LIBBY CLAIMS BUSH APPROVED LEAK
LIBBY
Libby claims that Bush approved the leak but there's no proof. Since Libby was Cheney's adviser, it would seem more probable that he was the one who told Libby to leak information. Joseph Wilson IV, Plame's husband, criticized the administration's wanting to go to war with Iraq based on a report that Iraq was buying nuclear material from Niger. Wilson went to Niger and couldn't find any evidence to support the claim and reported such. This was going to prevent the US from going to war with Iraq, something Cheney wanted since he couldn't oust Saddam Hussein when Cheney was Secretary of Defense. You get in Cheney's way and he will stomp on you, or shoot you like he did his hunting partner in TX.
posted by Kenny @ 9:56 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Man, you are way out there.
Headline: The Uranium Joe Wilson Didn't Mention)
Dateline: Sunday, July 17, 2005
Source: NewsMax
Byline: Carl Limbacher
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."
Headline: Spy Valerie and the rogue CIA
Source: The American Thinker
Dateline: July 18th, 2005
Byline: James Lewis
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss’s long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss’s remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA “experts” in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame’s outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn’t figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame’s bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it’s about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don’t suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
Clearly the CIA managers who failed the United States so terribly on 9/11 should have been fired four years ago. Others now worried about their careers include officials who have long resisted the onerous task of building a topnotch human intelligence capability in the most dangerous parts of the world.
Porter Goss’s new broom should also sweep away:
1) personnel who utterly failed to thwart critical technology theft by China during the Clinton years;
2) those who constantly undermine the war on terror;
3) the ones who make a regular habit of dropping media stinkbombs against the White House.
4) Finally, there is the faction that supported Saddam Hussein’s hold on power, as Joe Wilson did.
It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon.
The charge against Rove is based on a blatantly forged document, purporting to show that Saddam tried to buy Niger yellowcake uranium. We now know that the document was forged by the French government to embarrass Secretary Colin Powell, and undermine the American case against Saddam at the UN. It was classic disinformation bait. Powell flourished the Niger forgery at the Security Council, and the very next day “European intelligence agencies” leaked word that it was a laughable fraud.
Months later, the London Telegraph published the fact that it was all a French disinformation ploy.
The CIA has to know all about the French forgery, just as it knows that Joseph Wilson’s famous trip to Niger was pure bilgewater. Nobody sends a has-been diplomat to Africa to drink mint tea with corrupt old President Tandja Mamadou, expecting to discover whether Mamadou has secretly been selling nuke materials to Saddam.
That’s pure Inspector Clousseau.
Valerie Plame’s CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr.
Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time. As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for DC, recently said, “The CIA isn’t stupid. They wanted this story out.”
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson’s “confidential trip” to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his “expose” in the Times. He’d gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson’s charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
What Karl Rove apparently did was to hint to reporters about the fraudulence of the whole Wilson stunt, and for that the media mob wants him drawn and quartered. No good deed goes unpunished.
Everything else Wilson has been saying on his two-year speaking tour around the country has been shown to be lies, but well-designed lies—- lies that fit right into the mad-dog world of the Democrat Left.
Telling lies to confirm somebody’s paranoid beliefs is a classic disinformation gambit, right out of Spy School 101. But such gambits would be far more usefully employed against al Qaeda, our opponent in war. If the United States is attacked again by terrorists, one reason will be that our CIA has wasted time fighting the White House rather than the enemy.
Given Wilson’s Niger trip, set up by wife Valerie for Joe Wilson to publicly show that a blatant forgery was, well, a forgery, the current media attack on the White House was completely predictable.
The Permanent Establishment had a perfect dress rehearsal last year with the uproar about Richard Clarke, who also worked in the Clinton White House, possibly next door to Joe Wilson. The barely-disguised message to George W. Bush was: if you try to get rid of us, we may pull a Deep Throat on you. J. Edgar Hoover would have seen through it instantly.
When the Twin Towers exploded in 2001, President Bush did not touch the FBI or the CIA. By comparison, after the Japanese decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR and George Marshall churned the commanding ranks of the Army and Navy, elevating talented officers like Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. They created Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, the seed of the CIA. Donovan in his turn brought street spooks to the top, political correctness (of the day) be damned.
A lot of careers were broken, and the new talent skyrocketed. It worked like a charm. The infusion of new blood into a stale bureaucracy was the key to victory in World War II. The old crew had allowed a deplorable situation to develop, and were obviously incapable of recognizing what needed to be done.
So why didn’t Mr. Bush clean out the dead wood at CIA?
A reasonable guess is that his father warned against it. George Bush, Sr. is a former CIA Director, after all, and is intimately familiar with its ways. He was a GOP Congressman during Watergate, when Mark Felt destroyed Richard Nixon for thwarting his lifelong ambition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover.
Paraphrasing LBJ’s immortal words, it was smarter to keep the CIA inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around. So George Tenet wasn’t fired, and as far as we can tell, neither was anybody else. Instead, the President met with Tenet every day for five years to get the latest about al Qaeda, and surely gained a deeper understanding of the intelligence maze at the same time.
The White House has played a very careful poker game since then, picking its cards one by one until it was ready to make the big move. Today, George Tenet is out, State and Defense are in the hands of Bush loyalists, the House and Senate have GOP majorities, and the new CIA Director is not an insider. The CIA itself is now subordinate to the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, a no-nonsense diplomat in the Kissinger mold. When Goss became Director, Agency bureaucrats complained bitterly to the press. Mr. Bush now holds all the cards, and it is time to play them.
All this isn’t just fun and games. It casts a deadly light on internecine warfare in Washington at a time of great national danger.
We know that Hoover blackmailed four successive Presidents by threatening to reveal confidential FBI secrets. We know that Hoover’s fair-haired boy, Mark Felt, destroyed the Nixon Presidency – a virtual coup d’etat that the media tell us was a victory of Democracy over the Secret Government. With the media as destiny’s servant.
We know that Nixon taped visitors to the Oval Office without their permission, but that FDR, LBJ, and Kennedy did the same, without facing media exposure. And during the unbelievable Clinton years we know that Bill and Hillary abused presidential power in a dozen egregious ways, and may still control copies of raw FBI files to use against their domestic enemies.
But it was Richard Nixon alone who got caught by a rogue FBI bureaucrat. Deep Throat showed how a president can be destroyed by a bureaucrat.
The farcical “outing” of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson’s eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
The sneering media mob is on display on C-SPAN whenever the White House holds a press briefing. The Left is apoplectic: “Karl Rove + traitor” brought up 97,000 entries on google three days ago, and 124,000 this morning.
But Karl Rove is merely today’s target for a permanent state of rage so deep and hot that it is always seeking new witches to burn. As for the failed CIA spooks who are now living in fear of losing their perks, one can only imagine the steam blowing from their ears, as the day of reckoning draws closer.
I’m cheering for the good guys.
Headline: Four Facts and Five Conclusions
Subheadline: What a week it's been in politics: Bad for
Democrats, bad for the Joe Wilson, and good for George W. Bush.
Dateline: 07/15/2004
Source: Weekly Standard
Byline: Hugh Hewitt
FOUR CRUCIAL FACTS came into the public's view these past few days:
First, Valerie Plame recommended her husband Joe Wilson for the mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium there.
Second, Joe Wilson lied about that, and about other things as well.
Third, Saddam did try to buy uranium from Niger.
Fourth, President Bush did not lie about Saddam's attempt to purchase uranium and the intelligence he was provided by the CIA showed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
From these facts flow five conclusions.
First, whoever leaked the name of Victoria Plame to Robert Novak has a pretty good whistleblower defense. The CIA shouldn't be allowing spouses to recommend spouses for anything, much less missions leading to book contracts. Plame's conduct, even though known by her supervisors to involve the promotion of a spouse for an agency assignment, seems to be self-dealing of the sort that ought never to go on in the government--especially in those parts of the government most shielded from public scrutiny.
Second, the Bush Doctrine has an important new corollary: "The Don't Even Think About It Doctrine." Briefly put, this corollary holds that if the United States has grounds to believe a nation with a history of abetting terrorists of any sort has weapons of mass destruction, of any sort, the United States will act to destroy the possibility that those weapons will pass to any terrorists. If our intelligence turns out to be faulty, we won't lose any sleep about
it. If you don't want to get burned, don't put your hand on the stove.
Third, the late stages of Moore's Disease prohibits sufferers of it to retreat from ill-advised reliance on discredited sources and information. Thus Joshua Micah Marshall would rather get battered throughout the blogosphere than admit he'd fallen hook, line and sinker for Vanity Fair's cover boy.
Fourth, if last week's concert in New York City didn't persuade you that the Democrats have advanced stages of Moore's Disease, then John Kerry's incredible response to Larry King that--the nominee didn't have to see Fahrenheit 9/11 because he'd "lived it," should seal the deal. The refusal of the nominee or the party's money bags to distance themselves from the nutty and increasingly embarrassing blowhard Michael Moore is evidence of the Democrats' need for electoral shock therapy of the radical sort. Only a smash-up will bring this unhinged party to its senses.
Which brings me to the fifth conclusion: The release of my new book, If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends Upon It, was nicely timed as it appeared in bookstores this week. It has soared on Amazon--I am sure in part because it is a direct, blunt rebuke to the collapse of the Democrats on national security issues, their fundamental unseriousness about the war on terror, and their infatuation with fringe characters like Moore.
A few more periods like these past few days, and the Torricelli Option may yet reappear.
Do you need more?
BTW, the reference to "Moores Disease" is a reference to Michael Moore.
Oh and Libby was never prosecuted for leaking Valerie Plames name to Novak, just lying to a prosecuter. To this day NO ONE has been accused because Valerie Plame was not an Undercover Operative. As for Cheneys War, get real, If you really think this is Cheneys War because he failed to get Saddam eed to look at the facts listed above. The First Gulf War was stopped short because the UN resolution deemed it so. We could not persue Saddam, just oust him from Kuwait. Sadly Bush listened to this crap and it led us to today. If you really think Saddam was going to sit there and be nice and kind to everyone around him you better think again. He already fought a war with Iran, Gassed the Kurds and Iranian., threatened Israel and Saudi Arabia and continually wanted to find a way to attack the US. He continually laughed at the US and UN over the decade and finally it bit him in the ass. His own words about the hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Sunnis and other he had killed...."They needed to die." Now tell me that was "Cheneys War
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