Free Republic

ATTACHMENTUnclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions,  1 January Through 30 June 2001 IraqBaghdad has refused since December 1998 to allow United Nations inspectors into Iraq as required by Security Council Resolution 687.  In spite of ongoing UN efforts to establish a follow-on inspection regime comprising the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team, no UN inspections occurred during this reporting period.  Moreover, the automated video monitoring systemsinstalled by the UN at known and suspect WMD facilities in Iraq are still not...

In violation of CIA regulations that bar contact with reporters without permission, Joseph Wilson's agency-employed wife Valerie Plame apparently accompanied him to a breakfast meeting with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof in which they discussed the ambassador's controversial mission to Niger one month before Plame allegedly was "outed" by Robert Novak.In a WND column, investigative reporter Jack Cashill points to a "stunning admission" by Wilson in a January 2004 Vanity Fair magazine story that apparently has been overlooked.

This comes in the wake of the Woodward revelation that a former administration official discussed Plame/Flame with Bob Woodward before Libby ever spoke to a reporter. Also, that Woodward can not recall if he revealed the information to Libby. I am paraphrasing what I heard on tonight's John Batchelor Program during the 10:30 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. EST time slot on 770 WABC here in New York. Keep in mind that the last time I posted iformation from this program it was regarding John Fund saying Harriet Meirs Harriet Meirs nomination will be pulled. My post was two weeks before...

Vice President Dick Cheney is not the unidentified source who told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward about the CIA status of the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, a person familiar with the investigation said Thursday. Woodward did not talk with the vice president that day, did not provide the information that's been reported in Woodward's notes and has not had any conversations over the past several weeks about any release for allowing Woodward to testify, said the person, speaking on condition of anonymity. Woodward gave a sworn deposition in the CIA leak investigation on Monday, testifying that a...

Headline of Article: Fitzgerald sees new grand jury proceedings ..... A lawyer in the case said Woodward's source had not previously testified before a grand jury in the leak case. .....

Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting By Joe Strupp Published: November 16, 2005 12:45 PM ET NEW YORK Walter Pincus, the longtime Washington Post reporter and one of several journalists who testified in the Valerie Plame case, said he believed as far back as 2003 that Bob Woodward had some involvement in the case but he did not pursue the information because Woodward asked him not to. "He asked me to keep him out of the reporting and I agreed to do that," Pincus said today. His comments followed a Post story today about Woodward's...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA took the first step toward a criminal investigation of a leak of possibly classified information on secret prisons to The Washington Post, a U.S. official said Tuesday. The agency's general counsel sent a report to the Justice Department about the Post story, which reported the existence of secret U.S. detention centers for suspected terrorists in Eastern Europe. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue deals with classified information, said the referral was made shortly after the Nov. 2 story. The leak investigation into the disclosure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's...

<p>Washington, D.C.</p> <p>After many, many months of being a punching bag, the punching bag is ready to fight back. Republicans believe it is long overdue.</p> <p>On FOX NEWS SUNDAY this morning, Brit Hume reported that he was told at the highest levels that the White House was finally going to engage the Democrats. They will be coming out with a defense of the war in Iraq.</p>

Accustomed to telling the story rather than being at the center of it, three journalists faced the extraordinary prospect Friday of holding key information that could send a top White House operative to prison. A variety of media watchers said they found that prospect chilling. In what promises to be an uncommonly media-centric prosecution, Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald charged vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby largely based on the testimony of journalists: NBC's Tim Russert, Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. They contradicted Libby under oath, exposing him...

Sep 27, 2004 WASHINGTON -- A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as "just guessing," the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other. Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a...

Newsweek magazine reporter Howard Fineman, who's been at the forefront of recent media speculation that top White House official Karl Rove would be indicted, has pronounced Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision to indict only Cheney aide Lewis Libby "a victory" for the Bush White House. "Given the expectations that have evolved around here in the last week or so, if it turns out that this phase of the grand jury ends with only Scooter Libby being indicted," Fineman told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough last night, "that will be seen as almost be seen as a backwards kind of victory here." Scarborough...

WOODWARD: I think one of the things that's fact that hasn't come out is we talk about... KING: Uh-oh, here it comes! WOODWARD: No, no. And this is not even a firecracker, but it's true. They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson's wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone and there was just some embarrassment. So people have kind of compared -- somebody was...

Special Report: Judith Miller Exonerates Bush Officials The true facts in the CIA-leak case are now becoming astonishingly clear. New York Times reporter Judith Miller's testimony, as she describes it in the Sunday edition of her paper, proves that the wrong people are under investigation. It's not really a story about Bush officials Lewis Libby and Karl Rove and their conversations with the press. Rather, it's a story about a CIA bureaucracy working to undermine the Bush administration through the media and cover up for its own mistakes. It's now obvious that Bush officials are spending time before a grand...

WASHINGTON Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's first charges in the White House leak case don't get to the heart of his two-year probe: the leak. The indictment of vice presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter' Libby Jr. is built on charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury _ and it will rest primarily on testimony from a handful of Washington reporters. "In some ways it seems less satisfying," said Michael Cahill, a Brooklyn Law School professor, adding that false statements might have impeded the probe into whether top Bush administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of CIA agent Valerie...

Pelosi Statement on Criminal Indictment of I. Lewis Libby 10/28/2005 1:33:00 PM To: National Desk, Daybook Editor Contact: Brendan Daly or Jennifer Crider, 202-226-7616, both of the Office of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 /U.S. Newswire/ -- House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today following the criminal indictment of Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby: "The criminal indictments of a top White House official mark a sad day for America and another chapter in the Republicans' culture of corruption. At the heart of these indictments was the effort by the Bush...

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Friday that his indicted ex-chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was presumed innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury. In a written statement, Cheney said he had accepted Libby's resignation with deep regret. "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," he said.

Libby indicted on obstruction of justice, false statment and perjury charge...

ROME — Secret meetings. Spies. Forged documents. Government denials. Burglary. As Washington braces for the possible indictment of some of its most powerful officials, Italy is reliving its own small but significant role in "Niger-Gate," the scandal that surfaced as the Bush administration made its case for war in Iraq. If all roads lead to Rome, so do the rumors: Washington's problem with the leak of a CIA officer's identity has tentacles here. Former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife was the covert CIA operative whose identity might have been leaked by White House officials, was dispatched in...

WASHINGTON — The federal grand jury investigating the CIA leak case prepared for a final day of deliberations as a special prosecutor huddled with his legal team Thursday about whether to seek indictments against administration figures for leaking the name of a covert operative. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was expected to announce today the results of his 22-month investigation, and there were growing expectations that one or more administration figures would be charged with wrongdoing. The grand jury was expected to meet this morning, with an announcement by Fitzgerald expected about midday.

CHICAGO (AFX) - The U.S. dollar, Treasurys and American stocks could sell off if top White House aides are indicted on charges they leaked the identity of a CIA employee, analysts said Thursday. Speculation has mounted that formal charges could be announced Friday by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, the final day of a grand jury session. Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby are the prime targets of Fitzgerald's investigation, press reports have said. Rove, a long-time political adviser to Bush, is deputy White House chief of staff. Libby is chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Any charges...

Joe Wilson Outed His Wife, Media Ignores October 26, 2005 Download Windows Media PlayerListen to Rush Conduct Broadcast Excellence (Highly recommended by poster) BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So I'm minding my own business last night as I usually do, bothering no one, and all of a sudden -- what time was this? I think it was before the World Series games. By the way, do you know that the Houston Astros don't have any black players? (interruption) They ought to be losing. They don't have any black players on the team. Well, I'm not saying this. Joe Morgan is saying...

Russo Martino, the man behind the forged documents indicating Saddam had purchased uranium from Niger, which Joseph A. Wilson falsely claimed he had seen and warned the Administration about, has come forward and admitted that he did this in the pay of France to undermine the British and American justification for the war in Iraq: The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, “Giacomo”. His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that...

WASHINGTON - The federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer's identity met for three hours Wednesday with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and adjourned for the day without announcing any action. Fitzgerald is known to be putting the finishing touches on a two-year criminal probe that has ensnared two senior White House aides. After the grand jury left for the day, federal prosecutors conferred for about an hour in the grand jury area of the federal courthouse. There was no word on whether Fitzgerald planned to make any announcement or whether the grand jury planned to meet again.

Covering up Iraq's quest for uranium in Africa October 26th, 2005 The left accepts as gospel the Joseph Wilson-inspired allegation that President Bush lied in his State of the Union address reference to Iraq seeking uranium in Africa. The media and much of the public parrots this line. The allegation is itself a lie. All evidence points to the Plame leak investigation as another battle in the ongoing internal war between US intelligence agencies and the Bush administration.  Of course, the mainstream media is only too happy to support a leftist CIA, which is out to keep its power intact...

The Judith Miller-Valerie Plame-Scooter Libby imbroglio is being reduced to a simple narrative about the origins of the Iraq war. Miller, the story goes, was an anti-Saddam Hussein, weapons-of-mass-destruction-hunting zealot and was either an eager participant or an unwitting dupe in a campaign by Bush administration officials and Iraqi exiles to justify the invasion. The New York Times now characterizes the affair as "just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq." Many critics outside the Times suggest that Miller's eagerness to publish the Bush administration's line was the primary reason Americans...

TIMES TRASHFEST IN the past few days, writers and editors of The New York Times have taken turns trashing the talent, integrity, skills and character of their colleague, Judith Miller — a reporter who had just spent nearly three months in jail defending the paper's journalistic rights against a hard-charging special prosecutor whose appointment the Times had demanded two years before. It's fair to say that nothing like this has ever happened before in the annals of American journalism. No one contemporaneously employed by a newspaper has ever been assailed by a colleague in its pages the way Maureen Dowd...

Reading the news about Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame these days, one would come away thinking that if not for Judith Miller, the United States would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. The New York Times reporter gets routinely pilloried for her close ties to administration officials and the way they supposedly used her to put false stories into the mainstream media. She gets almost no credit or sympathy from her own industry for spending three months in jail for defending a principle that all of them see as critical to their profession, that of the protection...

Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005 12:03 p.m. EDT NY Times: CIA Leaked Plame's Name The ultimate source of information identifying Leakgate accuser Valerie Plame as a CIA employee my turn out to be the CIA itself, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Notes obtained by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald identify then-CIA Director George Tenet as the person who gave up Plame's secret to the White House, with the Times reporting that Tenet tipped Vice President Dick Cheney to her identity. However the notes - taken by Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby - "contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or...

The savage left-wing attack on Judith Miller from inside and outside of the New York Times completely misses the point. She is under attack for being a lackey of the Bush Administration when she failed to do the administration and the public a big favor. She could have done a potential Pulitzer Prize-winning story that could have broken the Joseph Wilson case wide open. It is a story exposing the Wilson mission to Africa as a CIA operation designed to undermine President Bush. For 85 days in jail, Miller protected her source, Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of...

The American public is still asking as to why the CIA failed to foresee and take counter measures against the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre? What was the FBI doing? Well, we have some of the answers: Clinton’s administration policy, which was reinforced by the thoroughly despicable Jamie Gorelick, of setting up a ‘wall’ between the CIA, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies destroyed interdepartmental cooperation. However, this does not explain why US intelligence has failed so badly in dealing with Middle Eastern terrorists. The answer lies in Congress. To be more specific, Democratic Congressmen...

NEW YORK - New York Times reporter Judith Miller is defending herself against her own paper's criticism of her role in the CIA leak controversy, saying she was proud to serve time in jail to protect a confidential source, "even if he happened to work for the Bush White House." Miller's response came in a lengthy e-mail to public editor Byron Calame, who recommended in a Sunday column that the Times review Miller's journalistic practices for conduct that raised "clear issues of trust and credibility." Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating...

With friends in high places, the New York Times' Judith Miller has sources galore -- but she may have trusted them too much. Among the string of prominent and powerful Washingtonians who traipsed through the Alexandria Detention Center to visit New York Times reporter Judith Miller this summer was former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. Danzig, who is now a Defense Department bioterrorism consultant, had come to the lockup to offer the embattled journalist comfort and support. Yet he came away from the 30-minute conversation feeling as energized and impressed as he had in many previous meetings with the star reporter....

Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry By DAVID JOHNSTON WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - As he weighs whether to bring criminal charges in the C.I.A. leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel, is focusing on whether Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, sought to conceal their actions and mislead prosecutors, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday. Among the charges that Mr. Fitzgerald is considering are perjury, obstruction of justice and false statement - counts that suggest the prosecutor may believe the evidence...

WASHINGTON Oct 21, 2005 — The New York Times' Judith Miller belatedly gave prosecutors her notes of a key meeting in the CIA leak probe only after being shown White House records of it, and her boss declared Friday she appeared to have misled the newspaper about her role. In a dramatic e-mail, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote Times' employees he wished he'd more carefully interviewed Miller and had "missed what should have been significant alarm bells" that she had been the recipient of leaked information about the CIA officer at the heart of the case. "Judy seems to have...

After the DIA has decided to run a smear campaign on LTC Tony Shaffer and to destroy his credibility, apparently for his revelations about Able Danger, the credibility of the agency itself has come under serious question. A CQ reader wishing to remain anonymous but with personal knowledge of the situation the Defense Intelligence Agency sends this description of the senior leadership at the agency: Deputy Director of DIA is Mark Ewing. He won't be in that position for very long, seeing as how he recently put in his paperwork to resign. This action comes after he had a spat...

The media version of the CIA leak case is that the White House illegally revealed a CIA employee’s identity because her husband, Joseph Wilson, was an administration critic. But former prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova says the real story is that the CIA “launched a covert operation” against the President when it sent Wilson on the mission to Africa to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. DiGenova, a former Independent Counsel who prosecuted several high-profile cases and has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, including as counsel to several Senate committees, is optimistic that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will figure it all out. DiGenova...

If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald. We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion...

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has just launched his own brand-new Web site. Could it be that he's getting ready to release some new legal documents? Like, maybe, some indictments? It's certainly not the action of an office about to fold up its tents and go home. Fitzgerald spokesman Randall Samborn minimized the significance of the Web launch in an interview this morning. "I would strongly caution, Dan, against reading anything into it substantive, one way or the other," he said. "It's really a long overdue effort to get something on the Internet to answer a lot of questions that...

New York Times reporter Judith Miller told the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case that she might have met with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby on June 23, 2003 only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she and Libby had indeed met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, according to attorneys familiar with her testimony. When a prosecutor first questioned Miller during her initial grand jury appearance on September 30, 2005 sources said, she did not bring up the June 23 meeting in recounting her various contacts with Libby, the...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Even if White House aides leaked a covert CIA officer's identity, they were simply passing along information they'd already heard from the news media, the administration's supporters maintain in a defense that looks increasing shaky as new evidence accumulates. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald now knows that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, met three times with a New York Times reporter before the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, that Libby initiated a call to NBC newsman Tim Russert and that Libby was a confirming source about the wife of Bush administration critic...

When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division. Goss, himself a former covert operative who had chaired the House intelligence committee, focused on the officers in the field. He pledged status and resources for case officers, sending hundreds more to far-off assignments, undercover and on the front line of the battle against al Qaeda.[snip]Some of the struggles that have dominated Goss's first year stem from a massive reorganization that stripped the CIA of its leadership role in the intelligence community...

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say. Those efforts by the chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year — well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration...