<p>And the first mob I noticed around this issue was trying to torch Joe Wilson.</p>
<p>Nothing of the sort, he was treated like a hero. Still is by too many people, at least for what he wrote in that op-ed in the Times. I’ll give him full credit for his actions in the first Gulf War, that’s different. </p>
<p>Questioning the truth of his op-ed is not torching anyone. Too much shows that what Wilson said in the Times was not true (not a lie, those came later). Even Cooper’s account of what Rove said doesn’t smear anyone, it goes to Wilson’s credibility, a legitmate point in any discussion challenging the truth of what he says.</p>
<p>citygirlsmom, note I didn’t say he lied in the op-ed piece. He assumed that his report went straight to the Vice President and was factored into the evidence used to make the case for war with Iraq. From that he concluded that if the President ignored what he found, the Administration was cherry picking the evidence.</p>
<p>It was not true. Even the State Department report that’s generated so much news recently agrees that Wilson’s report to the CIA was spiked at a very low level. It was never used by the CIA in any analysis and it certainly was not circulated to anyone in the Administration. They found it added little or no value except to support the opposite of Wilson’s conclusion.</p>
<p>If you want to make the case that the Administration fixed the evidence, please do. Just realize that isn’t what happened to what Wilson said. It was ignored for better reasons, at least according to the people who were involved who know. </p>
<p>That’s the real irony of all of this. The first time someone made this claim was simply not true.</p>
<p>But has the President asked the question, oh yeah, his press secretary said, ROve is not involved. and low and behold, he is…</p>
<p>Consider the first time McClelland was asked that question:
July 22, 2003</p>
<p>Then when Bush spoke for the first time:
September 30, 2003</p>
<p>It’s been about breaking the law and leaking classified information from the beginning. That’s what “involved” refers to. </p>
<p>I don’t know if Bush has asked. I don’t know that I care. Even Rove’s attorney probably won’t ask him if he’s guilty. By this point there had been justice department investigation that stalled and a special prosecutor was appointed. Once that happens, you have to let the legal wheels turn, that’s all there is to it. If there was a crime, anyone Rove or who ever was responsible to could become an accessory after the fact if they weren’t careful. At the very least there were charges that the Administration was covering up.</p>
<p>Remember that Nixon didn’t know about the Watergate break in until later. Only a fool would ask Rove anything given the way these things twist and turn once a special prosecutor is involved.</p>
<p>Nice dramatic wording but let’s do a thought experiment: if Wilson was just an error-ridden untruthful ■■■■■ to be easily dismissed, why on earth would you have an orchestrated effort, with someone at the highest levels of the administration, making multiple phone calls to individual reporters–the type of media relations stuff ordinarily reserved for lower-level flunkies?</p>
<p>Begging the question of whether this is ever appropriate, one seldom sees the pulling out of the heavy guns with heavy ammunition unless there’s fire behind the smoke. This administration has a track record of doing its damnedest to not just counter, but destroy, people they think have crossed them, from Paul O’Neill on.</p>
<p>Strick, I agree with you in part about the “wait until October” though it will be interesting to see if Fitzgerald’s operating writ will be extended. However, if it’s perjury, obstruction of justice, or even conspiracy, I’ll make book that Rove is in the center of it. The guy is a hands-on micromanaging control freak and it’s almost preposterous to think he wasn’t involved if anything significant was going on.</p>
<p>Greybeard, you may be right about the perjury and I don’t know. Certainly Fitzgerald feels that he’s got his teeth on something. It’s hard reading tea leaves from the outside, makes old-fashioned Kremlin-watching downright easy. Especially when you figure where most of the leaks have been coming from, e.g., Rove’s lawyer.</p>
But…you don’t have that. You have reporters calling high level officials. That’s what everything out there now shows. I realize you slavering mobsters want it to be otherwise, but you’re not writing this script. It was only the now-discredited Joe Wilson making the claim you cite.</p>
<p>Especially when you figure where most of the leaks have been coming from, e.g., Rove’s lawyer.</p>
<p>Luskin, who, right or wrong, told Cooper it was OK to testify because Fitzgerald had assured him his client was not the object of the investigation. Interesting thing to think about if true, isn’t it?</p>
<p>…if Wilson was just an error-ridden untruthful ■■■■■ to be easily dismissed, why on earth would you have an orchestrated effort, with someone at the highest levels of the administration, making multiple phone calls to individual reporters–the type of media relations stuff ordinarily reserved for lower-level flunkies?</p>
<p>I presume you’ve forgotten how damaging this accusation was? That it required responses from nearly everyone in the Administration? Remember that Fitzgerald is supposedly interested in Rove, Libby, et al, and the time they spent working on Tenet’s response to Wilson.</p>
<p>If anything the Administration was caught flatfooted by all this. Condi Rice nearly made a fool of herself on “Meet the Press” when asked about it. Powell, whose own statement to the UN didn’t not have the 16 words in it primarily because the State Department agreed with Wilson (where the CIA feeding info to the rest of the Administration didn’t), knew so little about it he borrowed a memo written for Grossman, that top secret one in which the paragraph on Wilson’s trip is marked down to secret, to get up to speed. </p>
<p>Everyone was scrambling, which suggests more that they didn’t know what Wilson was talking about, that they hadn’t seen anything of his report, than that he was right.</p>
<p>ANd there is now evidence that the administration made several phone calls toe various news reporters…or is EVERYONE in the world lying and you have high level administration people calling reporters…and high level administration people ANSWERING questions with, yeah well, I heard that too, instead of, where did you hear that, I can’t comment, and for you to even have that kind of information is bad</p>
<p>ANd there is now evidence that the administration made several phone calls toe various news reporters…or is EVERYONE in the world lying</p>
<p>Can’t answer about the lying part, but I know that the primary source for that accusation came from Wilson, who might have a vested interest in all this. He said a Administration official called and told him about it. OK.</p>
<p>From what one blog has pieced together, of roughly a dozen reporters who had contacts with the White House during the time period in question, only four testified:
Miller is still in jail for not testifying. The implication is that the special prosecutor has filtered through the contact lists he subpoenaed and received from the White House and was only interested in the ones whose contacts related to the case. Otherwise, they’ve have subpoenaed the whole lot of reporters. Four plus Miller. I guess that’s “various”, though we know that certain of them called Rove, not the other way around.</p>
<p>It describes reporters hovering over their rolodexes and dialing for dollars looking for a source who will give them a story. Are you sure you know who called whom? Who gave that evidence, can you name who Wilson said told him? Without that, what evidence are you talking about, Wilson’s word? On something he admits he didn’t personally witness and can’t prove? Hearsay?</p>
<p>I’ve said before, and I’ll venture farther out on the limb in saying again: there are going to be some very unexpected shoes dropping in this case, and they’re going to drop in ways that surprise and disappoint the anti-Bush Moonies. An investigation into CIA attempts to influence the 2004 presidential election–through leaks of classified information to the press----would indeed be worthy of a serious special prosecutor, and I predict that is where this all leads. A prescient article from the WSJ, nearly two years ago:
<p>I’d also remind you Moonies of this fascinating statement by one of President Bush’s former Harvard Business School classmates:
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? More colloquially, this classmate, himself a HBS teacher at one time, noted that George Bush routinely set them up and then cleaned them out. The same thing that happened to you in 2004 is likely happening again. And will continue happening through his next 3 Supreme Court appointments.</p>
<p>Not trying to rekindking a fire or anything, but this from Newsweek is interesting:
</p>
<p>No doubt Luskin is the source again. Still, if there’s any truth to this and Rove, after referring to other sources, informed the FBI of the conversation before they asked about it, that’s not going to be a serious problem for him. I’d still argue that the differences within the conversation Cooper I’ve heard so far aren’t that interesting either. If Cooper said that Rove had called him AND Rove told him Plame’s name and that she was a undercover op for the CIA where Rove said he didn’t, that would be serious. Perjury over the little details? Not likely.</p>
<p>If Fitzgerald could show that Rove learned anything from an official source rather than a reporter? Maybe. I’d still bet the original source is someone else with earlier and better access to the information, particularly that State Department memo which some sources say was quoted as early as June. That was long before Rove was suspected of having access to someone who had access to it.</p>
<p>Cheney gave the classic “non-denial” on Wilson, telling Tim Russert things like, “I don’t know Joe Wilson, I’ve never met Joe Wilson,” and “if he wrote a report, I never saw it.” “Sure I asked a question about Niger. I ask a lot of questions.” *As Wilson stated in the July 6 op-ed piece, he hadn’t written a report: he gave four face-to-face briefings.</p>
<p>*Full disclosure - I’m reciting these from memory, so they may not be exact quotes.</p>
Which says something about the relevance/importance of his information/mission. </p>
<p>Not sure what your points about Cheney’s conversation with Russert mean. Why would Cheney know a flunky like Wilson, and why would the CIA let him in on a plan to sandbag the administration before the election?</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting Cheney would have known Ambassador Wilson. I’m suggesting that he had been briefed on Wilson’s trip, and artfully avoided admitting that to Russert.</p>
<p>Put that in the catogory of “I didn’t tell Novak Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife. I didn’t even know her name,” or “There is no sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”</p>
<p>Referring to what we’re doing in Iraq as a “War on Terror” is about as accurate as saying the Cold War was a “War on Nukes,” or saying that the U.S. Civil War was a “war on bullets.”</p>
<p>Terror is a tactic. It’s a weapon. Don’t dignify it by elevating it to a philosophy, or an ideology.</p>
I’m suggesting that’s wishful thinking. The CIA wouldn’t tip the administration off to a sandbagging mission just before the election. They were performing very poorly, but I can’t imagine they’d undermine a domestic job that badly.</p>
<p>Some of you keep putting down the Wilson report, saying it wasn’t bucked up the line, because the CIA didn’t find it credible. According to the Seymour Hersch article I cited sometime previously in this thread, that’s the opposite of what happened. Hersch, writing 2 years ago, said the reason Wilson’s report didn’t make it higher was because it only verified what the CIA was already saying. In other words, the CIA had been saying in many ways on many occasions that the case for wmd in Iraq wasn’t strong and that the stories from Chalabi et al lacked credibilitly. Cheney’s office asked them to look into the yellowcake story, which they did by sending Wilson. He came back with his report, and the CIA said, basically, “more of the same - backs up what we’ve been saying all along”.</p>