Investors Business Daily points out that Valerie Plame Wilson’s recent Congressional testimony is contradicted by the facts, and adds another anecdote demonstrating that Joe Wilson had identified his wife’s job widely months before the appearance of the Novak column.

“I did not recommend him,” Plame claimed before the House panel last Friday. She was referring to her husband, Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger in early 2002 by the CIA to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein sought uranium there. “I did not suggest him,” she added.

But the Senate bipartisan report of July 2004 indicates otherwise:

The reports officer of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division (CPD), where Plame worked, told committee staff that Plame “offered up his (Wilson’s) name.”

In a memo to the CPD deputy chief dated Feb. 12, 2002, Plame wrote, “My husband has good relations with both the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” That’s not a recommendation?

The day after that memo, Plame’s CPD division sent a cable “requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador (Joseph Wilson) to Niger …”

Plame “told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him ‘there’s this crazy report’ on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.”

A CIA analyst intent on discrediting what she calls a “crazy report” is indicative of a spy agency at war—or at least at odds—with the White House it is supposed to be serving. The actions of both Mr. and Mrs. Wilson suggest that is exactly what is at the heart of the Plame Affair.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the first person we know of to reveal Plame’s identity to the press—first to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, then to columnist Robert Novak. He was never indicted. Still, he had some very interesting things to say about Plame and Wilson.

On the tape of his conversation with Woodward, played at the Libby trial and apparently recorded a month before he spoke to Novak, Armitage said of Plame’s job at the CIA, “Everyone knows it,” immediately adding that “Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody.”

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone wrote a column in US News, contrasting the seriousness of the offenses committed by Sandy Berger with the discrepancy between Lewis Libby’s memory and those of Tim Russert and Matt Cooper and noting the irony of Libby facing far more serious penalties than Berger received.

Sandy Berger responded with this defensive email.

“Michael: I screwed up. There was nothing sinister about it. I was under serious pressure to digest the entire Clinton record on terrorism for eight years so that we could testify fully to the 9-11 commission. I spent several arduous days at the Archives looking through the files. This document was interesting to me because I had commissioned it in 2000–a look at what we learned from the millennium terror threats that were avoided. Tired, stressed, I made a very stupid decision–to take the documents home with me so that I could review them in more detail and so that I could compare the apparent differences among versions. Since this document had been widely circulated to all the relevant agencies (State, Defense, CIA, Justice, etc.), I felt certain the commission would get it from one or more of these agencies.

There were no handwritten markings on the documents (which were copies) or anything else unusual. I took no other documents–originals or copies–besides the ones specified in my plea agreement.

The DOJ has stated unequivocally that there is no evidence that I took other documents and that the commission received everything.

That’s the long and short of it. I made a very stupid mistake. I deeply regret it. Top-level career Justice Department prosecutors investigated it aggressively for two years. We reached a plea agreement that they believed was fair. That was two years ago. Now I wish this thing would go away.

Best, Sandy”

John Hinderaker expresses some very appropriate skepticism of Berger’s veracity.

I don’t buy it. Berger didn’t make an impulsive decision—”tired, stressed”—to smuggle documents out of the National Archives. He stole documents on multiple occasions. On one occasion, he sneaked them out of the archives, went to a nearby construction site and hid the documents under a construction trailer, so he could come back later and pick them up. I simply don’t believe that Berger engaged in this kind of cloak and dagger behavior just because he found the documents “interesting” and wanted to study them at home.

Most of all, I don’t see how Berger’s explanation can be reconciled with his own admission that he didn’t just take the documents home; he cut some of them to pieces with a pair of scissors. Why did he destroy the documents if he wasn’t trying to prevent them from coming to light?

Nor am I impressed by Berger’s claim that the Department of Justice “has stated unequivocally that there is no evidence that I took other documents and that the commission received everything.” There is no evidence as to what documents Berger took because the Archives staff let him walk off with them and didn’t try to monitor what he was doing until it was too late. That being the case, the only evidence as to what documents were taken is Berger’s own confession.

Steve Gilbert provides a very illuminating timeline of the Plamegame and explains exactly what Joe Wilson was up to.

June 2003: According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, the following interview with Richard Armitage at the State Department transpired about a month before Robert Novak’s column appeared on July 14, 2003.

Woodward: Well it was Joe Wilson who was sent by the agency, isn’t it?
Armitage: His wife works for the agency.
Woodward: Why doesn’t that come out? Why does that have to be a big secret?
Armitage: (over) Everybody knows it.
Woodward: Everyone knows?
Armitage: Yeah. And they know ’cause Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody. He’s pissed off ’cause he was designated as a low level guy went out to look at it. So he’s all pissed off.
Woodward: But why would they send him?
Armitage: Because his wife’s an analyst at the agency.
Woodward: It’s still weird.
Armitage: He — he’s perfect. She — she, this is what she does. She’s a WMD analyst out there.
Woodward: Oh, she is.
Armitage: (over) Yeah.
Woodward: Oh, I see. I didn’t think…
Armitage: (over) “I know who’ll look at it.” Yeah, see?
Woodward: Oh. She’s the chief WMD…?
Armitage: No. She’s not the…
Woodward: But high enough up that she could say, “oh, yeah, hubby will go.”
Armitage: Yeah. She knows [garbled].
Woodward: Was she out there with him, when he was…?
Armitage: (over) No, not to my knowledge. I don’t know if she was out there. But his wife’s in the agency as a WMD analyst. How about that?

Why would Richard Armitage have been talking about Wilson and Plame in June of 2003? This was still weeks before Joe Wilson wrote his New York Times editorial, and a month before Robert Novak published his column mentioning Valerie Plame.

Armitage brought this up because he is a gossip and it was already common knowledge because Joe Wilson had been calling all of the newspapers trying to get them to run his story about his mission to Niger.

Given the chronology and Mr. Armitage’s remarks, it seems quite obvious Mr. Wilson outed his wife when he spoke to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and then to the subsequent reporters at the Times, the Post and elsewhere, when he was hawking his story about his trip to Niger.

Wilson’s motivation for bringing up his wife would have been exactly as Armitage suggested to Woodward. Wilson told the panelists and reporters about Plame’s work at the CIA to give his radically new and dangerous story more credibility.

It’s highly probable Wilson used his wife’s position as a WMD analyst at the CIA to bolster his outrageous (and we now know fallacious) claims against a then popular President in a time of war.

July 6, 2003: Frustrated that his trip to Niger story was still not getting enough attention, Mr. Wilson finally stepped out from behind the curtain and wrote his now notorious op-ed piece for the New York Times, What I Didn’t Find in Africa.

Sometime after July 6th and before July 8th 2003 Richard Armitage told Robert Novak about Wilson’s wife working at the CIA. Mr. Novak then published that information in his column on July 14, 2007.

But Valerie Plame’s work at the CIA had almost certainly long since been disclosed to anyone who would listen by Joe Wilson. And he probably disclosed this information to promote himself, his fantasy about his “mission to Niger,” and his new political career.

Remember, there was much talk within the Kerry camp that Joe Wilson might be the new administration’s Secretary Of State. The vainglorious Mr. Wilson surely had his eyes on that prize.

And any concern about the secrecy of his wife’s job at the CIA was a minor consideration compared to that lofty goal.

The disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment by the Wilsons to Nicholas Kristof in early May of 2003 was previously reported here.

George W. Bush, who is not running for anything, neither blocked the Plamegame witch hunt nor pardoned its only victim, Lewis Libby. But Fred Thompson, who is considering running for the presidency in 2008, will be hosting fundraisers to help pay for Libby’s defense.

He’s definitely winning points in my book.

Charles McCarry, in his currently out-of-print 1991 thriller Second Sight describes the Washington ritual of trial by media.

In Late Twentieth Century Washington,.. a certain politicized segment of the news media exercised many of the functions belonging to the secret police in totalitarian countries. They maintained hidden networks of informers, carried out clandestine investigations, conducted interrogations on the basis of accusations made by anonymous witnesses and agents provocateurs, and staged dramatic show trials in which the guilt of the accused was assumed and no effective defense allowed. They had far greater powers of investigation than the government. The authority of the state to persecute the individual was defined and limited by the Constitution, whereas the media were restrained by nothing more than the rules of theater. Because their targets were usually thought by the best people to deserve the punishment they might otherwise have eluded, the media had no worry about the quality of its evidence; journalists were not concerned with truth in any case, only with “accuracy.” That consisted of verifying the existence of their sources and confirming that they had actually spoken the words quoted, or something close to those words; nothing beyond that was required. If one person denounced another, even if anonymously, that was reason enough to publish the charge. There was no requirement to question the evidence or the accuser’s motives, or even to identify the accuser; in fact the accuser usually spoke on the understanding that his anonymity would be preserved under all circumstances. Verdicts of “innocent” based on these rules of evidence were almost unknown. The sentence was degradation, shame, exile, and, usually a lifetime of impoverishment resulting from the attempt to pay lawyers’ fees incurred in the vain hope of self-defense. Conviction in the media was sometimes followed by conviction in the courts, but the punishment handed down by judges, a mere prison sentence or fine or condemnation to a stated number of hours of good works among the underclass, was regarded as the lesser penalty.”

J. Peter Mulhern suggests that, “more than halfway through his second term,” George W. Bush should give serious though to assuming control of his own government.

Scooter Libby is a convicted perjurer because the United States Department of Justice grossly abused its power and because politics short-circuited all the safeguards that are supposed to prevent such abuses. This is one of the most appalling perversions of a civilized judicial system since France sent Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island because the ruling elite didn’t like Jews.

If the appellate and executive review processes fail as badly as the investigative and trial processes did in Libby’s case, Libby will go to a federal penitentiary because Democrats don’t like Republicans. There is enough shame in this outcome to go around.

Patrick Fitzgerald is a disgrace both to the legal profession and to the human race. His partisan allies, such as Senator Chuck Schumer and certain nameless bureaucrats at the CIA, are beneath contempt. The jury was unfit for its task, because it was apparently both prejudiced and intellectually incapable of noticing that the prosecution had no case. The trial judge lacked either the wit to see a gross miscarriage of justice unfolding before his eyes or the courage to stop it. But ultimate responsibility for Fitzgerald’s outrageous misconduct lies with his boss.

George W. Bush could have stopped Fitzgerald’s farce at any time. He could stop it today. He doesn’t even need to use the pardon power, at least not yet. Fitzgerald serves at the President’s pleasure Mr. Bush has every reason to be severely displeased. The President could simply fire him and, for good measure, order the DOJ to start an investigation into Fitzgerald’s misconduct in the Libby matter. President Bush could then instruct Fitzgerald’s replacement to join Libby’s defense in its motion for a new trial. If the court grants that motion the DOJ could then offer Libby its apologies and withdraw the prosecution. If it doesn’t the DOJ could join in Libby’s appeal. If that fails then the pardon power lies in reserve.

Of course, he won’t. He’ll just let the whole comedy proceed, then (at best) pardon Libby on the morning of Hillary’s inauguration.

Clarice Feldman responds to the appalling Libby verdict with a riff upon this week’s Rome episode:

In this week’s episode of Rome (a superb HBO series which increasingly reminds me of the Nation’s Capital), Servilia, whose son was killed in a power grab, knelt before the door of manipulative Attia, mother of Octavian and lover of Marc Anthony, the two men responsible, calling out in a haunting cry,

“Attia of the Julii, I call for justice.”

She did so because the unavailing legal system was broken, and curses (which were taken seriously in those days) were the one remaining way most people had to redress grave wrongs.

I call for justice for Scooter Libby because he has had none in this ridiculous matter…

This entire process has been an outrage from beginning to end.

How preposterous is it to watch Nancy Pelosi strutting about the forum today-her record filled with appointments like William Jefferson’s to head Homeland Security and John Conyers to head the Judiciary? A Speaker who has the chutzpah to say,

“Today’s guilty verdicts are not solely about the acts of one individual. The testimony unmistakably revealed—at the highest levels of the Bush Administration – a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.”

And I explode with laughter at the Cassius-like Kerry who sneered,

“This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear…. This trial revealed a no-holds barred White House attack machine aimed at anyone who stood in the way of their march to war with Iraq. It is time for President Bush to live up to his own promises and hold accountable anyone else who participated in this smear. It is also well past time for Vice President Cheney, who according to the testimony was protected by Scooter Libby’s lies, to finally acknowledge his role in this sordid episode.”

Sordid the episode is, but not because of anything Libby did. And “a troubling picture” of Washington it is-but not of this Administration. The Bush crowd is guilty only of terminal naiveté and the foolish idea that high standards of probity will ever beat the opposition’s utter unscrupulousness and willingness to misuse the legal system to their own partisan ends, even if it means the ruination of an innocent and capable man and enormous hardship to his family.

The Rome metaphor certainly fits the corruption of the political processes of today’s American Republic, and invites the question: how soon before our own Octavian arrives?

Joe Scarborough accurately describes the Libby verdict.

video

Victoria Toensing, who in 1982 as chief council to the Senate Intelligence Committee played a key role in the drafting of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, believes the law was never violated in the case of Valerie Plame, and suggests a number of persons and entities she considers more worthy of charges in the Plame Affair than Scooter Libby.

John Hinderaker, at Power Line, comments on the latest attack by Pouting Spooks upon this Administration.

During the halcyon early years of the Bush administration, it still seemed possible that the President and his appointees could prevail over the inertia and, often, outright hostility of the almost-entirely-Democratic federal bureaucracy. One instance of the administration’s effort to get beyond the bureaucracy’s stale thinking was the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans, which was overseen by Douglas Feith, who was then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Feith’s group became known for challenging the CIA’s dogmatic belief that Iraq’s “secular” dictatorship couldn’t possibly collaborate with radical Islamic groups like al Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans argued that the CIA consistently played down its own raw evidence of relationships between Iraq and al Qaeda because such evidence didn’t fit the agency’s theoretical framework. That act of lese majesty must naturally be punished.

So tomorrow, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General will present a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on whether—I’m not kidding—it was illegal for the Defense Department to independently analyze the data gathered by the intelligence agencies.

You can breathe a sigh of relief, though; the Inspector General concluded that disagreeing with the CIA is not a crime.

Byron York identifies the basis for two of five counts of Patrick Fitzgerald’s charges against former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

Two of the five felony counts in the perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are based entirely on a single phone conversation Libby had with Matthew Cooper, then a White House correspondent for Time magazine, on July 12, 2003. In federal court in Washington Wednesday, CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed his documentary evidence to support those charges — one count of perjury and one count of making false statements — and the evidence was this:

had somethine and about the wilson thing and not sure if it’s ever

Victor Davis Hanson comments on Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial overreach in the Libby case.

I doubt the average American is in much danger from some out-of-control government sleuth sending him to the Gulag, or putting her in a camp, or even reading his email.

But there are things to be afraid of—out-of-control prosecutors who can trample all over jurisprudence if their cause is considered to be progressive and politically-correct. The prosecution of Scooter Libby is a travesty. If the federal prosecutor knew he had to select a jury in Omaha rather than Washington DC, he would never bring this non-case to trial.

There are at least four considerations that are troubling about Mr. Fitzgerald’s case: (1) We know that Ms. Plame was not, as originally alleged, a covert, or undercover CIA agent at the time in question, and thus had no secret identity to be exposed; (2) we know the source that leaked the nature of her employment—and it was not Mr. Libby, at least initially and most prominently, but Mr. Armitage who apparently is not to be charged with anything (why not?); (3) we know that Mr. Wilson, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, lied about a great deal in connection with his trip to Niger and so far has escaped most accountability and probably will thereby seek to avoid testifying at the trial he once so eagerly demanded; (4) Mr. Libby is therefore being charged with obstruction of justice and perjury—not the original mandate of the prosecutor. Why not shut down the inquiry since it has not fulfilled its mission; then turn over the transcripts and testimony to local prosecutors to see if any feel there is a perjury case to be made? From my limited experience with trials (my late mother was a California Superior and Appellate Court Judge), perjury seems a rare charge, and most DAs do not peruse the testimony of witnesses to find contradictions to establish grounds for such indictments.

From the Friday New York Times, we learn that some of the captured Iraqi documents, recently made available for public scrutiny on the Internet, contained technical details of atomic weapons production whose availability on-line alarmed arms control officials.

The Times published all this as an indictment of the public release of captured Iraqi documents.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release…

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.

But the Times overlooks the fact that this kind of detailed technical information about an Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Program specifically confirms the Bush Administration’s causus belli, against which elite media (like the Times), and the most influential sectors of the Intelligence Community have so successfully waged a campaign of denial.

Does not the very existence of documents providing factual information of the highest relevance to the most vital public debate of the last three years, concealed by powerful elements of the Intelligence Community, perhaps prejudiced on policy issues, or possibly motivated (as some suspect) by partisanship, demand “second-guessing?”

Hat tip to Matt Drudge.

Whited sepulchre Byron Calame needed to ponder for four months before coming to the astonishing conclusions, that:

1) The Federal Government’s international banking data surveillance program was legal.

2) No abuses of private date have occurred.

3) The program really was secret.

Banking Data: A Mea Culpa

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

The source of the data, as my column noted, was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That Belgium-based consortium said it had honored administrative subpoenas from the American government because it has a subsidiary in this country.

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn’t a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.

The Times Public Editor, however, chose not to acknowledge:

4) That surveillance of international financial transfer data is a vitally important tool in combating terrorism.

5) That the unauthorized disclosure of secret information compromising national security in time of war constitutes espionage and treason.
—————————————————-

One really has to admire the monumental arrogance and unmitigated gall of the New York Times in appointing a sycophantic worm like Calame to that bogus and ersatz Ombudsman position. When the Times commits treason, its in-house watchdog slumbers contentedly for four months, then buries an apology at the bottom of his weekly column, grudgingly admitting he was “off base.” Though, it is now, as it was then, in his view, “a close call” whether the Times ought to compromise a vital counter-terrorism program (and betray its country). We readers have to understand, though, that Calame warned us when he started as Ombudsman that he was prejudiced, prejudiced in favor of The New York Times, which Calame has the astonishing mental ability to transform from the sleekest and fattest of all fat cats into “the underdog.”

We commented disfavorably on Calame’s initial support of Times’ treason here referring accurately to Byron Calame as an example of the type of invertebrate that leaves a trail on the sidewalk.
——————————————————-
Michelle Malkin makes the important point (which I happened to overlook) that Calame justifies his prejudice in the Times’ favor on the basis of “the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration,” and she wonders appropriately, just what vicious criticism was that? Then she reviews what the president and other administration officials actually said, exposing the emptiness, the fundamental fraudulence, of Mr. Calame’s rhetoric very nicely.

House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra suspended an unidentified individual working on the staff of one of the democrat committee members on Thursday, when it was established that the staffer had requested a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before selected leaked portions of the document were published in the New York Times.

It has since been learned that the suspended staffer was Larry Hanauer, employed by California democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman .

Cooperative Research tells us:

After George W. Bush took office in 2001, Larry Hanauer, who has long been at the Israel-Syria-Lebanon desk and who is known to be “even-handed with Israel,” is replaced by David Schenker of the Washington Institute. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004.

Harman has stated that she is “appalled,” and is demanding Hanauer’s reinstatement.

The suspension is evidently payback for Harman’s unilateral release earlier this week of an independent investigator’s report on the bribe-taking of resigned-convicted-and-imprisoned former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham.

In order to counter the Pouting Spooks’ weekend leak of highly selective excerpts of last Spring’s National Intelligence Estimate, obviously intended to provide a nice pre-election front page Sunday lead, President Bush will be declassifying key portions of the report.

The Wall Street Journal this morning argued that he ought to release the whole thing (with some reactions).

In the meantime, (the non-Pouting) Spook86 offers some details from the report contradicting the Sunday paper’s spin.

The quotes printed below—taken directly from the document and provided to this blogger—provide “the other side” of the estimate, and its more balanced assessment of where we stand in the War on Terror (comments in italics are mine).

In one of its early paragraphs, the estimate notes progress in the struggle against terrorism, stating the U.S.-led efforts have “seriously damaged Al Qaida leadership and disrupted its operations.” Didn’t see that in the NYT article.

Or how about this statement, which—in part—reflects the impact of increased pressure on the terrorists: “A large body of reporting indicates that people identifying themselves as jihadists is increasing…however, they are largely decentralized, lack a coherent strategy and are becoming more diffuse.” Hmm…doesn’t sound much like Al Qaida’s pre-9-11 game plan.

The report also notes the importance of the War in Iraq as a make or break point for the terrorists: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves to have failed, we judge that fewer will carry on the fight.” It’s called a ripple effect.

More support for the defeating the enemy on his home turf: “Threats to the U.S. are intrinsically linked to U.S. success or failure in Iraq.” President Bush and senior administration officials have made this argument many times—and it’s been consistently dismissed by the “experts” at the WaPo and Times.

And, some indication that the “growing” jihad may be pursuing the wrong course: “There is evidence that violent tactics are backfiring…their greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution (shar’a law) is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.” Seems to contradict MSM accounts of a jihadist tsunami with ever-increasing support in the global Islamic community..

The estimate also affirms the wisdom of sowing democracy in the Middle East: “Progress toward pluralism and more responsive political systems in the Muslim world will eliminate many of the grievances jihadists exploit.” As I recall, this the core of our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Quite a contrast to the “doom and gloom” scenario painted by the Times and the Post.

Christopher Hitchens dissects the facile dismissal of Iraq seeking Niger uranium in the Pouting Spooks’ Senate Intelligence Committee report.

And, on page 54 we read, under the heading “Conclusions”:

Iraq had two contacts with Niger after 1998, but neither involved the purchase of uranium. The purpose of a visit to Niger by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, was to invite the president of Niger to visit Iraq. The other visit involved discussions of a Nigerien oil purchase from Iraq.

Since the report does not trouble to supply any reasoning from the evidence to its conclusions, we are left to infer that there is nothing odd about Saddam Hussein’s envoy (to the Vatican) paying a visit to Niger, and nothing unusual about Niger’s desire to buy (“for cash”) crude oil from a country under international sanctions that is much less close and convenient a source of oil than, say, its neighbors Nigeria and Algeria.

That ambassador to the Vatican, it turns out, was none other than Wissam al-Zahawi. Ambassador Rolf Ekéus, head of the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first Gulf War, tells Hitchens:

When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger, I thought well, then, that’s it. Conclusive.

One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq’s delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions). . . . He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq’s top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues.

Hitchens sums it up.

The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie’s name without ever once mentioning his significant background. It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip. It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger… It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekéus. It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions. It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless.

Now that Richard Armitage has been exposed by the Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Bob Novak finally tells his version of how he learned about Valerie Plame, and contradicts Richard Armitage.

I want to set the record straight based on firsthand knowledge.

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he ‘‘thought’’ might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

And Joe Wilson and Valerie have changed their minds, and are adding Richard Armitage as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The merry gang of former John Kerry supporters in control of the US Intelligence Community under the Bush Administration have produced two extremely partisan reports, establishing that they were right all along: Saddam Hussein was perfectly harmless, had no WMDs, and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism generally, and Bush lied.

These conclusions are reached by the artful selection of data, and by systematically dismissing the sources of all evidence to the contrary of a preferred reality as unreliable on a variety of questionable bases. This source spoke to the Press, that proves he’s lying. And that source took a job with the Iraqi opposition, obviously he was always peddling propaganda on their behalf. If you throw out every piece of evidence you don’t like, using any convenient rationalization, it isn’t difficult to arrive at the conclusions you desired all along.

The reports were adopted, and amended, in a series of partisan votes, in which so-called Republican Senators Olympias Snowe (Maine) and Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) voted with the democrats.

New York Times story
——————————————————The Reports:

Postwar Findings on WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism

Report on Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress
——————————————————
AJStrata notes that media establishment journalists can’t read.

Now I know why journalists get their stories so wrong so often – they lack basic reading comprehension skills. With all the hoopla about the Senate Intelligence report supposedly saying there were no ties between Saddam and Terrorists (despite Iraq documents which log the training of thousands of terrorists, and notes regarding meetings with Al Qaeda) it might behoove people to read them for themselves.

Like the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

“Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq…

I’m still weeding through this “report”. First impressions I got is that it seems to read as if it were trying to convince me that Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda as if by repeating over and over again I would descend in to a state of BDS and start a new liberal blog…

Our Senate Intelligence Committee could care less about getting to the truth, for the Democrats on the committee it was just another way to get Bush, nothing more, and nothing less.

Rowan Scarborough sums up the life and career of the now deceased L’Affaire Plame, and arrives at the same conclusion the US Senate did previously: former Ambassador Joseph Wilson is irresponsible and a liar.

The expectation on the left that the Valerie Plame affair would blossom into another Watergate, bringing down a second Republican presidency, has fizzled.

Liberals expected that convictions of one or more persons in the Bush administration for leaking or confirming to columnist Robert Novak that Mrs. Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, was an undercover CIA operative. Echoing Mr. Wilson’s claims, prominent liberals and leftists, most of them in the press, accused the White House of orchestrating a smear, and sought to drive Karl Rove either out of office or into prison, or both.

Three years on, none of that has happened, and the “scandal” is played out.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, urged on by the pundits and the mainstream press, delved into the city’s culture of reporters and their confidential sources. He issued subpoenas for all types of e-mails and documents to find out which Bush administration officials were talking to which reporters. He threatened reporters with jail—and imprisoned one of them—which may have set a precedent for future prosecutors to compel reporters to disclose their confidential sources.

But in the end, the exhaustive investigation produced no criminal charges against any official for leaking Mrs. Plame’s name in violation of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Moreover, it has recently emerged that the official who first revealed her name to Mr. Novak, for a July 2003 column, was not a White House official, but Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state to Colin L. Powell…

David Corn, the Washington correspondent for the left-wing Nation magazine, was one of the first columnists to suggest that the Plame matter was a scandal, orchestrated to punish critics of the Iraq war.

“Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security—and break the law—in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?” Mr. Corn asked in the Nation two days after the Novak column appeared. “It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.”

Last week, Mr. Corn, co-author of a new book that revealed Mr. Armitage as Mr. Novak’s original source, took a different view, acknowledging Mr. Armitage’s reputation as an “inveterate gossip” rather than a partisan hit man…

Why were Mr. Armitage, Mr. Rove and others talking about Mrs. Plame? Rather than a smear, the mentioning of Mrs. Plame’s name now appears to have been an attempt to set the record straight on this issue: how it came about that Mr. Wilson, a Bush critic who later joined Sen. John Kerry’s campaign and who was not a trained intelligence investigator, was chosen by the CIA to travel to Niger to investigate an important question for the administration as it planned to go to war in Iraq.

The question: Did Baghdad approach Niger about buying yellowcake, a refined uranium that can be further processed into weapons-grade material?

Mr. Wilson said he found no such evidence and went public with his findings in summer 2003. In an op-ed essay in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, he disclosed his CIA mission and said he found no evidence of a deal… a 2004 report cast doubt on some of Mr. Wilson’s claims.

In 2003-04, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent considerable time investigating why the CIA got the intelligence wrong on Iraq. As part of that mandate, staffers delved into the Niger mission.

First, it reported that, despite Mr. Wilson’s denials, he did get the Niger assignment because of his wife. When her unit, the Counterproliferation Division, got word that Mr. Cheney wanted the yellowcake report investigated, Mrs. Plame recommended him to her boss, and she put it in writing.

The committee, which wrote a bipartisan report, turned up a memo to her superior which said, “My husband has good relations with both the [prime minister] and the former minister of mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” The report said that the next day her unit arranged for Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger.

She approached her husband with the remark that “there’s this crazy report” on a deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. Niger had sold yellowcake to Saddam two decades ago, and some of it was still in Iraq when U.S. troops arrived in the Gulf war in 2003.

The Senate investigators reported that Mr. Wilson did, in fact, find evidence that an Iraqi overture to buy yellowcake may have occurred. To Republicans, this meant Mr. Wilson’s op-ed in the New York Times—the essay that triggered the whole affair—was inaccurate, just as Mr. Libby contended to Mrs. Miller that it was.

In an addendum to the bipartisan report, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, wrote that “public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report ‘debunked’ the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public’s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador’s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.”...

At the end of the affair, some liberal voices concede the fizzle. In an editorial last week, The Washington Post observed that “It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming—falsely, as it turned out—that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”

David Corn, co-author of Hubris, the book which revealed Richard Armitage as Valerie Plame’s leaker, is spinning some more of the background detail in Nation article.

Corn gives this precis of Plame’s CIA career.

Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what’s known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA’s frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer—before 9/11—word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

We have posted some discussion of Valerie Plame’s career here. Corn unfortunately does not identify the location of Valerie Plame’s NOC activities.

It is clear that the purpose of the article is to shore up the central thesis of the Anti-Bush Intel Op, the thesis that Intelligence Community professionals told the Bush Administration that Saddam was innocent, there were no WMDs and an invasion of Iraq would be unjustified, but the wicked Neocons around Dick Cheney ignored the facts supplied by experts and professionals, and led the nation into a ruinous and unnecessary war.

By Corn’s account, rather than a bit player (just a camp follower member of the Enlightened Community of Pouting Spooks Opposing Bush), Valerie Plame was really one of the most important experts and professionals who knew better.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists—in America and abroad—looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

“We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.” Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming—wrongly—were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)

The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds—fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough—or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist.

Note the nice try by Corn, identifying one specific trip to Jordan to discuss aluminum tubes, and alluding darkly to very unspecific “occasional trips overseas” (very possibly merely to conferences, conventions, and liaison meetings with allies), intended to provide the essential predicate for the applicability of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

Roger L. Simon puts the mainstream media on the couch:

what interests me is how the Plame Affair fits into the whole framework. It may be opera bouffe, but it is far from unrelated to the way the press has conducted itself in recent years. Is it so different from Pallywood and the Mohammed Al Doura case, the Reuters photographs, the Jenin “massacre” and so forth – all lies swallowed whole by a gullible Western media? At first glance they would seem far apart, but in this small world one concept draws them all together – narrative. The truth is less important than the weltanschauung of the publication. But we knew that, didn’t we?

So next step – why this phenomenon? Why the acceptance of this narrative whose result is so negative to world history and seems in continuous aid of the destruction of the Enlightenment itself? Is it just Bush Derangement Syndrome? Well, I think that’s a large part of it. But the term (BDS) is too narrow to encompass the phenomenon. A variety of psychological forces are in the mix, but most notable to me is a sense of deprivation. 9/11 stripped the left of its self-perceived idealism that was the mainstay of its “personality.” Forces (like Bush) that lefties once dismissed as reactionary were taking the lead in the preservation of the West instead of supporting dictators as they once did. Furthermore, in the old days the left could take concilation that the enemy (communism) had at least a theoretical rationale – economic fairness to all. The new enemy was more troublesome – on the one hand poor (only seemingly, of course, considering the oil rich) and on the other hand medieval, anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-modern… essentially anti-liberal. What to do…. what to do?

In the beginning the left went along with Bush, but the minute things began to lag in Iraq, they deserted him in a flash. At first glance the reason was political but on a deeper (and I believe more important) level the reason was psychological. The left was in a rush to reclaim its lost idealism (the “it’s about oil” nonsense was but an obvious example of this), to preserve its disintegrating sense of self. Of course the big loser in all this is the truth. Sure Bush made a bunch of mistakes (who wouldn’t?) but it should be obvious to anyone that we are at the earliest stages of a very long war. Nevertheless, a culture of media corruption set in almost instantly that ended up creating absurdities like the Plame Affair. We are lucky this one got unmasked. We will also be lucky if the conclusions drawn in the WaPo editorial stick for that publication at least. We shall see.

Hat tip to PJM.

The Washington Post concludes that we now know that “the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame’s cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage” the Plame Affair story is over and dead.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,” according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House—that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson—is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage’s identity been known three years ago.

And the Post identifies the real culprit:

it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming—falsely, as it turned out—that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

The Washington Post has joined the United States Senate in identifying former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a liar.

Michael Issikoff himself reveals in Newsweek, that a forthcoming book he co-authored with the Nation’s Washington editor Davd Cornidentifies Robert Novak’s source for Valerie Plame’s employment as the long-suspected Richard Armitage.

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a “senior administration official” who was “not a partisan gunslinger.” Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was…

Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn’t thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame’s identity. “I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,” he later told Carl Ford Jr., State’s intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had “slipped up” and told Novak more than he should have. “He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f—-ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” Ford recalls in “Hubris,” to be published next week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine.

As it turned out, Novak wasn’t the only person Armitage talked to about Plame. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has also said he was told of Plame’s identity in June 2003. Woodward did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but, as late as last week, he referred reporters to his comments in November 2005 that he learned of her identity in a “casual and offhand” conversation with an administration official he declined to identify. According to three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case and an Armitage confidant, all of whom would not be named discussing these details, Armitage told Woodward about Plame three weeks before talking to Novak. Armitage has consistently refused to discuss the case; through an assistant last week he declined to comment for this story. Novak would say only: “I don’t discuss my sources until they reveal themselves.”

The left has never really yearned for Armitage’s scalp. however, since:

Armitage was a member of the administration’s small moderate wing. Along with his boss and good friend, Powell, he had deep misgivings about President George W. Bush’s march to war. A barrel-chested Vietnam vet who had volunteered for combat, Armitage at times expressed disdain for Dick Cheney and other administration war hawks who had never served in the military. Armitage routinely returned from White House meetings shaking his head at the armchair warriors. “One day,” says Powell’s former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, “we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me and said, ‘Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears in anger … None of them ever served. They’re a bunch of jerks’.”

Captain Ed puts all this into the proper perspective, which reflects abysmally on both Patrick Fitzgerald and Richard Armitage:

This means that the Department of Justice knew the source of the Plame leak within four months of its occurrence. It also knew that the leak had no malicious intent. Patrick Fitzgerald, who almost certainly knew of it within the first days of his investigation, never attempted to indict the man whom he knew leaked the information. Why, then, has Fitzgerald’s mandate continued after the first week of October?

Fitzgerald took the case on September 26. If this book is accurate about its dates, the DoJ and Fitzgerald would have known about Armitage’s role as the source of the leak five days later. Instead of either charging Armitage or closing down the investigation, Fitzgerald went on a witch hunt. He didn’t even talk to Scooter Libby until two weeks after Armitage’s confession. A year later, Fitzgerald had reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to divulge a source about a leaker from whom Fitzgerald had already received a confession.

This shows the danger of independent investigators who answer to star chambers instead of the elected representatives that have electoral accountability. The entire Fitzgerald investigation is a massive waste of money and energy, an ego project for one man, a wild-goose chase without the goose. Up to now, we all thought that Armitage never came forward or did so much later in the process. This time line shows Fitzgerald as a dangerous Cotton Mather with a briefcase. What else should we think of a prosecutor who hauls people into court and jails them for contempt when his culprit confessed at the very beginning?

Addendum: The more I think about this, the angrier I get—and not just at Patrick Fitzgerald. Richard Armitage confessed to the DoJ in October 2003, and then sat on his ass for the next three years as the media and the Left play this into a paranoid fantasy of conspiracies and revenge. I know Armitage dislikes Rove, Libby, Cheney, and Bush, but what kind of man sits around while the world accuses people of a “crime” that he himself committed? Armitage did nothing while the nation spent years and millions of dollars chasing a series of red herrings, never speaking out to remove the mystery and end the witch hunt. Even three years later, Armitage hasn’t mustered the testicular fortitude to publicly admit that he leaked Plame’s identity and status; he has Isikoff and Corn do it for him.

Ann Althouse, law professor and often acerbic blogger (who notoriously does not tolerate fools gladly), lowers the boom on Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in the Times.

As long as we’re appreciating irony, let’s consider the irony of emphasizing the importance of holding one branch of the federal government, the executive, to the strict limits of the rule of law while sitting in another branch of the federal government, the judiciary, and blithely ignoring your own obligations.

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions. Although the first half of the opinion, dealing with the state secrets doctrine and the first part of the standing doctrine, has the usual detail and structure one expects in a judicial opinion, the remainder of her text dispenses with the formalities.

Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force are disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington, told The Times that the section on the Fourth Amendment is “just a few pages of general ruminations … much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect.”

For those who approve of the outcome , the judge’s opinion is counterproductive. It will be harder to defend upon appeal than a more careful decision. It suggests that there are no good legal arguments against the program, just petulance and outrage and antipathy toward President Bush. It helps those who have been arguing for years about result-oriented, activist judges.

Laypeople consuming early news reports may well have thought, “What a courageous judge!” and “It’s a good thing someone finally said that the president is not above the law.” Look at that juicy quotation from Judge Taylor’s ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.

This system works only if the judges suppress their personal and political willfulness and take on the momentous responsibility to embody the rule of law. They should not reach out for opportunities to make announcements of law, but handle the real cases that have been filed.

This means that the judge has a constitutional duty, under the doctrine of standing, to respond only to concretely injured plaintiffs who are suing the entity that caused their injury and for the purpose of remedying that injury. We trust the judge to say what the law is because the judge “must of necessity expound and interpret” in order to decide cases, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury. But Judge Taylor breezed through two of the three elements of standing doctrine — this constitutional limit on her power — in what looks like a headlong rush through a whole series of difficult legal questions to get to an outcome in her heart she knew was right.

If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge’s word about what the law means over the word of the president? If the judge’s own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of the law evaporates.

There’s irony for you.

Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, responds to the left’s most dishonest blogger’s rantings over criticisms of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s NSA opinion by the Washington Post (and others), observing:

the Administration is giving the program only a very partial defense in its public documents, so there is a lot more that we don’t know. (For example, I teach and write in the area of the Fourth Amendment, and my view is that I don’t know enough of the facts to know if the program violates the Fourth Amendment.

Professor Kerr has identified the most interesting feature of the NSA flap. The December 16, 2005 New York Times leaked NSA story accused the Bush administration of “monitoring,” a term subsequently rhetorically upgraded to “spying,” and ultimately to “eavesdropping,” on international phone calls and email messages “within the United States” without warrants.

The Bush Administration’s accusers knew that they were taking a very serious step by divulging the existence of one or more top secret National Security programs, and they not surprisingly chose merely to apply partisan and inflammatory characterizations without ever specifically describing what it was that they were pointing to with feigned outrage.

Since all this is secret, no one outside certain intelligence agencies and the upper reaches of the US Government really knows who is doing what, when, or to whom. It is really as if all it required was for Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau to write a story saying “the Bush Administration is secretly violating the law,” some unidentified persons said “by doing bad things,” and the left faithfully falls into zombified lockstep, and begins shouting cries of pain and outrage in chorus.

A key problem is no one has ever been identified anyone who has ever experienced a known wrong, or a perceived consequence of any kind, from whatever it is that NSA might, or might not, be doing.

Can the Constitution really be violated, or the law be broken, by persons unknown secretly peforming unknown acts devoid of discernible effect?

The left obviously thinks that George W. Bush is just intrinsically unconstitutional, and that he breaks the law just by being in office, and their grasp of so much of the MSM allows them to create an echo-chamber alternative reality in which the liberal articles of faith which everybody knows seem very real, however tenuous their relationship to mere diurnal reality.

Oh, sure.

The ACLU, a little jurisdiction shopping, and a Jimmy Carter-appointed ultra-liberal ideologue judge with a record of partisan political judicial conduct, a cooperative MSM, and voila! you have headlines shouting U.S. Judge Finds Wiretapping Plan Violates the Law.

In reality, Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling will simply go on to the Circuit Court of Appeals and on to the Supreme Court, where the arguments will be evaluated by more serious and responsible judges.
——————————-
MaggieCarta on Free Republic provides the song of the hour.

My Law School Told Me You Better Shop Around.
(Tune: My Momma Told Me You Better Shop Around)

Just because you’ve briefed a big case now
There’s still some things that you must understand now
Before you step into court with demands now
Make your choice nonrandom as you can now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

There’s some knowledge I want to bestow now
Know which way that the wind’s gonna blow now
Judgments come and judgments are gonna go now
The more you look, you’ll find one apropos, now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

You must use your all best jargon, son
Don’t stay stuck with the very first one
Hard working judges come a dime a dozen
Try to find you one with a verdict you’re lovin’
Presume you got no standing to sue, now
Find one who’s in bed with ACLU now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

Ruling against a defense motion to dismiss in the case of US v. Steven J. Rosen, Keith Weissman, District Court Judge Thomas Selby Ellis, III held that, under the federal Espionage Act private citizens can be prosecuted for unauthorized receipt and disclosure of classified information.

Although the question whether the government’s interest in preserving its national defense secrets is sufficient to trump the First Amendment rights of those not in a position of trust with the government [i.e. not holding security clearances] is a more difficult question, and although the authority addressing this issue is sparse, both common sense and the relevant precedent point persuasively to the conclusion that the government can punish those outside of the government for the unauthorized receipt and deliberate retransmission of information relating to the national defense.

The government must… prove that the person alleged to have violated these provisions knew the [restricted] nature of the information, knew that the person with whom they were communicating was not entitled to the information, and knew that such communication was illegal, but proceeded nonetheless.

Finally, with respect only to intangible information [as opposed to documents], the government must prove that the defendant had a reason to believe that the disclosure of the information could harm the United States or aid a foreign nation…

So construed, the statute is narrowly and sensibly tailored to serve the government’s legitimate interest in protecting the national security, and its effect on First Amendment freedoms is neither real nor substantial as judged in relation to this legitimate sweep.

It is to be expected that this ruling will be tested at the Appeals Court and Supreme Court levels, but Judge Ellis’ reasoning is sound, and there is distinct cause for a nervous evening on the part of several reporters working for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles and New York Times newspapers.
——————-

Steven Aftergood reports at Secrecy News.

AP reports:

Federal prosecutors investigating a leak about a terrorism funding probe can see the phone records of two New York Times reporters, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned on a 2-1 vote a lower court’s ruling that the records were off limits unless prosecutors could show they had exhausted all other means of finding out who spoke to the newspaper…

The case involved stories written in 2001 by Times reporters Judith Miller and Philip Shenon that revealed the government’s plans to freeze the assets of two Islamic charities, the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation.

Prosecutors claimed the reporters’ phone calls to the charities seeking comment had tipped the organizations off about the government investigation.

The New York Times reports that the process of bringing pouting spooks to justice for disclosing vital National Security programs to journalists in an effort to gain partisan political advantage is finally underway.

A federal grand jury has begun investigating the leak of classified information about intelligence programs to the press and has subpoenaed a former National Security Agency employee who claims to have witnessed illegal activity while working at the agency.

The former employee, Russell D. Tice, 44, of Linthicum, Md., said two F.B.I. agents approached on Wednesday and handed him the subpoena, which requires him to testify next Wednesday before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

The subpoena, which Mr. Tice made public on Friday, says the investigation covers “possible violation of federal criminal laws involving the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.” It specifically mentions the Espionage Act.

Tice was still spouting combative complaints about “persecution of whistle-blowers.” We’ll see if Tice keeps up that sort of talk after he’s read the charges on his indictment, and is aware of just what kind of sentences he is facing.

Background on Tice here.

(Subscription-barrier) Roll Call reports:

The FBI is close to finishing a series of interviews with the top Congressional leaders and other key Members in both chambers as part of its wide-ranging criminal probe of alleged leaks of the previously classified domestic surveillance program.

Raw Story adds

(FBI) agents and Justice Department officials are investigating whether any of the 15 current and former Members briefed earlier this decade about the National Security Agency spying program were a source for a New York Times report about the issue last December.

There are also indications from at least one Senator, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), that the FBI is asking Members about comments of theirs that appeared in other publications regarding the NSA program.

The interviews, which came about after extensive negotiations this spring between the Justice Department and the counsels for the House and Senate, are taking place in Members’ Congressional offices, usually with two FBI agents and one Justice Department lawyer in attendance. Members are also permitted to have a House or Senate counsel on hand if they wished.

Former Ambassador Wilson and wife never got what they wanted for Fitzmas, so what can they do but sue?

I never knew that there was a Constitutional right to immunity from rebuttal, but Joe Wilson says his was violated.

At American Thinker, essential commentator on the Pouting Spooks Anti-Bush Operation, Clarice Feldman, offers her latest observations on Robert Novak’s account of his role in the Plamegame scandal, published yesterday in Human Events.

Novak writes:

For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew—independent of me—the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Causing Feldman to ask:

If Fitzgerald knew by January 12, 2004 who the leaker was and that it wasn’t Libby or Rove, why did he later call them to testify before the grand jury? Was it simply to determine whether he could trap them into making perjurious statements, something the law does not permit?

She believes, along with many others, that Novak’s unnamed source “is almost certainly Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s Deputy Secretary of State. The same man who almost certainly was Bob Woodward’s source as well.”

Feldman makes an important connection:

If Fitzgerald has known since January 12, 2004 of the name of the leaker, why is he still protecting him, and why is he treating the leaker’s (that is, Armitage’s) source, who is almost certainly Marc Grossman, former Under Secretary of State for political affairs, the man reportedly the source for the first accusations against Libby and Rove, as an impartial witness to the events? In the discovery process it turned out that Grossman was a longtime friend of Wilson’s, dating to their college days at the University of California—Santa Barbara. Is it likely that the famous prosecutor missed this fact?

and then asks another question:

Finally (and I hope to report more fully on this soon) what role, exactly, did former Deputy Attorney General Comey, who set up this extra-statutory (and I think unconstitutional) appointment of his friend Patrick Fitzgerald, play in steering Fitzgerald toward the mistaken notion that Libby was lying, not Wilson or the CIA?

Our own Comey Connection report here.

New York Times Leakmeister Eric Lichtblau, writing with Scott Shane, on Saturday, exposed a secret and undisclosed May 18th letter from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra to President Bush. The Times treats the story as the revelation of another Administration secret Counterterrorism program.

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

I’m not sure that the Times’ interpretation of the story is correct.

Tom Maguire, the right Blogosphere’s specialist in these matters, reviews the guesses as to the object of Chairman Hoekstra’s wrath from various MSM and blogosphere sources, which suggest:

1) the SWIFT program.

2) the missing Iraqi WMDs.

3) some “more explosive secret” previously alluded to by NSA-leaker, and renowned stalker, Russell Tice.
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I have a wildly speculative alternative theory. It just might be that the Times has completely missed the point.

Mr. Hoekstra was also interviewed on Fox News (Allahpundit has the video). In that interview, Chairman Hoekstra referred to his committee having a passion about three things:

1. Getting the right people in the right leadership positions in the Intelligence Community.

2. Implementing the establishment of the office of Director of National Intelligence.

3. Complete and aggressive oversight of all the programs pursued by the Intelligence Community.
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Number one is clearly referring to the appointment of Stephen R. Kappes (Previously mentioned here)

In the Times-revealed May 18th letter to President Bush, Hoekstra objects vehemently, and at length, to Kappes’s appointment, writing:

the choice for Deputy Director, Steve Kappes, is more troubling on both a substantive and personal level…

Regrettably, the appointment of Mr. Kappes sends a clear signal that the days of collaborative reform between the White House and this committee may be over… Individuals both within and outside the Administration have let me and others know of their strong opposition to this choice for Deputy Director. Yet, in my conversations with General Haydon it is clear that the decision on Mr. Kappes is final…

I understand that Mr. Kappes is a capable, well-qualified and well-liked former Directorate of Operations (DO) case officer. I am heartened by the professional qualities he would bring to the job, but am concerned by what could be the political problems that he could bring back to the Agency. I am convinced that politicization was underway well before Porter Goss became the Director. In fact, I have been long concerned that a strong and well-positioned group within the Agency intentionally undermined the Administration and its policies. This argument is supported by the Ambassador Wilson/Valerie Plame events, as well as by the string of unauthorised disclosures from an organization that prides itself with being able to keep secrets. I have come to the belief that, despite his service to the DO, Mr. Kappes may have been part of this group. I must take note when my Democratic colleagues – those who vehemently denounced and publicly attacked the strong choice of Porter Goss as Director – now publicly support Mr. Kappes’s return.

Further, the details surrounding Mr. Kappes’s departure from the CIA give me great pause. Mr. Kappes was not fired, but, as I understand it, summarily resigned his position shortly after Director Goss responded to his demonstrated contempt for Congress and the Intelligence Committees’ oversight responsibilities. The fact is, Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Mr. Sulick, were developing a communications offensive to bypass the Intelligence Committees and the CIA’s own Office of Congressional Affairs. One can only speculate on the motives but it clearly indicates a willingness to promote a personal agenda.

The subject of the House Intelligence Committee’s wrath seems not to be the Administration, but rather the Administration’s adversaries.

I’m going to climb way out on a limb with a speculation of my own. I think, perhaps, the “secret program” Chairman Hoekstra is indignant about, which he says is in violation of the law, may not be an Administration program at all. He may actually have been referring to the briefing of the Congressional oversight committees about a very secret Intelligence Community program, viz., the Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation, described by a reluctant Administration at Congressional request.

Suppose Pete Hoekstra is fed up with the Administration’s failure to expose and prosecute the cabal of Pouting and Leaking Spooks behind the Plamegame, the NSA flap, the renditions story, and all the rest, and is now trying to hold the President’s feet to the fire in order to force him to act. Investigation, exposure, and prosecution of the leakers and conspirators could be initiated by Congress itself, instead of the Justice Department.

I could be completely wrong, of course.
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The (Australian) Advertiser seems to read this story the same way I do.

The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

Michael Barone, in the WSJ, reflects on the consequences of the habitual misuse of power of the press to delegitimize elected administrations.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother’s administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter’s come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband’s book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times’ disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America’s newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame’s name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, ‘50s and early ‘60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans’ faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the “mainstream media” has been plunging. There’s also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America—and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

Read by Michelle Malkin.

Video

From Mr. Right:

Ms. American Spy
(Sung to the tune of Don McLean’s American Pie)

A short, short time ago
I can still remember
How the “Plame Game” used to make me smile
And as I read those D-Kos rants
I got a big bulge in my pants
And thought maybe we’d get “Chimpy” for awhile

But then June 12th made me shiver
Fate became an “Indian Giver”
Bad news on the Internet
Precisely what I had fret!

Oh, I remember how I cried
When I thought of Wilson’s “outed” bride
Something deep within me fried
The day that Fitzmas died

So don’t cry, Ms. American Spy
We’ll get Libby for his fibby
And then Cheney will fry
And that smirking chimp will finally wave us goodbye
Singin’, this’ll be the day donkeys fly
This’ll be the day donkeys fly.

MORE

Marc Coffey identifies the top ten “Progressive” reactions.

Scrappleface

‘Twas the Night Before Fitzmas.
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Pretty girl casting admiring glance at good old Karl is identified at Wonkette.
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• I know, I know, having to annotate this kind of thing is an open admission of just how out-of-it some my college contemporaries, and readers, really are, but I discovered today that it has to be done. “Fitzmas” is the Blogospheric term for what all the lefties want for Christmas: the indictment on any old day of the year of Karl Rove by Plamegame Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

No Fitzmas, no handcuffs, no frogmarch, no Karl Rove’s head on a platter for them.

Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald sent a letter to Karl Rove’s attorney, reports the New York Times, throwing in the towel, and stating officially that he does not intend to pursue any criminal charges against Mr. Rove.

Some of us don’t find that very surprising, considering the astonishing levels of conceptual acrobatics and prosecutorial overreach it required for Fitzgerald to bring an indictment against I. Lewis Libby. The charges against Scooter Libby will eventually be laughed out of court, and Fitzgerald will have to slink off to Salem, Massachusetts to see if he can find further employment in the next witch hunt.

PJM has the best link collection.

I thought the best leftist comedy material was here, including Joe Wilson attorney’s statement:

While it appears that Mr. Rove will not be called to answer in criminal court for his participation in the wrongful disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s classified employment status at the CIA in retaliation against Joe Wilson for questioning the rationale for war in Iraq, that obviously does not end the matter. The day still may come when Mr. Rove and others are called to account in a court of law for their attacks on the Wilsons.

Clarice Feldman, again writing at American Thinker, identifies a contradiction in published information.

In the infamous Vanity Fair article on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame (the one with a photo spread of them in their Jaguar convertible), an article obviously sourced by them, Alan Foley is described as Plame’s boss:

Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as “intimidation,” according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame’s boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)

Ray McGovern, a prominent member of the misnamed anti-administration group,Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity(VIPS), who was active in the effort to get intelligence officers to leak secret information against the war, claimed to know Foley and suggested early on that upon his resignation in May 2004, Foley might join the VIPS in attacking the Administration.

Clarice Feldman wrote to Foley asking some questions, and he replied:

I didn’t know that Valerie Plame or Joseph Wilson existed until after the Novak article. I have never met nor communicated with either of them. Nor did I have any responsibility or authority relating to them, the reported trip to Niger, or the subsequent leak investigation. As for Ray McGovern, I don’t believe that I have either seen or talked to him since before his retirement from the Agency. That was many years ago; probably sometime in the late 1990’s. Please do not contact me again.

And Feldman naturally wonders:

Why did Wilson indicate to Vanity Fair that Foley was his wife’s boss when he apparently wasn’t? Why did McGovern suggest that Foley was going to become a more forceful critic of the Administration and the war after his retirement when he barely knew him and had had no recent contact with him at the time he made that suggestion?

Curiouser and curiouser.

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.

The Anti-Bush Intel Community captured today’s news lead with its latest leak in USA Today. Despite all the traction the story is getting in the Blogosphere, we are clearly really just dealing with a repackaging and reissue (“old wine in new bottes”) of the same old NSA communications data-mining story originally leaked to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the New York Times last December.

Today’s leak goes:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

Leslie Cauley, author of the USA Today article, adds (curiously overlooking the fact that she and her employers are also breaking the law, and her name is right there at the top of the article):

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

The Mahablog, which styles itself (tin trumpet call) as “Home blog of the American Resistance,” grabs today’s headlined leak, and runs with it, demanding indignantly:Let’s See the “Libertarian” Righties Defend This One.

Why, sure, always glad to oblige a moonbat.

The United States is at war. Foreign enemies are actively engaged in efforts to carry out attacks on civilian population centers in the United States. Enemy agents are undoubtedly resident in the United States and operating off US soil. Can the president of the United States, in such circumstances, authorize the intelligence services of the United States to intercept and open mail addressed to, or sent by, US residents, including citizens? Of course, he can. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked, “The US Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The caterwauling of the left over the NSA’s communications data-mining activity is nothing more than narcissistic fantasy. Are there any adults on the left? You people all read like adolescent teenagers. The world revolves around little you.

In reality, no one is actually listening to your phone calls, or reading your phone bills. Some very very large computers are crunching through databases which include your phone records, my phone records, and another few hundred million phone records mechanically and indifferently, searching for various kinds of incriminating clues. If you haven’t been placing a lot of calls to suspicious numbers in Waziristan, if your favorite phone buddy is not on a list of terrorists, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

Speaking frankly, guys, if they haven’t arrested Dana Priest, Lichtblau and Risen, Leslie Cauley, and most of their informants yet, there isn’t a lot of chance that anybody is coming looking for you.

Pouting Spook mouthpiece, Dana Priest in today’s Washington Post exults over Porter Goss’s departure and mourns Goss’s purge of disloyal, disaffected officers (sharing some interesting gossip that gives a revealing glimpse of the other side’s perspective):

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials…

.” Within headquarters, “he never bonded with the workforce,” said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

“Now there’s a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there’s a hemorrhaging of very good officers,” Brennan said. “Turf battles continue” with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community “because there’s a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA’s future.” Brennan added: “Porter’s a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.”...

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq. “He came in to clean up without knowing what he was going to clean up,” one former intelligence official said.

Goss’s counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

“The agency was never at war with the White House,” contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. “Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat.”

Less than two months after Goss took over, the much-respected deputy director of operations, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned in protest over a demand by Goss’s chief of staff, Patrick Murray, that Kappes fire Sulick for criticizing Murray.

Kappes “was the guy who a generation of us wanted to see as the DDO [operations chief]. Kappes’s leaving was a painful thing,” Berntsen said. “It made it difficult for [Goss] within the clandestine service. Unfortunately, this is something that dogged him during his tenure.”

The confrontation between Murray and the agency’s senior leadership continued throughout Goss’s tenure, exacerbated by the fact that Goss effectively allowed Murray and other close aides to run the agency, in the view of some current and former intelligence officials. Many agency officials felt the aides showed disdain for officers who had spent their careers in public service.

Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department’s more optimistic scenarios.

“Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics,” said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. “His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience” in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.

Though the agency has grown considerably in size and budget in the past four years—the operations branch has reportedly grown in size by nearly 30 percent—dozens of officers with more than a decade of field experience each, those who would have been tapped as new staff chiefs or division heads, chose to leave.

Read from the opposite viewpoint from that of the Santa Cruz graduate I like to think of as: “Will-no-one-rid-me-of-this-turbulent?” Priest, it all sounds like awfully good news. Goss’s tenure may not have been long enough to settle Intelligence agency rivalries and turf wars, or to make the Agency as effective as it should be, but apparently Porter Goss did much toward accomplishing the absolutely necessary first step of cleaning out the self-important Mandarins pretending to a right to over-rule the policies of the elected government, along with the Peaceniks who somehow accidently wandered into the CIA’s Langley headquarters thinking they had arrived at Woodstock.

So the evening’s toast is: Hurrah for Porter Goss, and confusion (and long prison sentences) to Pouting Spooks and VIP-ers.

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?
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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.

Dana Priest, Washington Post reporter and favorite confidante of Mary O. McCarthy and other Pouting Spooks, participated in an on-line discussion Thursday on the topic of National Security. Ms. Priest was asked:

Indianapolis, Ind.: Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer the other day that you should be arrested for your story about secret prisons. Wolf asked Howard Kurtz to respond. Howie looked a little stunned at first and then came strongly to your defense. How do you respond to people that are saying you should be arrested?

Dana Priest: Well, first, Bennett either doesn’t understand the law or is purposefully distorting it. He keeps saying that it is illegal to publish secrets. It is not. There is a category of secrets that is illegal to publish—names of covert operatives, certain signal intelligence and nuclear secrets—but even with these, prosecution is possible only under certain circumstances. Beyond that though, he seems to be of the camp that the government and only the government should decide what the public should know in the area of national security. In this sense, his views run contrary to the framers of the Constitution who believed a free press was essential to maintaining not just a democracy, but a strong, vibrant democracy in which major policy is questions are debated in the open.

There you have it.

There are dogmatists, like Bill Bennett, who think only the elected government should decided what is classified information, and which disclosures could be harmful to National Security. And there are more latitudinarian thinkers, like Ms. Priest, who believe disclosing Intelligence secrets in America is kind of like going to Communion in the Anglican Church: none must, some should, all may.

It looked suspicious to me this morning when I read Rick Moran’s explanation of just who is representing Mary O. McCarthy. The mere presence of that particular counsel suggested strong ties to the strategic and financial wellsprings of the democratic left.

We had already seen Larry Johnson, Rand Beers, and Larry Wilkerson rush to McCarthy’s defense. And now here comes no less than Ray McGovern himself, chief spokesman of VIPs, the public face of the Anti-Bush Intel Operation, defending her on PBS.

video

The ever-expanding roster of Pouting Spooks appearing out of the woodwork to defend La McCarthy’s God-given Constitutional right to register personal dissent from White House policies by dispensing National Security secrets to the Press would appear further to hint darkly about the lady’s personal and professional associations and ties.
——————————————Hat tip to AJStrata