Bush says something and does another

[Ummu Amatullah]

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The Rove case - Bush says one thing does another
7/20/2005 1:15:00 PM GMT

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President George Bush and his long time aide and confidant Karl Rove.


Hands up those who believed George W. Bush would actually fire his aide, Karl Rove. Rove who was responsible for transforming a Texan “businessman” into a serious politician and thus made himself the second most powerful man in Washington.

President Bush cannot exist without Rove at his side.

It was nothing more than an empty promise when President Bush vowed to fire any White House staffer involved in the revenge outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Now that Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been ‘identified’ as the culprits, Bush changed the standards he himself set by saying -- they must've "committed a crime."

That means indicted, tried and convicted. If Rove and Libby are charged, which seems wholly improbable in any event, the trial could be years away, assuming that the Justice Department, Bush-appointed judges and the Bush-controlled Republican Congress would even think of going up against Rove.

Rove’s influence shouldn’t be underestimated.

The man President Bush calls "The Architect" of his political victories, is hatching his own escape from justice.

He hurried the president into nominating a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, thereby igniting a new Washington controversy and effectively getting the CIA-leaker story out of the main news and off the agenda.

There are numerous other issues which could also capture the headlines and keep the CIA leaker story off the headlines. How about announcing early withdrawal of troops from Iraq? How about all-out efforts to capture Osama bin Laden?

It’s strange that President Bush would suddenly demand waterproof evidence of Rove's and Libby's possibly criminal abuse of a CIA operative cause he certainly didn’t require such irrefutable evidence of Iraq’s WMD’s before invading the sovereign nation.

No ironclad proof was required before he memorably said "Mission Accomplished" about the Iraq war.

Even staunch Republicans see through the Rove cover-up: 71 percent of Republicans in an ABC News national poll this week believe Rove should be fired for being the leaker (83 percent of Democrats) while only 25 percent of the public believe President Bush is cooperating with the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's name.

[YamahaR1]

Bush originally said:

"If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."

Now he has said:

"We have a serious ongoing investigation here. And it's being played out in the press. And I think it's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. And I will do so, as well. I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts. The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it. I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts, and if someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."

Bush has not changed his position. He says essentially the same thing...if someone has violated a law/committed a crime, they will no longer work in his administration. Seems pretty similar to me.

The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame had operated under non-official cover, but was outed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, and has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997. Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent's status has already been compromised by the government?

As for Rove, I don't know yet if Rove did something wrong. That is like putting the cart before the horse. If he is found guilty of breaking the law, he should be removed and prosecuted. But to say that he is guilty before the investigation is completed is like prosecuting someone without a trial. All I've seen to date are accusations. I've seen no proof, not one shred that Karl Rove broke the law. If you have seen proof that he has done something wrong, please share it. The statute Rove allegedly violated has a number of very specific triggers. The person who reveals the identity of a covert CIA operative has to intend to uncover her identity, know she is a covert operative and know that he is blowing her cover.


There are two questions that need to be answered at this point:
1. Was Valerie Plame a covert agent? So far, all the evidence says no. If she was not in the field as an agent in the last 5 years, all of this discussion is a waste of time.
2. Why is Judith Miller sitting in jail? Who is she protecting? Why is the New York Times refusing to give her up?

[YamahaR1]

Here are a few articles to read as well. There is more to this case than most people realize.

The Uranium Joe Wilson Didn't Mention

By April 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had stockpiled 500 tons of yellowcake uranium at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant south of Baghdad.

That intriguing little detail is almost never mentioned by the big media, who prefer to chant the mantra "Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction" while echoing Joseph Wilson's claim that "Bush lied" about Iraq seeking more of the nuclear material in Niger.

The media's decision to put the Wilson-Plame affair back on the front burner, however, may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for President Bush - giving his administration a chance to resurrect an important debate they conceded far too easily about the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
First, the facts - from a reliable critic of the White House, the New York Times, which covered the story long after the paper announced it was tightening its standards on WMD news out of Iraq.

"The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure place outside Iraq," the paper announced in a little-noticed May 2004 report.

"The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program until it was largely shut down after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, holds more than 500 tons of uranium," the paper revealed, before insisting: "None of it [is] enriched enough to be used directly in a nuclear weapon."

Well, almost none.

The Times went on to report that amidst Saddam's yellowcake stockpile, U.S. weapons inspectors found "some 1.8 tons" that they "classified as low-enriched uranium."

The paper conceded that while Saddam's nearly 2 tons of partially enriched uranium was "a more potent form" of the nuclear fuel, it was "still not sufficient for a weapon."

Consulted about the low-enriched uranium discovery, however, Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, told the Associated Press that if it was of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, the 1.8 tons could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.

And Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times that the low-enriched uranium could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions.

"A country like Iran could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium," he explained.

Luckily, Iraq didn't have even the small number of centrifuges necessary to get the job done.

Or did it?

The physicist tapped by Saddam to run his centrifuge program says that after the first Gulf War, the program was largely dismantled. But it wasn't destroyed.

In fact, according to what he wrote in his 2004 book, "The Bomb in My Garden," Dr. Mahdi Obeidi told U.S. interrogators: "Saddam kept funding the IAEC [Iraq Atomic Energy Commission] from 1991 ... until the war in 2003."

"I was developing the centrifuge for the weapons" right through 1997, he revealed.

And after that, Dr. Obeidi said, Saddam ordered him under penalty of death to keep the technology available to resume Iraq's nuke program at a moment's notice.

Dr. Obeidi said he buried "the full set of blueprints, designs - everything to restart the centrifuge program - along with some critical components of the centrifuge" under the garden of his Baghdad home.

"I had to maintain the program to the bitter end," he explained. All the while the Iraqi physicist was aware that he held the key to Saddam's continuing nuclear ambitions.

"The centrifuge is the single most dangerous piece of nuclear technology," Dr. Obeidi says in his book. "With advances in centrifuge technology, it is now possible to conceal a uranium enrichment program inside a single warehouse."

Consider: 500 tons of yellowcake stored at Saddam's old nuclear weapons plant, where he'd managed to partially enrich 1.8 tons. And the equipment and blueprints that could enrich enough uranium to make a bomb stored away for safekeeping. And all of it at the Iraqi dictator's disposal.

If the average American were aware of these undisputed facts, the debate over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would have been decided long ago - in President Bush's favor.

One more detail that Mr. Wilson and his media backers don't like to discuss: There's a reason Niger was such a likely candidate for Saddam's uranium shopping spree.

Responding to the firestorm that erupted after Wilson's July 2003 column, Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters:

"In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger."

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/...17/171214.shtml

[YamahaR1]

Outing Plame may not have been illegal. What is the prosecutor hunting?
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Why is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursuing so zealously the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, since it is all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime?


Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires that the leaker have learned the identity of a "covert agent" from authorized sources. And it requires that the leak be deliberate.

The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame had operated under non-official cover, but was outed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, and has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997.

So why is Fitzgerald acting like Inspector Javert in "Les Miserables"? The answer may lie in a sentence Walter Pincus of The Washington Post wrote on June 12, 2003. First, some background:

At Plame's suggestion, the CIA sent her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, to Niger in February 2002 to investigate a report by a foreign intelligence service that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium. In his report to the CIA (as documented by the Senate Intelligence Committee), Wilson said Iraqis had approached Nigerien officials. In 1999, an Iraqi delegation met with the prime minister in the interest of "expanding commercial relations" -- which the prime minister interpreted to mean uranium sales -- but no deal had been made.

In September 2002, the British government published a white paper in which it made public British intelligence's belief that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. A month later, the CIA received from an Italian source documents purporting to show that Niger and Iraq had done a deal. These turned out to be forgeries.

President Bush mentioned the British findings in his State of the Union address in January 2003. In his leaks to Pincus, and earlier to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Wilson claimed Bush knew this was false. The key sentence in Pincus' story is this:

"Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."

Wilson's official role ended when he returned from Niger in March. The CIA didn't get the Italian forgeries until October. Wilson had no access to them. He either was making up what he told Kristof and Pincus, or he had received an unauthorized leak of classified information.

Wilson outed himself in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which described his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger in 2002. On July 14, 2003, columnist Robert Novak wondered why Wilson, who had no intelligence background and strong anti-Bush views, had been selected for the Niger mission. "Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report," he wrote. That set off the Plame name game.

Journalists lost interest when in July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Wilson was lying about who sent him to Niger and what he learned there. Furthermore, the Butler Commission concluded reports Saddam was trying to buy uranium were "well founded."

But by then the special prosecutor they'd sought had been appointed, and Fitzgerald was demanding testimony from two reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote a story about Plame, and Judith Miller of the New York Times, who didn't.

Journalistic interest revived when Cooper revealed his source was Bush political guru Karl Rove. Novak (the journalist who outed Plame) hasn't revealed his sources. But a fawning profile of Wilson and Plame in Vanity Fair in January 2004 offers a clue:


"Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he received a phone call from Robert Novak who, according to Wilson, said he'd been told by a CIA source that Wilson's wife worked for the agency."

Cooper is a free man because Rove gave him explicit permission to talk about their conversation. Miller is in jail because her source didn't, suggesting he or she is someone other than Rove.

Liberals want Rove's scalp. But the revelation Friday (if true) that Rove learned of Plame's occupation from a journalist makes it most unlikely that he could prosecuted successfully under the Identities Act.

Maybe Rove -- or someone else -- lied to the grand jury. Or maybe Fitzgerald is investigating a different crime.

What if someone in the CIA was leaking classified information to influence the 2004 election? Uncovering a crime like that would be worthy of Inspector Javert's doggedness.

I suspect the biggest shoe in this case has yet to drop, and liberal journalists won't be happy when it does.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05198/538809.stm