Libby Says Bush Authorized Leaks

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by Phil theStalker

NO ONE, NOT EVEN THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW.

I'll bet you didn't say that 7 or 8 years ago when perjury and obstruction charges were pretty obvious against a well-know ex-President.

[EAT MY ASSHOLE]

Originally posted by ODShowtime
Oh, a savings account! Did you get your own yet, or did your mommy set it up for you?

You accuse me of lame jokes, and this and Waboritos references are the best YOU can do?

Weak little shit.

[ODShowtime]

Originally posted by EAT MY ASSHOLE
You accuse me of lame jokes, and this and Waboritos references are the best YOU can do?

Weak little shit.

I don't even need to try with you. I just state the truth. You SUCK, pure and simple.

[EAT MY ASSHOLE]

Originally posted by ODShowtime
I don't even need to try with you. I just state the truth. You SUCK, pure and simple.

Yeah, but you swallow.

Weak little shit.

[Phil theStalker]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
I'll bet you didn't say that 7 or 8 years ago when perjury and obstruction charges were pretty obvious against a well-know ex-President.

Dear BBB,

Why pick on mme? huh

Why doo yoo ASSume t2o know mmypersonal poliTICKs? huh

I hate Clinton da SOCIALIST, New Werld Odor, scum, puke!

I hate da FASCIST republiscums!

uh uh uh u hu hu hu hu hu hu h

Need I say mmmore? huh

[Nickdfresh]

A 'Concerted Effort' to Discredit Bush Critic
Prosecutor Describes Cheney, Libby as Key Voices Pitching Iraq-Niger Story

By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 9, 2006; A01

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year -- in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there -- as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney's knowledge. But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next known meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.

Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons." But it also said U.S. intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations.

Iraq's alleged uranium shopping had been strongly disputed in the intelligence community from the start. In a closed Senate hearing in late September 2002, shortly before the October NIE was completed, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and his top weapons analyst, Robert Walpole, expressed strong doubts about the uranium story, which had recently been unveiled publicly by the British government. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise, called the claim "highly dubious." For those reasons, the uranium story was relegated to a brief inside passage in the October estimate.

But the White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002 to foster "public education" about Iraq's "grave and gathering danger" to the United States, repeatedly pitched the uranium story. The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most U.S. analysts -- the hard part for Iraq would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller -- but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters. Most nuclear arguments were highly technical, but the public could easily grasp the link between uranium and a bomb.

Tenet interceded to keep the claim out of a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, but by Dec. 19 it reappeared in a State Department "fact sheet." After that, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal U.S. evidence as bogus. A Bush-appointed commission later concluded that the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was "transparently forged."

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was producing no results, and as the bad news converged on the White House -- weeks after a banner behind Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln -- Wilson emerged as a key critic. He focused his ire on Cheney, who had made the administration's earliest and strongest claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear program.

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House"-- not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified -- discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

At the same time, top officials such as then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley were pressing the CIA to declassify more documents in hopes of defending the president's use of the uranium claim in his State of the Union speech. It was a losing battle. A "senior Bush administration official," speaking on the condition of anonymity as the president departed for Africa on July 7, 2003, told The Post that "the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." The comment appeared on the front page of the July 8 paper, the same morning that Libby met Miller at the St. Regis hotel.

Libby was still defending the uranium claim as the administration's internal battle burst into the open. White House officials tried to blame Tenet for the debacle, but Tenet made public his intervention to keep uranium out of Bush's speech a few months earlier. Hadley then acknowledged that he had known of Tenet's objections but forgot them as the State of the Union approached.

Hoping to lay the controversy to rest, Hadley claimed responsibility for the Niger remarks.

In a speech two days later, at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney defended the war by saying that no responsible leader could ignore the evidence in the NIE. Before a roomful of conservative policymakers, Cheney listed four of the "key judgments" on Iraq's alleged weapons capabilities but made no mention of Niger or uranium.

On July 30, 2003, two senior intelligence officials said in an interview that Niger was never an important part of the CIA's analysis, and that the language of Iraq's vigorous pursuit of uranium came verbatim from a Defense Intelligence Agency report that had caught the vice president's attention. The same day, the CIA referred the Plame leak to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, the fateful step that would eventually lead to Libby's indictment.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[ODShowtime]

Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House"-- not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified -- discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Yeah, this was a "no story"

There's no evidence to show that this whole administration is a bunch of crooks?

Big Train, meet Fitzgerald!

Now that this will be proven, everything else we accuse them of is much more believable.

[DLR'sCock]

tick tock...

[Hardrock69]

Here is another angle.

Basically that Cheney and his organ-grinder monkey Chimpy authoriized the declassification of intel ONLY WHEN IT SUITED THEIR AGENDA. When it was intel that did not support what they wanted the public to hear, they would not authorize the declassification of it:


Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks
BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND RON HUTCHESON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

Court papers filed late Wednesday by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald quote Libby as telling a grand jury that Bush, via Cheney, authorized him to reveal the key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. The president and vice president have virtually unlimited legal authority to declassify government secrets.

The authorized leak, in July 2003, came two days after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an article in The New York Times charging that the White House had manipulated intelligence on Iraq's alleged quest for uranium ore from Africa to make its case for war.

Libby isn't charged with revealing or mishandling classified information, but with five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI about the unmasking of Wilson's wife, former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame.

On Friday, White House officials said that the administration declassified information to rebut charges that Bush was manipulating intelligence.

Without specifically acknowledging Bush's actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified."

McClellan didn't address why administration officials often declassified information that supported their allegations about Iraq but not intelligence that undercut their claims.

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from January 2003 to February 2005, said there was nothing improper about Bush's reported actions.

However, Hutchings said, "The decision to put in the public domain classified information, whether through a leak or through the formal authorization" shouldn't be done for "political convenience."

"There should be some higher purpose," he said.

Libby's allegation, which the White House hasn't disputed, isn't the first time that the Bush administration has declassified secrets in an effort to bolster its case for a pre-emptive war against Iraq.

The White House declassified a range of material, including spy satellite photographs and highly sensitive intercepts of Iraqi military communications, when former Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 to argue that Iraq was an international threat.

Powell's presentation, it's now known, came after he and his State Department team spent several days at CIA headquarters going over the intelligence on Iraq and tossing out dozens of pages of questionable material that Cheney's office pressed him to include.

In September 2002, unnamed Bush administration officials told The New York Times that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire specially designed aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Experts in the Energy Department and elsewhere, however, didn't think that the tubes were designed for nuclear weapons, and it's now known that they weren't.

Nevertheless, Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell took to the Sunday television talk shows on the morning that the report was published to warn of a growing threat from Saddam. Rice used some of the same language that appeared in the newspaper story, warning that, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

As the war approached, the White House released other documents and statements containing allegations about Saddam's weapons and ties to terrorism, many of which included information from Iraqi defectors and other sources that already had been discredited.

Among those was a document published in October 2002, titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," which was a public version of the National Intelligence Estimate's main points - but with doubts and dissents stripped out.

Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said that while it doesn't appear that Bush did anything illegal in the Libby case, "it does appear that the president engaged in selective declassification for purposes of political advantage."

The latest revelations could affect a long-running partisan feud over a Senate Intelligence Committee probe into the administration's use of intelligence.

Committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said this week that he hopes to complete drafts of a report following Congress' Easter recess.

Democratic leaders on Friday renewed their call for a full investigation into Bush's use of intelligence and the release of Plame's identity.

The White House's McClellan took issue with suggestions that the leak to Miller called into question the sincerity of Bush's frequent complaints about government leaks.

"There is a difference between providing declassified information to the public when it's in the public interest and leaking classified information that involved sensitive national intelligence regarding our security," he said.

Still, when leaks of classified information help make the White House's case, officials haven't always complained.

In November 2003, the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard published highly classified raw intelligence purporting to a show a link between Saddam and al-Qaida.

The Pentagon disavowed the report. But in early January 2004, Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News newspaper that the magazine report was the "best source of information" about the Saddam/al-Qaida connection. That connection has never been proved.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14291966.htm