Shalimar

I think they’re still desparately trying to protect Cheney here. And I think, arrogant fucks that they are, they believe they’ve come up with a way to do so.

emptywheel, excuse me if I’ve missed your comments on this elsewhere, but what about Bob Somerby’s point that Wilson’s op-ed piece and Bush’s statements don’t contradict one another? That Wilson’s mission wasn’t to determine whether or not Iraq had sought uranium in Niger, but rather to find out whether they could have succeeded had they done so?

This is a key point in all this, because basically the cabal (borrowing Wilkerson’s term) reacted to Wilson’s piece by going into attack mode when they should have been playing defense by explaining the above.

So the question is, why didn’t they do that? Surely they knew the defensive approach was a good option for them. My guess is that they went into attack mode because they knew that Bush’s statement was itself vulnerable, that it might be possible to show that Bush knew it was not true. So better to smear Wilson than to debate him, even though his knowledge posed no real threat to Bush’s statement.

Was it Valerie Wilson’s knowledge they were ultimately afraid of? Can it be that the reason Fitzgerald is so pissed off and willing to do what it appears he will do is that basically, in the end, the whole thing is an intimidation campaign aimed not at Wilson, but rather against his wife, that is, the CIA?

Again, apologies if you’ve said all this before.

I think they’re still desparately trying to protect Cheney here. And I think, arrogant fucks that they are, they believe they’ve come up with a way to do so.

That’s possible, but wouldn’t it have been easier to just destroy the notes? The implication, I think, is that Libby saved them just in case he needed to cut a plea deal by turning on Cheney.

This story is so convoluted that several strands could simultaneously be true and people who have an interest in the matter keep trying to focus us on one or the other as if they were mutually exclusive. What I mean is this:

It could BOTH be true that Tenet told (or more likely confirmed) to Cheney in a meeting that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that Cheney learned it from Bolton/Fleitz, a possibilty that leapt out during the Bolton hearings when Fleitz’s dual role was confirmed.

Tenet may have BELIEVED that he was an inadvertent source of the leak and told Fitzgerald that early in the inquiry. It would also make him a prime candidate for the person who went to Pincus and blew the whistle on the campaign to discredit the Wilsons when he saw what Cheney/Libby/Rove did with the info, and why the referral to DOJ.

But Cheney is also likely to have heard at least something about the results of the Wilson trip in the spring of 2002. There are only two plausible (to me) scenarios of what happened to the report Wilson gave the CIA. Either it fell into the hands of someone who knew that it wasn’t what the boss wanted to hear and so it never made it to Cheney, or it got at least as far as Libby, but since it wasn’t news to him since Libby should have known about the forgeries, it was a big deal only insofar as it was a threat to the disinformation campaign. And remember–there were two camps at the CIA, and the report itself was likely to be much more ambiguous than Wilson’s own report of what he didn’t find.

Although I speculated that the original plot to forge the Niger documents might have been an attempt to embarrass a (future) Gore Administration, their utility after 9/11 must have made using them irresistible. But I can’t imagine Dewey Claridge, Alan Wolf and Michael Ledeen doing this entirely on their own–even if they are the quintessential â€Secret Team†types. And Cheney is likely to have learned at some point, maybe during the fall of 2002–when there were the fights over what Bush could say in speeches that culminated in the SOTU 16 words–that many in the CIA thought (or even knew) that the Niger info was bogus. But he wouldn’t have been really interested in Wilson, as in â€get Wilson†until Wilson started talking and they got scared what he might reveal. (Remember Cheney seems to have evolved into something of a paranoid control freak.) At that point Cheney would go to Bolton/Fleitz to find out more about Wilson. Fleitz is the one who would know her inside name.

I do think that the article is from the Libby camp and bears the marks of two talking points–blame Tenet and try to argue that whoever was the recipient of the leak from the percipient witness didn’t know Wilson’s wife was undercover. In fact, the latter is explicit in the article.

If the bones of the article are correct–that Tenet talked about Wilson’s wife in a meeting with Cheney, who told Libby, then Fitz has known about this from almost the beginning of the inquiry–if not from the very beginning.

Finally, the most intriguing idea I have heard floated lately is the idea that Fitz might bring charges for violation of the Wilsons’ civil rights–that is, under 42 USC sec. 1983, part of the post-Civil War laws that make it illegal, â€under color of law†(using your official position), to intimidate someone from exercisisng their civil rights. This was used extensively to prosecute voting rights violations, but also is used in a wide variety of cases. Here I suppose the rights violated would be the first amendment rights to speak out and petition the government. Maybe Valerie’s employment rights as well? The Right would really go nuts over this as â€criminalizing†attack politics, but it is an interesting theory and a salutary one to float about.

One last point–now that we clearly know Cheney knew, what did Cheney tell Andrea Mitchell at Gerald Ford’s birthday party?
Time for the media bigfoots to ’fess up.

Judy:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked questions about Mr. Cheney, Ms. Miller said. â€He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interview with me or was aware of them,†Ms. Miller said. â€The answer was no.â€

â€The answer was no.†Wow, that’s pretty convincing, huh?

Judy:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked questions about Mr. Cheney, Ms. Miller said. â€He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interview with me or was aware of them,†Ms. Miller said. â€The answer was no.â€

â€The answer was no.†Wow, that’s pretty convincing, huh?

TTT

I’ve pretty studiously avoided Somersby on this. He’s just not credible. But I do think that there’s more to Wilson’s comments than meet the eyes. He says he told them how to tell if the documents were forgeries. There’s a LOT of contention about what Wilson was told in that February 19 meeting. I suspect he WAS told enough to learn enough to refute the story. But that didn’t get reported in the CIA report (see Mimikatz’ comment about the factions in the CIA).

Swopa

There’s good reason to believe some of the notes were altered–I’ll discuss how in a later post.

Re: were they after Plame or Wilson

I still honestly believe they were after Wilson. We know what they did with people who refused to cooperate, because it did happen to other people. They were kicked out of WINPAC and, if that didn’t shut them up, charges were trumped (in one case of sexual misconduct) so they could fire them.

I think the second outing, of B-J, was a message to CIA, revenge, if you will, for having recommended this case onto DOJ to be prosecuted. If Tenet (and not Powell, as I actually believe) was the WaPo October 2003 source, all the more reason, because it would be punishment for Tenet for going to the press and confirming there was a case.

Mimikatz

I’m confused. Why do you believe the Tenet told story in this (almost certainly leaked by Libby’s lawyer) than the Tenet didn’t tell story leaked by someone pretty indentifiable at CIA?

aspTrader

Yeah, the raid on Chalabi is interesting, especially now that Condi is pushing for Chalabi as Prime Minister after all. I suspect the leak really was unintentional (that is, Feith or whoever leaked the code break) didn’t mean to. But that Chalabi exposed them all; they had to make a good show at punishing him. So yeah, they raided his stuff to try to get the incriminating materials back from him. But either didn’t succeed (and Chalabi still knows where the bodies are buried, even if he doesn’t have paperwork to that effect), or they just decided that an inconsistent Chalabi was better than a consistently pro-Iranian Jafari.

Mimikatz

Don’t forget the WaPo reported a report from Italy debunking the documents six months before the war (that is, in September, right when Hadley would have been meeting with SISMI). Someone in CIA knew that in March.

Judith Miller – Strategy at Aspen, Vacation in Wyoming

A close reading of â€Countering WMD Proliferation After Iraq†by Judith Miller in In Search of an American Grand Strategy in the Middle East: A Report of the Aspen Strategy Group, edited by Kurt M. Campbell, March 2004 is important because 1) Miller is writing as a US strategist, not as a New York Times reporter 2) Miller extracts lessons from her two month embed with a US military unit searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from March to May of 2003 (the Expeditionary Task Force’s Mobile Exploration Team Alpha) into lessons to be applied to US policy vis a vis Iran 3) While laying to rest persistent questions about Miller’s strange correspondence with Lewis Libby, it points to a specific line of questioning for Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald about whether Miller may have shared her strategic conclusions – which appear to be premature and risky – with Lewis Libby and Vice President Richard Cheney when they all happened to be vacationing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August 2003.

more at

http://blog.ltc.arizona.edu/beyondmes/

I’ll post these comments on the source of the Times story, from ABC’s The Note:

(Although we would Note that there is no mention of Cheney’s lawyer, Terrence O’Donnell of Williams and Connolly in the Times story. ABC News has been told that Mr. O’Donnell is out of the country currently. Could the Times really not have tried to reach Mr. Cheney’s lawyer or not Note that they did try? Any Note reader not familiar with Williams and Connolly’s fabled history of last-minute strategic leaking to one single news organization on behalf of political clients needs to spend the day on Nexis.)

(On the other hand, the Gang of 500 is very focused on the specificity of what Libby lawyer Tate would not comment on within the Times story. Some see it as quite different from the usual construction that â€he could not be reached†or â€would not comment.†But the Times story says, â€â€¦Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby’s legal status.†(Italics added by a over-excited Googling monkey.) For some, that makes Tate, quite simply, the Gang’s number one suspect.)

– the â€Gang of 500†refers to the DC press.

Armando.

I hope my response at DKos is enough to explain. But you’re conflating Cheney’s motive and Grossman’s. Cheney may well have called the meeting (or caused the meeting to be called) in response to the Kristof column. But as Pincus has reminded us only last week, the meeting was called not to respond to Wilson, but to talk about increasing criticism of the Niger claims in general.

As a former State Department official involved in the process recalled it, Grossman wanted the letter as background for a meeting at the White House, where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush’s inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.

Now perhaps that â€former State Department official†is Wurmser or someone (which would mean Pincus is playing Judy-like games on identifying anonymous sources, which I doubt). But if it’s not, it’s clear that Grossman wrote the memo to prepare for a meeting–a meeting called to discuss â€growing criticism of Bush’s inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.â€

One more note. I have no idea how Bolton et al are involved on the State side. But it is almost certainly in a way more complex than simple involvement in the memo. None of Bolton’s people are INR analysts, which mean they wrote neither the memo itself or the analyst’s notes. I speculate here that tha analyst who wrote the notes (significantly after the fact) may have been interfered with by Bolton before he wrote the notes. I speculate here that Bolton et al may have influenced the content of the memo during the vetting process (I’m fairly confident Bolton would have had a chance to vet this). Or it could simply be that the analyst’s notes were faulty, they caused a faulty interpretation in the INR memo, Grossman alluded to the memo during his meeting at the WH, and Cheney sicked Bolton et al on the memo, to get a copy. I’ve actually got even more nefarious theories about the INR analyst, but not ones I can back with more than hunches, so I’ll leave it there.

Arthur KC: You are right about section 1983 applying only to state officials. I can’t remember where I read the speculation about a civil rights count, but I jumped (erroneously) to the conclusion it was a 1983 claim. My bad.

Emptywheel: I have no idea what Tenet said to Cheney. I was speculating that IF Tenet did say something to Cheney in a meeting, then it made sense that he would be the source for Walter Pincus and might help explain why the CIA did the referral. It is also possible that Tenet didn’t tell Cheney, that Cheney got it from someone else at the CIA and just blamed Tenet, or he could be covering for the fact that he knew much earlier. One always has to assume they could be making up these leaks.

I also think it unlikely that Grossman wrote the INR memo; rather, he had someone summarize for him why INR and that faction at State didn’t credit the Niger info. He’s too high up to write that kind of memo–he would probably need someone with expertise in the area to summarize the evidence for him. See here So there is another INR analyst in the mix here. I had speculated earlier that someone could have been asked to summarize the evidence; he or she went around and asked the people at the meeting and got the notes. But they got some stuff mixed up when they wrote it up, or, as you suggest, some of the info may have been altered by July 8.

Why doesn’t it make sense that Cheney would have first hand knowledge of this? I mean, he and Libby were walking around the CIA banging on peoples heads trying to get them to come up with intelligence supporting their belief that Saddam had WMD’s. Wouldn’t they most likely be wandering the halls of WINPAC to do so? Wouldn’t they have first hand knowledge of Brewster Jennings and the NOCS that supported it? Maybe Mrs. Wilson was one of those ornery operatives that weren’t interested in succumbing to their pressure tactics… Killing two birds with one stone…

Alrighty, admittedly the information would have to come from somebody, but the fact the she was married to Joseph Wilson could have been fairly common knowledge in spookville. And if I knew this and was in the mood for leaking I would certainly want to â€abstract†myself from this by making sure it got spread around that it was Joseph Wilson’s wife (minus any name) at the CIA that got him the job. And if I was really in the mood for abstraction I’d make sure that the rabid reporters that received this information were pointed to a source that would reveal her maiden name, not her real name, further distancing me as the source. Now of course I would have to rely on the fact that my cabal-mates wouldn’t turn on me, but being the hubris filled ass that I am, I would never have expected that. Just a thought…

Hi E, I need to read this dense thread again, meanwhile busy far afield from the peculiar chat which permits these investigative sessions their ephemeral, though important, halflives. During the week of your most recent published investigative speculative items at this site, as you observe in another thread in response to some links I provided last week, a few more parallels have come to mind, perhaps less easily scrutinized; plus a neat backgrounder article Monday on the triple title official who manages the vice president’s office I. Libby. I would imagine with your usual thoroughness you would have read that vignette of his lifetime and WA-DC career written in the Washington Post. It adds some interesting human and intellectual perspectives. The parallels I first mentioned above are UN related; as you recall, besides hyping the existence of evidence of Iraq weapons in Powell’s speech at the UN, there were fairly contemporaneous efforts to discredit ElBaradei, Blix, and Anan. I would imaging Bolton shredding items, but maybe Armitage archived some documents to provide background on whether discrediting the inspectors was, besides trying to obtain a more stringent inspection regimen, perhaps a dual purposed project to blunt UN’s capability to weigh in on the side of world opinion to get the US to cancel the Iraq escapade. All that is ancient history now, and we are in Powell’s proverbial Pottery Barn with a new set of variables; well, some of the participants continue in place. If all these considerations are places you ain’t gonna go, at least at the minimum, you have from this comment the link to the capsule bio of Libby; it is two pages long, which means WA-Post put some thorough details and breadth into that article.

I love your speculation about the man in the sunglasses at the Jackson Hole rodeo, emptywheel. That little story has been driving me nuts since I first read it. It is one of the most implausible scenarios I’ve read in such a long time.

I’ve lived in Wyoming for almost 30 years now and have never heard a Jackson Hole rodeo. Jackson is known for a lot of things but its rodeo??? Not really. So I went to look it up. Sure enough, there is a Jackson Hole Rodeo and its website seems to be reflective of the apparent level of the rodeo itself. Do a google search for Jackson Hole rodeo and notice the kind of links that come up. All tourism related. By contrast, do a google search for Frontier Days, the premiere Wyoming rodeo, and you’ll see immediately the difference in the type of references.

The other clue lies in the â€Jackson Hole.†Jackson Hole is a geophysical, and a tourism industry, construct. So the name itself tips you off to the fact that this is a tourism rodeo for those people who are doing their once-in-a-lifetime western tour and want to say they went to a rodeo but only have time to hit the highlight locations — i.e., Mt Rushmore, Yellowstone, Devil’s Tower, etc.

And, sure enough, look at the description of the JHRodeo: Unlike the larger gatherings in other parts of the state, Jackson maintains it’s local, â€anyone who has the gumption can do it†attitude that makes it representative of both the community and the original intention of the sport. Noted for fine stock, young cowboys coming up through the ranks and people who just love it, it’s a great choice for action-packed fun during summer nights in Jackson Hole.

Yes, that’s right. During summer nights. Hmmm… Judy talks about an afternoon rodeo. Sunglasses at night?? Hmmmm…

Above and beyond that, you have to understand the culture of Jackson. There’s the tourist town and then there’s the exclusive multi-millionaire’s villages. And what’s that they say about â€never the twain shall meet?†The Jackson Hole valley is one of the most beautiful places on earth and people like Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Judy Miller see it from an entirely different vantage point — from behind closed gates, in multi-million dollar condo towns — way away from your ordinary riff-raff at the Jackson Hole Rodeo.

This story reeks on so many levels that it only makes sense if it was designed to send a message and your explanation, emptywheel, is the best I’ve heard.

Sorry for the double post. Trouble posting and glad it finally got up there. I’ve been going nuts over this damned Jackson Hole rodeo since littlesky read it to me during our nightly vacation news searches.

On Tuesday, FBI agents interviewed a Washington neighbor of Valerie Plame for a second time. (Watch Washington wait for possible indictments — 2:59)

It makes no sense that DOJ would investigate CIA; who they now work for domestically and internationally.