NY Times Editors Go Insane

The Valerie Plame case has claimed another victim - the editors of the NY Times have lost their minds.

Their latest editorial calls on Special Counsel Fitzgerald to put or or shut up [in a "WHILE THE TIMES PASSES THE TIME" update, we exhort the Times to do the same]:

Last week, it was reported that Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, was the first to mention Valerie Wilson to Mr. Novak, and that the federal prosecutor knew this more than two and a half years ago.     The revelation tells us something important. But, unfortunately, it is not the answer to the central question in the investigation — whether there was an organized attempt by the White House to use Mrs. Wilson to discredit or punish her husband, Joseph Wilson.

...

Mr. Armitage, a White House outsider, would be an odd participant in such a plot. He is said to have learned from a State Department memo that Mrs. Wilson had recommended sending her husband to check the Niger story since he had worked there as a diplomat. The memo was prepared for Mr. Cheney, who was eager to prove that there was an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and to silence critics.

It’s conceivable that Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, has evidence that suggests the information in the memo was used in some illegal manner. Or his investigators may have learned something troubling about the second, unknown, source cited in Mr. Novak’s column, or about some other illegal activity. But whatever it is needs to be made public. The Armitage story is mainly a reminder that this investigation has gone on too long.

...It’s time for Mr. Fitzgerald to provide answers or admit that this investigation has run its course.

Oh, stop - Labor Day officially kicked off the fall election season so now the Times wants Fitzgerald to hand a gift to one party or the other?  Why couldn't they have written this editorial in mid-June following the All-Clear For Karl announcement?  It is not as if the Armitage story is driving this, since, as the Times noted, "In recent months... Mr. Armitage’s role had become clear to many".

Look, if Fitzgerald is about to indict someone, fine, bring it on  (pigs may fly, IMHO).  But does the Times really expect him to send out a press release saying "I am ever-so-close to some Really Big Indictments, but I'm Not Quite There"?  Republicans would howl, and rightly so.

Or should the Special Counsel stage an "ally-ally-in-come free" press conference sometime soon?  Dems will wonder why that couldn't have waited until after the election; some will wonder why Fitzgerald could not have been a bit more forthcoming in the fall of 2004, when news that Libby and Rove were under the microscope might have swung the election.

Well.  The Times has certainly handed the Bush Administration a gift.  With the NY Times providing cover, shouldn't AG Gonzalez ask Fitzgerald for an update on his status and plans?  The Public Wants To Know!

And if the prognosis is grim for Cheney et al (it's not), then the Attorney general can exhort Fitzgerald to carry on and maintain his no-leak procedures.

But if the news is good for the Administration, will the Times object to a well-informed highly placed source passing that news along?  How could they?

This editorial is absurd - the Times will just have to wait with the rest of us for this investigation to fizzle out under its own lack of evidence.

BUT WHILE WE WAIT:  Doug Johnston of the Times thought it was over in June:

The decision to decline a prosecution in Mr. Rove's case effectively ends the active investigative phase of Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry because Mr. Rove was the only person known to still be under active scrutiny.

The WaPo provided a source for that same conclusion:

With Rove's situation resolved, the broader leak investigation is probably over, according to a source briefed on the status of the case. Fitzgerald does not appear to be pursuing criminal charges against former State Department official Richard L. Armitage, who is believed to have discussed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame with at least one reporter, according to the source.

"I'm not worried about my situation," Armitage said last night on the Charlie Rose television show.

A source briefed on the case said that the activities of Vice President Cheney and his aides were a key focus of the investigation, and that Cheney was not considered a target or primary subject of the investigation and is not likely to become one. There are no other outstanding issues to be investigated, the source said, though new ones could emerge as Fitzgerald continues to prosecute I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, on charges of lying to investigators and a grand jury.

The deeply committed still hold out hope that Libby will strike a deal to rat out Cheney before Bush delivers a pardon; for the rest of us, this is a Dead Case Walking.

ERRATA:  Here are some confidence-undermining points leaving one to wonder if the Times has followed this case:

It’s conceivable that Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, has evidence that suggests the information in the memo was used in some illegal manner. Or his investigators may have learned something troubling about the second, unknown, source cited in Mr. Novak’s column, or about some other illegal activity.

The "second, unknown source"?  Are they talking about Karl Rove, who has been identified in court filings and by Bob Novak himself? I am at sea - all we know about Armitage is that several reporters have sources saying he was the leaker; neither Armitage nor Novak has confirmed that.  On the other hand, Novak has identified Rove.  So don't we "know" Rove is involved?

A second annoying bit of text is here:

A former diplomat, Mr. Wilson debunked the claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons.

Well, he debunked the claim that Saddam had succeeded in buying uranium from Niger.  As to the attempt, Christopher Hitchens has been pounding the table about the 1999 trip to Niger by Saddam's nuclear ambassador.

Finally, the Times is factually challenged here (emphasis added):

Mr. Armitage, a White House outsider, would be an odd participant in such a plot. He is said to have learned from a State Department memo that Mrs. Wilson had recommended sending her husband to check the Niger story since he had worked there as a diplomat. The memo was prepared for Mr. Cheney, who was eager to prove that there was an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and to silence critics.

No, the memo was prepared at the request of Marc Grossman of State in response to questions from Libby (and by extension, Cheney); Mr. Grossman wanted a review of the State Department and INR role in the Wilson trip and the Niger-uranium reporting.  As best I know, neither Cheney nor Libby ever saw the memo, although Libby had a meeting with Grossman during which he was orally advised of its contents.

WHILE THE TIMES PASSES THE TIME:  While the Times waits for an accounting from Special Counsel Fitzgerald, perhaps they could deliver a bit of an accounting themselves:

(1) How did the Times fail to disclose, as part of the July 6 Wilson op-ed, that Wilson was working for the Kerry campaign and had changed the "debunked the forgery" story reported by Nick Kristof? Wouldn't that have been valuable to readers attempting to assess his credibility?

2. In all their fulminating about investigating the leak, did the Times ever grill Nick Kristof as to whether Wilson or his wife spilled the beans to Nick?  They all had breakfast together while Joe told his story, so this is not exactly a longshot.

And since we are talking about both a criminal and civil suit, doesn't the public have a right to a bit of a hint as to just how deep the BS is running here? (Aside - Yes, this strikes to the soul of the Times' "Protect our sources" religion, but I'll ask anyway)

3. Why did Times editors lie about just what it was Judy Miller was protecting when she went to jail?  Here is Bill Keller:

TERENCE SMITH: Now, the prosecutor made the point in court that not only does he know the identity of Judy Miller's source, that he -- that the source has signed a waiver of confidentiality, in which case, what is Judy Miller defending?

BILL KELLER: I don't know whether the special prosecutor knows the identity of her source. I do know this: that Judy Miller made an absolute pledge to her source that she would not reveal his name or the substance of their conversation, and to this point, she has received no waiver or release that she regards as freely given anyway from that source.

Fitzgerald had delivered a subpoena ordering Ms. Miller to describe her contacts with one person, I. Lewis Libby; Times management had reviewed the case with Ms. Miller and her attorneys.  Even if they had not been apprised of his name, surely they understood that there was a name, and just one - the WaPo understood, as did their readers.

Now, when she testified Ms. Miller certainly gave the impression that she had discussed Ms. Plame with more people than just Libby, so she may have been in jail to protect them (that was my Official Editorial Speculation last summer, anyway).  But that is hardly what Bill Keller is discussing here.

Comments

[Neo]

I see that the DNC has swung into action on the "path to 9/11" thing.

Meanwhile, the DUers are planing to flood Technorati with their spin in the hours and days after the mini-series.

So far the only plan missing is to have Michael Moore's masterpiece on 9/11 shown on ABC before and after.

I wonder if there will be physicitrist available after the showing (ala "The Day After") to aid those who can't handle it ? If they include Moore, many will need one.

[Other Tom]

Check out Byron York today on the gutless behavior of Armitage. http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/ByronYork/090706.html

[clarice]

SBW, I love that book jacket stuff..Can we have a blonde in a ripped bodice drawing on the front? (Something very film noirish would work for me.)

[Verner]

OK, Just read the "Pone" at the Nation. Here's my take, for what it's worth.

Corny and Issy were aiming for a Pulitzer level October surprise and ended up with an August Fizzle. (Hint--notice any headlines screaming "SHE WAS COVERT! No, me either) Let me translate the Cornspeak to show why :

DC "Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been."

V: Note the "may have" here. And Rohn was not under oath now, was he? Sounds like an attempt on Rohn's part to keep from being "cut an shunned" by the right people to me.

DC: "Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA's frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA. "

V:Kind of sketchy here David. Why was she pulled from the field? Couldn't you give us a sentence or two about that?

DC:"In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.)"

V:And she blew her cover to a married man during a third date sex session.

DC: "She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter."

V:Yep. And considering Joe's Middle East connections, a much bettter choice for the family business.

DC:"Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch."

V:Quite a jump here David. And the CPD's Iraq branch was "modest" grace a Bill Clinton, who like the monkey, didn't want to see any evil. And what was Val doing then? She'd just gotten back from the PPD leave.

DC:" But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group."

V:Let's see now, Saddam, the guy guy who gassed the Kurds and had thousands of chemical shells and a documented under seal nuke program and had kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998-and the Bush administration is going to grow the CPD's modest program to 50. That's not a good thing? Oh, I forgot, we're trying to prove that the goal was to invbade Iraq "before" 911.

DC:"There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked."

V:So let me get this straight. Val's group was going to Dearborn and looking up the long lost cousins of Saddam's WMD people, in hopes that they would go home and get the goods on his programs. Yeah, that's the ticket! As if, the minute those people hit the tarmak in Baghdad, they wouldn't have had half of Saddam's security force on their tails. By the way, how about that Mahdi Obeidi! Wonder if they knew about the centrifuge buried under his orange tree! Sorry, this sounds like a rather backwater effort to me--kind of proves the point that Val was nothing more than a lower mid level manager with a big job title.

DC:"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock."

V:Yeah, mainly because a) you had Clinton as Commander in Chief for 8 years and he could have cared less, and b) you had nitwits like Valerie in positions of authority. Can't blame Bush for that.

DC:"Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)"

V:OK, so she was working WITH Jordanian intelligence, which means that they knew who she was. Not exactly NOC, huh. Oops, there goes the covert mess!

DC:"The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs."

V:Did they check with the Iraqi scientists in Libya? No, thought not. Say it again--AQ Kahn!

DC:"Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons?"

V:Saddam played them like a fox! Val and the CIA bumblers were convinced that papa Saddam had hidden the Christmas presents in the attic, and didn't have the skill and brainpower to find out that he had given them to the neighbor for safe keeping in case the kiddies went snooping! By the way, where did all those chemical and biological shells go? Did they evaporate into thin air?

DC:"Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.) "

V:Only because they were looking in the wrong places David. My only question is, was it a result of incompetence, or was it intentional?

DC:"When the war started in March 2003, JTFI officers were disappointed. "I felt like we ran out of time," one CIA officer recalled. "The war came so suddenly. We didn't have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs.... How do you know it's a dry well? That Saddam was constrained. Given more time, we could have worked through the issue.... From 9/11 to the war--eighteen months--that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question."

V:Hey, don't feel too bad. Every intelligence agency in the world thought he had them too--how soon we forget what we don't want to remember! As for eighteen months, do we think that Saddam was sitting on his hands all that time? Sheesh!

DC:"When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator--to rise up a notch or two--and then return to secret operations. But with her cover blown, she could never be undercover again. Moreover, she would now be pulled into the partisan warfare of Washington. As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty."

V:This whole paragraph is horseshit. She had not been NOC since 1997, and there was no way that she would ever be able to go back. And David gives it away when he saiys "go back to secret operations" as in, when all this happened, she was NOT in secret operations.

DC:Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to "discredit, punish and seek revenge against" the Wilsons. She is also writing a memoir. Her next battle may be with the agency--over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.

V:Well David, you sure have spilled a lot of beans! But then, you didn't have to get anything vetted by the agency, now did you?

[cathyf]

-- Larwyn: Italiacto!

Shouldn't that be

-- Larwyn: Italiacto!

Brilliant, sbw!

[clarice]

Mr. Snitch, I'm afraid I'm too busy to start the petition, but anyone who wants to use the substance of my letter as the basis for one has my permission to do so.

[Steve Thill]

News Alert: once again- people die in alphabetical order today in the paper.

[Dwilkers]

....(DWILKERS and Herbie, where are you?) ...

/wave TSK9

Been around. Haven't had that much to say I guess. Dave and I have more or less been thinking about how dumb humans are, that we spent so much time on this stupid Plame thing when we could have had a nice plate full of enchilladas and a frozen Margarita.

About the only thing that's changed around here is Dave doesn't feel sorry for Our Gal Val like he used to. Used to be Dave kinda thought poor Val was just another of Joe's victims, but since they came out with the lawsuit he's trying to figure out a new angle on what those people have been up to.

Really, I can't comment because almost any spot I started in would turn into a rant at this point. Don't get me started on what this all means about Powell and Armitage. Or what is says about Bush that he let all this go on in his own State and CIA, etcetera.

[Jane]

York gives us a few more names for our list:

Frank Lautenberg, Doug Hattaway, Al Gore, James Comey, Ashcroft

[HerbieWilkers]

Oh, sorry. That was actually me. Sometimes I forget to change the monikor when I'm using Dave's confuser.

[sad]

testing

[no one of consequence]

[REDACTED] twisted the intelligence to justify the invasion of [REDACTED], which the [REDACTED] had been planning long before [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] was simply and excuse to execute this plan and has been a diversion from the real war on terror. [REDACTED] never had anything to do with [REDACTED] and it is simply unconscionable that real culprit behind [REDACTED], [REDACTED] has not been brought to justice.

[REDACTED] lied and [REDACTED] [REDACTED].

The Bushies / Iraq / neocon cabal / 9/11 / 9/11 / Iraq / al Qaeda / 9/11 / Osama bin Laden

Bush / people / died

--OR--

The left and partisan media outlets / the White House / Democrats / Plame was outed / The Plame kerfuffle / A White House conspiracy to out Valerie Plame to punish the Wilsons / the truth / the Plame kerfuffle / Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson / the media / went along for the ride

[boris]

Clinton/Monica/horndog/the cigar arrived

Closing the office door/

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy/BJ's problems

the Impeachment/BJ himself

BJ/people/finally saw him for what he really was.

[JM Hanes]

Herbie:

"Dave's confuser" LOL! You've been missed (Dave too).

[JM Hanes]

sbw:

Book/Blurbs: You are sooo hired!

[sbw]

Clarice: Can we have a blonde in a ripped bodice drawing on the front? (Something very film noirish would work for me.)

Sure, sugar. ::as he sneered through a pall of smoke from his Lucky Strike.::

[noah]

Watching CBS news for the first time in many years solely because Rush will be on in a pre-recorded segment. Armitage goes public with nothing new but the voice-over and Katie repeat the unproven....that Valerie was "undercover".

[Verner]

Noah: This from Armitage's interview:

Armitage adds that while the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified.

"I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government," he says.

He adds that he thinks he referred to Wilson's wife as such, or possibly as "Mrs. Wilson." He never referred to her as Valerie Plame, he adds.

"I didn't know the woman's name was Plame. I didn't know she was an operative," he says."

Add to that what Novak said about his conversation with Harlow--no indication that she was "covered", just that they would rather that he not print her name etc.

While Val may have been working on a classified program, her "transition" from NOC appears to be for all purposes complete,(and even Corn admits that she was headed that way) so she would not have been covered under the law. Her job was "classified" just like hundreds of other analysts and managers in the building.

And since Fitz has finally given him the OK to talk, I'd say he's done.

Now all he has to do is drop charges against Libby.

And speaking of Libby, how will Wells use the new Classified info that Corn has leaked? If the jury can read it in a book, why should Walton keep it from Libby's team?

[clarice]

I can't imagine hos they can continue to keep his name out of the case now that Armitage has publicly admitted this. Moreover, given all the circumstances, I think if he takes the stand, Libby should be allowed to explore that Fitz evidently didn't, all the other reporters he spoke to during that time and whether he is positive he told no one else.

[verner]

Not only Armitage Clarice, but a whole lot of other stuff, like that referral letter.

It is insane that the Wilsons, who Fitz did not even dipose under oath, are now allowed to leak what they feel is beneficial to their case through their mouthpiece Corn, and the rest of us are denied the whole truth.

I also guess Novak was right. He did get her name out of Who's Who!

[MayBee]

This is how easy it could have been.

The popular Armitage could have gone to Katie Couric 3 years ago and apologized. It would have been over-- as extraneous pointed out-- as fast as Sandy Berger's pants.

[clarice]

Tradesports now figures that the chances of a conviction on even one count is less than one in three. Time to pull the plug if Fitz doesn't.

[verner]

Oh yeah MayBee. And the stuff about "I hurt the president" was just precious.

And it's all Fitz's fault for not letting him talk!

[sad]

***And the stuff about "I hurt the president" was just precious.***

With three years to rehearse and prepare it just seems there might have been more "flair."

[cnj]

Would there have been an investigation had
Novak referred Valerie Plame as "Wilson's wife" ?

[Verner]

If he had referred to her as "Wilson's Wife, someone in the blogsphere would have put up "Valerie Plame" about three minutes after it hit the net. It's called "google" and Who's Who is on it.

So really, what's the difference?

If she was NOC, they should not have even mentioned her at all, knowing that her name was in the public domain. But they did, didn't they. And not only in Armitage's memo--but also in a confirm to Novak.

I would still like to know more about CPD's JTFI. Not much out there. There were lots and lots of Intelligence groups involved in Iraq's WMDs, what exactly were they doing? If Corn printed the most important stuff he could dig up(tracking down the families of Iraqi scientists etc.) then they sound pretty lame. I mean really, I can't believe that over a decade after the first Gulf War, they didn't already have all of that--seems pretty elementary, if they had done what they should have in the first place.

The fact that Val's group (that she wasn't even in charge of) was much less than 50 and stuck in the basement should tell us all something...

Also, is CPD to thank for the fact that we had ZERO on the ground intelligence in Iraq? Well done!

[Sara (Squiggler)]

Does anyone else feel like gagging? I know I do. How can Fitzgerald justify his actions in keeping Armitage silent all these years?

[Sara (Squiggler)]

The picture S&L has along with the Times article on Armitage is really too much:

Armitage admits he leaked

[verner]

Yeah Sara, especially when you consider that Woodward came forward and told Fitz that he might have been the "reporter" Libby had confused with Russert.

And with Armitage now out, all of that stuff will come into play in a big way.

I wonder if at this point Fitz will be willing to send any more reporters to jail?

[clarice]

Remember how much time we spent on whether the classified stamp on the INR memo meant that the reference to her meant she was covert? LOL Or how hard we argued that had she been covert she shouldn't have been in the memo or at the mwwting?LOL LOL

[Sara (Squiggler)]

I just want to know what it is Libby perjured himself with ... that simple little fact?????

That redated memo is going to play a role, mark my words.