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I agree, let's not let the Rove story die just yet
David Limbaugh (archive)

July 22, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend
Before President Bush's Supreme Court nomination of Judge John Roberts
completely overshadows the misidentified Karl Rove scandal, I think we
better take a second look at the twisted direction this sad story has taken.

As far as Karl Rove's conduct in the Plame/Wilson affair, there is no
scandal. He didn't come close to committing a crime, nor even an ethical
infraction.
He didn't set out to expose a CIA operative, much less an undercover one.
He was the recipient of a phone call in which he cautioned Time's Matt
Cooper not to be taken in by the politically driven Joe Wilson, whose
operative wife, Valerie Plame, had played a great role in securing Wilson's
"fact-finding" trip to Niger.
Rove, who didn't even mention Plame's name, couldn't have known she was an
undercover CIA agent -- because she wasn't. He manifestly wasn't motivated
to expose her for the purpose of punishing Wilson -- because "exposing" her
non-covert status couldn't possibly have damaged her.
But Rove did have a motive to share his information with Cooper: to warn
him of the nepotistic connection between Plame and Wilson and to thus take
Wilson's claims with a grain of salt.
Rove did nothing wrong. Indeed, he had an obligation to alert Cooper to
Wilson's chicanery because, among other reasons, questions of our national
security were involved. As the president's right-hand man, shouldn't we
expect Rove to do his part to correct the record about a matter so serious:
whether Saddam was trying to or did acquire uranium from Niger?
The media and Democrats seem to be saying that we can't let Rove off the
hook just because he might not have technically violated the law. He must be
fired or at the very least lose his security clearance because of his
indiscretion.
But there was no indiscretion. Plame was not undercover and hadn't been.
She had no secret status to protect. Neither she nor her husband -- it
appears -- even treated her status as clandestine. Rove isn't getting off on
a technicality. He did nothing wrong. The fact that the allegations against
Rove are so serious doesn't change that -- and in no way taints his
credibility -- because the allegations are false.
"But there was a leak," cry the Democrats and the press. "President Bush
has always said he had a zero-tolerance policy for leaks out of his
administration. He must fire the evil Karl Rove."
Even conservative pundits seem to be falling for this ploy. But if there
was nothing secret about Plame's status, if there was nothing to protect,
there could have been no leak.
Rove talked about her position for the purpose of showing the nefarious
link between her and her husband -- and thus the dubiousness of Wilson's
supposed findings. He "leaked" nothing. Why is simple English so difficult
for people? You can't leak that which is already in the public domain.
But the cockeyed slant on this non-story is masking the real story here,
which is not just that Joe Wilson was caught red-handed lying about his wife
recommending him and the nature of his actual findings. The real story is
the treachery of Wilson in distorting his findings for political purposes to
the detriment of our national security.
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wilson's findings did more
to bolster than discredit the Brits' allegation that Saddam was trying to
buy uranium from Niger. When he misrepresented those findings -- while
working to elect John Kerry -- he consciously damaged our national security
by tainting the historical record against America and her image. And what
role, if any, did the CIA play in allowing itself to be manipulated for
political purposes?
The fact that Democrats and the media are so desperate to bring down Karl
Rove, the perceived primary mastermind behind their glorious loss of
influence and power, respectively, apparently blinds them to their effective
collusion with Wilson in his reckless conduct against this nation. And their
non-stop bluster is apparently keeping the rest of us from focusing on it as
well.
They are so determined to prove that President Bush lied about weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq they're obviously willing to use discredited
sources and data to make their case.
Let's not move beyond this story without noting the robust irony it
contains. The same people who routinely (and baselessly) accuse President
Bush of having fraudulently played the national security card in furtherance
of his agenda to remove Saddam are demanding Karl Rove be fired because he
can't be trusted in a sensitive national security position.
But it is these people, in their shameless elevation of Joe Wilson -- among
other things -- who are complicit in sacrificing our national security
interests for their own political agenda.
David Limbaugh is a syndicated columnist who blogs at DavidLimbaugh.com

"Yang, AthD (h.c), Cocaine Snorting *****"
<eacmole@/*/mail.com> wrote in message
news:po31e1p3ararjdmifnugtt1q7qmgnodldd@4ax.com...

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:36:28 GMT, "John Tibbs" <jwtibbs@earthlink.net>
wrote:

Go to www.townhall.com
Can the liberals learn from Vietnam?

Plame's Identity Marked As SECRET

B.S.

(Leftist propaganda deleted in deference to truth and decency)
jt

Plame's Identity Marked As SECRET

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517_pf.html


Plame's Identity Marked As Secret
Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01



A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak
investigation 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, according to current and former government
officials.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in
the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page
document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR),
according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph
C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified
material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies
as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert,
according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained
secret information, though that designation was not specifically
attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert,
the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years
in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity
of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying
to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government
officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative
to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained
access to information about her from the memo, according to two
sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the
Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA
role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity?
And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department
intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in
the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two
sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July
7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard
Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D.
Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife's identity was revealed to retaliate against
him for accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to
justify the Iraq war. In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times
and in an interview with The Washington Post, he cited a secret
mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined
there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear
weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson's wife's CIA connection in
telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip,
according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine,
and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were
questioning White House officials during the early days of the
investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, has testified that
he learned Plame's name from Novak a few days before telling another
reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband's
mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove's account. Rove has
also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo
was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him,
said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

"He had not seen it or heard about it before that time," Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa,
including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer and others. Bartlett's attorney has refused to discuss the
case, citing requests by the special counsel. Fleischer could not be
reached for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson's wife with
Cooper. Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their
knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from
conversations with reporters.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear
that information about Wilson's wife was sensitive and should not be
shared. Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The
Post.

The material in the memo about Wilson's wife was based on notes taken
by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA
where Wilson's intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc
Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to
the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson's wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002,
meeting at the CIA was considered "a footnote" in a background
paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the
process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson's trip
to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries,
already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium
from Niger. Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the
senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC's "Meet the
Press" and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to
Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to
explain Wilson's statements for Powell, according to sources familiar
with the events. He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but
changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating
the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the
sources said. Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to
his office

Emmett Tyrrell (archive)


July 20, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend


Washington -- When retired Gen. William Westmoreland (Ret.) died this week
in Charleston, S.C., the press erupted with reminiscences, mostly about him
and the Vietnam War, mostly permeated with the myths of the Kultursmog , the
politically-polluted culture of our elites, our liberal elites. After
Vietnam the general spent the rest of his life refighting the war. He never
learned that it was a war we could not win. He was a failure. These are
three of the foul thoughts that pollute the liberals' culture and were
repeated in many of his obituaries.

I knew Westmoreland later in life, not as a general but as a private
citizen. For years he served on the board of The American Spectator. He was
interested in journalism. He felt many American journalists did a pretty
shabby job in covering the military. When a CBS News documentary, "The
Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," claimed in 1982 that he, as the
commanding officer in Vietnam, had engaged in a "conspiracy" to "suppress"
unfavorable intelligence and dupe America into believing we were winning the
war, Westmoreland sued. CBS, after four painful months, admitted to grievous
error and settled out of court. The general felt vindicated, but I doubt he
ever felt fully satisfied. Somehow, he could not accept that American
journalists would get the facts so wrong and apply the paranoid scheme of a
"conspiracy" to his generalship.

The old general I knew at American Spectator board meetings and other
events was as incapable of conspiracy as he was incapable of bad manners. He
was a thorough gentleman. Far from being consumed by Vietnam, he never
mentioned it unless one of his fellow board members brought it up. Nor did
he talk much about military matters or his own illustrious military service.
He had breezed through the Citadel and West Point, where in his last year he
received the Pershing Sword for achieving the highest command position in
the student body. He went on to fight valiantly through WWII in Europe. In
Korea he commanded paratroopers and late in his career, insisted on leaping
out of airplanes. I once asked him why, as a relatively old man, he
attempted such derring-do. If his young troopers could do it, he told me, he
wanted to, also. And I remember his smile in answering my question.

He was a perfect gentleman, but he was also a can-do kind of guy. Most of
our soldiers are. Westmoreland was also a fount of good sense. There was a
serene quality to him, and far from being preoccupied with anything from
Vietnam to politics, he always struck me as level-headed and sagacious. At
the magazine, we have always prided ourselves in developing younger
generations of clear-headed journalists, and that seemed to be an interest
of his. With regard to the Vietnam War, he thought many of the journalists
had gotten it wrong, but I could only get that judgment out of him when I
brought the matter up.

The war was never a military defeat, he believed. It was a political
defeat. The politicians did not have the stomach for victory. What burned
them most badly was the 1968 Tet Offensive, during which the North
Vietnamese launched a massive offensive that temporarily put them in control
of critical parts of the country. Westmoreland instantly counterattacked,
vanquishing the enemy and leaving 40,000 dead to the one thousand we lost.
In military terms, it was equivalent to Gen. Andrew Jackson's victory over
the British at New Orleans, but the journalists reported it as a defeat, and
so it was recorded for years.

Actually, now historians are noting that in military terms, Tet was the
Communists' defeat. Our armies never lost in Vietnam, and Vietnam only fell
after our armies had been withdrawn and our politicians reneged on their
promise to resupply the South Vietnamese and bomb the North Vietnamese in
the event of further aggression against the South. In the end the Vietnam
War was very useful to the defense of American interests. Westmoreland's
forces held off Communist designs on the Pacific rim, showed Moscow and
Beijing that continued aggression would be costly, and demonstrated the
superiority of American military hardware and tactics, a demonstration that
did not escape the Communists' notice, particularly in Moscow. Vietnam was
the last time the Communists mounted such an assault.

Yet back home the liberal politicians and their intelligentsia were
whipped. They never again regained their resolve. Even today, after the
American military's demonstration of its effectiveness in Afghanistan and
Iraq, these bearers of the Kultursmog are revealing their defeatist nature.
In Vietnam they demanded that we negotiate with Hanoi. Today the Taliban and
the insurgents in Iraq offer no such opportunities to negotiate.
Nonetheless, the liberals are increasingly calling for withdrawal before our
interests are realized. One wonders: Can they screw things up as nicely as
they screwed up Vietnam?

jt

-----

Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
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