possibility, too. Note that the passage at 43:

Moreover, Libby has been given a transcript of the conversation between Woodward and [redacted] and Novak has published an account briefly describing the conversation with his first confidential source ([redacted]).

Which would still allow two different sources for Novak and Woodward.

If Fitzgerald is seriously probing some sort of cover-up, that might explain the silence of Bob Novak. And there is surely something going on – on p. 2 Fitzgerald promises a detailed overview of the investigation on pages 2-12, all of which are redacted. [NOTE – well, there was something going on at one time – maybe this is water under the bridge now. Fitzgerald did say in a Miller-related filing that his investigation was substantially completed, except for the testimony of Cooper and Miller.]

So, is this all about the Karl Rove angle, with Matt Cooper and the missing Hadley email? Or is there more, and might that “more” explain Novak’s continued silence?

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued on Friday that he is really trying a perjury case, and the question of Valerie Plame’s covert status does not matter, i.e., it doesn’t matter if any crime was ever committed in the first place.

All a prosecutor has to be able to do, in Fitzgerald’s proposed Amerika, is to demonstrate that he can contradict details of the sworn testimony of the minutiae of the activities and conversations two years back of a senior government official intensely occupied with the affairs of state, and he is entitled to a conviction.

Convictions for the crime of obstructing investigations have become a popular prosecutorial fallback in cases like this where it is found to be impossible to prove that anyone ever committed the initially alleged crime. Martha Stewart was successfully imprisoned in just such a fashion, essentially for the crime of protesting her innocence of insider trading. No insider trading was ever proven, but Martha went to jail anyway.

By a curious coincidence, Mr. Fitzgerald owes his appointment to Martha’s prosecutor, Mr. James Comey.

Clarice Feldman is superb as always, and delivers a thoroughly devastating critique of Fitzgerald’s case. A must read.

A comparison illustrates the fatal flaw. Fitzgerald could not convict Scooter Libby for lying about what he had for lunch a year ago, if the investigation in which he made that statement had no relationship to his lunch that day. For exactly the same reason, he cannot win a conviction of Libby for lying to prosecutors while they are in effect on a fishing expedition, rather than pursuing evidence of an actual crime…

The details are a bit complex, so the antique media have not lavished much attention on the flawed nature of the prosecution. For most of them, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff is far from a sympathetic figure, and they relish his indictment as symbolic of The Larger Truth — the imagined corruption of the Bush administration…

..I think it apparent that it is Fitzgerald who tried to throw sand in our eyes.

I doubt that he will be able to pull off this trick a second time in Court. Simply, Fitzgerald could not find a violation of the only relevant law because the necessary predicates for its application did not exist. And, even assuming for the sake of argument that the factual assertions he made in the indictment of Libby are true, they could not have impeded his inquiry, for it was always about conduct manifestly not covered by any federal criminal statute.

How can someone impede the due process of justice when the inquiry itself is a make-believe one? That is the key question in the Libby case. For it is clear that there was only one statute available to deal with the Plame situation; the facts of the case never fit it; and it was an error to proceed with a full bore investigation and grand jury when the prosecution knew or—with prudent inquiry- should have known that.

Meanwhile Byron York at National Review Online reports that Libby’s lawyers have delivered a potentially fatal brief challenging the constitutionality of Fitzgerald’s appointment.

Fitzgerald’s authority comes from a December 30, 2003 letter from Deputy Attorney General James Comey in which Comey—after the recusal of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft—“delegated to Mr. Fitzgerald all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department’s investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency employee’s identity.” In that letter, Comey told Fitzgerald, “I direct you to exercise that authority as Special Counsel independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department.”

Libby’s motion to dismiss argues that that is a unique, and constitutionally unsupportable, grant of power:

Acting without any direction or supervision, Mr. Fitzgerald alone decides where the interests of the United States lie in an investigation that involves national security, the First Amendment, and important political questions. He alone decides which individuals to subject to investigation, what evidence will be obtained or not obtained, and whether or not continued investigation and prosecution are warranted. He is subject to no oversight and has no obligation to comply with Department of Justice policies and regulations that constrain the exercise of law enforcement powers in all other federal cases. Furthermore, he has unilateral authority to expand his jurisdiction and the power to say when, if ever, his office should be terminated. It was limitations on those powers that led the Supreme Court to uphold the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act. It is the absence of such controls that violates the Appointments Clause in this case.

The Washington Post today reported on an article by Paul R. Pillar in Foreign Affairs which criticizes the Bush Administration for “politicizing intelligence.”

Pillar’s basic contention is that the Bush Administration didn’t listen to the mandarins at the CIA. They cherry-picked analysis to support their own policy decisions, which were made independently of the opinions and preferences of far-better-qualified people like himself.

In Pillar’s view, the intelligence community has interests and responsibilities of its own, which need to be pursued without being in thrall to the whims of temporarily elected amateurs:

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.

In a slightly more polite way than the noisiest and most arrogant of the pouting spooks, Pillar is saying exactly the same thing. American foreign policy, decisions of peace and war, belong to an internal government elite, connected with and mirroring a national elite, not to temporarily elected parvenus with unconventional views on these matters, representing a bunch of yahoos from fly-over states.

At the very least, the intelligence community, if mean-spiritedly denied its own liberum veto, should really be entitled to cross the aisles and start vigorously criticizing and actively opposing any elected Administration’s policies, while retaining complete job security. A position in the US intelligence community ought to be rather like a tenured professorship at Harvard. And the collective body of that community should be, in relation to the US government, much like the Harvard faculty. When embarassed by the statements, policies, or behavior of a Bush, (shudder!) a Cheney, they ought to be able to circulate petitions advocating his removal, and vote on motions of censure.

Frankly, the more I read of this sort of arrogance, the more I feel like I’m revisiting some of the earlier sections of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Murray Waas, at National Journal, is reporting that:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records…

Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Libby testified to the grand jury that he had been authorized to share parts of the NIE with journalists in the summer of 2003 as part of an effort to rebut charges then being made by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make a public case for war.

All this seems to go without saying.

L’Affaire Plame has been operating from the outset on the basis of a kind of bizarre hyper-legalism, in which senior officials of the Executive Branch of the government are being targeted for indictment, and prosecuted, on a strange theory that the principal functionaries of government, the ultimate users and proprietors of classified information, can be deemed to have injured or offended the government, i.e., themselves, by using classified information to inform the public.

But, of course, the Executive Branch is itself the actual owner of all US classified information, and the employer of every participant, so we are regarding the preposterous unfolding of a scenario in which subordinate members of the Executive (the CIA, the Department of Justice) are seeking to indict and/or convict their superiors (The Vice President’s Chief of Staff; and in the left’s happiest and wildest dreams, also the President’s Policy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, and the Vice President himself).

Obviously the Executive Branch at its highest levels ought to be (absent a particular law) assumed to be entitled to use classified information in any manner it finds necessary or desirable in support of the policies of the Government, i.e., itself. At its most senior levels, the Executive branch can, in theory, classify or declassify at will.

So how can the Executive Branch be prosecuting the Executive Branch over its own classified information?

It is as if we find there were a dispute among the king’s servants in the royal castle over the proper arrangement of some table settings, and a coterie of disgruntled footmen had complained to the castle warden that the king’s chancellor’s seneschal was misusing the silver, and were trying to persuade him that the chancellor should be held responsible for this outrage as well, along with another principal crown minister, and all of them should be sacked and flung into the dungeon for their offense against the footmen.

The only possible rational basis for a possible crime would have to be the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982, which was enacted to protect genuinely covert intelligence officers, working overseas and consequently particularly vulnerable, from being endangered by having their identities disclosed by adversaries of the US Government. There has considerable public confusion concerning Mrs. Wilson’s employment status, but public information makes it clear enough that she has been working in Washington for more than the five years, stipulated in the Act.

In relation to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as “a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years”. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.)

Mr. Fitzgerald’s unspecific reference to Mrs. Wilson’s “covert overseas work” is very probably merely a desperate and highly disingenuous attempt to obfuscate the inapplicability of the statute serving as the basis for his entire investigation by so defining Mrs. Wilson’s employment as ipso facto covert, and treating any sort of trip abroad on Counterproliferation issues for consultation, or even conferencing, however brief, as sufficient to meet the terms of the statute.

If there is no violation of the 1982 Act, there was never a crime in the first place, and the entire affair represents a Kafka-esque spectacle of out-of-control partisan elements of government run wild, of government devouring its own tail.

The Washington Post reports today that Lewis Libby’s defense team has taken the obvious step of trying to force the prosecution to disclose the factual circumstances of Valerie Plame’s employment:

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff urged a court yesterday to force a prosecutor to turn over CIA records indicating whether former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s employment was classified, saying the answer is not yet clear.

As we have previously discussed here and here, it seems unlikely, on the basis of what we know, that Valerie Plame really was employed as a covert operative in the sense refered to in the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Clarice Feldman predicts that members of the MSM who helped the Pouting Spooks play Gotcha! on conservative policy adversaries in the Bush Administration in L’Affaire Plame will soon be hauled into court via subpoenas by Scooter Libby’s defense team, and find themselves on the hot seat, where they will be forced to divulge independent knowledge of Valerie Plame’s occupation (Take that Nicholas Kristoff) and expose other information sources, or—like Judith Miller—face penalties for contempt.

Jason Leopold, writing in the leftwing venue “truthout,” claims he has leakers of his own, leaking details of Inspector Javert’s, excuse me, Special Council Fitzgerald’s obsessive and monomanaical quest to apprehend Jean Valjean, excuse me, indict White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to have spent the past month preparing evidence he will present to a grand jury alleging that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove knowingly made false statements to FBI and Justice Department investigators and lied under oath while he was being questioned about his role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity more than two years ago, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe… According to sources, Fitzgerald had planned to meet with the grand jury several times last month, hoping to wrap up the case specifically as it relates to Rove’s involvement. But the prosecutor, who empanelled a second grand jury in November and whose term expires in 18 months, had his hands full dealing with another high-profile criminal case he is prosecuting involving Lord Conrad Black, owner of several major metropolitan newspapers, who was indicted on charges including racketeering. Moreover, several members of the grand jury had questions involving Rove’s prior testimony before the previous grand jury on four separate occasions and had requested additional information about the testimony and about the overall case, these sources said, leading to a delay in the proceedings so Fitzgerald could provide that information. Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, said in a brief interview Monday that he has not heard anything about the grand jury requesting additional information about Rove and is unaware that Fitzgerald has been building a case against his client… But sources knowledgeable about the case against Rove say that he was offered a plea deal in December and that Luskin had twice met with Fitzgerald during that time to discuss Rove’s legal status. Rove turned down the plea deal, which would likely have required him to provide Fitzgerald with information against other officials who were involved in Plame’s outing as well as testifying against those people, the sources said.

Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, tells democrats and their MSM allies promoting the ersatz NSA scandal:

Stop lying. Show us the victims.

Name one honest citizen who has been targeted by our intelligence system. Name one innocent man or woman whose life has been destroyed. Come on, Nancy. Give it up, Howard. Name just one.

Can’t do it? OK. Let’s dispense with the partisan rhetoric and reach for the facts:

Has a single reader of this column suffered personally from our government’s efforts to defend us against terrorists? Have any of your relatives or even your remotest acquaintances felt our intel system intrude into their lives?

That’s what I always ask the group-think lefties. Not one has ever been able to answer “Yes.”

The same big-lie politicians attacking the president’s efforts to uncover plots against America by monitoring terrorist communications will be the first to shriek that the War on Terror has failed when we’re attacked again.

They want it both ways: Drop our defenses, then blame Bush when terrorists strike

Time reports:

Angered by recent leaks of information about sensitive intelligence operations, CIA Director Porter Goss is redoubling efforts to get his spooks to keep their mouths shut. At staff meetings last week, CIA managers at the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters told employees that the leaking had got out of control and needed to stop. “They’re exercised about it and are trying to do what they can to clamp down,” a former senior CIA official tells TIME…

there are efforts within the government to identify leakers. The Justice Department is investigating who gave away the NSA secrets. While such probes rarely succeed, the department’s new willingness to subpoen a reporters and their records could change that. And the CIA has a group of mostly retired officers on contract to read news stories that contain classified material and try to uncover their sources. This may be the toughest spook work. Over the years, the unit, nicknamed “the leak chasers” by some agency hands, has been able to finger only a few talkers. But it has an enthusiastic—and active—backer in Goss. He told TIME in June that he had made dozens of leak-investigation referrals. “Virtually every day I can pick up a paper and find somebody who is an anonymous source,” he said. “That is willful. And it seems to me there ought to be a penalty for that.”

It can’t be terribly hard to identify the leakers. One could start by subpoenaing the reporters who published information received from unidentified offficials.

VIPS-hunter extraordinary Clarice Feldman is on the job at American Thinker identifying the connections between the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) organization and Russ Tice:

Tice is a member of a group formed in August 2004 called National Security Whistleblowers. Here’s their website.

But if you look at the NSW group you may notice that the founder, director and chief spokesperson of the group is Sibel Edmunds. She has faced a real uphill battle in her struggle with the FBI, which dismissed her. And her story about why she was fired from the FBI has a number of variations, although she, like Wilson/Plame, numbers among the darlings of the Bushitler crowd.

Then look at the group’s list of members. Along with more familiar names like Daniel Ellsburg, you’ll see Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer on the list. You’ll also find Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. These are members of VIPS, the group that encouraged intelligence agents to leak, shopped Wilson and his story (Johnson was in the agency with Plame and is close to her.) As I noted earlier here, they seem to have been behind much of the Plame/Wilson story. I smell the same public relations/media campaign .The same phony claims of maltreated government employees. If Tice was a source for Risen, and it’s not clear he was, the reporter was certainly casting a broad net. For as Mr. Gertz notes in his article:

“Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program.”

The only significant difference between the original Plame/Wilson scandal and the revival at NSA is that the same folks who moaned about a major intelligence breach that had to be punished when Valerie Wilson’s desk job at the CIA hit print are now openly supporting a leaker and claiming he is entitled to protections — even though he hasn’t gone through the channels established by law.

Rick Moran at RWNH agrees with the hypothesis I lean to myself: that Tice is the spook who had the information, and who could be persuaded by the VIPers managing the Anti-Bush Intel Operation to leak the NSA story to the New York Times. I would also suppose that the letters from Tice to the Congressional Intelligence Committees in the news today were a key part of their plan, intended to get him off the prosecutorial hook by offering the not-very-subtle hint that he is entitled to be immunized as a “whistleblower” to Congress, disclosing Watergate-style Executive Branch crimes, not a deservedly discharged stalker seeking personal revenge on his former agency, even at the price of damaging National Security.

Clarice Feldman, in her latest, is experiencing schadenfreude at the plight of the New York Times.

Patrick Godfrey thinks the administration’s months of passivity in the face of countless opposition leaks and attacks might really be Karl Rove’s most diabolical maneuver yet:

As a long time Boxing fan and as a student of the Sweet Science, it was thrilling to watch Muhammad Ali in his prime and in particular, his patented “Rope a Dope” strategy. In the later rounds, when his opponent was particularly aggressive, Ali would back against the ropes and cover up his head and mid-section as his opponent would unleash a barrage of punches. Many of those punches would be absorbed by his arms and gloves, but occasionally some would get through. He would take some punishment as his foe would be a blur of activity, the blows coming nearly non-stop as it appeared Ali might be in trouble, on the ropes and covering up, not fighting back. His opponent would be feeling good, seemingly scoring at will, his punches hitting a man on the ropes. Eventually however, even the best conditioned fighter would become arm weary, and take a step back to rest.

This would be the moment Ali was waiting for.

Ali would come off the ropes swinging, his rested arms pounding his worn out opponent. Sure, he was on the ropes and took a few shots, but it was all part of a strategy. Once his opponent had spent himself, Ali would go in for the knockout. Now Politics isn’t Boxing and care must be taken to avoid specious analogies. That being said let me point out some things.

Like you, I have been worrying and wondering what has been going on at the RNC.

For months, I have listened to a constant refrain of; Bush Lied, Quagmires, imagined scandals and that “He doesn’t have a plan”.

I would read, with a growing sense of anxiety, daily updates of doom and gloom. Rising Troop losses, one sided reporting. A defensive posture and Bunker-like mentality was the order of the day.

Seemingly prodded by Maverick House Members and its increasingly alarmed base, the White House is finally firing back. Along with this new offence have come rising poll numbers which, lets face it, were approaching Carter-Like numbers.

It has puzzled me for a long time, why hasn’t the White House fired back on this stuff? Some of it was so easy to refute it was almost a “gimme” for the other side. A quick trip back to the Front Pages of only 2 years ago would have been enough for some of the more egregious whining.

Then it struck me, could this all be on purpose?

Clarice Feldman is reporting in The American Thinker on the developments in the Pouting & Leaking Spooks affair. She is of the opinion that the tables are soon to be turned:

Liberal fantasies of Karl Rove being frog-marched in handcuffs for leaking classified information may turn into a nightmare of prominent liberals being prosecuted for damaging the fight against al Qaeda via leaks of classified data. There are no names on the public record yet, but somebody leaked the classified information about NSA surveillance to James Risen of the New York Times, and a year later his paper published the story.

The pieces falling in place are far from conclusive, but they are mighty suggestive.

President Bush believes that the national interest has been harmed. In all probability, gears are turning right now for a criminal investigation leading to a possible felony prosecution. Others are noting, as AT did last Sunday, that at the demand of the left itself, precedents have been set that could ensnare not “evil Republicans,” but “virtuous liberals” who think of themselves as whistleblowers. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

She links Jack Kelley who notes that L’Affaire Plame has already established the precedent of throwing reporters in the slam until they divulge their sources.

And she refers us to a very interesting theory proposed by AJ Strata, and continued here suggesting that activist liberal FISA Judge Robertson didn’t really resign after all, that he was suspended for a participatory role in the NYT leak leading to the current NSA Flap.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Harvard Crimson yesterday reports that Bob Woodward disclosed an interesting bit of gossip, over roast beef and asparagas, during an invitation-only dinner he attended at Harvard on December 5th:

in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame, which touched off the scandal in the first place.

“His source was not in the White House, I don’t believe,” Woodward said of Novak over a private dinner at the Institute of Politics on Dec. 5. He did not indicate what information, if any, he had to corroborate the claim.

Woodward also denied conventional wisdom about the leak:

At the Harvard dinner, Woodward sparred with his friend and former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, over the motives behind the leak. The pair had just come from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics, where they spoke for more than an hour before television cameras and a large audience. The invite-only dinner afterward, which was attended by Harvard students as well as a handful of journalists and politicians, was declared on-the-record from the outset by Alex C. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who moderated the dinner conversation.

Responding to Bernstein’s claim that the release of Plame’s identity was a “calculated leak” by the Bush administration, Woodward said flatly, “I know a lot about this, and you’re wrong.”

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

One of our correspondents in the Comments section, who signs himself “Charles Peirce” (clearly a pragmatist), cites a CNN article, dated 11 Feb 2004, in which it is reported that:

Sources told CNN that Plame works in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—the part of the agency in charge of spying—and worked in the field for many years as an undercover officer.

“If she were only an analyst, not an operative, we would not have filed a crimes report” with the Justice Department, a senior intelligence official said.

Thanks to “Charles Peirce” for bringing this to our attention, but the question remains: is it actually true that Valerie Plame was in the Directorate of Operations? The Counterproliferation Center was clearly an analytic, rather an operational, entity.

A bit of web searching discloses an earlier Valerie Plame career as an CIA officer working with Non-Official Cover, what is called an NOC:

Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame’s boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a “nice European city.” Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. “[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, ‘Yeah, he works for us,’” says Rustmann. “The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.”

We find also some speculation on her earlier career:

France to expel US ’spy’ diplomats Evening Standard (London) February 22, 1995

FRANCE has accused four American diplomats and a fifth US citizen of political and economic spying and has ordered them to leave the country, Le Monde newspaper has reported.

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua wrote to President Francois Mitterrand that the five worked for the CIA and were guilty of “acts of interference”, including attempts to recruit aides to Cabinet ministers, the newspaper said. The letter reportedly said the five were uncovered in a “long, detailed investigation” by France’s counter-intelligence service. It was not immediately clear whether France had set a deadline for them to leave. The State Department would not comment today on the expulsion but former deputy assistant Secretary of State Ernest Preeg, who ran the White House Economic Policy Group, said the action seems unnecessarily dramatic and may have an ulterior motive. “It looks as if this may be just a little hanky-panky around the edges,” he said.

‘Every country has people trying to get intelligence one way or another. It’s standard practice, even among allies. You don’t do anything as sensational as expelling five Americans unless there is something else going on.” Mr Preeg added: “It is well known that the French are doing a lot of espionage in America, most of it commercial.”

Other sources suggest the motive for CIA recruitment of French officials may be political. France’s recent relations with Iran and Iraq have been worrying to Washington, which has focused a great deal of intelligence activity on the two governments.

One of the five, a woman, worked with “clandestine cover” outside the embassy, said Le Monde. One is considered the head of the CIA’s Paris operations and a second his deputy. The other two, a man and a woman, also have diplomatic status, said the paper.

Exaggeration on the part of the pouting spooks of the hazardous character of Valerie Plame’s CIA activities is not unknown:

Former CIA official Larry C. Johnson, who left the CIA in 2004, indicated Plame had been a ‘non-official cover operative’ (NOC). He explained: ‘...that meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.’

Valerie Plame graduated from the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. One tends to doubt that even the bloodthirsty Belgians would really have executed the poor girl, no matter how mad the frogs had gotten at US attempts to suborn ministerial assistants or to steal recipes.

Valerie Plame is next known to have met Joe Wilson at a Washington party in early 1997. If she is, in fact, working in Washington in “early 1997,” then she is not stationed overseas five years before July of 2003, and no one has violated the Covert Agent Identity Protection Act.

Tom Maguire quotes Don Luskin, who concludes:

Was Plame really a covert operative? Yes, but this will be difficult to officially confirm and there will be debates as to just how covert she really was, and what real harm was done by outing her.

But is that really true?

Bob Novak, in the infamous 14 July 2003 column, refers to her imprecisely as an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. The word operative suggests that Valerie Plame was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a covert agent, working undercover on hazardous overseas assignments.

Valerie Plame was working in the Directorate of Operations, but she was working domestically in the DO Counterproliferation Division (CPD).

corrected 1 May 2006.

The MSM made much of Valerie Plame’s Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. The reality is not that Mrs. Wilson infiltrated the barbed-wire fortified boundary of a hostile foreign state, trusting for protection in her forged Brewster-Jennings parking permit. She merely listed that imaginary firm as her employer in connection with a 1999 one thousand dollar campaign donation to Al Gore. It appears that the reality is that “Brewster-Jennings” was merely a general purpose CIA front address, established in 1994, and available to numerous CIA personnel for use as a very modest form of employment camouflage.
———————————————————-

The real case for prosecuting the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment is based on the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which defines the protected category of covert agent as:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

She obviously was not serving outside the United States at the time of the publication of the Novak column, so the basic question for a Special Counsel ought to have been: did Valerie Plame Wilson within the five years prior to 14 July 2003 really serve on CIA assignment outside the United States? If she did not, he ought to have packed his bags, closed the investigation, and gone back home to Chicago.

A chorus of peepings emanating from the interior of the fever swamps of the Left may be heard tonight promising that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald really will deliver the Xmas present found heading the list in every liberal’s letter to Santa: a grand jury indictment of Karl Rove for obstruction of justice in L’Affaire Plame.

Raw Story is reporting:

Short of a last minute intervention by Rove’s attorney, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to ask a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to indict Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove for making false statements to the FBI and Justice Department investigators in October 2003, lawyers close to the case say.

David R. Mark

Talk Left

Booman Tribune

The Left Coaster
——————————————-

If I were George W. Bush, I would note that they have all been very bad this year, and I’d transform Fitzgerald’s Xmas gift into coal with a stroke of my pen by pardoning Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and everyone and anyone connected to the non-existent crime. While, at the same time, I would announce the appointment of a new Special Counsel for the investigation of leaks pertaining to the conduct of the War on Terror, originating from groups of persons both active in, and retired from, the Intelligence Community.

The LA Times is reporting that Alain Chouet, the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service, has, in an interview last week, revealed previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French intelligence, demonstrating once again the lengths the Bush Administration was willing to go in ignoring powerful counter-evidence when it brazenly referred to attempts by the Iraqi regime to purchase uranium in Niger. Isn’t it convenient the way this wonderful new French revelation confirms what retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the domestic opponents of the US invasion of Iraq, have been saying all along?

But there are some who have noted the possibility of a connection between Joe Wilson and French Intelligence, and who contend that French Intelligence may have been conducting a disinformation operation against the Bush Administration focussed on the Iraqi Niger uranium purchase for a considerable period of time.

See also Jack Cashill and Fedora and Anchoress

Daniel Henniger in a well-worth reading editorial in today’s WSJ considers the possibilities of the motivations for the MSM’s obsessive coverage of L’Affaire Plame:

Two reasons emerge. The first is if Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Karl Rove for violating this law, Mr. Rove likely would resign and the Bush presidency would be significantly damaged. The alternative explanation is that the press is merely pursuing a possible violation of federal law and any damage to the presidency is therefore the self-inflicted wound of Ms. Plame’s outer. If it is the former, then the conservative paranoia about the press isn’t paranoia. If the latter, then the Beltway press has lost its mind; they are making the practice of journalism more litigious for all the rest of us.

Mona Charen at TownHall is urging that Congressional oversight committees get to work. She’s perfectly right. There is at least a nominally Republican majority in Congress. The Intelligence Community cabal of doves has successfully gotten a major investigation of its own going on the most slender of pretexts. Why doesn’t this administration start using its congressional allies to defend itself and the national interest instead of standing there like a deer in the headlights? Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

The Dec. 1 edition of The New York Times carried a story about the damage done to U.S. interests by the revelation that the CIA maintains a number of secret interrogation prisons for terrorists in Europe and elsewhere. (“Reports of Secret U.S. Prisons in Europe Draw Ire and Otherwise Red Faces.”) Governments throughout the continent are now demanding explanations from the U.S. Department of State and otherwise strutting their outrage that the U.S. might be kidnapping suspected terrorists from European soil and transferring them to other nations.

How did this bit of classified information become public? It was a leak from within the CIA (to The Washington Post in that case)—and a breathtaking one at that. Though the agency has been steadily leaking damaging stories about the Bush administration since 9/11, it has now crossed a new threshold with a leak that severely damages CIA activities and arguably harms national security—all for the sake of crippling George W. Bush.

Thomas Joscelyn discusses anonymous source spinning of information obtained by the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative captured in March 2002, into firm evidence of the lack of ties between the Iraqi Baathist regime and al Qaeda. Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line also is investigating another even more important leak by the ( in Safire’s happy phrase) “pouting spooks” actively participating in the onging Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Operation, describing secret CIA transports of terrorist prisoners. Richard Miniter, author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How President Bush is Winning the War on Terror and Power-Line readers discuss whether the information of the flights was simply gleaned from public records with the addition of a little trade-craft by retired CIA officers (now part of the VIPS cabal):

(Richard Miniter says:)

It turns out that the movements of the CIA aircraft (and virtually all private aircraft) are a matter of public record. All you need is a tail number and you can usually obtain its movements for the past year.

Even without the tail number, you can pore through the records looking for suspicious movements (DC to Kabul to Baku and back, say). The CIA could ask (as can private parties as well) that its leased planes not have its logs publicly reported, but, whether through incompetence or design, they have not. Also, Grey told me, the incorporation records of Aero and other leasing outfits are publicly available. Here again the CIA was sloppy. Apparently many of the people named in those documents overlapped with people named in corporation’s documents, i.e., Joe Blow shows up as the chief executive of several different aircraft companies simultaneously and a Google search strongly suggests that Blow has a CIA connection. Add in some visits to bars frequented by charter pilots and airplane mechanics’ shops, and you have a large chunk of the story—all without a single (actively-serving) CIA leak.

Readers Rich Cox and P.S. Malloy are skeptical, and Malloy argues the fact that it may have been possible to reverse engineer the story using public information does not mean that the information leaked necessarily was obtained from public sources. There is no reason to feel certain that all participants in anti-Bush intel operations are currently retired. It is known, for instance, that CIA officers not-then-retired were leaking information intended to help discredit the aministration’s case against Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Miniter has a later response.

John Hinderaker of Power-Line discusses in the Daily Standard damaging intelligence leaks by active CIA officer members of the anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Community cabal.

THE CIA’S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency’s most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer’s words, “the book was being used to bash the president.” However, the agency’s preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America’s foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency’s agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal. Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration

The Guardian reports in tomorrow’s edition:

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument “that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”. Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: “Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.”

Colonel Wilkerson has been unleashing a series of attacks on the administration in recent weeks, making the same kinds of arguments made by known and acknowledged members of the VIPS cabal of State Department and Intelligence Community doves operating in opposition to the current administration since well before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

PREVIOUS REPORT 1

PREVIOUS REPORT 2

Jack Cashill reports in WorldNetDaily that Valerie Plame Wilson may have broken the law in May 2003, revealing her own identity, and role in the Joe Wilson Trip to Niger, to reporter Nicholas Kristof.

Wilson makes a stunning admission to Vanity Fair magazine reporter, Vick Ward, who reported it in the January 2004 edition of the magazine. It has been heretofore overlooked. The wording of the relevant paragraph needs to be repeated in full since it is clumsy enough to allow misinterpretation:

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.

If “his wife” refers not to Kristof’s wife but to Plame, which it almost assuredly does, Wilson has implicated Plame in a serious transgression. “As an employee of the CIA,” he writes in the preface to the paperback version of his book, “The Politics of Truth,” “she could have no contact with the press without prior approval.”

Judith Coburn is cheerleading for Bush’s eventual impeachment over at Moonbat Jones, in an article headlined Worse than Watergate?

The current “One-Party State” seems to preclude hope, Coburn laments. But, still, she notes:

It’s often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected….

Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers’ break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration’s unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration’s imperial modus operandi.

Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience.

We can rely on the Extreme Left to be diligent in consciousness-raising in support of its affiliated Intelligence Community members in their continuing efforts to build momentum, to fan the sparks of L’Affair Plame into a media barnfire adequate to provide the basis to overthrow an elected president.

My suggestion is that the Bush administration must realize that this is a terribly dangerous situation: at a time of national danger, when we are at war, the CIA has become a rogue agency, uncontrolled by any branch of the federal government. It conducts its own foreign policy; it dictates military policy (through control of the intelligence the Department of Defense needs); it has seized control of a significant portion of the powers of the elected Executive.

It’s time to fight back… and best and quickest way to do so would be for President Bush to direct Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to immediately begin Justice Department investigations of this rash of recent leaks from the CIA, including the decision to allow Joe Wilson to go public with his lying claims in the New York Times about “what [he] didn’t find” in Niger; the leak about the previously secret prison facilities for terrorists; and so forth.

Reporters should be subpoenaed; if they refuse to testify, put them in jail for contempt until they do. Use the full powers of the Patriot Act to seize records and find out who is doing the leaking. And then drop the hammer on them: prosecute them for misuse of classified information or even worse criminal violations. At the very least, get enough evidence to strip them of their security clearances… make it plain that leaking to the press to damage the administration is a career-terminating offense and might even lead to prison time.

Also, be sure to widely publicize the names of leakers as soon as you dredge them up. These people rely upon anonymity; if word gets around that whatever you tell Harry ends up in a Walter Pinkus column tomorrow, the leakers will be shunned by many of the folks who have unwittingly been helping them funnel damaging information to the mainstream leftist media.

Bush can do all of this without Congress lifting a finger. He can do it over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and he doesn’t need any votes from the Democrats.

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Moonbat journal Mother Jones, states that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out—that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Why is this group of disaffected intelligence agency and state department officials trying to bring down the Bush Administration?

Because there is no English word to describe our outrage. We’ve been watching this for a year now, and we’ve published eleven memos on what the Bush administration has done. We’re just aghast at what we saw all during 2002.

We have never seen anything like this orchestrated campaign, as the Administration chose to play on America’s real suffering and trauma to sell an illegal and unnecessary war.

VIPS original steering committee included:

Raymond McGovern, Arlington

Richard Beske, San Diego, “former CIA officer”

Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
and
William Christison, Santa Fe, resigned from VIPS 15 July 2003, over memo calling for Cheney’s resignation.

Patrick Eddington, Alexandria Sourcewatch

David MacMichael, Linden, VA

Obvious additional affiliates or allies, appearing in the 2003 Moveon.org-sponsored film, Uncovered: the Whole Truth About the Iraq War include:

David Albright

Robert Baer

Milt Bearden, former CIA station chief in Pakistan

Rand Beers more politely

David Corn

Philip Coyle

John Dean

Chas Freeman

Graham Fuller

Mel Goodman Mother Jones bio and in CounterPunch Democracy Now! interview

John Brady Kiesling

Karen Kwiatkowski

Patrick Lang

Scott Ritter

The Rt Honorable Clare Short

Stansfield Turner

The Honorable Henry Waxman

Thomas E. White also

Joe Wilson article about

Colonel Mary Ann Wright

Peter Zimmerman.

Linked via Goodman above:

Greg Thielmann

Vincent Cannistraro

Other alleged VIPS members:

Ray Close, Princeton, NJ quotes CounterPunch 10Jun03 On Fallujah30Apr04

Eugene Betit

Larry Johnson web-site

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker points to an ultra-left affilliated group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, frequently abbreviated as VIPS, as the behind-the-scenes allies of the MSM in fanning the flames of the Plamegate scandal. VIPS recently appeared in the Washington Post:

A group of former intelligence officers urged President Bush not to pardon anyone convicted of leaking Valerie Plame’s name to reporters and to pull security clearances of any White House officials implicated in the investigation.

Feldman notes a previous article of her own demonstrating that some of the same group of people have been conducting an anti-Bush administration campaign for a considerable period of time.

VIPS was opposing the upcoming invasion of Iraq, and predicting catastrophe, on Alexander Cockburn’s far-left CounterPunch in February of 2003:

after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441, and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.

VIPS can be seen organized and in operation already arguing for Dick Cheney’s forced resignation over his role in pre-war intelligence assessment as far back as 14 July 2003:

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney “not guilty.” His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation.

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is reported by Raw Story to be the source who informed the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment and her role in arranging Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.

Raw Story is an unreliable moonbat site, but…

The Washington Post reports that the big secret of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment as an ANALYST, not a spy, was known by leftie journalist extraordinaire Bob Woodward a month before Bob Novak spilled the beans:

Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday…

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby’s lawyers, said yesterday that Woodward’s testimony undermines Fitzgerald’s public claims about his client and raises questions about what else the prosecutor may not know. Libby has said he learned Plame’s identity from NBC’s Tim Russert.

“If what Woodward says is so, will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?” Jeffress said last night. “The second question I would have is: Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson’s wife?”

Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked classified information.

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has been taking point on Blogosphere coverage of L’Affaire Plame.

A former CIA case officer and writer on US intelligence says of L’Affaire Plame”

A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short “fact finding” mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that’s not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn’t deserve.

James Lewis, in the The American Thinker, notes Joe Wilson’s various French social and business connections, and speculates upon L’Affaire Plame constituting a French intelligence operation designed to injure the Bush Administration.

The CIA, as much or more than the State Department, didn’t support President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. And to discredit that decision, it appears the CIA first chose an unspeakably unqualified political activist for a sham intelligence mission, structured it so that the results would be utterly public, and then—when the activist resumed his publicity-hound activity—demanded and achieved a high-profile criminal investigation into White House activities that resulted, so far, in the indictment of the Vice President’s chief of staff. It’s time for the Justice Department—or, better yet, for the Senate Intelligence Committee—to investigate the Wilson/Plame sham. Not only was the Wilson mission to Niger a sham, but the CIA’s demand for an investigation of Robert Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame may itself have been a criminal act.

With the sure hand for snatching at defeat we’ve seen working ever since George W. Bush long ago alluded to all the accrued political capital he was going to spend on Social Security reform, the behind-the-scenes political savants of the Bush White House this Sunday gave the Times a story, which undoubtedly brought a smile to the face of every one of the president’s and the administration’s adversaries from Berkeley to Babylon. All members of the Presidential staff are going to be required this week to attend “refresher lectures” on ethics and the handling of classified material.

What could assure a more effective spirit of efficiency, enterprize, and elan in managing the affairs of a great nation than a mandatory corporate training lecture (out of Dilbert) on covering your hindquarters as priority number one?

What more could they possibly do to affirm the legal validity of the preposterous Plamegate investigation, aside from affixing Karl Rove’s head to a stake on the White House fence, and having the president appear on the porch barefoot and attired in sackcloth, wearing a sign around his neck bearing the inscription: Peccavi ?

The lecture on ethics ought to be scheduled for the firing of the CIA officials involved in policy war activities leading to the appointment of a special prosecutor, and the lecture on handling classified information for the arrest of the “intelligence officials” mentioned in last week’s Washington Post as sources for a report alleging the existence of top-secret Eastern European terrorist prison facilities.

Follow-up: The ethics classes begin.

Stephen Hayes has been reporting on the Weekly Standard on the affaire Plame, Joseph Wilson’s mendacity, and the CIA involvement in the press-orchestrated scandal:

The White House, the CIA, and the Wilson 24 October 2005

The Incredibles 25 October 2005

A Spooked White House 29 October 2005

One Good Leak Deserves Another 31 October 2005