UnFairWitness

Turn a Republican into a civil libertarian - Indict his friends

Special Counsel Fitzgerald's investigation and ongoing legal proceedings are serious, and now the proceedings -- the process moves into a new phase. In our system, each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial.....George W. Bush

In our system of government an accused person is presumed innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury after an opportunity to answer the charges and a full airing of the facts. Mr. Libby is entitled to that opportunity...Dick Cheney    

       

José Padilla was arrested by federal agents at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, and held as material witness on the warrant issued in New York State about the 2001 9/11 attacks. On June 9, 2002, President Bush issued an order to Secretary Rumsfeld to detain Padilla as an "enemy combatant". He is currently being detained without charge in a South Carolina military prison under orders of President George W. Bush.

US deaths in Iraq rise to 2025

Reuters reports:

Seven U.S. troops were killed in three roadside bombings near Baghdad, the military said on Monday, making October the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since January.[...]

That made October, which saw Iraqis vote for a constitution and put Saddam Hussein on trial, the worst month the Americans have suffered since January, when violence surged in advance of a parliamentary election.[...]

A week after the U.S. death toll since the 2003 invasion passed the 2,000 mark, it rose to at least 2,025 with the deaths of four soldiers in an attack on a patrol near Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad, and two in a similar incident near Balad, 60 km (40 miles) to the north of the capital.

It brought to 92 the number of Americans to die in October, the same as in August and the highest since 107 died in January.

Cheney replaces Scooter

From Josh Marshall:

The Vice President today appointed David S. Addington of Virginia to be the chief of staff to the Vice President. The Vice President also appointed John P. Hannah of the District of Columbia as the Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs.

Murray Waas beat them to the punch on Addington here.

Republican Hissy Fits and the Martha Stewart Defense

Tom Knapp on the Republican "Hissy" fit over Scooter Libby's indictment.

Also, Mark Kleiman is prescient here on why The Martha Stewart Comparison ("Look at Martha Stewart, for instance, where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime." - Kay Bailey Hutchison, "Lying to a grand jury is serious, if true. The rest is Martha Stewart stuff."...InstaGlenn)"is baloney. 

The sentiment has been expressed -- not just by the invariably-wrong Richard Cohen but by the usually-right Kevin Drum -- that only substantive charges such as espionage or an IIPA violation -- as opposed to perjury, false statements, obstruction, or conspiracy -- would constitute "real" charges worth of the Special Prosecutor's effort, and that ancillary charges in the Plame affair would represent undesirable prosecutorial overstretch.

That seems to me to elide two crucial distinctions. I'm not comfortable when someone who has not committed any actual crime but who is panicked by the investigative process into making a false statement about his or her own behavior -- Martha Stewart, for example -- is then prosecuted for that false statement. Yes, it's naughty to lie to the FBI, but I'm not sure people in that circumstance should face criminal sanctions for it. (As recently as 25 years ago, the Justice Department had a policy against proseucting what was called "a simple exculpatory 'no', " as opposed to making up a bunch of lies.)

On the other hand, sometimes a substantive crime cannot be proved precisely because the criminal managed to shred the evidence. In such cases, the prosecution on the ancillary charge substitutes for prosecution on the charge-in-chief. (That's often the case for people prosecuted for "recordkeeping violations": they failed to keep the records that would have proven their substantive offenses.)

That's a very different matter from prosecuting a factually innocent person, and I see nothing wrong with it.  More....

It would also be timely to review what actually happened in the Martha Stewart case and why it isn't analogous to the Scooter indictment. Butler Shaffer's article, Martha the Scapegoat, points out why we should oppose Martha's treatment at the hands of Federal prosecutors yet consider Scooter Libby's indictment as a corrupt system for once getting something right:

The scapegoating purposes of the Martha Stewart trial were apparently evident to at least some of the jurors. One of them stated, afterwards, that the verdict "sends a message to bigwigs in corporations they have to abide by the law." He added that the verdict "was a victory for the little guy who loses money in the market because of this kind of transaction." Considering that Martha was convicted only of obstruction of justice and lying to government investigators – and not for any illegal "transaction" – it appears that some of the jurors, at least, were responding to what they perceived as systemic problems within the business community, and not to any acts for which Martha was charged. It is not the role of juries in criminal cases to "send messages," but only to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. It would seem that, in the eyes of some of the jurors, Martha became a stand-in for the alleged sins of others.

The prosecuting attorney got caught up in this act of ritual sacrifice. "The victims in this case are the entire American public," he intoned. He then added: "when we first indicted this case, we said that it was all about lies," and "no matter who you are, if you’re Martha Stewart or Joe Q. Public, we’re going to go after you."

The prosecutor failed to note, of course, that those who tell more dangerous lies out of the White House, and those well-placed business interests who profit from the consequences of those lies, will remain untouched. That "the entire American public" has been victimized by government policies that have been "all about lies," will unlikely move this man to indict Mr. Bush and his cohorts. Martha will serve as a convenient scapegoat for the dishonesty and corruption of a political system that is to remain beyond criticism.

That Martha’s conviction serves to vindicate purposes irrelevant to the crimes with which she was charged is seen in the numerous attacks upon her personality following the verdict. I have heard people who should know better defend the jury’s decision on the grounds that Martha is "obnoxious," or "arrogant," or a "bitch." Such responses lend credence to the mistaken view of many feminists that this case was only about Martha as a woman. There are doubtless many people – women as well as men – whose personal sense of identity looks upon the proper role of women as inheritors, rather than generators, of great wealth, and to such persons Martha becomes a useful scapegoat.

I caution you not to hold your breath awaiting federal prosecutors bringing criminal charges against any of the big-time players who hang out on "Boardwalk" and "Park Place." It will be the denizens of "Baltic Avenue" who will be called upon to bear the sins of a disappointing system. "Take that, Martha Stewart! Take that, John Q. public! We have a ‘zero tolerance’ policy when it comes to the offenses of you ordinary people!" In the end, cases of this kind only reconfirm the centuries-old observation that:

The law locks up both man and woman
    Who steals the goose from off the common.
    But lets the greater felon loose
    Who steals the common from the goose.

At least this once the greater felon, one of the "big-time players" AND - we can hope - Mr. Bush and his cohorts just might get locked up. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

Friday Cat Blogging

What the hell:

This is my polydactyl cat. Polys are otherwise known as "Hemingway cats." No felines were harmed in the production of this post.  USB connections are, however, in constant danger.

Best Post-Indictment observation

Larry Johnson:

A careful reading of the indictment shows beyond a reasonable doubt that there was an organized effort in the White House to go after Joe and Valerie Wilson. At a minimum, Vice President Cheney was witting of this effort. Too bad these guys did not work as feverishly in tracking down Osama Bin Laden. They only had time to attack two American citizens who were serving their country.

Finally, Patrick Fitzgerald, what a class act!

Fitzgerald press conference - 2 PM

CNN just reported that Patrick Fitzgerald will hold a press conference at 2 PM Eastern time.

"Scooter's" indictment

UPDATE: USDOJ Office of Special Council Media Advisory

UPDATE: MSNBC reporting that at noon, there will be a release of documents.(via ReddHedd at firedoglake)

UPDATE: Bloomberg:  The Justice Department was scheduled to make an announcement ``regarding the status of the special counsel's criminal investigation'' at noon Washington time. Fitzgerald will hold a news conference at 2 p.m.

New Iraqi political alliance

This should make the next Iraqi elections interesting. You could almost call it an anti-Iranian, anti-occupation coalition. Undoubtedly the Americans will back the pro-Iranian Shiite slate.

More at Lenin's Tomb

Support the Troops! Give them fake intelligence.

More fake "documents" used to push Bush's war on Iraq, Newsweek reports:

The new report is only the latest chink in the armor of the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Last year, the September 11 Commission found there was no "collaborative" relationship between the Iraqi regime and Osama bin Laden; one high-level Al Qaeda commander—who had been cited by Powell as testifying to talks about chemical- and biological-warfare training—later recanted his claims. But the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case: in the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.)

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium.

via Laura Rozen

So, the CIA managed to keep the Niger forgeries out of Bush's Cincinatti speech of October 7, 2002 but the WHIGgers shoehorned this one in:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

Though the Saddam-Al Qaida connection is generally scoffed at now and considered about as reliable as the Niger uranium myth, at the time they were trying to scare the American people into a war, the Bushies desperately needed to prove this connection. As the number of American war dead passes 2,000 and the unknown tens of thousands of Iraqi dead continue to mount, consider the consequences of this series of lies. Consider the wasted efforts of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, and then the ISG, searching the sand dunes of Iraq for imaginary WMD. Consider the frustrations of being sent on a deadly dangerous task purely on the basis of fake, worthless "intelligence." As the Telegraph reported in April of 2004:

US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".

"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," the agent said.

"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."

The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The Bush administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the country's worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had links to al-Qa'eda.

However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq's Sunni minority.
[...]
Both President George W Bush and Tony Blair have, to varying degrees, conceded that intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme was misleading. But both continue to maintain that the continued violence since Saddam was ousted is because Iraq is now the front line in the war on terrorism.

Yet it now seems that the intelligence on which such claims are based is haphazard, scanty and contradictory

And now we know why. It was just more faked, cooked up propaganda, not "intelligence" at all. This is how the War Party "supports the troops."

Harriet Miers, WIP

Harriet Miers withdraws.  Wingnuts celebrate.  Question of the day - will she continue to blog?

OK, Tom - she was withdrawn without this part of your prediction materializing:

In next nominating Priscilla Owen, Janet Rogers Brown or some other reliably conservative jurist, Bush will have two defensible claims: That his conservative base demanded a real conservative, and that since Democrats rejected the non-ideologue he tried to appoint, they were looking for a fight ... so he might as well fight them for what he wants instead of for another compromise candidate.

The Democrats failed to oppose Miers at all and maybe Bush was afraid David Corn's idea would gain traction:

Here's an idea that I reserve the right to reject upon further reflection: Democrats in the Senate should vote "present" on the Miers nomination. It's not an aye, and it's not a nay. They could argue that they believe this is a sub-standard nomination that deserves no one's support but that they do not want to provide Bush the opportunity to satisfy those who are calling for a right-wing jurist who will decisively steer the court further in a conservative direction. Facing two awful options--both bad for the nation--Democrats can assert that they will be party neither to Bush's cronyism nor to Bork's crusade. Let the Republicans slug it out and bear responsibility for the consequences.

Oh, some cranky think-tankers and commentators will call this a cop-out, a dereliction of constitutional duty. But why validate--or be used by--either side in the Republicans civil war?

Wouldn't that have been an amusing spectacle?  Alas, we'll never know how it might have worked out.

Now what? 

Frog-March Watch

Dan Froomkin writes:

So, two suggestions for the folks staking out the courthouse:

 
1. Even if he seals everything, Fitzgerald would have to take any indictments returned by the grand jury to a judge today. And he would be accompanied by his grand jury foreperson. So keep an eye out for that.
 
2. Also keep an eye out for senior administration officials showing up at the courthouse very, very late at night.

Hrmmmm....

The federal prosecutor investigating the alleged involvement of White House officials in the leak of a CIA operative's identity spent most of the lunch hour today meeting with the chief judge of the federal district court in the nation's capital, Judge Thomas Hogan.

As reporters massed outside an elevator lobby leading to the grand jury rooms, the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, apparently slipped out a back exit to conduct the noontime meeting with Judge Hogan. Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment as he and a colleague emerged from the judge's chambers just before 1 p.m. JOSH GERSTEIN New York Sun

One down, one to go?

La Repubblica - UK Niger "intelligence" also from SISMI

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has translated part of today's La Repubblica piece:

La Repubblica has another story today on the role of Italian intelligence in feeding bogus evidence on Niger to Hadley and others in the US and elsewhere. There’s one key piece of new information. UK intelligence claimed to have evidence independent of the forged documents, which showed that Iraq had indeed been trying to obtain uranium in Niger. According to La Repubblica:   

This “evidence” has never been brought forward … “If it ever were brought forward,” said a source in Forte Braschi to la Repubblica, with a smile, “it would be discovered, with red faces, that it was Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980’s, and shared with our friend Hamilton McMillan.”

More analysis by Henry here.

Fitzgerald investigation news

UPDATE:  From Pat Lang:

An hour ago I was contacted by a U.S. government official close to the Fitzgerald case. This person told me that there WILL be indictments announced later this afternoon, and the Special Prosecutor will hold a press conference tomorrow.

Richard Sale

******************

I'm not sure exactly what the provenance of this Richard Sale (intelligence correspondent for UPI) article is, but it's posted by Pat Lang on his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis and referred to here by Larry Johnson and here by Patrick Doherty of Tom Paine.com.  Some highlights:

• Two top White House aides are expected to be indicted today on various charges related to the probe of CIA operative Valerie Plame whose classified identity was publicly breached in retaliation after her husband, Joe Wilson, challenged the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy enriched unranium from Niger, acording to federal law enforcement and senior U.S. intelligence officials.
  
  If no action is taken today, it will take place on Friday, these sources said.


• Although most press accounts emphasized that Fitzgerald was likely to concentrate on attempts by Libby Rove and others to cover-up wrongdoing by means of perjury before the grand jury, lying to federal officials, conspiring to obstruct justice, etc. But federal law enforcement officials told this reporter that Fitzgerald was likely to charge the people indicted with violating Joe Wilson's civil rights, smearing his name in an attempt to destroy his ability to earn a living in Washington as a consultant.
  
  The civil rights charge is said to include "the conspiracy was committed using U.S. government offices, buildings, personnel and funds," one federal law enforcement official said.


• The probe is far from being at an end. According to this reporter's sources, Fitzgerald approached the judge in charge of the case and asked that a new grand jury be empaneled. The old grand jury, which has been sitting for two years, will expire on October 28.


• Thanks to a letter of February, 2004 which Fitzgerald asked for and obtained expaneed authority, the Special Prosecutor is now in possession of an Italian parliament nvestigationi into the forged Niger documents alleging Iraq's interest in purchasing Niger uranium, sources said.
  
  They said that Fitzgerald is looking into such individuals as former CIA agent, Duane Claridge, military consultant to the Iraqi National Congress, Gen. Wayne Downing, another military consultant for INC, and Francis Brooke, head of INC's Washingfton office in an effort to determine if they played any role in the forgeriese or their dissiemination. Also included in this group is long-time neoconservative Michael Ledeen, these federal sources said.

La Repubblica on SISMI and Hadley

Laura Rozen has just posted a blockbuster article on the La Repubblica Niger forgery series:

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet, but the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

Go read!  For additional context, see this Gordon Prather article in AntiWar.com today.  From  Fixing and Forging :

In late 2001, the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service had informed the CIA that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican had reportedly attempted on a visit to Niger to arrange the purchase of yellowcake.

There was, at that time, no documentation.

In February 2002, Wilson and others went to Niger and reported back that the Italian report was without foundation.

Hence, in early October 2002, CIA Director Tenet asked that a reference to the alleged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq be removed from a speech President Bush was to give on Oct. 7.

Guess what happened next.

The "documentation" for the arranged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq from Niger was delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome on Oct. 9.

The next day, Congress approved the Joint Congressional Resolution Authorizing the Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq.

And Bush, Cheney, and Condi Rice began referring to the Niger documents as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstructing his nuclear weapons program.

The documents were provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency in March 2003, and within hours were determined to be forgeries.

Days later, Bush invaded Iraq.

UPDATE: Henry at Crooked Timber has done a translation of the actual La Repubblica article.

Blowing the cover off Top Secret Pajamas Media Foreign Correspondents

Oh, please!  Check this Pajamas Media profile out:

Mohammed and Omar, brothers and dentists in Baghdad, do not reveal their full names or faces because they write about their city and country, for a growing global audience, at personal risk to themselves.

Shh!  I'm going to let everyone in on a BIG SECRET!  Mohammed, Omar and Ali Fadhil full frontal campaign shot:

Click to enlarge

Latest Press Release...

Baghdad, IRAQ August 18th, 2004 -- Two popular Iraqi webloggers, Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil, today announced their candidacies for the Iraqi National Assembly.

The bloggers, who are brothers, have been writing their popular weblog www.IraqTheModel.com since November of 2003. Their weblog has been quoted in major world media, including the BBC,  USA Today, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Bulletin, Dallas Morning, and New York Post.

Jeez, how long are you people going to keep pretending these guys are undercover?  Enough already, Jarvis already beat this smelly horse carcass to a pulp and it wasn't even all that amusing then, even though he threw a phony hysterical shit-fit over the whole thing. 

Hey, PJ Media!  Sign up any advertisers yet?

Quoting The Editors - "This is going to end in tears.  Of laughter."

Is "discrediting Joe Wilson" a red herring?

The confirmation that Patrick Fitzgerald is indeed investigating the forged Niger uranium documents introduced to the Bush Administration through Italy, first broken by AntiWar.com's Justin Raimondo is now appearing in multiple "MSM" reports. On October 19, 2005, Justin wrote:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Among other major media outlets, UPI's Martin Walker reports:

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Still, Walker doesn't appear to have tumbled to the logical explanation of why Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame logically leads him to the Niger forgeries. Mark Kleiman is in the same boat. In speculating about the selection of documents Fitzgeral has posted on his new website, Kleiman writes:

On the other hand, his selection of documents does seem significant. As against the GOP spin that he was appointed to look into violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he has the original letter giving him "all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity" and a second letter written shortly thereafter specifying that his authority extends to any criminal attempt to frustrate that investigation.

But note that none of the documents on the site gives Fitzgerald any authority over the wider question of who made up and peddled the Nigerien yellowcake story, or the still wider question about how the administration hyped the threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons acquisition program as part of its sales pitch for the war.

Apparently Frank Rich suggested on Meet the Press today that the case might go in that direction. Ain't gonna happen. Surely if Fitzgerald were moving that way, he would have asked for authority to do so, and would have added that request and the response to it to his webpage.

There is an explanation for why Fitzgerald's existing authority covers the Niger forgeries, which Kleiman and Walker miss, which is explained in Justin Raimondo's column today:

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

Read the rest.

One of the most puzzling questions about the Plame-outing scheme has always been why? How stupid and petty is it to "discredit" Wilson with lame charges of nepotism and wife-sponsored boondoggles? A flat-out hit job on the CIA for getting too close to the Niger forgeries is far more in character for the Bushistas.

Oh, and that mysterious "third man?" My money is on Grover Norquist.

UPDATE: Well, isn't Jane Hamsher's post interesting?

Daniel Goetz: A soldier silenced

Via The Editors at The Poorman, this post at The Tattered Coat is a must read.

...Daniel has been silenced, against his will. And not only has he been silenced — he has been forced to publicly declare himself “a supporter of the administration and of her policies.”

A stop-lossed soldier angry that he is still serving in Iraq, seven months beyond his original enlistment agreement, Daniel is no longer free to post on his blog.

Read the entire thing, but here's a sample of Daniel Goetz's writing, from July 04, 2005:

S.O.S.

We - the forlorn Atlas, who bears the burden of lofty decisions - salute you, the free. May this day be a blessing to you and yours as you celebrate your freedom from the clutches of tyranny and strife. May your beer be as cold as the hearts of your enemies and your fireworks carry the zeal of your patriotism.

On this day, may you not be napalmed by an invading Army. May you not be tortured for a parking violation. Today, may your hometown not be bombed. When you sit down to eat tonight, may armed men not barge into your house and search your wife’s underwear drawer. May you not be zip-tied, marched outside, beaten and shot in the face.

God Save America.

God, save America.

Miller vs. Fitzgerald: Place your bets

Newsweek, in an article highlighting the animosity of many NY Times staffers to Stenographer to Power Judith Miller, ends the short piece with this intriguing little insight into Miller's reaction to her pariah status:

But Miller is, for now at least, standing firm. Late last week she told NEWSWEEK she had every intention of returning to work. She also did some digging of her own. "Are you hearing anything about Fitzgerald?" she asked, before quickly hanging up.

What an amusing spectacle. Judy - cornered, discredited, and widely detested even by her ostensible colleagues - has delusions of dishing dirt on Fitzgerald, despite the fact that she will almost certainly be a guest, once again, in his courtroom? The Bushista talking-point phrase "divorced from reality" springs to mind.

I wonder if Judy has considered that this first impulse of smearing adversaries, so typical of her and the Bush Administration crowd she hangs with, is what got them into this mess to begin with. Some people never learn.

Iraq: Not Getting Better

This poll result:

Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph.

Less than 1 percent of those polled believed that the forces were responsible for any improvement in security, according to poll figures.

Eighty-two percent of those polled said they were "strongly opposed" to the presence of the troops.

Might explain why scenes like this still occur in Iraq:

Four U.S. contractors for the U.S. military were killed in Iraq last month, the military said on Saturday, confirming an attack that a British newspaper said saw two of the men murdered in front of a jeering crowd.
[...]
The Telegraph, quoting a U.S. officer in the area who had spoken to soldiers involved, said the victims were American employees of Halliburton unit Kellog, Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq.

At least two of the men were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up, and forced to kneel in the road before being killed, it said.

"Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight," the newspaper report said.

"Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man's body to stoke the flames."

The Telegraph said U.S. soldiers escorting the convoy were unable to respond quickly because the hatches on their Humvees were closed.

The hatches on their Humvees were closed?  That's an odd thing to say, isn't it?  Were the soldiers locked in or what?

As if on cue, the New York Times has posted another story featuring death by fire:

The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city's main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again.

Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop.

Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die from a lookout post at a Marine encampment. His heart reached out to them, but he could not. In Ramadi, Iraq's most violent city, two blocks may as well be 10 miles.

"I couldn't do anything," he said of the incident, which he saw on Oct. 10. He spoke quietly, sitting in the post and looking straight ahead. "It's bad down there. You hear all the rumors. We didn't know it was going to be like this."

Here in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Sunni Arab insurgents are waging their fiercest war against American troops, attacking with relative impunity just blocks from Marine-controlled territory. Every day, the Americans fight to hold their turf in a war against an enemy who seems to be everywhere but is not often seen.

The cost has been high: in the last six weeks, 21 Americans have been killed here, far more than in any other city in Iraq and double the number of deaths in Baghdad, a city with a population 15 times as large.

Does this sound as if Iraq is getting any better?  Even before these stories were reported, Larry Johnson made the following astute observation:

The delusional happiness reflected in Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's remarks this week to Congress about the so-called progress in Iraq ignores hard facts that point to a debacle. The international media appears to be finally catching on that the Washington spin about the purple thumb as a sign of democratic progress is pure nonsense. It is true that more people in Iraq voted in this election than last January. What Rice and other folks out of touch with reality ignore is that the increased number of Sunnis who voted came out to defeat the constitution. Unfortunately, the fix was in. Vote fraud was rampant. U.S. TV crews caught one Shia on tape casting seven yes votes. That's sort of an old style American politics a la Chicago's Daley machine--you know, vote early, vote often. And, results are now, once again, being withheld to "investigate" the irregularities.

Here is a bold prediction: The Constitution will pass and Shia politicians will have a lock on the new Government of Iraq. Consequently, the civil war currently underway will escalate. As the Iraqi Army grows, comprised mostly of Shia and Kurds, attacks against Sunnis will also increase. And that will put the United States in an impossible situation. If we allow the Shia Army and militias to attack Sunni targets we will continue to be the target of Sunni insurgents. If we intervene to try to aid the Sunnis, the Shia's will turn on us. If you doubt that I would ask you to recall what happened in the Shia enclave, Sadr City, in April of 2004. That battle killed Casey Sheehan and left my cousin's son with a shattered leg.

End it.  Now.  Bring them home.

Karen Hughes' Magical Misery Tour

Dear US State Department,

Here's a suggestion for shutting Karen Hughes up:

Please bring her back to the US before she says any more offensive and stupid things.

U.S. envoy Karen Hughes on Friday defended Washington's decision to go to war against Iraq in front of a skeptical audience, saying Saddam Hussein had gassed to death "hundreds of thousands" of his own people. A State Department official later said she misspoke about the number.

Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, made the comment before a group of Indonesian students who repeatedly attacked her about Washington's original rationale for the war, Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were ever discovered.

"The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat," Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

"After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people," she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. "He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas."

Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam's decades-long rule — only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.

Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. Gordon Johndroe, a State Department official traveling with Hughes, later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.

The title of this post has been blatantly ripped off from Princess Sparkle Pony. 

Judy, Scooter, and the classified NIE

Jay Rosen at Press Think has a very interesting  post up about the New York Times' stonewall reluctance to comment on Judy Miller's various claims regarding her "security clearance."   I posted the following in Jay's comment thread:

One thing I didn't see covered in this post is the fact that in the June  July 8 meeeting with Libby, Miller was given information from the still-classified NIE document "Iraq's Continuing Programs For Weapons of Mass Destruction."  That document was partially declassified later and a redacted version released to the public. Judy:

As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.

An unclassified version of that estimate had been made public before my interviews with Mr. Libby. [Lie. Oops, "mistake."] I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I had pressed Mr. Libby to discuss additional information that was in the more detailed, classified version of the estimate. I said I had told Mr. Libby that if The Times was going to do an article, the newspaper needed more than a recap of the administration's weapons arguments. According to my interview notes, though, it appears that Mr. Libby said little more than that the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version.

In Miller's NY Times account, this information comers under the "Second Meeting with Libby" section, which occurred on July 8, 2003. The NIE referred to here was declassified on July 18, 2003.

Fitzgerald was clearly interested in whether or not Judy had seen the still-classified NIE:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn't think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.

All three of Judy's conversations with Libby occurred before the NIE was declassified.

Judy Miller's protected sources

In light of Ms. Run Amok's source-protecting stint in jail, this is an interesting anecdote from Franklin Foer's article on Judy Miller called The Source of the Trouble published in New York Magazine in June of 2004:

But when there is trouble, it appears she’s more than happy to pass around the responsibility. One incident that still rankles happened last April, when Miller co-bylined a story with Douglas Jehl on the WMD search that included a quote from Amy Smithson, an analyst formerly at the Henry L. Stimson Center. A day after it appeared, the Times learned that the quote was deeply problematic. To begin with, it had been supplied to Miller in an e-mail that began, “Briefly and on background”—a condition that Miller had flatly broken by naming her source. Miller committed a further offense by paraphrasing the quote and distorting Smithson’s analysis. One person who viewed the e-mail says that it attributed views to Smithson that she clearly didn’t hold. An embarrassing correction ensued. And while the offense had been entirely Miller’s, there was nothing in the correction indicating Jehl’s innocence.

Having been summoned to testify before the grand jury, I went to jail instead, to protect my source - Mr. Libby - because he had not communicated to me his personal and voluntary permission to speak....Judith Miller, NY Times, October 16, 2005

Judy Miller: WHIG charter member?

Holy cow, who's leaking to the Daily News today?  Here's another shocker they just broke:

It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.

So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.

One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.

The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.

Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.

"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.

"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.

"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

The wheels are coming off the Bush war bus.

Cast fails to show for show trial

What if they have a trial and no witnesses come?

THE chief judge trying Saddam Hussein and seven others on charges of crimes against humanity said today the main reason why the trial has been adjourned was because many witnesses were too afraid to turn up.

Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin said about 30 or 40 witnesses had not come to Baghdad for the trial, which took place in a heavily defended building inside Baghdad's fortress-like Green Zone compound.

"The main reason is the witnesses did not show up," Judge Amin said. "They were too scared to be public witnesses. We're going to work on this issue for the next sessions."

The trial has been adjourned until November 28.

It's kind of takes the show out of your show trial when you hold it in the middle of a war zone occupied by foreign troops.

And Saddam studied up his dialogue and everything!

The "Afghanistan Model" for success

The "Afghanistan Model" for success

Condoleeza Rice is telling Congress today that the Bush strategy for Iraq is the "successful" one they used in Afghanistan.

Here's Condi:

"Our strategy is to clear, hold, and build," she said. "The enemy's strategy is to infect, terrorize, and pull down."

I couldn't find a mention anywhere that indicated what the end to this was supposed to be. However, shooting for the Afghanistan benchmark is probably a good idea, as the two countries have some clear similarities already.

 

Afghanistan Election Pop Quiz

Who won the elections in Afghanistan last month?

A)  Jeffersonian democrats

B)  Drug Smugglers

C)  Warlords

D)  B and C

Answer

The Rovian School vs. the Scooterian School of leakage

The thread in the WH deceit and corruption tapestry leading under Scooter Libby's office door got a nice yank as revealed by the Guardian:

Information attributed to Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff in New York Times reporter Judith Miller's interview notes is incorrect, offering prosecutors a potential lead to tracking the bad information to its original source.

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.

The three all spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the current secrecy requirements of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the leak of Plame's identity in 2003 to the media.

Ms. Run Amok may yet have other opportunities to contribute to Fitzgerald's WH roast, but her notes clearly nailed Scooter.

At that breakfast meeting, our conversation also turned to Wilson's wife. My notes contain a phrase inside parentheses: "Wife works at Winpac." Fitzgerald asked what that meant. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the CIA that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons.

I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation. But I told the grand jury that I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Wilson's wife worked for Winpac. In fact, I told the grand jury that when Libby indicated that Plame worked for Winpac, I assumed that she worked as an analyst, not as an undercover operative.

Fitzgerald asked me whether Libby had mentioned nepotism. I said no. And as I told the grand jury, I did not recall - and my interview notes do not show - that Libby suggested that Plame had helped arrange her husband's trip to Niger. My notes do suggest that our conversation about Plame was brief.

Now, I just happened to be reviewing a certain interview done by everyone's favorite wingnut reporter, Jeff James Gannon Guckert today, and it's worth reviewing for Joseph Wilson's own theory about the "two waves" of the leaks from the White house:

TN: Regarding the revelation of your wife as a CIA operative, do you think Karl Rove was behind the leak?

Wilson: Scott McClellan has admitted that Karl Rove spoke about it to the press after the leak took place. Now the only thing that we're disputing now with these guys is whether or not he used the term "fair game" or not. Now my contemporaneous notes from a journalist who called me say that that is precisely the term he used. My credibility, my batting average with this administration on truthfulness is about 3 for 3 so far.

TN: But the question again: Is Karl Rove the leaker?

Wilson: I don't know the name of the leaker. I will say this: the CIA is an executive branch agency that reports to the President of the United States. The act of leaking the name of a national security asset to the press was a political act. There is a political office that is attached to the office of the President of the United States. That office is headed by Karl Rove.

It is a useful place to start asking questions. Now, nobody has told me the name of the leaker or who authorized the leak. I did not know until I saw the Washington Post article that there were apparently two waves. There was the wave of the leak, two by six, two leakers to six journalists. And then there was a subsequent wave when Karl Rove and perhaps the communications office were pushing the story.

TN: Novak says it wasn't the White House.

Wilson: Well I don't care. Novak has changed his story so much that it's hard for me to understand what he is talking about. He also says that he isn't one of the six, but that issue is somewhere between Novak and the Washington Post and the person who leaked. I can tell you only that Novak called me before he wrote his story asking for a confirmation, and he confirmed to me after he wrote the story that there were two senior administration officials who provided the information to him. And I can tell in the week after his story appeared, I was getting calls from reputable members of the press saying that the White House was pushing the story.

TN: Including?

Wilson:Including my favorite, a respected journalist calling me up, and saying, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, he tells me your wife is fair game."

TN: Any names attached to these journalists?

Wilson: Well the only one that I have actually used is Andrea Mitchell and that was in the second wave. The other two, one was a producer, and I had not used his name before, and I will not use it now. The third one is a fellow who me he was going to prepare to confirm it but he then sort of went back on that, so I keep his name private as well.

TN: Is that the basis for the "frog-march" remarks?

Wilson: Well the "frog-march" remark, the basis for that of course is the telephone call saying that "your wife is fair game." Absolutely.

TN: What do you think he meant by "fair game"?

Wilson: That it was okay to go ahead and drag my wife out into the public square and administer a beating, to "slime" her as they say, or use her to in somehow discredit me.

TN: What was the "sliming" part of it?

Wilson: I don't know.

TN: The fact that she got you the job?

Wilson: I don't know.

TN: That to me is the "Washington way."

Wilson: Well that is certainly what they are trying to say, that some nepotism was involved, which of course is not the case. You will have to ask them why they decided that they would "out" the name of a national security asset.

TN: Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the New York Times recently that the CIA believes that Aldrich Ames may have betrayed your wife to the Russians prior to his arrest in 1994. That would make her not an undercover operative for the CIA in effect.

Wilson: I don't know where Kristoff got that. I think that there is a fair amount of material in the public record to suggest that there is a lot of concern that Mr. Ames betrayed a number of American operatives during his spying.

TN: Including your wife?

Wilson: I don't know about that. I can't tell you anything about that.

TN: But if that is in fact true, then the leak is not necessarily a leak.

Wilson: Let me put it to you this way, I don't believe that the CIA would refer this to the Justice Department frivolously, if they thought it was a frivolous matter or if it was not a leak that might be a violation of the Intelligence Agents Identification Act.

TN: There are some who are skeptical that the CIA is fully on board with our actions in Iraq.

Wilson: Well, the CIA is not a policy organization, the CIA is paid to provide the best intelligence information it can.

TN: So you don't believe the CIA has an agenda that's different from that of the White House?

Wilson: Well in the particular piece of this that I own, the trip to Niger, the CIA produced my report, but there were two other reports produced that said that "Gee this story of uranium going to Iraq is just bogus." Subsequent to that we now know this particular "16 words" were the subject of a number of telephone conversations and a couple of memoranda that somehow were lost in the system or forgotten about. But the two uncontested facts in this matter are the following: The 16 words in the State of the Union did not rise to inclusion in the State of the Union, that's the White House's statement. Had my report or the other two reports been accepted instead of this information that was based as we know on forgeries and even at the time didn't pass the smell test for an Italian weekly tabloid, then the President would not have found himself in this predicament. That is not a CIA betrayal of the political system, that is if anything a political betrayal of the intelligence assessment process.

And the second uncontested fact is that a national security asset's name was leaked to the American public in what may have been a crime but certainly is considered to be of sufficient concern to the CIA that they referred the matter to the Justice Department. Now in neither of those it seems to me do you have nefarious CIA involvement unless you are prepared to make the argument that the CIA would have "outed" one of its own, which seems to me to be highly, highly unlikely.

TN: From your perspective, your wife indeed was a covert operative at the time of the disclosure of her name to Robert Novak?

Wilson: It's not really from my perspective and remember this is not a crime that has been committed against my wife or against me. If there was a crime, it was committed against our country. The CIA has referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation, I don't believe that's a frivolous referral.

TN: If it's determined that in fact there was no leak, that no crime was committed, are you prepared to take back some of the things you've said?

Wilson: Well, actually what I have said is that I would support the investigation, and the investigation will turn up what the investigation turns up. And if there is anything to take back in all of this, it would only be the handcuffs part of the frog-marching out of the White House. Because irrespective of whether or not the Justice Department determines that there was a crime committed and there is prosecution of that crime, even in this bare-knuckles town of Washington, it is below the belt of politics to drag a family member out into the public square to administer a beating because you find yourself unable to adequately discredit her husband who is your adversary in this particular matter.

TN: So you don't blame Rove for the leak, you blame him for pushing the story and dragging your wife into the public square?

Wilson: It's not so much that I blame him, it's that my information which I have no reason to disbelieve and every reason to believe, particularly since Mr. Rove has now acknowledged through Mr. McClellan that he in fact did talk about my wife to members of the press, that the White House actually pushed this story.

TN: I don't recall him saying that.

Wilson: I think if you go back and take a look at something Mr. McClellan said last week or the week before, you'll find that. I think there was a statement that he acknowledged that he did speak about it to somebody. That's what I've seen anyway. Notwithstanding that, after all, this President set a certain standard when he was a candidate that he was going to come to Washington to restore the dignity and honor to the White House, he also said he was going to come to Washington and change the tone. Now is that what he meant, that the family members of people who point out the truth are subject to being slimed, to being dragged out into the public square, to being outed? I doubt it, frankly I think that is probably not what he had in mind but I'd certainly like to see a little more suggestion of that from him.

TN: You don't suggest the President had any involvement in this?

Wilson: On the contrary, I have said repeatedly that I don't think for a moment that the President of the United States would be doing that sort of behavior. Moreover I have also said that I don't believe that for a moment that the White House would have seen fit to do to my wife what they have done simply because I contributed $2,000 to a campaign that wasn't their own.

TN: How about the Vice President?

Wilson: As for the Vice President, I reserve comment.

Judy: My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003.  There's Judy distinguishing herself as a Scooterian.

Remember that in her grand jury testimony account  Judy was asked about "nepotism." I think it's clear that Wilson's "two by six" theory describes leaks that have distinct characteristics. Rove's leak effort concentrated on pushing the nepotism angle while Libby's contained the "wife works for WINPAC" theme. Gannon-Guckert is of the Rovian leak branch, and Judy is of the Scooterian school.  In fact, the Mysterious Six are all Rovians, which is why Judy wasn't lying when she denied being one of them.

But keep this in mind:

Joseph Wilson:   Now, nobody has told me the name of the leaker or who authorized the leak. I did not know until I saw the Washington Post article that there were apparently two waves. There was the wave of the leak, two by six, two leakers to six journalists. And then there was a subsequent wave when Karl Rove and perhaps the communications office were pushing the story.

I think Wilson doesn't quite have the waves sorted out here.  There were actually two sources of the original smear effort - Rove and Libby.  The Six were Rove targets.  The smears are distinct enough for Fitzgerald to trace. 

And where did Jeffy of Talon News and the White House Press Corps get it?  He wasn't one of The Six, and he wasn't a Scooterian.  He's singing the Rove theme song, though.  Who was in the second wave?  The Third Man?

INFO: Guckert/Wilson interview Part I, Part II, Part III.  The above quoted segment of the interview is from Part III.  The infamous question, "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?" which revealed that Gannon/Guckert knew about the INR memo is from Part I.

THIS indicates that Novak was also a Scooterian. (October 5, 2003, interview on NBC's Meet the Press)

NOVAK: So in interviewing a senior administration official on a number of other subjects, I asked him if he could explain why [Wilson was chosen for the mission], and he said, "Well, his wife works in the counterproliferation section at the CIA" and that she suggested his mission. And it was given to me as an offhand manner and by a person who is, as I wrote in the column, not a partisan gunslinger by any means.

[...]

I know when somebody's trying to plant a story. This thing -- this came up almost offhandedly in the course of a very long conversation with a senior official about many things, many things, including ambassador Wilson's report.

 

Headline of the Day

The Harriet Miers Do-Over

The count was fair and accurate!!!!

Iraqi election officials said today that they were investigating what they described as "unusually high" vote totals in 12 Shiite and Kurdish provinces, where as many 99 percent of the voters were reported to have cast ballots in favor of Iraq's new constitution, raising the possibility that the results of Saturday's referendum could be called into question.

***********************
Saddam 'wins 100% of vote'

There were 11,445,638 eligible voters - and every one of them voted for the president, according to Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council.

The government insists the count was fair and accurate.

Iraqi Vote - Worst Possible Outcome

The consensus today seems to be that, "In the crucial central provinces with mixed ethnic and religious populations, enough Shiites and Kurds voted to stymie the Sunni bid to reject the constitution."

According to the AP report,

The Sunni ''no'' campaign appeared to have made the two-thirds threshold in Anbar province, the vast western Sunni heartland where Ramadi is the capital, and in Salahuddin, where Sunnis hold a large majority and as many as 90 percent of voters cast ballots. But in two other provinces where Sunni Arabs have only slim majorities -- Ninevah and Diyala -- the ''yes'' vote apparently won out.

Sunni leaders responded angrily, some of them saying they suspected fraud and accusing American officials and the Shiite parties that dominate the government.

As Chris Albritton pointed out in a passage I quoted yesterday,

The absolute worst-case scenario is if the Sunnis come close to defeating the constitution, but fail. There will be accusations of vote-rigging and any political momentum the Sunnis felt was moving their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have consolidated their power and those Sunnis on the fence might be moved into active opposition. The insurgency might even worsen, if such things are possible, or a close vote might be the trigger for open civil war.
[...]
I do think that defeating the constitution might be best in the long run. It will embolden the Sunnis and give them a political win, motivating them to further involve themselves in the political process. This will force the Shi’ites and Kurds to deal with real elected representatives instead of appointed ones. Will this spell and end to violence? Of course not, but anything that allows the Sunnis to claim victory instead of forcing them to eat political table scraps is a big step in ending the Sunni-led insurgency.

Of course, as so often is the case in Iraq, the worst case scenario was the most likely scenario. John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim report in the Washington Post today:   

But it was unclear whether Sunnis would stay engaged in the political process if they thought it was stacked against them or perceived that they lost the referendum by fraud. Months of negotiations to win broad support from Iraq's three main communities largely failed, as demonstrated by the Sunnis' overwhelming rejection of the charter. In a sign of how deep and hard divisions ran, the no vote was as high as 90 percent in some Sunni communities, while some Shiites approved the charter by a similar figure, local officials said.
[...]
As early tallies from the constitutional referendum emerged Sunday, some Sunni leaders cried foul, saying their field surveys showed that they had in fact crossed the threshold for defeating the proposal. They charged that the U.S.-backed government, a coalition of Shiite and Kurdish parties whose leaders dominated the drafting of the constitution, was stealing the election.
[...]
"I believe they will rig the results and announce the success of the referendum, but our monitors reported to us that more than 80 percent of the voters in three governorates have said no to this draft," Saleh Mutlaq, a spokesman for the Sunnis' National Dialogue Council, told reporters at a news conference; Iraq's provinces are formally called governorates. "This constitution is a menace to the unity and stability of Iraq, and we shall have no legal or legitimate means in order to defeat it." (emphasis added)

That the perception of complete Sunni political marginalization is correct was underscored by statements made by triumphalist Shiite politicians like this one:

Shiite leaders said the Sunni Muslims wouldn't win enough seats in the next Assembly to make major changes to the document next year. The document will remain largely the same when voted on again.

"The changes made (this week) on the permanent constitution were not very radical," said Saad Jawad Khandeel of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite political party. "Changes are normal, but I do not expect big changes" next year.

Those perpetual "bullets into ballots" cheerleaders of Bush's "democracy spreading" agenda crowing about how the Sunni vote shows that they've been drawn into the "political process" in Iraq by the constitutional bait, might do well to consider that the Sunni hope of having a voice in Iraqi politics has just been crushed. How they react to this proof of their subjection is yet to be seen.

UPDATE:  Chris crunches the numbers being reported from Ninevah province and comes up with some very odd results.

Massive Iraqi Sunni vote, 5 US soldiers killed on "peaceful day"