| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Patriotboy is Fair and Balanced" |
| Date: |
05 Oct 2003 06:35:55 PM |
| Object: |
Cover-up timeline |
"The Novak story and the Time story came out the same week. Both were
obvious results of White House plants: the Time story said as much.
The WaPo's "senior Administration official" says six other reporters
were called by "two top White House officials" before the Novak thing
appeared. So whoever planted it would be looking for reaction.
[Footnote: After ABC's The Note and other folks noticed a slight
verbal variation between Mike Allen's first and subsequent accounts,
he has repeated his original formulation word for word [*]. So Allen
is sticking with his account of what his source told him, and I see
no reason to doubt him.]
Even without that, since both stories specifically mentioned the
White House, they would have shown up in the daily clips. Not
everyone reads the whole clip file every day, but someone reads all
of it and lots of people read a little of it. What's in the clips is
"common knowledge." Novak isn't a major journalist in my eyes, but
he's a player in Republican circles. Time is Time. So those stories
didn't go unread or un-discussed.
As to the Nation, I bet it's not widely read in the White House. But
it, too, would have made the clips, and it involves a charge about a
very serious crime. Moreover, since it's clear that they were on a
tear about Wilson, someone in the WH "strategery" group was doing a
daily Lexis/Nexis search for Wilson's name, which would have turned
up the Corn piece. If Wilson, whom they were attacking, had made a
reckless charge to Corn about exposing his wife's identity when her
identity was in fact no secret, that would have been another
vulnerability for Wilson, and worth pursuing.
Then Howard Dean demanded an answer. If Dean was right, they had
trouble. If Dean was wrong, they could clobber him with it. Either
way, the oppo research guys at the RNC and inside the White House had
to be aware of it, and inquire about it. If it turned out she was a
file clerk or a press officer, they could make Dean look like a
complete monkey. They wouldn't have to do it in their own name: just
sic the Washington Times on it, or Novak himself. Of course, they
might want to wait until Dean had the nomination before going with it
-- no point weakening your weakest opponent -- but they'd want to
check the story out right away to see how much ammunition Dean had
just handed them.
Then Krugman had a column, making very harsh charges. No one can
pretend that Krugman hasn't managed to get under the skin of the Bush
Administration. Krugman's column, and Luskin's attack on Krugman for
it at NRO, would have been noticed: assuming, that is, that Luskin's
attack wasn't itself the product of a White House plant.
On July 22 Newsday had a story, sourced to "intelligence officials,"
that Plame was undercover. That was enough to force even Luskin into
a graceless and half-hearted retraction. (Ten weeks later, the
defenders of the White House were still insisting that we didn't know
whether Plame's status was secret or not.) Assume you're inside the
White House, and innocent. Wouldn't you have someone call the CIA and
ask why they're throwing spitballs at the White House?
The same day, a reporter asked a question of Scott McClellan at the
daily briefing, which he dodged by saying it was impossible to track
down anonymous-source stories. (A proposition true in general and
obviously false in this case, given the very limited number of
"senior Administration officials" in a position to have known the
central facts.) The question to McClellan wasn't a surprise to him;
Newsday reports having called Claire Buchan before its story ran and
being bucked over to the NSC staff, which didn't respond. That
question was repeated a few days later, and he dodged again.
How likely is it that McClellan never checked around to see if anyone
had trouble on this and to get guidance about what he could and
couldn't say? His readiness with an answer the first time, and its
identity with his answer the second time, suggests that he had
briefed himself on the issue beforehand, as he naturally would have
when Buchan told him about the Newsday inquiry. Is it really
conceivable that by then someone at the top hadn't become aware of
the matter? How many times a week does someone credibly accuse two
senior administration officials, in print, of committing aggravated
felonies?
The Newsday story was followed by demands for investigation from
various Senators, including Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton,
demands which both whoever was following the newspapers, and the
White House Congressional Affairs office, must have been aware of. (A
Republican congressman told The Hill that no law had been broken;
hadn't he checked with someone first?)
If the charges were bogus, Schumer in particular was a sitting duck.
And if they were bogus -- if, in particular, Plame wasn't covert --
there was no problem about discussing them in public. So if you're
Rove or Card and you see this, and you weren't in fact involved and
are confident none of your colleagues was, or that they were but it
was OK because she was overt, the first thing you do is call someone
in Condi's shop and ask them to check with the CIA about whether
Plame was undercover or not. If not, you go to town: again, through
intermediaries.
What that means is that any of Rove's people, or Card's, wouldn't
have been afraid to bring the boss bad news: potentially, it was
absolutely terrific news, unless they already knew she was covert.
And there would have been no way to figure out whether your enmies
had just dealt you a winning hand without turning up the ugly truth:
that Plame was about as undercover as anyone can be, and that your
guys had put the word out. (Whether the two top officials who made
the initial phone calls, or whoever encouraged them to do so, knew
when they made the calls that her identity was a secret is a
different question, one likely to be considered by a twelve-person
focus group.)
Moreover, we now know that the CIA made an informal referral to DoJ
almost immediately after the Novak column appeared. How likely is it
that no one at the CIA or DoJ ever mentioned this to anyone at the
White House? Surely anything from either of those sources would have
gotten someone's undivided attention.
(Dan points to a New York Times story in which Tenet doesn't mention
the Plame affair to Bush at a meeting last week. First, that story
clearly comes from Andy Card, so it reflects WH spin. Second, that
Tenet didn't mention it to the President face-to-face now doesn't
mean that no one on his staff gave anyone in the White House a polite
heads-up eleven weeks ago. Bringing it up now would be rather
insulting; not giving a heads-up back then would have been a hostile
act. I would say that the lack of hostility between Bush and Tenet,
if that is the case, is more supportive of the idea that the CIA did
warn the White House than of the idea that it didn't.)
Moreover, the latest story from Newsweek has a source close to Karl
Rove (or maybe it's Rove himself on background) denying that he'd
told Chris Matthews in the days immediately after the Novak column
that "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game," but confirming that he Rove
told Matthews that "it was reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to
Niger."
[Note to reporters and other investigators: If you want to make
someone confirm a guess, accuse him of having done something awful --
worse than your guess -- in a question that assumes as its basis the
charge you're looking to confirm, and hope that he will give you his
confession to the lesser charge as part of his exculpation on the
greater one. I bet that's how Novak mousetrapped some poor CIA
spokesgeek into confirming Plame's employment: He probably asked, "Is
it true that Joseph Wilson's wife picked him for the assignment?" and
the victim said, "No, she just recruited him after he'd already been
picked." Presto! He has the confirmation he wanted. The gull never
knows he's given anything away because Novak's question assumed that
Plame worked for the Agency. Avoiding that sort of trap is much
harder than it looks. Ask anyone who has used it, or had it used on
him. I've been on both sides of this myself, and I can tell you the
questioner has all the advantages.]
So Rove certainly knew about the story back then, unless you want to
think that Isikoff -- last seen chasing a semen-stained dress -- has
now joined in a conspiracy to manufacture a conversation that never
happened.
It remains possible that Bush himself didn't know about the problem.
His habit of being briefed orally on the news rather than reading it
for himself leaves him open to a dangerous degree of insulation from
the real world. [*] But if he was kept in the dark, it could only be
because everyone around him knew that the story was nothing but bad
news for the administration, which would have been true only if
everyone around him knew that Valerie Plame's identity was, in fact,
a closely-guarded secret.
What all that means, to me, is that the White House, though not
necessarily the President personally, showed guilty knowledge of this
affair nearly from its inception. So far, they've done fairly well at
spreading the perception that, as soon as they learned about the
problem, they acted to "get to the bottom of it." That has worked
because the laxity of the mass media didn't bring this to the
public's attention until eleven weeks after it started, and of course
the media have little incentive now to remind us that the White House
was keeping silent at the same time they were.
This is not Watergate, with the media generically pursuing and the
White House defending. Reputationally, they're in this together. If
the story can be made to seem as if it started at the end of
September, the media and the President can both look good. But if the
public recognizes that it started in mid-July, and the media and the
White House both worked hard to keep it from coming to light until
the bureaucrats forced it onto the front pages, they both look bad.
As, I am convinced, they deserve to."
http://tinyurl.com/ptk6
--
"If the administration said the Earth was flat, Fox News would say
that the Earth was flat, and anyone who said otherwise hates America.
The rest of the media would say 'Shape of the Earth-- Views Differ.'
And quote one Democrat saying that the Earth was round."
--Paul Krugman
Tim
"Fair and Balanced"
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| User: "Brian Quincy Hutchings" |
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| Title: Re: Cover-up timeline |
09 Oct 2003 04:08:35 PM |
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yes, but most Democrats (and most scientists,
from my experience in the literature) merely *believe*
taht Earth is rounded. that is to say,
they've haven't learned celestial navigation, QED.
I promised I would get out of the rat-trap
of the googolplex, if Captain Arnie won Enron's recall.
bye ... I'll probably still work sci.math, though,
because I like it.
Patriotboy is Fair and Balanced <tim@somecallme.net> wrote in message news:<Xns940BA8744DF47timsomecallme@216.168.3.44>...
The rest of the media would say 'Shape of the Earth-- Views Differ.'
And quote one Democrat saying that the Earth was round."
--les ducs de Buffet et Schulz ("R"&"D" Chair Assoc.Intl.);
vote NONE OF THE BELOW
on Trickier ***** Cheney's California Recall/e-Dereg!
http://larouchepub.com
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/
http://tarpley.net
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