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WASHINGTON: The famous African explorer Dr David Livingstone might have been impressed, even if the agenda was suspect. Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear proliferator-hero Abdul Qadeer Khan traversed the breadth of Africa in his hey day as a nuclear salesman , going to as romantic a getaway as Casablanca in Morocco and as remote an outpost as Timbuktu in Mali.   US officials might dearly like to get hold of Khan’s travel agent, or simply his itinerary, since he seems to have pretty much charted his own course during his profligate proliferating days. According to accounts now surfacing in the Pakistani media,...

Barack Obama has come under fire for extending a formal invitation to a shamed African dictator who has ruthlessly plundered billions of dollars from his own country. The U.S. President will today have a coveted private meeting with President Ali Bongo of Gabon in the Oval Office despite his appalling track record. Bongo’s family has ruled the impoverished African nation with an iron fist for five decades and have used its oil riches to fund a life of outrageous luxury. Meanwhile one third of people in Gabon live on less than $2 a day and thousands starve to death each...

It was gutsy for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein to come out against Washington's recent rash of dangerous intelligence leaks last week; she made criticism of the leaks bipartisan. Flanked by the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, Dutch Ruppersberger, and GOP committee leaders, Feinstein declared: "This has to stop. When people say they don't want to work with the United States, because they can't trust us to keep a secret, that's serious." A week later, Feinstein is more than halfway through New York Times reporter David E. Sanger's book "Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of...

In his Loyal Opposition blog, New York Times ed page editor Andrew Rosenthal goes after the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute former CIA officer, former Democratic Senate staffer and Huffington Post blogger John Kiriakou for leaking classified information — including the names of CIA operatives — to journalists. Rosenthal writes, That may seem simple: CIA officer, classified information disclosed, prison. But take a closer look. He’s been charged with revealing that two men accused of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, were tortured. So the man who blew the whistle on torture may go to...

Now that memoirs by the late Bob Novak, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, and former President George Bush have all been published, we now know much more about the Valerie Plame case than we did before these individuals put what happened to paper. (Plame, if you'll remember, was a CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the press during a newsman's investigation into George W. Bush's explanation for going to war against Iraq.) Yet, the one book that still needs to be written is a memoir by Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the VP’s assistant, the only individual indicted by the Special Prosecutor...

During Thanksgiving weekend I went to see the movie REDS with Bruce Willis. Awesome movie and I highly recommend it. But during the trailers they showed the movie FAIR GAME with Sean Penn, supposedly based on the Plame/Wilson affair. I groaned when I saw it. It appears my groan was warranted. Here is the WaPo: (h/t Dan Riehl) In fact, "Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi...

WE'RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film "Fair Game" - which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq - deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame's exposure as a CIA agent. "It's accurate," Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson:...

Minutes after Naomi Watts, movie star, arrived at the CIA’s secret Virginia training center called The Farm, she was thrown to the ground in a way that left bruises. When she cried out in pain, her instructor glared and informed her, “Don’t say 'ow’ again unless you need to go to the hospital.” During the days that followed, she was “stripped of everything that cloaked her in specialness,” said director Doug Liman. The actress chose the rough treatment, Liman said. He chose Watts to play Valerie Plame Wilson, the spy who was outed in one of the most controversial episodes...

... the title is drawn from how Karl Rove told Matthews that the CIA agent Valerie Plame was fair game for critics of her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson, you’ll recall, was dispatched by the CIA in 2002 at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson came back with the answer no, and he was outraged when President Bush nevertheless stuck with the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address, which made the case for war with Iraq. Just three...

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? [taken from October 2010 articles/blog posts]NASA's Islam Outreach Minister Charles BoldenGOP lawmakers are critical of Charles Bolden for leaving last week on a trip to China just as the agency he leads begins pursuing an ambitious new agenda. It is the latest in a series of controversial moves that some speculate could result in Bolden's ouster. A law signed a week ago gives NASA four months or less to develop a dozen different plans for the future, including a detailed report on how it would replace the retiring space shuttle.It's an ambitious schedule, one that NASA...

While Imagenation Abu Dhabi is behind a number of overtly pro-Muslim and pan-Arabist arthouse movies that will be shown in the U.S. to smaller audiences, it also has its hands in a number of bigger feature films, including–surprise! surprise!–a movie starring philo-Semite Mel Gibson (“The Beaver”) and directed by his biggest defender, Jodi Foster. Plus the company has partnered with Steven Spielberg and his Dreamworks studio. Imagenation Abu Dhabi hired a former top Walt Disney pictures exec, Edward Borgerding, as its CEO, as well as many other top Hollywood veterans to run the company’s operations, because these monied Muslim oil...

Imagine a movie about Abraham Lincoln's assassination that neglects to include the character of John Wilkes Booth. Ridiculous, right? Well, that is pretty much what has happened in the movie Fair Game in which the person who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, Richard Armitage, never appears in the film. So how to excuse such an absurd situation? Simple. Just write off complaints about this as political insider nitpicking. That is what Washington Post writer Ann Hornaday has done in her article that sets up laughable excuses in advance to what is sure to be a firestorm...

The only way we even know the name of Valerie Plame (and fame seeking hubby Joe Wilson) is that that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaked her name as a CIA officer to columnist Robert Novak. That is what set in motion the long drawn out Plamegate affair in which only Scooter Libby was convicted of something other than leaking her name. So you would figure that the supposedly biographical movie scheduled for a November USA release about Plame, Fair Game, would feature Armitage front and center as the principal villain. Right? Wrong. The fact is that "Fair...

The Valerie Plame affair can shed some light on Rod Blagojevich's trial. It was Plame's husband Joe Wilson who put the lie into the "Bush lied us into war" slogan. Bush rightly told the nation that Hussein had sought yellow cake uranium from Niger. Joe Wilson claimed he was sent by Dick Cheney to go to Niger to find out. Wilson was found to be lying in parts large and small. But the damage was done. The entire focus of the war shifted to the lack of yellow cake uranium and other WMD. Turns out that Dick Cheney did not...

I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces. If the Times actually sees this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with. Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket. Each and every American should be outraged. As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central...

Democrats said that the outing of a CIA agent, personnel, whatever, was bad, and said that someone's head in the Bush Administration had to roll. Democrats wanted Cheney, but didn't get him. When the New York Times outs Karzai's brother as supposedly being paid by the CIA to do who knows what, Democrats act as if it is no big deal. What gives?

WASHINGTON--A federal judge said the Federal Bureau of Investigation must publicly reveal much of its interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney during the investigation into who leaked the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative. The FBI interviewed Mr. Cheney in June 2004 as it was investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity after her husband criticized the Bush administration. Both the Bush and Obama administrations said they wanted to keep the interview confidential because future vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if it became public.

The Associated Press reported today (Friday) that lawyers for certain detainees at the Gitmo Prison in Cuba, possibly violated federal criminal law by releasing the identity of CIA covert operatives. The current Justice Department investigation connects to both the Valerie Plame matter a few years ago, and the current issue of where and how Gitmo detainees should be charged and tried. First, the Plame affair. According to the mainstream media, that was about the “outing” of a CIA “covert operative” in violation of federal law. But that law applied only to people who had been a covert operative “within five...

Security Breaches: Scooter Libby went to prison for the "outing" of a desk-jockey CIA agent. He forgot conversations. Pelosi forgets briefings. And the outing of our entire intelligence apparatus by Democrats is OK. Remember the thrilling days of yesteryear and the alleged outing of the already known CIA officer Valerie Plame? We were told then that the Vanity Fair cover girl's 15 minutes of fame jeopardized our national security even if everybody already knew who she was. "Scooter" Libby went to prison because his memory of events and who said what to whom regarding Plame differed from the recollections of...

Justice Department (through Solicitor General Elena Kagan) urges Supreme Court not to hear appeal from former CIA officer Valerie Plame, after lower courts threw out her lawsuit claiming damages from alleged scheme to invade her privacy by exposing her as a CIA employee. Plame’s exposure led to conviction of Cheney aide Lewis Libby on obstruction of justice charges. -- Josh Gerstein (3:31 p.m.)

First, Sean Penn played outed gay politician Harvey Milk. Now it looks like he may play the husband of outed CIA hussy Valerie Plame. “Fair Game,” based on the memoirs by Plame and Wilson, is being made in to a big budget Hollywood fiasco. Tinsel town normally calls a biographic picture a “bio-pic,” but in this case it might be more appropriate to call it a “lie-o-pic.” Producers are negotiating with Sean Penn to play ...

"Fair Game," the drama about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, has come together with Naomi Watts starring, "Mrs. and Mrs. Smith" helmer Doug Liman directing and William Pohlad's River Road financing. But the big question is whether Oscar-winning "Milk" star Sean Penn will close a deal to play Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Penn is negotiating, but no deal has closed.Pohlad has a strong relationship with Penn: he was a producer on the Terrence Malick-directed "Tree of Life," which stars Penn and Brad Pitt, and Pohlad also was a producer and financier for "Into the Wild," which Penn directed....

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday to turn over a copy of a FBI interview with Vice President Dick Cheney or face contempt charges. The document in question is an interview Cheney gave to the FBI in the investigation of the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent. “The arguments you have raised for withholding the interview report are not tenable,” Waxman wrote in a letter to Mukasey. “When the FBI interview with the Vice President was conducted, the Vice President knew that the information...

McClellan Late Show by: Ben Giles, June 25, 2008 Former press secretary Scott McClellan remains concerned about what he calls “a cloud of suspicion over the White House,” particularly concerning the leak of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on June 19, McClellan expressed his frustration over alleged leaks and cover-ups by White House officials, and questioned the possible involvement of Vice President Dick Cheney. “I do not think the President had any knowledge,” said McClellan. “In terms of the Vice President, I do not know.” The allegations at the time were...

Scott McClellan testifies this morning before the House Judiciary Committee beginning at 9:30 (eastern). It will be covered live on C-Span and the three cable networks.

I guess things must not be going well with Joe Wilson's (and wife Valerie Plame's) movie. It was hyped bigtime over a year ago and now that Warner Bros project appears to have dropped out of sight. I sure know Wilson's book is way down in the DUMPS at #1,310,194 in Amazon. The paperback edition isn't doing much better at #266,321. This might explain Joe Wilson's over-the-top partisanship in favor of Hillary. 'Fess up, Joe. What did Hillary promise you? The Secretary of State slot if she is elected president? In any event, it is entertaining to watch Wilson...

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in...

When former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson got the redacted manuscript of her draft memoir back from the CIA Publications Review Board (PRB) earlier this year, her book publisher realized it had a problem. "We were looking at a manuscript where 20 percent of the author's story was deemed classified by her former employer [even though] much of the information was probably in the public domain," explains an editor at the publishing house, Simon & Schuster. "So the challenge was, if Valerie can't tell her own story because she is bound by her agreement, then how is this story going...

Removing any doubt about how she sees the world from the left, Valerie Plame Wilson, in an interview Thursday which aired Saturday night on a Washington, DC area cable channel, admired the work of the far-left Media Matters as she revealed she seeks out the group's postings for their “accuracy” and presentation of “the facts.” Carol Joynt (her blog), a former CBS News producer who as the owner of the Nathans of Georgetown restaurant every week interviews a newsmaker in front of a lunch crowd in what becomes the hour-long Q&A Cafe on NewsChannel 8, asked whether she reads “news...

The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington. I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title ("Case Closed") of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove...

Seated at the Washington Gridiron dinner March 31, I was interrupted by a man crouching at my feet who was dressed Air Force formal with the four stars of a full general. It was CIA Director Michael Hayden, who complained to me profanely that my column had misrepresented him in the Valerie Plame Wilson case. Denying he favors Democrats, Gen. Hayden indicated to me he had not authorized Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman to say Mrs. Wilson had been a "covert" CIA employee, as he claimed Hayden did, but only that she was "undercover." Keeping busy at a Gridiron evening supposedly...

The publicist for a book written by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan released an excerpt on Monday that set all of the Old Media tongues to wagging again about the Valerie Plame Affair: "The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the...

What do you do when your heavily hyped book plummets from number 6 on the New York Times bestseller list to a mere 299 on Amazon.com in just a matter of a few weeks? If you're Valerie Plame, you turn to discredited "journalist" Jason Leopold for self-hype help as you can see in this video. Howard Kurtz has written of Leopold's dubious background in a March 9, 2005 Washington Post article: Jason Leopold got a journalistic black eye three years ago when Salon retracted a story the freelancer had written about a Bush administration official, saying it could not authenticate...

This is a fascinating video in many ways. One way is the fact that Valerie Plame allowed herself to be interviewed with a journalist described in a Howard Kurtz Washington Post ARTICLE as engaging in "lying, cheating, and backstabbing." The article also states that Leopold was a cocaine addict who has battled mental illness his whole life. So this is the person that Valerie Plame allows to interview her which says a lot about her. One interesting thing in this 10 minute video is that at 3:45 into it, Leopold FINALLY admits to being wrong about his infamous "scoop"...

WASHINGTON - Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Sunday he was foolish to have revealed Valerie Plame's CIA identity. Armitage's acknowledgment came in response to comments by Plame, who said the former Bush administration official had no right to talk to a reporter about where she worked. A year ago, Armitage publicly apologized to Plame and her husband. The former No. 2 State Department official remains the only principal in the leak to have done so. At least three one-time administration officials in addition to Armitage discussed Plame's CIA status with reporters. They are former White House political...

The Prince of Journalism by: Malcolm A. Kline, October 29, 2007 It contains more useful information than any journalism textbook we have seen but don’t expect legendary reporter Robert Novak’s memoirs to become required reading in communications classes anytime soon. “I was too much of a right winger for most of America’s institutions,” Novak writes in The Prince of Darkness. The title refers to a nickname that a colleague gave Novak early in his career as a comment on his trademark pessimism that has stuck for decades. When he does get on campus, Novak tells college students something they seldom...

If Valerie Plame's memoir was intended to lay to rest the conflicting accounts of how she came to be outed as a covert CIA agent, it fails. Instead, she paints herself as a naïve, whinging victim of circumstance married to an angry, obstreperous egotist who volunteered to involve himself in a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA over how President Bush came to make untrue statements in a State of the Union speech. Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (Simon and Schuster, $26) shows how mistaken her husband's judgment was....

To flip through the first third of Valerie Plame Wilson's "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House" is to confront an optical maze of gray stripes interrupting juicy anecdotes and methodical musings. CIA censors blacked out 10 percent of the text in her memoir, leaving its narrative disjointed and sometimes hard to follow. "I believe the vast majority of what is blacked out in the book has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with diminishing me and Joe," she said. Agency censors also wouldn't allow Plame Wilson to acknowledge working...

In a lame attempt to help ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame's soggy book sales (currently #33 on Amazon behind Stephen Colbert, Eric Clapton, Clarence Thomas, O.J./Goldman Family, Paul Krugman, and an umpteenth reprint of "War & Peace"), Katie Couric "conducted" an interview aimed at dummies who didn't pay much attention when the whole episode culminated in the Scooter Libby fiasco. For those of us who did pay attention, this whole episode continues to be an insult to our intelligence....

(CBS) Valerie Plame Wilson chides President Bush for not firing anyone for the leaking of her covert CIA identity, which caused a national scandal and an investigation resulting in a perjury and obstruction of justice conviction against Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff. She also tells Katie Couric that she has learned of the damage that the leaking of her identity caused agents of the clandestine service and it is serious. Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accuse the Bush administration of leaking her identity to the press as retaliation for her husband's public charge that...

Columnist Robert Novak said Saturday Ambassador Joe Wilson did not forcefully object to the naming of his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, when Novak spoke to him prior to the publication of a column that sparked a federal investigation and sent White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to jail. “He was not terribly exercised about it,” Novak said. Instead, Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war. Wilson also stressed that his wife went by his last name, Wilson, rather than Plame, Novak said. Novak forcefully defended his handling of the column...

Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall. Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson was not free to say so. “The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified...

Apparently one of the movie roles that Alec Baldwin won't be playing in the future is that of Sherlock Holmes. Baldwin writes an entire Huffington Post blog, Prosecuting Those Responsible For Outing Valerie Plame, without once mentioning the name of the leaker---Richard Armitage. Baldwin starts out with a fantasy about the things he would do if he were play-acting as president: The fifth thing that I would do is to prosecute whoever is responsible for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. At this point you would think that Baldwin would lash out at the leaker, Richard Armitage, or at...

It is amazing to me how many times in the course of our history, serious issues have taken a back seat to trivial and often foolish diversions that were politics-driven. Does anyone remember Quemoy and Matsu – nondescript islands off the coast of China whose status probably enabled John Kennedy to defeat Richard Nixon in 1960? Does anyone remember the “brainwashing” of George Romney or the pubic hair in the Coke can? How about the videos that someone in Judge Bork’s family viewed – videos that were gleaned from receipts fished out of the Bork family garbage by people who...

The hypocritical braying that has greeted George W. Bush's commutation of White House aide "Scooter" Libby's (pictured) prison sentence continues. "The president's critics are contrasting his leniency for Libby with his overall advocacy of stiff sentences," writes the San Francisco Chronicle this week. I think the scandal isn't the President's lenience for Libby, but that Libby was prosecuted in the first place. Here are the facts. A former ambassador named Joseph Wilson wrote an article in 2003, suggesting that the President had played fast and loose with intelligence to justify his invasion of Iraq. The piece appeared in The New...

Link references article which can't be posted here. ~~~~~ As always in the liberal Beltway, no one's ever questioned Fitzgerald's unsupervised free ride and tenure as Special Prosecutor in the Plame/Libby case by his college summer roommate, James Comey, now legal counsel for the giant, Lockheed Martin.

Merry Fitzmas, DUmmies!!! Yes, it's Fitzmas in July as a judge tosses OUT a lawsuit by Valerie Plame against the EVIL Bush Regime. Of course, this action has stirred up the residents of my DUmmie Ant Farm as you can see in this THREAD titled, "Valerie Plame's lawsuit dismissed." Freudenschade, baby! So let us now watch the DUmmies gloomily assess yet another DEFEAT in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble correspondent, eagerly waiting for the DUmmie reaction when Libby wins his appeal, is in the [brackets]: WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday dismissed former CIA operative...

Earlier today, NewsBuster Noel Sheppard posted an item wondering how the media would cover the dismissal of Valerie Plame's civil lawsuit against V.P. Cheney and Scooter Libby. We now have the answer from the New York Times: an article that miraculously manages to omit Plame's name from the headline! That's right. The Times article is cryptically entitled: "Judge Dismisses Suit by Former C.I.A. Operative". For the casual reader, it could have been any old former spook. Move along; nuthin to see here. Nice undercover work there by the Grey Lady. Do you think if Plame had won her case the...

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson signed on with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign yesterday, saying "it's entirely possible" his ex-spy wife will hit the trail with her, too. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a covert CIA operations officer by President Bush's advisers in 2003 as they sought to discredit her Iraq war critic husband. She's writing a memoir due in the fall. "I would expect her to be engaged [politically] probably after the book tour," Wilson told the Daily News after Clinton announced his endorsement. Wilson said his wife shunned politics during her two decades as a covert spy. But...

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