Free Republic

EU investigator seeks data on CIA planesJAN SLIVAAssociated Press PARIS - The head of an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe said Tuesday he was checking 31 suspect planes that landed in Europe in recent years and was trying to acquire past satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.If the European probe uncovers evidence of covert facilities, the potential impact ranges from major embarrassment for the United States to political turmoil in countries that might have participated, even unwittingly. Countries found housing secret detention centers also could be suspended or expelled from the 46-member Council...

NBC's senior diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell is claiming that her comments have been deliberately distorted in reports covering a 2003 interview where she said Valerie Plame's identity had been "widely known" before her name appeared in a Robert Novak column. "The fact is that I did not know did not know [Plame's identity] before the Novak column," she told radio host Don Imus on Thursday. "I said it was widely known that an envoy had gone [to Niger]," she insisted. "I said we did not know who the envoy was until the Novak column." But the actual exchange in question...

(italics/bold/< > mine) Zell Miller is my favorite Democrat. I started this long-running series here noting Miller's speeches, columns and books in March 2003. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an important column by Senator Miller on the subject that is the current focus of my interest: "Rule can head off dirty tricks at CIA." The proposed rule is of less interest than Senator Miller's observation that the story underlying the saga of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are the dirty tricks they have undertaken courtesy of the CIA to defeat the Bush administration. Within the journalistic trade, only Stephen Hayes...

Just heard a blurb from John Gibson's alter ego. Megan? CIA happy about indictments, claiming they were being FORCED to make a case for War against Iraq. Well the snakes are crawling out from under the rock.

It was one of the biggest of the American pre-war blunders. Iraq, documents showed, had tried to buy uranium from Niger. The papers, though, soon proved to be false. But who forged them? Now, a new article in an Italian newspaper says that the Italian government was heavily involved. Remember the Niger "yellow cake" scandal? Back in the days before the US invasion of Iraq, nobody except of course the UN weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq, was really sure whether Saddam had the Bomb or not. US President George W. Bush was desperately looking for some shred of...

For more than two years, many in the mainstream media have been buzzing about the prospect that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or Vice President Chief of Staff Scooter Libby would be indicted for revealing the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame.The press has been full of righteous indignation that high officials in the Bush administration would endanger the identity of a covert agent. And it has been argued that administration officials did this to protect a fearless truth-teller -- Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson -- a former ambassador who charged that the Bush administration purposefully ignored intelligence...

The White House is bracing itself for the possible indictment of senior officials as Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, prepares to wrap up his two-year inquiry into the leaking of a covert CIA agent's name. Further details about the role of White House officials were underlined in a report in the New York Times on Sunday. Judith Miller, the reporter released from jail after 85 days after she agreed to testify before a grand jury, gave an account of her conversations with Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, vice-president. She also admitted that Mr Fitzgerald had asked whether...

The Left isn't obsessed with destroying Karl Rove simply because they want to taint President Bush by taking out one of his closest confidants. When they're not focused on their fantasy Vice President Cheney is the de facto president, they sometimes think Mr. Rove is. To destroy Mr. Rove is to neuter the Bush presidency. As resolute, effective and visionary as Mr. Bush has been in office, the Left obviously still doesn't consider him in charge. Only a superhuman Machiavellian strategist could have engineered this bumbler's unlikely ascension to the presidency. And anyone capable of facilitating a lightweight's rise to...

Why is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursuing so zealously the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, since it is all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime? So why is Fitzgerald acting like Inspector Javert in "Les Miserables"? The answer may lie in a sentence Walter Pincus of The Washington Post wrote on June 12, 2003. President Bush mentioned the British findings in his State of the Union address in January 2003. In his leaks to Pincus, and earlier to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Wilson claimed Bush knew this was false. The key...

In its lust to take down Karl Rove, the Washington press corps is protecting Joe Wilson by failing to tell the American people who he really is. So let me do it: Wilson is the Ward Churchill of the U.S. State Department. Before his outburst, Churchill was an obscure professor in Colorado. Before his outburst, Wilson was an obscure former diplomat at Foggy Bottom. Churchill called the victims in the Twin Towers "little Eichmanns," based on his hate for America. Wilson called George Bush a liar based on a two-week junket to Niger in which he lounged by a hotel...

WASHINGTON — Karl Christian Rove, 54, has spent his entire career in Republican politics. With an open door to the Oval Office, he has no intention of stopping now. His goal, he has told friends, is to remain at the side of the President, his friend for 32 years, until 2008, to make sure the Republican Party is firmly entrenched in power for years to come. Without doubt, he is the most influential person in the Republican Party and the White House, except for President Bush. In the center of a maelstrom over discussing the identity of a CIA operative...

CIA agent's husband attacks Rove As top political strategist, Mr Rove is very close to Mr Bush The husband of a CIA agent who was outed during a row over Iraq has accused the White House of a "cover-up" involving top aide Karl Rove.Political strategist Mr Rove has denied being behind the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity to the media in 2003. It is alleged that Mr Rove spoke to a journalist about the agent, days before her name was revealed in the press. Ms Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, added his voice to Democrat calls for Mr...