How the lying began in the lead up to the Iraq War

In May, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed a covert “lethal finding” that authorized the C.I.A. to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.”

The CIA hired an organizantion called the Redon Group. The Redon Group is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result.

John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."

Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It set up the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an opposition coalition of 19 Iraqi and Kurdish organizations whose main tasks were to "gather information, distribute propaganda and recruit dissidents." Journalist James Bamford reports that Rendon came up with the name for the INC and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as its head.

In addition, ABC reports that Rendon channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to the INC between 1992 and 1996. Writing in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh says the Rendon Group was "paid close to a hundred million dollars by the CIA" for its work with the INC.

Francis Brooke was hired by the Rendon Group.

From an office near Victoria Station, the Rendon Group set out to influence global political opinion against Saddam. Given Saddam’s record of atrocities against his own people, it wasn’t a hard sell. “It was a campaign environment, with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy,” Brooke recalled. “It was great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns.” The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the London press. Occasionally, he said, the company would be reprimanded by project managers in Washington when too many of those stories were picked up by the American press, thereby transgressing laws that prohibited domestic propaganda. But, for the most part, Brooke said, “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.”

In addition to generating anti-Saddam news stories and creating a traveling “atrocity exhibit,” which documented the human-rights abuses of Saddam’s regime, the Rendon Group was charged with the delicate task of helping to create a viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam. “That is when I first met Dr. Chalabi,” Brooke said.

Chalabi, who had become an international banker and financier, had surfaced almost immediately as the C.I.A.’s favored opposition figure. As Frank Anderson, a former agency official, said, “Chalabi had rare administrative competence.” A secular Shiite who was passionately dedicated to overthrowing Saddam, he spoke excellent English, dressed elegantly, and was well organized and impressively connected. He also displayed a facility for backroom political maneuvering. He wasn’t popular with other exiles, however. According to a former I.N.C. member, in June, 1992, the Iraqi National Congress held one of its first organizational meetings, in Vienna; Chalabi didn’t win enough backing to qualify for a seat on the fifteen-member board. By the time attendees returned from the meeting, however, Chalabi’s name had somehow been added to the list of members. (Chalabi claims that support for him was unanimous.) His management of the group, other exiles complained, was similarly impervious to the democratic will.

The The Redon Group (which was sponsored by the CIA) sponsorship of Chalabi came at an opportune moment. He had recently been convicted, in absentia, by a military court in Jordan for his part in a spectacular bank fraud that imperiled the country’s fragile economy. With the help of the U.S. government, Chalabi was able to recast himself from an accused swindler to a charismatic political leader and a champion of liberal democratic values.
(http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/07/040607fa_fact1?currentPage=all)

Chalabi was a willing pawn.

The first BIG story that transgressed laws that prohibited domestic propaganda

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan, was given a lie detector test.
He insisted insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of the Rendon PR campaign. And they liked the story al-Haideri told. So, in a really bold, and terribally illegle move, they contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times.

Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that the CIA was paying the Redon Group, to make up, that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald Statement about Libby's commuted sentance

Patrick J. Fitzgerald(born December 22, 1960) is an American attorney and the current United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. On December 30, 2003, Fitzgerald was appointed to continue the investigation into the Plame affair.

Fitzgerald brought an indictment for 5 counts of false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice against Lewis "Scooter" Libby, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff. Libby resigned to prepare for his legal defense. Fitzgerald indicated that the leak investigation was not over, and it was widely believed that Karl Rove was the main target of the investigation, although Fitzgerald refused to
comment on any specific person.

Fitzgerald announced on the courthouse steps that while he is always open to receiving new information related to the case, he expects to file no further charges, and the prosecutors will "return to their day jobs." Libby was sentenced to a $250,000 fine, 2 years of probation and a 2 1/2 year prison term. After a court of appeals rejected Libby's attempt to delay the prison sentence while he appealed the verdict, President George W. Bush commuted the prison portion of Libby's sentence.


Fitzgerald released a brief statement t, after President Bush commuted the prison sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation
decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not
comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the
sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this
case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which
occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced
federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then
imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is
fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar
of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the
trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of
imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious
felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions
through the appeals process.

---- Book suggestion:


New York Times Review: HUBRIS

The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal,

and the Selling of the Iraq War.

By Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

463 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.95.

In the fall of 2002, Dick Cheney assembled some of his favorite intellectuals, including George Will, Bernard Lewis and Victor Davis Hanson, at the vice-presidential residence in Northwest Washington to discuss the coming Iraq war. Cheney focused on Hanson's book ''The Soul of Battle,'' which profiled George Patton, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Theban general Epaminondas to argue that they may have employed ruthless tactics that led their contemporaries to condemn them, but that each was later vindicated by history. As the evening wore on, it became apparent that Cheney viewed himself as one such leader.

In ''Hubris,'' Michael Isikoff and David Corn chronicle the Bush administration's delusional march to war. Though there has been a deluge of works denouncing the follies of the military and the administration, Isikoff and Corn cover somewhat different terrain. They offer the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations, aimed at convincing Congress and the public that Iraq posed a dire threat. Isikoff is an investigative correspondent for Newsweek and the author of ''Uncovering Clinton,'' and Corn is an editor at The Nation and the author of ''The Lies of George W. Bush.'' The authors, who have interviewed key politicians and government officials, supply a lot of new information. They show that in many ways the administration became the dupe of its own propaganda. Though their narrative spins out of control by the end, much of the book makes for fascinating reading.

As Isikoff and Corn demonstrate, the administration's first mission was to snow Congress. At every step, Cheney took the lead, convincing the four top leaders of Congress -- Dennis Hastert, Richard Gephardt, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle -- that war was unavoidable. Together with George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Cheney and the lawmakers gathered in the House Intelligence Committee briefing room, where they examined photos of what looked like new construction at what Cheney declared were Iraqi nuclear weapons sites. ''When the Congressional leaders departed that briefing,'' Isikoff and Corn write, ''they looked grim.''

Cheney also tackled the job of persuading a skeptical House majority leader, Dick Armey. ''Trust me on this, Dick,'' Cheney told him. ''When I get done with this briefing, you're going to be with me.'' Armey was perplexed: ''He didn't say, 'You're going to be with us.' He didn't say, 'You're going to be with the president.' He said, 'You're going to be with me.'' After Cheney showed him a bunch of pictures of putative W.M.D. sites in Iraq, Armey opted to give him the benefit of the doubt, even though he didn't find the briefing very persuasive.

To buttress the administration's case, Cheney not only visited the C.I.A. to pound away at agency analysts for failing to come up with links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but also drew on a secret intelligence unit -- if the term is not too grandiose -- that was overseen by Douglas Feith, then under secretary of defense. Feith's researchers, David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, who were both protégés of the prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, spent months combing through raw intelligence reports to discover the truths that had somehow eluded the entire intelligence community. In a small windowless office at the Pentagon, they created ''giant wall charts'' detailing the intimate links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary at the time, was bowled over: he ''was especially taken with the spaghetti lines that Maloof had drawn between the Abu Nidal terrorist organization in Iraq and training camps in Lebanon.'' From Lebanon, the lines then went to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Isikoff and Corn report that these analyses, such as they were, made a big splash at the White House. If anyone complained that solid evidence was lacking, Feith's team was unmoved: ''The Feith analysts were essentially claiming that because Al Qaeda and Iraq had joined together in a clandestine partnership to attack the United States, there would be little, if any, evidence to prove the conspiracy.''

Where Isikoff and Corn themselves go astray is in their own obsessive focus on Judith Miller and The New York Times, as well as on the story of Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame Wilson and Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, who is under indictment for obstruction of justice and perjury. The attention they lavish on both the Miller and the Plame cases is out of all proportion to their true significance. These chapters reach a level of detail that is simply eye-glazing. To read Isikoff and Corn, one would think that Miller (whose conduct was bad enough) and The Times were almost uniquely responsible for abetting the administration's march to war.

Far more interesting is Isikoff and Corn's exploration of the mental world that the administration inhabits. They recount that in December 2001, Scooter Libby read aloud to a visiting journalist a famous passage from Winston Churchill's memoirs about being named prime minister: ''I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.'' Libby declared that these words could be applied to Cheney after Sept. 11. Hubris? Megalomania may be more like it.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a book about neoconservatism.

"Evidence in this case overwhelmingly indicated Mr. Libby's culpability "

Scooter Libby today expressed no remorse, and Judge Reggie B. Walton showed no mercy.



Libby's defense team had asked for probation. But Walton sentenced Libby to two and a half years in prison and fined him $250,000. Libby was found guilty in March of obstruction of justice for lying to a federal grand jury and the FBI about his disclosure of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

Walton put off another important decision, however. Saying he was not inclined to grant the defense's request that Libby be allowed to remain free on appeal, Walton nevertheless put off his decision until a June 14 hearing.

From Amb. Joseph Wilson: (husband of `outed' CIA agent Valerie Plame) As Americans, both Valerie and I are grateful that justice has been served, reconfirming that our country remains a nation of laws. We are also saddened for the pain that Mr. Libby has inflicted on his family, friends, and the nation. Mr. Libby benefited from the best this country had to offer: the finest schools, a lucrative career as a lawyer and many years of service in Republican administrations. That he would knowingly lie, perjure himself and obstruct a legitimate criminal investigation is incomprehensible. It is our hope that he will now cooperate with Special Counsel Fitzgerald in his efforts to get to the truth. As Mr. Fitzgerald has said, a cloud remains over the Vice President. Every official in this administration must be held accountable for their actions.

Via the WaPo, from Amy Goldstein and Carol Leonnig:




"Evidence in this case overwhelmingly indicated Mr. Libby's culpability," U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said moments before he handed out the sentence. The judge said he was sentencing Libby "with a sense of sadness. I have the highest respect for people who take positions in our government and appreciate tremendously efforts they bring to bear to protect this country."

At the same time, Walton said, "I also think it is important we expect and demand a lot from people who put themselves in those positions. Mr. Libby failed to meet the bar. For whatever reason, he got off course.["]…

Prosecutors successfully argued that Libby had lied repeatedly to the FBI and a grand jury about how and when he learned about Plame's identity–and what he told reporters about her.

In the court filing that sought Libby's prison term, Fitzgerald emphasized that Libby's lies prevented investigators from learning the full truth about the campaign to discredit Wilson, and may have helped conceal another administration official's criminal leaks. Fitzgerald noted that Cheney was one of the first people to tell Libby about Plame, and that Libby has testified that Cheney and he may have talked about sharing information about Plame with reporters….

The month-long trial cast a harsh light on the way power and information flow through Washington. It offered a window onto the nation's divisions over the war, the Bush administration's disdain for critics and the complex working relationship between an elite tier of Washington journalists and their confidential sources inside the government.

The weeks of testimony and evidence also exposed rivalries within the White House, and the close guarding of information, even among the president's top aides. The trial also made clear that Cheney was involved more personally than had previously been known in the administration's campaign to discredit Wilson.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was revealed as Novak's original source on Plame's identity, a fact that Fitzgerald learned early in his investigation….

In the weeks before today's sentencing, admirers and detractors of Libby sent Walton more than 150 letters recommending leniency or a harsh prison term. Walton today released the letters, which come from high-ranking government officials and ordinary citizens. Among the current and former officials are former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, and Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ten days after the trial ended, Plame broke her long public silence about the case during an appearance on Capitol Hill. Calmly but bitterly, she lashed out at the the president's aides, telling a House committee that they had destroyed her career and slipped her name to reporters for "purely political motives That same day, the CIA confirmed for the first time that Plame had been working in a covert capacity when Novak's column disclosed her identity and that her employment status was classified under an executive order. (emphasis mine)

Plame CIA leak Lawsuit in Court - Lawyers questioned by Judge

This is a follow up on The Plame Case

1. Joe Wilson was sent to Niger on a diplomatic mission to see if then Iraq President Hussein was trying to buy weapons grade Uranium to use in Weapons of mass destruction.

2. He came back and reported that it was not true

3. President Bush went on to claim it was true (despite the knowledge that it was not.)

4. Joe Wilson wrote an editorial in the New York Times saying he told the White House that it was not true.

5. Angered Vice President Cheney working with political adviser Karl Rove instructed Cheney's assistant Libbey to leak the fact that Joe Wilson was married to an undercover CIA agent (Valerie Plame)

6. A Republican Attorney was called to see if their was any illeagle activity in the handling of this matter and found and charged Libby with basically obstructing justice. Libby was found guilty. No one was criminally charged with outing the CIA agent.

7. The CIA agent has pubically sued Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove and former State Department official Richard Armitage and Libby.




White House players (from left): Rove, White House Counsel Dan Bartlett, the vice president’s chief of staff Lewis Libby, and Dick Cheney


Other Iraq War News post on this subject

23 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby = The Guilty Scapegoat

Piecing together the story of the weapons that weren't

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation

Video Documentary- Part 4 on the Neocons

Joe Wilson's Op-Ed for New York Times

Joe Wilson -Background information

George Tenent is still at the Center of the Storm
******

White House Lawyer Criticize Plame Suit



WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and two other Bush administration officials belittled Valerie Plame's lawsuit Thursday over the disclosure of her CIA identity.

At a nearly-three-hour court hearing, Cheney's lawyer said Plame was making "fanciful claims" in what amounted to "a fishing expedition."

Plame says her constitutional rights were violated by Cheney and his now-convicted former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as well as White House political adviser Rove and former State Department official Richard Armitage.

Her suit is "principally based on a desire for publicity and book deals," said Michael Waldman, who represents Armitage.

The case is "about egregious conduct by defendants that ruined a woman's career," countered Plame's lawyer, Erwin Chemerinsky.

Several administration officials, including Armitage, Rove and Libby, disclosed Plame's identity to reporters in 2003. That disclosure came after Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Evidence at Libby's trial showed that Cheney told Libby about the CIA employment of Wilson's wife more than a month before she was outed.

U.S. District Judge John Bates questioned both sides closely.

"Why would these government officials have any kind of protection for these disclosures" about Plame's classified CIA status? the judge asked.

Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, arguing on behalf of all the defendants, said there is no allegation that any of them knowingly disclosed classified information.

The Justice Department has asked Bates to drop an invasion of privacy count in the suit because government officials cannot be sued personally for such claims when acting in their official capacity.

"There is nothing these officials could have said that could go beyond the scope of their employment?" asked Bates.

Not in the context of the Plame affair, replied Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Bucholtz. What the suit alleges amounts to a government policy dispute in which the defendants tried to discredit Plame's husband, Bucholtz said.

Plame's lawyer responded that the scope of employment ends where the outing of Plame's CIA identity begins.

Plame's identity was exposed eight days after her husband publicly suggested in The New York Times and on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the administration distorted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

To be allowed to pursue their effort to collect compensation, Plame's lawyers must show that Cheney and the other defendants are not immune from such suits.

The vice president "has a lot of the same attributes and considerations that relate to the president," Bucholtz argued, seeking to apply presidential immunity to the vice president.

The judge expressed concern the case might have to delve into classified information comparing Plame's circumstances with those of other CIA officers.

That's a "reasonable prospect," replied Bucholtz.

Chemerinsky pointed out that the government overcame classified information issues in the Libby case, which resulted in his conviction for lying to investigators about how he learned of Plame's identity and what he did with the information.




This up-to-date electronic book on CD-ROM provides the best collection available anywhere of official Federal government information and documents on the subject of the criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Valerie Wilsons CIA affiliation to various reporters in the spring of 2003. The investigation is being headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the grand jury indicted senior White House official I. Lewis Libby on obstruction of justice, false statement and perjury charges for allegedly lying about how and when in 2003 he learned and subsequently disclosed to reporters then-classified information concerning the employment of Valerie Wilson by the Central Intelligence Agency. Libby was charged with one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements in a five-count indictment returned today by a federal grand jury as its term expired, announced Justice Department Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The defendant, also known as Scooter Libby, has served since January 20, 2001, as Assistant to the President, Chief of Staff to the Vice President, and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. The charges allege that Libby lied to FBI agents who interviewed him on October 14 and November 26, 2003; committed perjury while testifying under oath before the grand jury on March 5 and March 24, 2004; and engaged in obstruction of justice by impeding the grand jurys investigation. The indictment alleges that Libby had frequent access to classified information and frequently spoke with officials of the U.S. intelligence community and other government officials regarding sensitive national security matters. With his responsibilities for national security matters, Libby held security clearances giving him access to classified information. Libby was obligated by federal criminal statute, regulations, executive orders, and a written non-disclosure agreement not to disclose classified information to unauthorized persons, and to properly safeguard classified information against unauthorized disclosure. According to the indictment, on September 26, 2003, the Department of Justice and the FBI began a criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Valerie Wilsons CIA affiliation to various reporters in the spring of 2003. In January 2004, the grand jury investigation began examining possible violations of criminal laws prohibiting disclosing the identity of covert intelligence personnel (The Intelligence Identities Protection Act), improperly disclosing national defense information, making false statements to government agents, and perjury. A major focus of the grand jury investigation was to determine which government officials had disclosed to the media prior to July 14, 2003, information concerning Valerie Wilsons CIA affiliation, and the nature, timing, extent, and purpose of such disclosures. This CD-ROM uses next-generation search technology that allows complete indexing and makes all files on the disc fully searchable. The disc contains information on key characters including: I. Lewis Scooter Libby
Karl Rove
Valerie Plame
Ambassador Joseph WIlson This disc has nearly 58,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software and Reader software is included. Advanced search and indexing features are built into our reproduction, providing a complete full-text index. This enables the user to search all the files on the disk at one time for words or phrases using just one search command! The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, and portable!

About the Author
The disc has nearly 58,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software and Reader software is included. Advanced search and indexing features are built into our reproduction, providing a complete full-text index. This enables the user to search all the files on the disk at one time for words or phrases using just one search command! The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, and portable! Our news and educational CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed, searched by finding specific words, or printed without untold hours of tedious research and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain government information that might otherwise remain inaccessible are available for instant review no matter where you are. This book-on-a-disc format makes a great reference work and educational tool. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and portable - everything you need to know, from the federal sources you trust.

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070517/cia-leak-lawsuit

FOX News -disregarding the Jury Verdict, Reports Libby Innocent

Did FOX NEWS fumble on the Verdict? Libby wasn't even found half innocent - he was found more than 3/4 Guilty.

FOX News should be puniched for spreading disinformation in the guise of news. Shame on them.



Thanks for heads up to:
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby = The Guilty Scapegoat

Basic Facts: There was an attempt at a cover-up of the illegal activity of outing a covert CIA agent for the purpose of discrediting her husbands report that went against the Administrations claim. A claim that was one of the reasons used to attack the sovereign nation of Iraq - without UN sanction -without proper troop levels - without proper equipment for the troops and at a cost of thousands of American's lives - hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilian lives- the creation of Millions of impoverished (and angry) refugees- and the creation of a bloody civil war.

Of all the crimes committed by this administration - this is one of the smaller- and only one man was charged which a crime that more than 23 others likely participated in- including the Vice President of the United States- Dick Chaney.

Scooter Libby trial result

Count 1 (Obstruction): GUILTY
Count 2 (Perjury): GUILTY
Count 3 (False Statement): NOT GUILTY
Count 4 (Perjury): GUILTY
Count 5 (Perjury): GUILTY

Libby Links:

White House: Little Comment on Libby Verdict

Juror Explains Libby Verdict: They Felt He Was 'Fall Guy'

Libby Verdict Puts Focus on White House Forbes Magazine


How Libby Came Undone Time Magizine


Don't forget: Valerie Plame "was a clandestine officer working for the CIA." Outing her compromised national security.





23 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

Books Related:

23 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

In the Administrations attempt to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson's report that Iraq was not seeking uranium from Niger, they criminally outed his undercover CIA agent wife Valerie Plame.

from Think Progress http://thinkprogress.org/leak-scandal

The Editorial by Joseph Wilson that started all of this can be found HERE



23 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

The cast of administration characters with known connections to the outing of an undercover CIA agent:
Karl Rove / I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby / Condoleezza Rice /Stephen Hadley
Andrew Card / Alberto Gonzales /Mary Matalin / Ari Fleischer / Susan Ralston
Israel Hernandez /John Hannah /Scott McClellan /Dan Bartlett /Claire Buchan
Catherine Martin /Jennifer Millerwise /David Wurmser /Colin Powell /Karen Hughes
Adam Levine / Bob Joseph /Vice President Dick Cheney /President George W. Bush

(Comment on this page here.)
Karl Rove

Senior Advisor to President Bush (2001-2005); Deputy White House Chief of Staff (2005-Present)

ADMINISTRATION, ROVE ORIGINALLY DENIED ANY INVOLVMENT IN THE LEAK: Asked on 9/29/03 whether he had “any knowledge” of the leak or whether he leaked the name of the CIA agent, Rove answered “no.” That same day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, after having “spoken to Karl,” asserted that “it is a ridiculous suggestion” to say Rove was involved in the leak. In August 2004, Rove maintained, “I didn’t know her name and didn’t leak her name.” [ABC News, 9/29/03; White House Press Briefing, 9/29/03; RawStory; Newsweek, 7/11/05]

ROVE SPOKE WITH TIME REPORTER MATT COOPER: In a conversation with Time reporter Matt Cooper — a conversation that Rove insisted be kept on “deep background” — Rove instructed Cooper, “Don’t get too far out on Wilson.” Rove then identified Valerie Plame as “Wilson’s wife” who “works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction].” According to Cooper, his conversation with Karl Rove was the first time he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife. Additionally, Rove told Cooper that further information discrediting Wilson and his findings would soon be declassified and ended the phone conversation by saying “I’ve already said too much.” [Time, 7/25/05]

ROVE SPOKE WITH COLUMNIST ROBERT NOVAK: A week prior to publishing his column which outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, Robert Novak spoke with Karl Rove. In the 7/8/03 conversation with Rove, Novak brought up Plame’s role at the CIA, and Rove confirmed for the reporter that Plame worked at the CIA: “I heard that too,” said Rove. [NYT, 7/15/05]

ROVE TESTIFIED FIVE TIMES BEFORE THE GRAND JURY: Karl Rove appeared before a federal grand jury for the fifth time on April 26, 2006. In his previous testimony to the grand jury, Karl Rove reportedly admitted “that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding [Plame] with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists” and “is said to have named at least six other administration officials” who were involved. From Rove’s description of the administration’s efforts, sources characterized the actions as “an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.” [Washington Post, 4/27/06; American Prospect, 3/8/04; Newsweek, 7/11/05; Reuters, 10/14/05]

ROVE DEFENSE TEAM ANTICIPATES CHARGES; ROVE PLANS TO RESIGN IF INDICTED: “Rove’s defense team asserts that President Bush’s deputy chief of staff has not committed a crime but nevertheless anticipates that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald could find a way to bring charges in the next two weeks.” “Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told Time.” [Washington Post, 10/15/05; Time, 10/24/05]

ROVE WAS REPORTEDLY ADMONISHED BY BUSH FOR LEAKING: “An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News. ‘He made his displeasure known to Karl,’ a presidential counselor told The News. ‘He made his life miserable about this.’” [NY Daily News, 10/19/05]

MEMBER OF THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Rove was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the other individual who has been confirmed as a leaker, Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby

Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney (2001-Present)

CHENEY AND LIBBY PRESSURED CIA ON URANIUM: Cheney and Libby visited the CIA headquarters to engage the CIA analysts directly on this issue of uranium acquisition in Africa, “creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives.” [Washington Post, 6/5/03]

LIBBY, WITH ROVE AND HADLEY, PREPARED TENET’S RESPONSE TO NIGER CRITICISMS: Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., were helping to prepare what became the administration’s primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address six months earlier. They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president’s political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet. [New York Times, 7/22/05]

LIBBY SPOKE TO JUDY MILLER: Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff discussed with New York Times correspondent Judith Miller the fact that the wife of a White House critic worked for the CIA on as many as three occasions before the woman, Valerie Plame, was publicly identified, according to a New York Times account. [NYT, 10/16/05]

LIBBY MAY HAVE BEEN TRYING TO OBSTRUCT JUSTICE: According to Miller, this was what her attorney Floyd Abrams told her about his conversation with Libby’s attorney: “He was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn’t give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, ‘Don’t go there, or, we don’t want you there.’ ” [NYT, 10/16/05]

LIBBY SPOKE TO WALTER PINCUS: “Pincus answered questions about Libby as well. Both he and Cooper said they did so with Libby’s approval, and both said that their conversations with Libby did not touch on the identity of Wilson’s wife.” [Washington Post, 9/15/04]

LIBBY SPOKE TO GLEN KESSLER: “Fitzgerald took a tape-recorded deposition that will be played to the grand jury from Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler. Kessler said he agreed to be interviewed, at the urging of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Cheney, about two telephone conversations he had with Libby. Kessler said he told the prosecutors that in conversations last July 12 and July 18, Libby did not mention Plame or Wilson.” [Washington Post, 6/24/04]

LIBBY SPOKE TO MATTHEW COOPER: Libby tells Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that Dick Cheney had not been responsible for Wilson’s mission. Speaking on the record, Libby denies that Cheney knew about or played any role in the Wilson trip to Niger. Speaking on background, Cooper asks Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife sending her husband to Niger. Libby replies, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.” [Time, 7/25/05]

WHITE HOUSE DENIES LIBBY INVOLVEMENT: During press briefing, Scott McClellan says of Libby and others that “they assured me that they were not involved” in “leaking classified information.” [White House, 10/10/03]

CHENEY ASKED ABOUT LIBBY BY PROSECUTORS: “Vice President Dick Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors who asked whether he knew of anyone at the White House who had improperly disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer. Mr. Cheney was also asked about conversations with senior aides, including his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby . It was not clear how Mr. Cheney responded to the prosecutors’ questions.” [New York Times, 6/5/04]

LIBBY NOTES FREQUENTLY REFERRED TO BY PROSECUTORS: “One set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser. Prosecutors have described the notes as ‘copious.’” [New York Times, 2/10/04]

LIBBY TESTIFIED BEFORE GRAND JURY, MAY HAVE MISLED: Libby told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned Plame’s identity from Tim Russert. Russert said in a statement last year that he told the prosecutor that “he did not know Ms. Plame’s name or that she was a CIA operative” and that he did not provide such information to Libby in July 2003. [Bloomberg, 7/22/05]

LIBBY PLANS TO RESIGN IF INDICTED: “Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told Time… The same would apply to I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment.” [Time, 10/24/05]

MEMBER OF THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Libby was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the other individual who has been confirmed as a leaker, Karl Rove. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Condoleezza Rice

National Security Advisor (2001-2005); Secretary of State (2005-Present)

RICE WAS ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE: Rice was one of several senior administration officials on a July 2003 flight to Africa, during which it was decided that she would appear on the Sunday shows to “protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue.” [Newsweek, 7/17/05]

RICE RECEIVED TOP SECRET BRIEFING BOOK ON AFRICA TRIP: “To allow her to prepare on the long flight home to D.C., White House officials assembled a briefing book, which they faxed to the Bush entourage in Africa. The book was primarily prepared by her National Security Council staff. It contained classified information — perhaps including all or part of the memo from State. The entire binder was labeled TOP SECRET.” [Newsweek, 7/17/05]

RICE SAID SHE LEARNED OF WILSON’S TRIP FROM ABC NEWS APPEARANCE: ” [O]n Ambassador Wilson’s going out to Niger, I learned of that when I was sitting on whatever TV show it was, because that mission was not known to anybody in the White House.” [State Department, 7/11/03]

RICE CLAIMED NO KNOWLEDGE OF LEAKS: “I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this. And it certainly would not be the way the president would expect his White House to operate.” [Fox News, 9/28/03]

“COOPERATED” WITH FITZGERALD’S PROBE. When asked if she had been asked to testify before the grand jury, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “I have, like everybody else, cooperated with Prosecutor Fitzgerald and I’m quite certain that he will make his report.” [Fox News, 10/16/05]

MEMBER OF THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Rice was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Stephen Hadley

Deputy National Security Advisor (2001-2005); National Security Advisor (2005-Present)

ROVE COMMUNICATED HIS CONVERSATION WITH COOPER TO HADLEY: After Karl Rove spoke to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper about Joseph Wilson (according to Cooper, this was the first time he learned of Plame’s identity), Rove wrote Hadley an email. The July 11, 2003 email said: “Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he’s got a welfare reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn’t this damaging? Hasn’t the president been hurt? I didn’t take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn’t get Time far out in front on this.” [Associated Press, 7/15/05]

HADLEY SEEN AS “EYES AND EARS” FOR CHENEY: In 1989, Hadley served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Hadley admitted Cheney was “a factor” in his hiring as deputy national security adviser by President Bush in 2001. The Washington Post reported that some saw Hadley as Cheney’s “eyes and ears” at the NSC. [Washington Post, 7/25/01]

HADLEY WAS WARNED NOT TO CITE URANIUM EVIDENCE: Hadley briefed reporters on July 22, 2003 to explain why the bogus intelligence should have been excluded from Bush’s State of the Union. Hadley noted his receipt of a memorandum from the CIA, dated October 6, 2002, that explained why references to Iraq’s pursuit of uranium was dropped from Bush’s October 7 speech against Iraq. According to Hadley, the memo provided “some additional rationale for the removal of the uranium reference.” The memo described “some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory This memorandum was received by the Situation Room here in the White House, and it was sent to both Dr. Rice and myself.” [Hadley/Bartlett Gaggle, 7/22/03]

HADLEY REVIEWED POWELL’S SPEECH TO U.N. WHICH DID NOT CONTAIN URANIUM REFERENCE: Prior to Powell’s speech, Condoleeza Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley led “the White House effort to sift through the intelligence with the help of the CIA,” and tried “to determine what can be released without damaging the agency’s ability to gather similar information.” The uranium reference mentioned in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union just one week prior was deleted from Powell’s speech to the U.N. because Powell said it did not stand “the test of time.” [Washington Post, 1/30/03]

HADLEY COORDINATED WITH TENET ON TENET’S APOLOGY: The Washington Post reported, “Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush’s speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation.” [Washington Post, 7/27/05]

MEMBER OF THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Hadley was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Andrew Card

White House Chief of Staff (2001-Present)

CARD GIVEN A TWELVE-HOUR HEAD START ON THE INVESTIGATION: On September 29, 2003, the Department of Justice informed then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that it was launching a criminal investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. Gonzales was instructed to notify the White House staff to preserve all documents related to the case. By his own admission, Gonzales didn’t comply with the request immediately; he went to Chief of Staff Andrew Card and told him that the White House staff would be told to preserve all documents related to the leak the following morning. As a result, Card had a 12-hour window to tip off White House staff about the request — an amount of time that “would give people time to shred documents and do any number of things.” [CBS, 7/24/05; Democracy Now; Fox News, 12/31/03]

CARD WAS ON AIR FORCE ONE: Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was on Air Force One accompanying President Bush on the July 2003 trip to Africa. A “senior State Department official confirmed that, while on the trip, Powell had a department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.” The State Department memo in question — a “key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation” — stated that “Wilson’s wife had attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger.” The memorandum “contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked ‘(S)’ for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified…” [Newsweek, 8/9/04; Washington Post, 7/20/05, 7/20/05; Knight Ridder, 3/5/04]

CARD INITIATED CONVERSATION BETWEEN TENET, BUSH ABOUT INVESTIGATION: Two days into the Justice Department investigation, Card initiated a conversation between President Bush and then-director of the CIA George Tenet about the leak investigation. Though Tenet was not planning on discussing the issue with the President at the daily intelligence briefing, it was Card who brought up the subject. [New York Times, 10/5/03]

MEMBER OF WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Andrew Card was the founder and a “regular participant” in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Alberto Gonzales

Chief White House Counsel (2001-2005); Attorney General (2005-Present)

GONZALES INTERVIEWED BY THE GRAND JURY: Gonzales testified in front of the Grand Jury about the Plame leak on June 18, 2004. [Washington Post, 6/19/04]

GONZALES WAITED TWELVE HOURS BEFORE INFORMING WHITE HOUSE STAFF OF INVESTIGATION: On 9/29/03, the Department of Justice informed White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that it was launching a criminal investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. Gonzales was instructed to notify the White House staff to preserve all documents related to the case. Gonzales, however, waited 12 hours before informing White House staff about the investigation. Instead, he told only Chief of Staff Andrew Card about the inquiry, in effect giving Card a 12-hour window to tip off White House staff, including Karl Rove, about the request. [Face the Nation, 7/24/05]

GONZALES SERVED AS ‘GATEKEEPER’ OF JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATION: After the Justice Department launched its investigation into the Plame leak, Gonzales was the chief advisor to White House staffers on complying with the investigation. He also acted as “gatekeeper,” invoking “executive privilege” in order to hold back certain sensitive White House documents from investigators. Gonzales personally spent days screening all requested documents before handing them over to investigators. [CBS, 10/7/03]
Mary Matalin

Senior Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney (2001-2002)

MATALIN WORKED CLOSELY WITH VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Mary Matalin was senior advisor in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office at the time of the leak. While in the White House, she worked closely with Scooter Libby — the Vice President’s chief of staff who was one of Matt Cooper’s sources. [Washington Post, 2/3/01]

MATALIN INTERVIEWED BY THE GRAND JURY: Matalin testified in front of the Grand Jury about the Plame leak on January 21, 2004. [Washington Post, 2/10/04]

MEMBER OF THE WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Matlin was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Ari Fleischer

White House Press Secretary (2001-2003)

IN EARLY JULY, FLEISCHER READ MEMO ABOUT PLAME ON AIR FORCE ONE: “On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip.” [Bloomberg, 7/18/05]

FLEISCHER TOLD GRAND JURY HE NEVER SAW THE MEMO: “Mr. Fleischer told the grand jury that he never saw the document, a person familiar with the testimony said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the prosecutor’s admonitions about not disclosing what is said to the grand jury.” [New York Times, 7/23/05]

FLEISCHER AMONG FIRST GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS TO CRITICIZE WILSON: Newsday reported, “In the subpoenaed July 12 [2003] transcript of a briefing in Nigeria, then-press secretary Ari Fleischer called Wilson a “lower-level official” and said Wilson had made flawed and incomplete statements.” The transcript of the briefing was pulled from the White House site but has since been restored. [Newsday, 3/6/04; White House, 7/12/03]

FLEISCHER TALKED TO NOVAK ONE DAY AFTER HIS COLUMN WAS PUBLISHED: Fleischer’s “telephone log showed a call on the day after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared from Mr. Novak, the columnist who, on July 14, 2003, was the first to report Ms. Wilson’s identity.” [New York Times, 7/23/05]

FLEISCHER INTERVIEWED BY FBI ABOUT LEAK: [Washington Post, 2/10/04]

FLEISCHER A FOCUS OF FITZGERALD INVESTIGATION: “‘Ari’s name keeps popping up,’ said one source familiar with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe. Another source close to the probe added there is renewed interest in Fleischer, ‘based on Fitzgerald’s questions.’” [New York Daily News, 7/15/05]
Susan Ralston

Personal assistant to Karl Rove (2001-Present)

RALSTON IS ROVE’S RIGHT-HAND: ABC News reported on August 2, 2005 that Susan Ralston, Karl Rove’s long-time right-hand, testified before the grand jury. The National Journal reported, “If Karl Rove is Bush’s main man, then it’s Ralston who makes this White House go — because she’s indispensable to Rove.” According to Newsweek, Ralston was suggested to Rove by ethically-troubled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, for whom she previously served as a top aide. [ABC The Note, 8/2/05; Newsweek, 4/20/05; National Journal, 6/18/05]

RALSTON WAS ASKED WHY ROVE’S CALL WITH MATT COOPER NOT ENTERED INTO PHONE LOGS: “At one point, the aides were asked why Mr. Cooper’s call to Mr. Rove was not entered in Mr. Rove’s office telephone logs. There was no record of the call, the person who has been briefed said, because Mr. Cooper did not call Mr. Rove directly, but was transferred to his office from a White House switchboard. The aides have worked closely with Mr. Rove, screening his calls and coordinating his activities with other White House officials. Mr. Hernandez had been an aide to President Bush since his successful campaign for governor of Texas in 1994, and Ms. Ralston is known as one of Mr. Rove’s most trusted associates.” [New York Times, 8/3/05]

FITZGERALD MAY WANT RALSTON’S TESTIMONY FOR SOMETHING BESIDES COOPER CONVERSATION: “But a person familiar with Cooper’s testimony said that Ralston’s name did not come up during the reporter’s grand jury appearance. That indicates that Fitzgerald may be interested in her testimony for other reasons.” [Los Angeles Times, 8/3/05]
Israel Hernandez

Personal assistant to President Bush (2001-2005)

ROVE AIDE HERNANDEZ TESTIFIED: ABC News reported on August 2, 2005 that Israel Hernandez, a Rove aide in July 2003 during the leak of Valerie Plame, testified before the grand jury. Hernandez was tapped as assistant secretary of commerce. [ABC The Note, 8/2/05; NY Daily News, 6/24/05]
John Hannah

Aide to Vice President Cheney

HANNAH A “MAJOR PLAYER” IN FITZGERALD PROBE: According to the UPI, “The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby were the two Cheney employees. ‘We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,’ one federal law enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned. Hannah and Libby did not return calls. [UPI, 2/4/04]

FITZGERALD PRESSURED HANNAH TO NAME SUPERIORS: The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah ‘that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time,’ as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law enforcement official said.’” [UPI, 2/4/04]

INVOLVEMENT IN LEAK PROBE: “Officials who testified or were questioned by investigators also included John Hannah, Mr. Cheney’s principal deputy national security adviser.” [NYT, 10/19/05]

HANNAH REPORTEDLY WORRIED ABOUT INDICTMENT: “John Hannah, an aide to Cheney and one of two dozen people questioned in the CIA leak case, has told friends in recent months he is worried he may be implicated by the investigation, according to two U.S. officials.” [Washington Post, 10/20/05]
Scott McClellan

Deputy White House Press Secretary (2001-2003); White House Press Secretary (2003-Present)

MCCLELLAN WAS NOT ON AFRICA TRIP: “Fleischer and Bartlett were with Bush on a July 7-12 trip to Africa just prior to publication of Novak’s column, and McClellan, then Fleischer’s deputy, was on vacation.” [Associated Press, 2/11/04]

MCCLELLAN SAID THE PRESIDENT “KNOWS” KARL WASN’T INVOLVED: “Q All right. Let me just follow up. You said this morning, ‘The President knows’ that Karl Rove wasn’t involved. How does he know that? MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I’ve made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. I saw some comments this morning from the person who made that suggestion, backing away from that. And I said it is simply not true. So, I mean, it’s public knowledge. I’ve said that it’s not true. And I have spoken with Karl Rove…” [White House, 9/29/03]

MCCLELLAN SAID THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE ANYONE IN THE WHITE HOUSE OR VICE PRESIDENT’S OFFICE WAS INVOLVED: “There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the vice president’s office as well.” [White House, 9/29/03]

MCCLELLAN SAID IF ANYONE IN THE ADMINISTRATION WAS INVOLVED THEY’D BE FIRED: “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.” [White House, 9/29/03]

MCCLELLAN SAID ROVE, LIBBY AND ABRAMS WERE NOT INVOLVED: “Q Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA? MR. McCLELLAN: Those individuals — I talked — I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that’s where it stands.” [White House, 10/10/03]

MCCLELLAN REFUSES TO COMMENT FURTHER BECAUSE “THE INVESTIGATION IS ONGOING”: Even though he made his previous comments while the investigation was ongoing. [White House, 7/11/05]

MCCLELLAN INTERVIEWED BY FBI: Time magazine revealed in mid-October 2003 that “the FBI has interviewed more than two dozen officials in several Washington offices, including White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Bush political adviser Karl Rove as well as other West Wing aides.” [Time, 10/27/03]
Dan Bartlett

White House Communications Director (2001-2005); Councelor to the President (2005-Present)

BARTLETT WAS ON AIR FORCE ONE: Bartlett was one of several senior administration officials on a July 2003 flight to Africa. During the trip, Bartlett gave a background briefing in which he urged reporters to look into the CIA’s sole in sending Joe Wilson to Niger. The briefing has not drawn “substantial interest” the prosecutor’s office recently. One source for a New York Times article on the subject said Prosecutor Fitzgerald knew about the briefing but was not pursuing it. A different source for the same article said the Mr. Bartlett did not see the State Department memo that was otherwise witnessed on the plane. [NYT, 7/27/05]

BARTLETT TESTIFIED BEFORE THE GRAND JURY: According to Anne Kornblut of the New York Times, citing “a person who has been briefed on the case,” Bartlett told investigators that “he did not know who Ms. Wilson was” when her name was leaked. Bartlett’s attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel. [[NYT, 7/27/05; Washington Post, 7/21/05]

BARTLETT HAS LONGSTANDING TIES TO KARL ROVE: Rove and Bartlett go way back, and the influence of the former still has a tendency to affect the later. As Newsweek reports: “Technically, Rove was in charge of politics, not ‘communications.’ But, as he saw it, the two were one and the same–and he used his heavyweight status to push the message machine run by his Texas protege and friend, Dan Bartlett.” [Newsweek July 25, 2005.] He has worked closely with both Bush and Rove since 1994, when he worked on Bush’s first successful campaign for governor. Before that, Bartlett was an employee of Karl Rove and associates, a political consulting firm established by Karl Rove after the 1980 primary defeat of George HW Bush against Ronald Reagan. [Link; White House]

BARTLETT OFFERED CONTRADICTORY EXPLANATIONS OF 16 WORDS: In July of 2003, Bartlett, referring the infamous “16 words” in Bush’s State of the Union address, told reporters that “there was no debate or questions with regard to that line when it was signed off on.” The very same week Condoleeza Rice told reporters that there was “discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought.” [Washington Post, 7/15/03;=]

MEMBER OF WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Bartlett was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Claire Buchan

Deputy Press Secretary (2001-2005)

BUCHAN ANNOUNCED THAT PRESIDENT BUSH HAD SPOKEN WITH A LAWYER REGARDING LEAK: On Wednesday, June 2, 2004, Buchan announced that Bush had consulted a lawyer, Jim Sharp, about the growing leak controversy. “The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself,” said Buchan at the time. [Associated Press, 6/2/04]

BUCHAN TESTIFIED BEFORE THE GRAND JURY: Buchan testified on February 6, 2004–the same day as Adam Levine, a former press office employee, and Scott McClellan. “I was pleased to cooperate,” said Buchan at the time. She has declined to reveal any details of her testimony. [Fox News, 2/11/04]

BUCHAN CLAIMED THAT NO WHITE HOUSE STAFF HAD BEEN ASKED TO SIGN WAIVERS: Despite the fact that the White House is “fully cooperating,” Buchan said that no one had been asked to sign a form waiving the right to privacy. White House officials said that privacy waivers were routinely sought from government employees in the course of investigations to find the sources of sensitive or classified information, even though the procedure was not widely known. [NYT, 1/3/04].
Catherine Martin

Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs (2001-2004)

MARTIN DENIED THAT CHENEY HAD ANY KNOWLEDGE OF WILSON OR HIS REPORT: In response to claims that Joe Wilson had circulated his Niger report prior to the State of the Union Address, Martin denied that Cheney had any knowledge of it. “The vice president doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press,” said Martin. [The New Yorker, 10/20/03]

MARTIN INTERVIEWED BY FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS: The FBI interviewed Martin about the leak. It is suspected, though uncertain, that Martin testified before the grand jury. [Newsday, 2/24/04; Washington Post, 11/26/04]

PROSECUTORS EXPRESS INTEREST IN CALLS MADE TO AND BY MARTIN: Prosecutors have reportedly asked about calls made to and from Martin’s cell phone in July of 2003. [NYT, 2/10/03]

MARTIN CLAIMED IGNORANCE OF WHETHER OR NOT LIBBY HAD TALKED TO NOVAK: According to a Newsweek article, Martin denied knowledge of whether or not Scooter Libby had talked to columnist Bob Novak. “I don’t know the answer,” Martin said when asked about Scooter’s possibly involvement. Her response is considered part of a larger White House tactic to avoid answering such questions. [Newsweek, 10/8/03]
Jennifer Millerwise

Spokeswoman for Vice President Cheney (2001-2003)

FORMER CHENEY SPOKESWOMAN: She served as Deputy Assistant for Communications and Press Secretary to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2003. During the first 10 months of the Bush Administration, she was Assistant Press Secretary in the White House Office of the Press Secretary. [CIA website]

CURRENT DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AT THE CIA: [CIA website]

QUESTIONED BY FEDERAL PROSECUTORS IN LEAK PROBE: Bloomberg reported that she was questioned by Fitzgerald’s team “about the vice president’s knowledge of the anti-Wilson campaign and his dealings on it with Libby, his chief of staff.” [Bloomberg, 10/17/05]
David Wurmser

Cheney assistant on national security

WURMSER REPORTEDLY A KEY TO THE PROBE: “Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, meanwhile, is combing over testimony by John Hannah and David Wurmser, national security aides to Vice President Cheney who sources questioned under oath say may be the key to the probe.” [NY Daily News, 10/20/05]

FBI AGENTS HAVE PURSUED WURMSER’S ROLE: “FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle of the defense board and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney’s office, according to sources familiar with or involved in the case.” [Washington Post, 9/4/04]

INVESTIGATION IS LOOKING AT WURMSER, PERLE, AND FEITH MEMO: “Some familiar with the case suggest that the FBI’s investigation is looking back as far as 1996, when Feith, Richard Perle, Feith’s boss at the Pentagon in the 1980s and until recently chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, a co-founder of OSP who is now Cheney’s Middle East adviser, wrote a radical memo, called ‘A Clean Break,’ to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling for confrontation with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the PLO.” [The Nation, 10/4/04]

WURMSER WAS SUBJECT OF ANOTHER FBI PROBE: “According to a government source, the Pentagon’s National Criminal Investigative division began probes in 2002–with FBI guidance–to determine who leaked secret war plans to The New York Times and The Washington Post in June 2002. At the State Department, diplomatic security launched an investigation into David Wurmser, an aide to John Bolton, for leaking a letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Pentagon objecting to the Syria Accountability Act. The letter ended up being the basis for a story in The Jerusalem Post.” [The New Republic, 10/10/05]
Colin Powell

Secretary of State (2001-2005)

POWELL WAS ON AIR FORCE ONE: Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was on Air Force One accompanying President Bush on the July 2003 trip to Africa. A “senior State Department official confirmed that, while on the trip, Powell had a department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.” The State Department memo in question — a “key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation” — stated that “Wilson’s wife had attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger.” The memorandum “contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked ‘(S)’ for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified…” There are also indications that Fitzgerald subpoenaed phone records from Air Force One — where the memo was first seen by many administration officials — to “determine whether presidential aides used the aircraft’s phones to leak the name of a CIA employee to reporters.” [Newsweek, 8/9/04; Washington Post, 7/20/05; Knight Ridder, 3/5/04]

POWELL TESTIFIED BEFORE THE GRAND JURY: Though not a subject of the inquiry, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the federal grand jury on July 16, 2004. Powell’s appearance was seen “as the latest sign the probe being conducted by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald [was] highly active and broader than [had] been publicly known. Sources close to the case say prosecutors were interested in discussions Powell had while with President George W. Bush on a trip to Africa in July 2003, just before Plame’s identity was leaked to columnist Robert Novak.” Sources saw the decision to question Powell as indicative of “the thoroughness with which Fitzgerald is conducting the probe–and that knowledge about Plame was circulated at the highest levels of the administration.” [Newsweek, 8/9/04]
Karen Hughes

White House Aide (2001-2002); Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2005-Present)

HUGHES INTERVIEWED BY SPECIAL PROSECUTOR: In the questionnaire for her confirmation proceedings, Karen Hughes listed that she had been interviewed by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. [New York Times, 7/22/05]

HUGHES DECRIED LEAK, DENIED ROVE’S INVOLVMENT: In her book, Ten Minutes From Normal, Hughes discussed the leak, calling it “wrong” and “unfair” to Bush. Hughes earlier said the leak was “disruptive to democracy.” In her book, she said whoever conducted the leak “should come forward and not hide behind journalistic ethics for his or her self-protection.” She added, “The use of unnamed sources has become a convenient way for too many political operatives to hide and avoid accountability for their statements.” Additionally, Hughes commented that she knew Rove wasn’t involved in the leak because “Karl has said he was not involved.” [Ten Minutes From Normal; POE News, 10/2/03]

HUGHES INVOLVED IN DRAFTING 2003 STATE OF THE UNION WITH FALSE URANIUM CLAIM: In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It has been reported that Karen Hughes was “involved in drafting the speech.” She said her primary goal in the process was to answer: “Why is Saddam Hussein’s continued defiance a threat to our country and to peace in the world?” Intelligence from the CIA and the State Department at that time indicated Iraq was not attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. Furthermore, the inclusion of the false statement led to apologies from Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, Ari Fleischer, and George Tenet. Instead of addressing the allegations at the time they were made, Hughes defended the false intelligence and devised a communications strategy that questioned the motives of those who criticized the president. [President Bush, 1/28/03; The Houston Chronicle, 1/27/03; Baltimore Sun, 7/23/03; Washington Post, 7/20/05; MSNBC, 9/28/03; White House Press Briefing, 7/29/03; CNN, 7/11/03; USA Today, 3/14/02]

HUGHES HAS PREVIOUS HISTORY OF SMEARING WHITE HOUSE CRITICS: Hughes “was an advocate of the howitzer treatment” of the former Bush counter-terrorism chief and White House critic Richard Clarke. In an attempt to attack and smear the character of Richard Clarke, the White House released numerous pieces of information that were previously classified, including an email from Clarke to Condi Rice shortly after 9-11 and Clarke’s resignation letter. The White House also revealed Clarke to be the source of an anonymous background briefing he had done on behalf of the president. However, the White House refused Clarke’s request to declassify his correspondence with Rice prior to 9-11 about the threats that were being ignored. Hughes admitted on ABC’s 20/20 that she was involved in these efforts against Clarke: “I’m involved in White House discussions about those issues… I think, from personal knowledge, that many of the things he said are not true.” [New York Times, 3/28/04; CNN, 4/9/04; CNN, 3/4/04; ABC’s 20/20, 3/29/04]

MEMBER OF WHITE HOUSE IRAQ GROUP: Hughes was a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the Bush Administration’s White House Iraq Group. The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. One clear example of this fact is that “the escalation of nuclear rhetoric” during the pre-war stage, “including the introduction of the term ‘mushroom cloud’ into the debate, coincided with the formation” of WHIG. The group included the two individual who have been confirmed as leakers, Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]
Adam Levine

Communications Aide (2001-2003)

LEVINE WAS ONE OF FEW PRESS AIDES TO SPEAK TO REPORTERS DURING AFRICA TRIP: “Levine was one of the few press officials at the White House to answer reporters’ calls [during the Africa trip].” [CNN, 2/10/04]

LEVINE AMONG THE FIRST WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS TO TESTIFY BEFORE GRAND JURY: Levine testified on February 6, 2004. “Levine’s testimony was described as ‘brief’ and non-combative, and followed several interviews with FBI agents. The source said there were many questions about which reporters [Levine] and other senior officials talked to, suggesting investigators are trying to get as much information as possible from press officials, knowing the reporters are unlikely to talk.” [Newsday 2/24/04; CNN, 2/10/04]

LEVINE SAID TO TESTIFY ABOUT ‘WHITE HOUSE PROCEDURES’: “Dan French, former U.S. attorney for New York’s Northern District, and Don Kinsella, the district’s longtime criminal bureau chief, are representing a former White House press aide, Adam Levine ‘The President of the United States has asked his staff to cooperate, and even though Levine’s no longer on the staff he’s adhering to the President’s request,’ French said. ‘He has been called to testify before the federal grand jury concerning his knowledge of White House procedures, in particular phone calls with reporters. He was called to testify and we represented him in those proceedings.’” [The Times Union (Albany, NY) 2/12/04]

LEVINE LEFT ADMINISTRATION IN DECEMBER ‘03, BUT RELATIONSHIP CONTINUED: New York Times: “Levine left the Bush administration in December after working as the principal liaison between the White House and television networks.” Later, the Washington Post describes Levine as “a former White House aide who portrayed Russert in mock sessions with administration officials,” referring to White House prep for President Bush in advance of his Meet the Press appearance in early February ‘04. [NYT, 2/10/04; Washington Post, 2/5/04]

LAST-MINUTE TESTIMONY FROM LEVINE: The Washington Post reported that prosecutors conducted “last-minute interviews with Adam Levine, a member of the White House communications team at the time of the leak, about his conversations with Rove.” [Washington Post, 10/27/05]
Bob Joseph

Director for Nonproliferation at National Security Council (2001-2005); Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs (2005-Present)

JOSEPH SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR INCLUSION OF URANIUM CLAIM IN STATE OF THE UNION: The New York Times reported that senior intelligence officials said that Alan Foley, a C.I.A. expert on weapons of mass destruction, said “he was asked by Bob Joseph, the director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, whether the president’s address could include a reference to Iraq’s seeking uranium from Niger.” [NYT, 7/18/03]

JOSEPH GUIDED WMD CASE AGAINST IRAQ: Bob Joseph, “the senior director dealing with weapons of mass destruction, guided the process of building the case against Iraq” from the White House. Thus, it appears likely he would have seen the State Department memo that contained Plame’s identity. [Newsweek, 9/30/03]
Vice President Dick Cheney

FITZGERALD FOCUSING ON DIRECT CHENEY INVOLVEMENT: Bloomberg reported, “A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent’s name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.” [Bloomberg, 10/17/05]

CHENEY INTERVIEWED BY FEDERAL PROSECUTORS: “Vice President Dick Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors who asked whether he knew of anyone at the White House who had improperly disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer. Mr. Cheney was also asked about conversations with senior aides, including his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby . In addition, those people said, Mr. Cheney was asked whether he knew of any concerted effort by White House aides to name the officer. It was not clear how Mr. Cheney responded to the prosecutors’ questions. [Cheney] was not questioned under oath and he has not been asked to appear before the grand jury.” [NYT, 6/5/04]

CHENEY SEEMS TO BE THE COMMON DENOMINATOR: Four members of the Vice President’s staff — “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, Mary Matalin, and Catherine Martin — have either been implicated in the leak or testified before the grand jury. In addition, Stephen Hadley worked under Cheney at the Defense Department and is considered by some to be his “eyes and ears” on the NSC staff. [Washington Post, 7/25/01]

CHENEY TOLD LIBBY ABOUT PLAME’S COVERT STATUS: According to the Libby indictment, “On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division.” The Counterproliferation Division is an agency in the CIA’s clandestine division. [Libby indictment]

CHENEY’S HANDWRITTEN NOTES REVEAL EFFORTS TO SMEAR WILSON: Vice President Cheney’s handwritten notes, disclosed in a new court filing by Patrick Fitzgerald, show that he was “acutely focused” on smearing Joseph Wilson. Among the questions Cheney jotted in the margins of Wilson’s op-ed: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?” [Newsweek, 5/14/06; Cheney’s notes]

CHENEY AND LIBBY PRESSURED CIA ON URANIUM: Cheney and Libby visited the CIA headquarters to engage the CIA analysts directly on this issue of uranium acquisition in Africa, “creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives.” [Washington Post, 6/5/03]
President George W. Bush

WAS BUSH INVOLVED IN THE LEAK? In July 2005, the New York Times raised the possibility that Bush could be involved in the leak. “It is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative’s identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president. Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely There is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer’s identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program.” [NYT, 7/24/05]

BUSH QUESTIONED BY FITZGERALD FOR OVER AN HOUR: On June 24, 2004, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and several of his assistants questioned the president for about 70 minutes in the Oval Office. Bush retained a private lawyer, Jim Sharp, for the interview. A prominent First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams, said “It’s hard to believe the special prosecutor would be burdening the president with an interview unless they had testimony to the effect that the president had information.” [Washington Post, 2/25/04]

STARR DEPUTY SAID BUSH INTERVIEW SUGGESTED HIGH-LEVEL INVOLVEMENT IN LEAK: The New York Daily News reported, “The Bush interview ‘indicates there’s obviously a belief that the leak was at a high level,’ said Sol Wisenberg, a former [Ken] Starr deputy who questioned Clinton. ‘The President usually doesn’t meet and knock around ideas with midlevel staffers.’” [New York Daily News, 6/25/04]

BUSH WAS ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE WITH THE STATE DEPARTMENT MEMO: A classified State Department report that contained Valerie Plame’s identity was sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration officials who were aboard Air Force One with the president on July 7, 2003. The extent of the circulation of the memo is not known. [Washington Post, 7/21/05]

BUSH CLAIMED TO WANT TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THE LEAK: On September 29, 2003, a senior administration official told the Washington Post that Bush said, “I want to get to the bottom of this,” during a daily staff meeting which Karl Rove attended. [Washington Post 9/30/03]

BUSH TOLD TENET HE WOULD COOPERATE WITH THE INVESTIGATION: A conversation between the president and Tenet about the investigation did not consume, according to Andy Card, “any significant amount of time or discussion or angst. It was basically, ‘We’re cooperating, you’re cooperating, I’m glad to see the process is moving forward the way it should.’” [NYT, 10/4/03]

BUSH REPORTEDLY KNEW ROVE WAS A LEAKER TWO YEARS AGO: “An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News. ‘He made his displeasure known to Karl,’ a presidential counselor told The News. ‘He made his life miserable about this.’” [NY Daily News, 10/19/05]

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 12 February 2007

Paul Wolfowitz, former under secretary of defense, has been identified in recently released grand jury transcripts as being involved in a White House smear campaign against Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

The previously undisclosed development comes on the heels of a scathing report released last week by the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General that said Wolfowitz played a key role in the cooking of intelligence related to Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda and its supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons. That effort helped the White House lay the groundwork for a US-led invasion.

Taken as a whole, the involvement of Wolfowitz in a full-scale effort to undermine the credibility of an Iraq War critic, and his hands-on role in knowingly providing the White House with the sort of dubious intelligence that came under scrutiny by people like Wilson, shows how widespread the issues surrounding manipulated intelligence truly were, and how crucial it became for senior members of the Bush administration to discredit anyone who threatened to expose their ruse.

The transcripts were released in conjunction with other documents in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. They state that Wolfowitz was chosen by Vice President Dick Cheney in mid-July 2003 to leak a highly classified portion of the National Intelligence Estimate to the Wall Street Journal as a way to rebut Wilson's claims that the White House "twisted" intelligence related to Iraq's attempts to build an atomic bomb. The section of the NIE that Wolfowitz leaked to the Journal claimed Wilson's assertions were flat-out wrong. However, it was later revealed that the section of the NIE that Wilson called into question was based on crude forgeries.

The transcript detailing Wolfowitz's involvement in attacks against Wilson's credibility would appear to support similar charges made by career CIA analysts. The analysts told Democratic lawmakers four years ago that they were pressured by Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fix the intelligence on Iraq around the administration's policy toward the country.

In September 2002, according to testimony given Friday by Thomas Gimble, a briefing took place at the White House, attended by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Libby and others purporting a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that "was not supported by the available intelligence." Gimble is the acting Defense Department inspector general who prepared the report on pre-war Iraq intelligence,

The meeting took place seven months after Wilson was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from the African country. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were unfounded. But Libby, Cheney, Wolfowitz, President Bush and other senior members of the White House ignored the findings of the intelligence community that said Iraq was not an immediate threat, and they pressured CIA analysts to cherry-pick intelligence that would help lay the groundwork for a US-led invasion, according to the DoD report.

An executive summary of the report, released Friday, stated that Douglas Feith, who headed the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."

The report concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.

Furthermore, senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Those in the intelligence community who dissented found themselves wholly discredited by Libby, Cheney and officials in the Office of the President.

That is exactly what happened to Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who worked in a division of the CIA that dealt with issues related to weapons of mass destruction. When Wilson went public in July 2003 with his criticism of the administration's use of pre-war intelligence, his wife's identity and undercover status were compromised.

Still, Libby and Cheney continued to hammer away at Wilson, for reasons unknown, days after Plame's name turned up in a newspaper column, and a week after the White House had acknowledged that the intelligence related to Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger was unreliable.

According to Libby's March 2004 grand jury transcripts, he said that Vice President Cheney discussed with him getting Wolfowitz to contact the Journal to leak the NIE as a way of undermining Wilson.

"After July 14, in that week, the Vice President thought we should still try and get the [NIE] out. And so he asked me to talk to the Wall Street Journal. I don't have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did, and so we talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across [to the Journal], and he undertook to do so," Libby testified.

Wolfowitz faxed the Wall Street Journal a set of "talking points" about the former ambassador that the paper's editors could use to discredit him in print, according to Libby's grand jury testimony, and then leaked to the paper a portion of the then-still-classified NIE that claimed Iraq did in fact attempt to acquire uranium from Niger. The Journal printed, verbatim, Wolfowitz's talking points in an editorial in its July 17, 2003, edition and then misled its readers about the source of the information.

According to the editorial, "Yellowcake Remix," the Journal said the data the newspaper received about Iraq's interest in uranium "does not come from the White House," despite the fact that Libby testified that he personally lobbied Wolfowitz to leak the NIE to the Journal, and that arguably Wolfowitz's position as Undersecretary of Defense made him a senior member of the Bush administration.

A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said Saturday she was unfamiliar with the issue and was not interested in responding.

Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.