Going Up In Plames 7 comments

18 Oct 2005 @ 09:49, by Richard Carlson You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest, and I smile, and am silent, and even my soul remains quiet: it lives in the other world which no one owns. The peach trees blossom. The water flows. ---Li Po Within the waters is the entire world; There is nothing in its depths but reflections of mountains and rivers. A fish breaks the surface and then disappears again --- What need is there to borrow the wind and thunder? ---Ingen The longest journey is the journey inward.... The road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. ---Dag Hammarskjold I'm not asking for sympathy, but I have to tell you I'm practically crazy after spending an hour and a half chasing the major newspapers around in their anticipation of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's announcement of possible indictments as early as tomorrow. So I complain if they don't cover these kinds of stories and now I complain if they all do. Google News is showing nearly 1100 entries at this hour, and nearly every one goes after a different angle. However this turns out, it has got to be among the most complicated cases the world ever has seen. Central to the complication, of course, is who's lying, who's mistaken, and who just can't remember. Having gone blank myself sometimes, either in a test or under scrutiny from a superior, I'm trying to empathize. What precisely did I intend with that behavior of mine, so casually performed, nearly 3 years ago? At what point does someone realize he has to shape up his act so that any moment of his life can withstand the public spotlight? My father always advised me to "live above suspicion," words that I've remembered but rebelliously rarely lived by. It would be most simple to imagine Bush, Cheney and the Iraq Group huddled in a corner planning covert revenge upon Joe Wilson for blasting their WMD plot out of the water. "Of course we can get Karl and Scooter to do the job. Their specialty." Those guys are in the oil business, which clearly is a more comfortable life in these Final Days than any sort of "elected" public service job. (How well we in Ohio understand Iraqis currently wondering where all those Yes votes came from!) But who is there to testify to such a scenario? More and more Americans are finding it easy to imagine, but a case in court it does not make. Let me point out a few sites I thought were significant this morning. I think probably the best summary of where we are appears in today's Washington Post, written by Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus. "As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney's long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame. "In grand jury sessions, including with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, including the leak of his wife's position at the CIA, Miller and others said. But Fitzgerald has focused more on the role of Cheney's top aides, including Chief of Staff I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, lawyers involved in the case said. "One former CIA official told prosecutors early in the probe about efforts by Cheney's office and his allies at the National Security Council to obtain information about Wilson's trip as long as two months before Plame was unmasked in July 2003, according to a person familiar with the account. "It is not clear whether Fitzgerald plans to charge anyone inside the Bush administration with a crime. But with the case reaching a climax -- administration officials are braced for possible indictments as early as this week-- it is increasingly clear that Cheney and his aides have been deeply enmeshed in events surrounding the Plame affair from the outset." [link] Another good one is Reuters coverage from yesterday that TruthOut is carrying, with a link to Bloomberg which I didn't find produced anything (possibly because the story is old already). Anyway it tells how many of Cheney's people have been questioned in the widening affair. [link] Most of the stories not involved in speculation have to do with Judith Miller's "tell-all" in the New York Times over the weekend [link] and The Times' own coverage of its own coverage, written almost well by Don Van Natta Jr, Adam Liptak and Clifford J. Levy [link] . Arianna Huffington has been merciless about Judy from the moment she went to jail, and unleashed a brilliant entry at her blog yesterday. "We now know that Miller's bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 -- a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on. "In today's WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda. "'I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller... I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,' and 'tried to stampede it into the paper.'" [link] Pete Yost is more apologetic for Miller in yesterday's Newsday [link] but James Ridgeway at the Village Voice seized upon a section of Miller's account that says she was given security clearance by the Pentagon to investigate the WMD thing. "Providing a journalist with a security clearance is unusual to begin with—former CBS correspondent Bill Lynch has likened it to the government's licensing journalists—but a security clearance within a WMD investigations unit dealing with highly sensitive matters is hard to believe. If Miller couldn't tell her editors what she had learned as a reporter because it would be revealing classified information, then how could she perform her job as a reporter? Did Miller instead become a secret government agent, as it were, operating within The New York Times?" [link] Representative John Conyers was so startled by the revelation that he wrote a letter to Donald Rumsfeld yesterday asking about security clearance for those embedded reporters. [link] But Pete Yost had another story yesterday, with John Solomon, that I found at Yahoo News that is equally unsettling. What they saw in Miller's article was "Miller disclosed this weekend that her notes of a conversation she had with I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby on July 8, 2003 stated Cheney's top aide told her that the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson worked for the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) unit. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, never worked for WINPAC, an analysis unit in the overt side of the CIA, and instead worked in a position in the CIA's secret side, known as the directorate of operations, according to three people familiar with her work for the spy agency." [link] The story goes on to wonder whether Miller's notes are wrong or whether Libby really didn't know he was outing a secret agent. It seems to me Libby can get off the hook with this...or at least pin it on such inconsequential aide who got his information screwed up. Since Cheney asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to "verify" his WMD, it seems logical to me that he would have wanted to discredit Valerie Plame for sending her own husband on the assignment...not caring whether she was undercover or not. In fact the CIA has confirmed that it was not Valerie's job to assign anyone to go, and that she only had suggested Joe because of his background and experience in the region. At any rate most analysts agree that the outing may not be the thrust of any indictments handed down. Instead there could be various obstruction charges...and that'll be fine with me for the moment. This Administration and its war certainly has obstructed my life. But let us not forget: through it all tens of thousands of men, women and children have died. Lastly I recommend a blog called Talking Points Memo that seems to be a center for everyone these days. Joshua Micah Marshall is keeping tabs on these developments literally moment by moment. [link]

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