I know everyone has been waiting anxiously for Novak's column and his role in the Plame case.

Here it is.

But more importantly he explains who is primary source is (doesn't mention the name) but does prove (assuming that Novak is telling the truth) that the release of Plame's identity was NOT about getting back at Joe Wilson, and was not intended to "scare" or "threaten" the family. Toward the end of his column, he writes:

"In my sworn testimony, I said what I have contended in my columns and on television: Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger. After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part."

So either Novak is lying (trying to protect the Bush White House) or he's telling the truth. Because Fitzgerald hasn't brought charges against anyone directly regarding the release of Plame's name (remember, Scooter is charged for lying under oath), I think it's safe to assume that Novak is telling the truth.

Rove and Bill Harlow (the CIA person)  confirmed to Novak, but where NOT the primary source. In fact, Novak says that it is he who called Rove, and it was in fact, not Rove trying to proactively destroy Wilson by calling reporters to get the info out as we've heard from critics, and others have stated on this board as "fact." (you know who you are if you're still around that is)

Novak continues:

"Following my interview with the primary source, I sought out (Jordans' Note - read those two words again) the second administration official and the CIA spokesman for confirmation. I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in "Who's Who in America." (So in the end, it was Joe Wilson who "leaked" the name!! LOL!!!!)

"I considered his wife's role in initiating Wilson's mission, later confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, to be a previously undisclosed part of an important news story. I reported it on that basis."

In the Washington Post article about this thing, the following is written: "Novak said he and Rove had differing recollections of what happened when he asked about Plame. Novak recalls Rove saying, "Oh, you know that, too?" Rove, according to Corallo, has said he responded, "I've heard that, too.""

Either comment from Rove (whichever it is) does suggest that Rove may have been surprised by the fact that Novak knew, and in fact, had may already heard from other reporters this information which I believe Rove has said under oath. 

so now we're back to square 1. Looks like the only crime that might've been committed was during the investigation (just like with Clinton), and that it's quite possible that nothing unethical happened either. Look at all the stories over the past few months taht the media has reported on because of "leaks" and yet the leakers are called "whistleblowers." Isn't that all Novak is in the end? Just a report blowing the whistle on potentially an unethical decision by a wife to send her hubby to do an investigation about WMDs?

Jordan .

Novak's is a cutting edge reporter.  Why just late last week, he had a prediction about a likely Republican candidate for the presidency. 

Rudolph Giuliani!

Who knew???  Look to Novak to always have insider info.

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I just heard Valerie is suing Cheney and Rove for damaging her career.

Incidently, wasn't/isn't this still ongoing Fitzgerald probe a three year and counting huge waste of taxpayer money ? Fitz knew the story almost from the gate and yet let it go on and on.........

Have you all seen this? 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

pulling this little thing topic out of page 2.

Now we have a JUDGE refusing to keep Plame and Wilson's addresses a secret because....oh well, because, according to the judge, within 30 minutes, the court was able to find their address through other sources!!! LOL!!!!

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0825061plame1.html  

AUGUST 25--A federal judge yesterday turned down a request from former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband that the couple's address be kept secret in court filings in her lawsuit against Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney. In an August 11 motion, Plame and Joseph Wilson argued that their privacy would be jeopardized if their Washington, D.C. residential address was included in court pleadings. But that request was rejected by Judge John Bates, who noted in an order filed yesterday that, "in less than thirty minutes, the Court was able to ascertain plaintiffs's residential address from multiple publicly available sources, including a database of federal government records." Bates added that the couple's lawyer, Christopher Wolf, has been quoted in one newspaper saying that he is Plame and Wilson's next-door neighbor, "and the residential address of that attorney is readily ascertainable." 

Just classic!!!!!  

Jordan .

What a waste of time and money this goose chase has been.

The stake in the heart for this fabricated daydream story from one of its proponents.

About that 'white house cabal'      new york post   8-29-06

The minor fact was that Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat and Clinton administration official, had been sent to Africa by the CIA to investigate reports of Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium at the suggestion of his own wife, who worked at CIA.

What the hell were you doing sending Wilson over there? I imagined Novak saying. Wilson worked for Clinton!

Administration official: We didn't send him there. Cheney's office asked CIA to get more information. CIA picked Wilson.

Novak: Why the hell would it do that?

Official: Look, I hear his wife's in the CIA. He's got nothing to do. She wanted to throw him a bone.

The day that speculative dialogue appeared in this paper, I received a private e-mail from Novak. Thanks to a computer meltdown in years since, I don't have a copy of that e-mail, but I recall Novak said something like "I'm sure you know that I can't say anything about the facts of the case, but I just wanted to say that was a very good column you wrote."

Novak couldn't say anything because the FBI was now on the case, investigating whether Novak's publication of Valerie Plame Wilson's name had been a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. If she was a covert CIA agent and the person who told Novak about it had done so with the knowledge that she was covert, that official would've committed a grave felony.

What Novak knew then, and what everybody knows now as a result of the publication of the new book "Hubris," is that the administration official who revealed Valerie Plame's CIA identity was Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state - the right-hand man and beloved friend of Colin Powell.

Nobody in his right mind could imagine that Armitage would have talked about Valerie Plame, as I (evidently accurately) speculated he did, if he had thought she was a covert agent.

And nobody in his right mind could imagine that Armitage was plotting with the White House officials who became the targets of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's attention as the case grew and grew. As Powell's adjutant, Armitage was not - to put it mildly - an ally or confidant of the White House.

And he was especially no ally of the supposed cabal that, we are told, plotted the exposure of Plame's name in the weeks after Wilson's (unbelievably distorted and mendacious) description of his trip to Africa in leaks to Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post.

The get-Wilson cabal of leftist fantasy was made up primarily of political honcho Karl Rove, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby - all of whom had spent years at daggers drawn with the State Department and, therefore, with Armitage. As one White House official told me, "Rich wouldn't have given Scooter a glass of water on the road to Hell."

For those of us obsessed with the case, it isn't exactly news. Indeed, I thought back in October 2003 that Novak's source was probably Armitage because a) Novak said his source was "not a partisan gunslinger" - Armitage to a T - and b) everybody in Washington knows that the only thing Richard Armitage loves more than Colin Powell is a reporter's off-the-record phone call.

Still, the revelation is a blockbuster for one reason: It comes in a book co-authored by David Corn, whose column in The Nation and blog have been central clearinghouses for the notion that everybody and his mother in the Bush administration should be tried and convicted, then drawn and quartered for the monstrous evil of deliberately exposing the uniquely delicate secret-agent woman Valerie Plame to all but certain murder.

Corn has put a stake in the heart of one of the foundational theories behind the "Bush Lied" lie - after having spent several years promoting that very theory.

So here we are, more than three years after the publication of the Novak column. No one's come forward with the proof that Valerie Wilson was a covert operative. Special prosecutor Fitzgerald brought no charge on that matter, despite his outrageous and unseemly claim, during his notorious press conference announcing the indictment of Libby, that Plame's identity was "classified" - a word that in this context has no legal meaning.

Fitzgerald indicted Libby while claiming he was the first "known" official to have talked to reporters about Valerie Wilson. But Fitzgerald was simply wrong about this central contention in his case. He was wrong to indict Libby on questionable charges of having been deceitful about a matter that wasn't in fact criminal to begin with. Valerie Wilson's boss was wrong to go along with her nepotistic plan of giving her vainglorious liar of a husband a few more days of government service.

And Joseph Wilson - the word "wrong" doesn't even begin to describe him.

Jordan .

Loved that Hitchens article, Jordan.  He's been all over this non-story from the get-go and now we learn the final truth.  I heard him today on the Dennis Prager show.  Great! 

Sigh.  It's times like this when I feel an unsettling emptiness deep down inside.  No wowBOBwow.  You just know how much he'd love to have shared the End of the Story with us...

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Wonder how Joe and Valerie are doing.  Wonder how their book sales are doing.  Their public speaking tour.  Wonder if they are still campaigning for select Democrats for the upcoming elections.  Wonder if KKKRove masterminded this whole mastermind. And who wrote the book of love...

I'm working up a Grand Theory about Internet blah-blah-blah versus the old days of newspapers, how the world has not yet developed a discerning eye for the onslaught of unfiltered information and why there seems to be so little wisdom available. Is it even possible for an entire population to develop a sound discriminating process of separating informational wheat from the chaff?  Or will we be an international society of chickens with their heads cut off quoting willy nilly sources as if they are any more credible than the neighborly gossip mill of days gone by?

But for now, I've got to go meet an ant killer!  Let us hope he is capable of killing all the ants!  If the spiders die in the process, all the better!  

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Lets point the final finger where it belongs -Joe Wilson :

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Oh yeah , I must  place a link here !

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/31/AR2006083101460_pf.html

Alright, I have been asked for and here I am. 

I seem to recall not prejudging the outcome of the Plame issue but rather saying how the Bush admin was handling it was my concern.  I am glad that things worked out the way they did, it would be unfortunate if those in high power engaged in activity like Wilson implied.  That said, I still have issues with the way the admin handled it, but I'll leave you with a republican's thoughts:

John Hinderaker, December 17, 1998:

"Like many others, we have been frustrated by the apparent inability of much of the American public to take the Clinton scandals seriously. "It's not about sex," we have patiently repeated to our benighted friends. "It's about perjury. It's about obstruction of justice. The sex is only incidental. At most it was the motive for the crimes. You wouldn't think murder was unimportant just because the motive for the murder was sex, would you?" So goes our argument."

 

From John Hinderaker when Scooter was indicted

Tomorrow may bring indictments of Scooter Libby on charges that can charitably be described as trivial. Tonight, one of our readers urged us to link to President Bush's great speech to the Joint Armed Forces Officers' Wives' group rather than being distracted by the minutiae of the day. Good suggestion.

"We cannot allow a mine shaft gap"

This story, like street names in Northern Ireland (or Ireland depnding on your terminology) or Civil War battles, has two titles.  It all depends on your point of view. 

It's either:

Courageous Joe Wilson and 'Outed' Covert CIA Op, Valerie Plame, Unjustly Maligned by a Cabal of Brutal Vindictive KKKRovian Forces Within the Fascist War-Mongering White House in Order to Go Ahead With Bush's War Against Innocent Iraq, whence Never a WMD Existed.

or

Anti-War Anti-Bush CIA Insiders Plot a Pre-Emptive Strike via the NYT against Bush White House after Obtaining So-Called Evidence While Drinking Green Tea during Niger Trip and Lying About WHO Sent the Op-Ed Writer to Africa in the First Place.

Susan  

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Or:

How polarized sides will each grab onto whatever they can and in the end everyone suffers (which is basically what you said above but it took me some time to catch on).

"We cannot allow a mine shaft gap"

...and thereby the real truth is lost and everyone is distracted from what's truly important...

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Jordan .

"We cannot allow a mine shaft gap"

Jordan .

More from Christopher Hitchens on the guy who really should be investigated, Joseph Wilson. And more about Niger. Yellow Cake and stuff. Wilson and his fawning sycophants who are donating to his legal funds should really give some thought to how far down this trail they want to venture. Leave it be and the whole Plame-Gate affair du jour may simply evaporate like Gary Hart and the Monkey Business. What business? Yeah, who remembers anymore.

But keep it going as if you were earnest in believing you'd been maligned in a sinister adminstration plot and you might get seriously exposed for the charlatan you are, Mr. Wilson.  Hitchens lays it all out as few are capable of doing.  

Susan

fighting words
Hello, Zahawie, My Old Friend
I've come to talk with you again.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2006, at 6:41 PM ET

As readers of the Fray will already have seen, I have once again drawn a response from Saddam Hussein's emissary to Niger. Dispel Wissam al-Zahawie's clouds of verbiage and you are left with the following:

1) Yes, he did represent Iraq at meetings of the International Atomic Energy Authority and at U.N. discussions on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

2) Yes, he has had dealings with Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, whose whole engagement with Iraq consisted of attempts, through UNSCOM, to disarm it.

3) Yes, he did attend a meeting of Hans Blix's WMD commission in Cairo, as a member of the Jordanian "entourage" if not "delegation."

Zahawie also stands by his earlier claim, which was that his visit to Niger in 1999 was solely for the purpose of persuading the Niger authorities to break the U.N. embargo on flights to Baghdad.

So, all you need to believe is that an Iraqi diplomat with experience in nuclear matters went all the way to a country to which he was not accredited; a country, furthermore, that exports mainly uranium, and that, although his visit was admittedly directed at sanctions-busting, it had nothing to do with sanctions on the acquisition of this material. At the time, Zahawie was the senior accredited Iraqi diplomat in Western Europe, the only one with full ambassador status. Could not an invitation to the president of Niger to fly to Baghdad have been conveyed just as easily by a cable from the Iraqi foreign ministry? What need of such a distinguished messenger?

Zahawie's uneasy conscience about this question is demonstrated by his resort to the old canard of the much-later-forged documents about his visit. These forgeries were circulated—whether for money or in order to discredit the original story is not yet known—long after British intelligence had informed Washington of Zahawie's trip. They have absolutely no bearing (unless as disinformation) on the authenticity of the original allegation.

Since I last had the pleasure of debating Zahawie on this, two further developments have come to light, both of them bearing on Niger. The security correspondent for BBC News, Gordon Corera, has published his illuminating book Shopping for Bombs, which is a detailed inquiry into the ramifications of the A.Q. Khan "Nukes 'R' Us" network. Recall that Zahawie's visit to Niger took place in February 1999. That was a busy month for the hospitality of the Niger authorities. It turns out that A.Q. Khan was visiting their capital also. Corera, who has been kind enough to make contact with me, has acquired the memoir of Abu Bakr Siddiqui, a member of Khan's traveling party, who reports on this trip that:

We left Dubai for Khartoum on 21 February 1999. The Education Minister of Sudan received the group and we were lodged at the State Guest House. After making a short stopover in a Nigerian city we reached Timbuktu on 24 February 1999. After spending a couple of days, we were on our way back and our first stop was Niamey, capital of Niger. Our next stop was N'Djamena, capital of Chad, where we were accorded official protocol. Next day, we flew to Khartoum. After Dr Khan attended to some business, we visited the Shifa factory that was destroyed last year by the American missiles. Dr Khan met the Sudanese President …

This was, in other words, by no means a sightseeing trip. The next year, according to Corera, the A.Q. Khan traveling circus "again went from Khartoum to Niamey in Niger where [former Pakistani Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif's former military secretary welcomed the group." And, as Siddiqui points out in his diary of the trip, "Niger has big uranium deposits." Indeed, as Corera adds, it is a one-commodity country. I might add that, in February 1999, while A.Q. Khan was hopping from one rogue state to another (Sudan being Iraq's closest ally in the region, as well as the former patron of Osama Bin Laden), Saddam had just driven out the U.N. inspectors. Such an interesting time for a senior Iraqi to pick for a visit to an otherwise obscure African country, which had been one of Iraq's sources for uranium yellowcake since as far back as 1981.

The second discovery of interest comes by way of Ray Robison, formerly of the David Kay weapons inquiry, whose patient work I have mentioned before. He is currently engaged in the translation and collation of the captured documents from Saddam Hussein's presidency. One of the logbooks of correspondence deals specifically with Africa. Here is one entry:

Official envoy:
Letter to the Presidency, secret and urgent, number B/2853/K June 4 1997.
The President of Niger, General Ibrahim Bare, informed us about his willingness to visit Iraq during the current month and he wants Iraq to set a date.

So, it seems that air travel between Niger and Iraq could indeed be discussed without all the bother of sending a senior nuclear-knowledgeable Iraqi official to Niamey. You can read the original here. (You can also follow Robison's other valuable work on the Saddam dossier.)

This is not the only such contact or approach that has been uncovered from the Niger end. Iraq had lots of off-the-record cash and lots of off-the-record cheap oil. What did Niger have to offer in return? (Remember that Joseph Wilson was recommended by his wife to investigate these people mainly on the grounds that he was so friendly with them!)

At a minimum, this would suggest that the Blair and Bush administrations were quite right to view the Iraq-Niger relationship with concern. At a maximum, it would suggest that the Niger connection was a great deal more significant—and more dangerous—than anyone has even suspected. (The A.Q. Khan network was not exposed until after Muammar Qaddafi's capitulation and the opening of the Libyan stockpiles, which in turn did not occur until after Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.)

In any conflict of evidence or interpretation between Rolf Ekeus and Wissam Zahawie, there cannot be a person living who would prefer Zahawie's word. In any evaluation of the Wilson visit to Niger, it must indeed be acknowledged that he found nothing—but only because he had neither the ability nor the intention to do so. This was yet another CIA "intelligence failure" in the making, and it follows that those who asked searching questions about the agency's role were doing exactly the right thing.

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Sniff.  Word is the Plame-Wilsons are gonna quit Washington.  Maybe this isn't official but it looks like it may become so soon.  Looks like they'll be going undercover in Santa Fe.  They'll be missed in DC. 

But somehow I think we'll hear from those crazy kids again.  And I don't mean a postcard...

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

RB - guess you don't care about the fact that the investigation never should've happened because NO LAW WAS EVER BROKEN. Special counsels are supposed to investigate laws that are broken, or determine if a law was broken. Fitzgerald knew pretty much from the beginning, it seems, that no law was broken and contniued with the investigation instead (this is different from Clinton's Lewinsky investigation where an actual law was broken -- lying under oath in a trial). Only during the investigation did any law get broken (by Libby). As we've seen time and time again, Rove (nor anyone in  the WH) was involved in the leak of Plame, nor was her name leaked as a means to destroy Wilson (who was lying - but that doesn't matter either to you I suppose).

All that matters to you is the end result - investigation of a "lying" administration. The ends do justify the means, I suppose?

BTW - what kind of money was used to fund homosexual hatred?

Jordan .

Clinton's case was the government invading the privacy of a citizen. He should have never been impeached. But that's the Republicans breaking another promise.

please put down the talking points.

"The investigation was used to find out if a law was broken. "

RIGHT, but then according to informtion, it seems that Fitz knew early on how the leak happened. Granted we don't have the final report, but Novak testified early, along with Woodward, and they both told him that they learned it from Armitage. The investigation was done in order to determine if laws were broken for leaking the identity of Plame ON PURPOSE. Once Novak and Woodward told Fitzgerald that it was Armitage, and once Amritage was interviewed, and once Fitz determined that there was no crime in the leak originating from Armitage, the investigation should've stopped. That's why the only crime that was committed was Libby DURING THE INVESTIGATION. DUH! Once Fitz knew who the leaker was, the investigation should've been over. The law involving special counsels needs to be revised so that they don't become witchhunts - would've stopped the GOP in the 90s for going after Clinton too if that was the case.

And I don't know what in the world you are talking about regarding public monies and pushing an anti-homosexual agenda. Help this evil (innocent) Republican out and tell me what public monies were spent. You can't be talking about the Constitutional amendment because Congress didn't spend any public monies regarding that (and it didn't go anywhere). So are you talking about Bush's plan for giving religious non-profits money to help with social issues? I hope not because that's a stretch.

"I know better and more and more Americans know better too. The Republicans have been caught more than once lying under oath. "

As have Democrats. As have all politicians. Your point? And any GOP member caught lying in a court of law should be tried and found guilty for the crime and sentenced -- even if it involves their personal life.

"Clinton's case was the government invading the privacy of a citizen. He should have never been impeached. But that's the Republicans breaking another promise. "

You do know that Clinton lied on the stand, right? I'm not talking about him wagging his finger at us, or anything like that. He testified in trial, and lied about the affair with Lewinsky on the stand in a criminal lawsuit in Arkansas. You do know that when normal people do this, they go to jail, or at least can't leave their home (home arrest)? There's a woman down in FL a few years back who was sentened to stay in her home and wear one of those devices because she lied under oath in a trial about sex. The whole issue of "privacy of a citizen" is a moot point since the first trial in the US that asked the private person about their private life. That's just a Democratic talking point with so many holes in it that it holds no water. Democrats don't care about a persona's private life - otherwise they wouldn't have publicly read from the diary of a GOP senator Bob Packwood in the mid 90s when he got in trouble for sexual harrassment when 29 woment came forth to accuse him of such (there was never a trial I don't think regarding this which is suspiscious). Packwood ultimately resigned after a lot of events transpired. But I still remember that Packwood's journal was read openly on the Senate floor. Talk about the privacy of a citizen.....and that's when the Democrats ran the Senate in the 90s. Here's an article from the time - these Democrats would switch their quotes a few years later when Clinton was in trouble regarding sex and his own charges of sexual harrassment. Oh, but Clinton - that was a GOP witchhunt about his personal life, and since Clinton is a Democrat, it must be a right-wing conspiracy....

Jordan .

No comment needed, but I didn't know anyone was still pushing the bona fides of that dead, buried and discredited Plamegate "Fitzmas wish". A decayed dead bird from last summer the cat dragged in ?  Is this thread some kind of time capsule ?  Someone been on a lengthy vacation ?