Free Republic

An extraordinary story has emerged involving former Lyndon Johnson aide and now PBS commentator Bill Moyers (search). The story was told in The Wall Street Journal by retired federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman, who reports that when he was acting attorney general under President Ford a memo written by Moyers to the FBI came to light in the press.

This latest claim Valerie PLAME'S identity was revealed then leaked in a memo is TWISTED BEYOND BELIEF. The memo referred to her as VALERIE WILSON This latest theory that the super secret identity of VALERIE PLAME was LEARNED from a memo then leaked from that memo is BOGUS. The Washington Post reported Thursday the identity of Valerie Plame -- identified by her married name of Valerie Wilson -- http://washingtontimes.com/upi/20050721-083555-1836r.htm Investigators are also trying to determine whether the gist of the information in the document, including the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. Wilson's wife ,http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/politics/16memo.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON -- Prosecutors in the CIA leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a CIA officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said. Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned the CIA officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials...

Memo Is a Focus of CIA Leak Probe By Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, July 16, 2005; A06 Federal prosecutors investigating the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity have asked several witnesses in the case whether they read a State Department memorandum mentioning her that circulated inside the Bush administration in the days before she was publicly named, according to people familiar with the testimony. FBI agents showed the State Department memo to several witnesses during the interviews over the past two years, according to lawyers in the case, in an effort to...

WASHINGTON, July 15 - Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said. Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists...

Since it was first published in the British press in May, the so-called Downing Street memo has generated debate about the Bush administration's intentions of going to war. Critics of the Iraq war have seized on the document--minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior government leadership--as proof that the Bush administration was hell-bent for war even as it publicly sought to bring Saddam Hussein to heel through diplomacy. War critics have focused on a section of the document in which a British spy agency chief, identified as C, discussed a recent...

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday the "Downing Street memos" paint a distorted picture, and he insisted that the Iraq war was not predetermined by the United States. "People say the decision was already taken. The decision was not already taken," he said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. Blair added he was "a bit astonished" at the intensive U.S. media coverage about the leaked memos, which suggested the White House viewed the war with Iraq as inevitable.

LONDON (AP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday defended the war in Iraq, and brushed off a new question about a government memo that suggested Washington had been determined to justify the invasion. "I was glad that we took the action we did," Blair told the House of Commons when asked about the so-called Downing Street memo. His comments came a day after President Bush rejected suggestions that Washington set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and urged patience. According to the leaked minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between Blair and top government officials...

Kerry cautious on probing `Downing Street Memo' By Noelle Straub Monday, June 20, 2005 - Updated: 10:36 AM EST WASHINGTON - Walking a tightrope on a politically charged issue, Sen. John F. Kerry vowed weeks ago to raise the controversial ``Downing Street Memo'' as an issue in Washington, but has since publicly held his tongue on the matter. Instead, Kerry has been enlisting other senators to sign onto a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking answers about the memo, aides said. The memo contained minutes of a 2002 meeting in which British officials told Prime Minister Tony Blair they...

Losers live in their parents’ basement and dream that they are just one hit song away from stardom. Losers neglect their retirement savings and fantasize about the way they will live after they magically win the lottery. Losers weigh 431 pounds and wish -- through a month full of Twinkies and Diet Coke -- that someone someday will invent a miracle diet pill so that they can be pretty. And this week, losers met in the basement of the Capitol building and sat behind little mismatched folding tables interviewing each other in an “unofficial investigative hearing” that they believe might...

So, again we have documents with no originals? The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

Another newly-released secret memo has forced Democrats to continue to filibuster the confirmation of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador, according to Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, who will hold unofficial hearings about the memo. Just days after The Sunday Times of London published the so-called 'Downing Street Memo' which reveals the opinions of a source known as 'C' (reportedly Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence), the Washington Post said it will print a document it called the 'Sesame Street Memo' which is "brought to you by the letter 'B' and by the number '9'." Post reporter Bob Woodward broke the...

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe. They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official. more...

AS LEAKED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS GO, the "Downing Street Memo" is pretty sexy. Not actually a memo but the official notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting in the British prime minister's office, the document reproduces the thoughts and concerns about Iraq of Tony Blair and his key advisers, including his foreign and defense secretaries, his attorney general, and "C"--code for Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, recently returned from high-level meetings in Washington. Rarely do you find an open window on such a high-level discussion, especially on a matter that will take a country to...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A newly disclosed memo appeared to cast doubt on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's insistence he was unaware of a bid by a Swiss firm that employed his son for a lucrative contract under the scandal-tainted U.N. oil-for-food program. U.N.-appointed investigators were "urgently reviewing" the memo, Michael Holtzman, a spokesman for the Independent Inquiry Committee led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said on Tuesday. The memo described a late-November 1998 Paris meeting of Annan with officials of Cotecna Inspection Services, just weeks before the Geneva-based company won the contract. The contract has become a...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Investigators of the U.N. oil-for-food program said Tuesday they are "urgently reviewing" new information that suggests U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan may have known more about a contract that was awarded to the company that employed his son. The December 1998 memo from Michael Wilson, then a vice president of Cotecna Inspections S.A., mentions brief discussions with Annan "and his entourage" during a summit in Paris in 1998. "We could count on their support," the memo said. If accurate, the memo could contradict a major finding of the Independent Inquiry Committee - that there wasn't enough evidence...

A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq.... "A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," warned the memorandum, prepared July 21.... It also appeared to take as a given the presence of illicit weapons in Iraq - an assumption that later proved almost entirely wrong - and warned that merely removing Saddam Hussein from power would not guarantee that those weapons could be secured.... The White House has insisted that Mr. Bush did...

WASHINGTON — A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country. The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable.

The top administrator of San Diego's pension fund worked with the city manager nine years ago to develop the now infamous plan to underfund the employee retirement system, according to a 1996 draft memo released by the city attorney. City Attorney Michael Aguirre says the memo, which will be part of his sixth report on the pension crisis, shows that the administrator, Lawrence Grissom, played an improper role in helping shape the plan when he should have been "acting as an independent representative of the board." Grissom denied the allegation, as did other former city officials. The seven-page memo from...

Recently, entertainer Pat Boone wrote NewsMax editor Christopher Ruddy a letter regarding his feelings on Abu Ghraib and Iraq, the contents of which are published here with permission: Mr. Christopher Ruddy Editor, NewsMax Dear Chris, Hasn't anybody got the guts to accuse the worst perpetrator in this whole Abu Ghraib prison debacle - CBS and 60 Minutes II? What do you call it when, in time of war, someone takes military intelligence and turns it over to the enemy, who in turn uses it to kill Americans? Isn't that the definition of treason? Did Benedict Arnold do worse? Did Julias...