emptywheel,
Thank you for the update. I check in everyday, but rarely comment.
You are a treasure trove of information on this case!
Merry Christmas!

This strikes me as getting to the heart of the matter.

Libby & Shooter pressured Tenet (wrote his mea culpa) to obscure that they werere the prime movers in inserting the Niger Forgeries into SOTU.

Using a forgery to start a war is not a hanging offense in my home state.

BUT IT IS IN TEXAS!

Thanks for the latest and for all your contributions this year, wheel. I’ve been thinking lately about people’s assumption that Cheney will be unflappable under cross examination. I don’t think we have reason to believe he performs well under pressure. I’m thinking of 9/11, when Cheney and his family were in a blind panic, hanging up on Clarke, breaking all the rules for what’s supposed to be done during a crisis. Then when he shot his friend in the face, the initial efforts at containing the scandal were ridiculous. Finally, he’s a poor improvisational speaker, which might be why he tends to fall back on old lies during interviews. I believe he’s flappable.

Redacted NYT things and now no Wilson five year thing?

Well, I figured out why you deleted the comment about the five year law for Congressmen being banned from committees after being served and how that might affect someone running for Congress and if it applied when they get there or started when they we served and carried into the Congressmen’s term:

See – it’s on ’Coast to Coast AM radio.’ George can figure anything out. The Mayan calendar ends and so does all humanity in 2012, last night. However, if you go by the Pope’s calendar that is still less accurate, although the goal was to compete with the Mayan calendar – the world and humanity ends in 2007 that’s FIVE YEARS early. So, there’s that five year law for informants and the five year banning the Congressmen from serving on Committees after being served by the Plame problem, effectively ending their careers. BUT, what’s really important is that in being wrong about the calendars we REALLY made a mistake with Millenium. Millenium is 2000, not a year on a calendar, but the number of alien metal men, not asteroids, created by Satan that are going to end all humanity like in Battlestar Galactica(just ask Google Quan)using the fission energy beam from their eye that moves back and forth on their head. [ At this point, people assumed that their program was changeable and the metal men could be destroyed by fission. In fact they can’t and at no point did a Priest battling Satan have fission made by a human because it’s a creation of Satan, so it’s not survivable for humans and is survivable by the metal men]. So, humnans lose. No way out. Dig all those secret installations and those metal men will just get in their sooner or later being like humans, it’s easier to get to those things.

Anyway, the election is in 2008 and the invasion begins in 2007, so, if we are supposed to survive until 2012, then we have four years after the election to save humanity. So, it’s important who we elect, assuming that the Transformer movie goes okay and no one figures out those are really metal men like the Tin Man and the terminator(the skin was the opposite, so that humans can’t travel – only metal can travel through time).

So, what parties solved the problem? Was there anyone from DOJ Ethics?

So, there are substitions for CIPA about the trip like case studies, but, if you look up CIPA and those substitions you end up with McVay. We need to know what the substitions are because they are, in fact, the lesson for the original trip and may give us understanding why the trip was not a foreign operation being ’bought’ by an ’agent’ of CIA(contractor) on behalf of CIA and put into effect by CIA, which, technically, is treason, if not unethical to send a husband on a trip paid by your company, which you run……………..

Anyway, like everybody else we really appreciate the posts and writing and it’s not like you were deleting comments, which you never do, as the dem bloggers hunted down a comment and other dem bloggers went on a comment deleting fest in support of what could not have been an error and, at the time, there was this arrest of a guy or anything, not that I was over at yahoo anwers answering questions about travel and not operations officers at the time, not that that was happening at the time you were deleting, which was really political and not like anything bad like the guy they arrested, not that he knew he was going to be arrested because no one else knew he was going to arrested, but, I guess Burger is free because it was a setup(suspicious archivists set trap – all on their own, whithout even calling CIA agents or nothin’ and they didn’t even approach him and ask him what he was doing ’cause he was so dangerous – they didn’t even tell him removing doucuments is illegal) and that’s just wrong because that’s how they use people and that’s probably not what happened to the guy they arrested because it just doesn’t seem that way, but maybe it will be criminal charge like just stealing documents instead of something really big like treason or selling drugs or something………………

Holy cow, that was a trip to read. My mind is aching.

AS for YOUR work EW, thank you very much for all the thoughtful posting and happy holidays to you. Looking forward to the book. And watch out for the Transformers!

PJ at 14:37 – Just an observational guess, but I think Uflic may be related to (is) SWE and 01 (can’t think of the other handles) that has been posting here recently. I can’t grasp anything and not sure there is anything to grasp.

July 11, 2003 is significant because it’s the day that Matt Cooper sent an email to his editor saying that Rove told him about Plame and it’s also the day that Rove sent an email to Hadley saying he spoke to Cooper.

“It was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized (Wilson’s) trip,†Cooper’s July 11, 2003, e-mail to his editor, obtained by Newsweek, says. “not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger …. â€

Also, from a Fitzgerald filing

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (â€Official Aâ€) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

â€I think Uflic may be related to (is) SWE and 01.â€

Completely agree.

It also reminds me of Harry Shed, one of Jason Leopold’s many handles.

there goes John Casper blaming everything that is unusual on ONE Jason Leopold

Casper is a kook. He basically travels between this blog and FDL and licks these women’s boots and comes to their defense should anyone voice an opinion that disagrees with them. Casper I am speaking for the small majority that would like to say SHUT UP! If you’re going to pin blame on people back it up. You do this all the time and it’s ridiculous. Apparently Casper doesn’t have a day job and has appointed himself local sheriff. You don’t get to accuse people of everything that goes wrong just because you feel like it. So put up or shut up you kook.

Time for you to lick the boots

Chiming in to second the holiday well-wishers, and to add some feedback about this crucial CIPA 6(c) ruling.

First, I’d call this about as watertight a ruling in case of appeal as one could ask for under CIPA procedure. That, I think, is because Judge Walton went about as far in Libby’s direction as he could possibly go, without falling over… What saved the day is the intelligence community – it appears that they basically took the ground out from under Libby and his lawyers with regard to the graymail dismissal effort. So this ruling really reinforces for me how indebted we all are to the declassifiers in the intelligence agencies, for the fact that the trial is back on track for next month.

The written 6(c) ruling spells out, and pivots on, only a very small portion of the substitutions offered [most of the rest having been orally agreed to or ordered during the four 6(c) hearings], but that key remaining portion objected to by Libby is the (literal) handful of documents that Libby apparently used to make his graymail effort’s ’last stand’ – in hopes of swaying the Judge to go his way on these last points, in the end. Thankfully, whatever the full backstory is to this CIPA process and ruling (and it must be a doozy), the government got the ball just far enough over the line to save the trial, one way or another, resulting in Judge Walton’s worthy decision (filed 12/11 but only released with redactions 12/22) to grant the government’s final substitution motion (after a little more extra-credit revising just before he ruled). Judge Walton appears to feel much more comfortable with this ruling than he did with his 6(a) ruling, and for obvious reasons, I think.

Judge Walton has also ended up breaking new ground in CIPA process and thinking, it seems to me, and I really hope Congress takes note of both how he applied CIPA in this case, and of the Judge’s clear message that CIPA, while valuable, has been an enormous and quite unprecedented burden and ordeal in this case [if it’s been â€arduous at best†as the Judge said in his 6(a) ruling, what has it been at worst…?]. Without absolutely outstanding, and continuous, cooperation from the agencies (and their handful of unknown-to-us individuals) responsible for reviewing and releasing classified documents and information, this trial almost certainly could not have proceeded. And, likewise, without a gifted and dedicated Special Counsel in this case, who must have had to push, and push again, every time the Judge pushed him, the effort to avoid the graymail threat of dismissal might very well have foundered.

I don’t think Congress envisioned quite the superhuman efforts that seem to have been required to get this case to the stage it is at today, when it wrote and passed CIPA with prosecutions of high-level government officials in mind. So I hope responsible legislators will take a very careful, painstaking look at what may need changing to improve the process for all concerned (and they now know who can give them valuable testimony in that regard…).

As Judge Walton concluded in this ruling:

â€When this Court began its foray into the CIPA morass in September, it could not have imagined the course of the journey it was about to traverse. During this tedious and complex expedition…â€, etc., etc.

Eleven hearings over two and a half months, and the result, as the Judge says himself in this ruling, is that Scooter Libby now has the ability to â€saturate the jury†with â€an overwhelming amount of information†from classified sources, in support of his â€quantitative and qualitative faulty memory defense.â€

Well I have a few comments.

1. I still see this prosecution as a stretch.

2. It seems awful complicated. Do juries usually handle these kind of complicated cases? I would have thought it would go to a Judge.

3. Perhaps though Libby and/or Fitz wants 12 befuddled jurors.

4. All these redacts, limits, obscure manipulations, and as I said, stretches that complicate everything, seem also to make this case easier to appeal, and overturn no matter which way it goes.

5. I am glad that personally I only have to worry about technology, science, and math, and whether something will benefit or if it will sell. (In other words I am glad I am not a lawyer. It muddles up my mind.)

Wow!! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good…day!! That was a tasty and substantial morsel from pow wow! A great reminder of where we have been and where we are headed. I felt proud to be an american, a glimpse of the thing that makes me stand proud when they raise the flag, while reading that post. This last few years didn’t come to torture the American people. Bush and his dynasty family came to teach Americans a lesson before we completely destroy the world. Now let’s wrestle our democracy back in order…shall we? For me that means accepting consequences gracefully in the form of impeachment, it means solving some world class problems. I actually think that the world will be very glad to get America back…to acting like America.

Peace,

Happy holidays to John Casper, a rare voice of civility on the internet.

This is about dates confounded in meshed syntax. The other day layering into a websearch about July 11 appeared that†page of text interspersed with photos of the Herbert Allen yearly Sun Valley media pow-wow of moguls attendance at which was Tenet’s alibi in 2003; do a search on that page for Tenet to see a photo of him in a garden alone on the cellphone. The text following is what jumbles events while describing Tenet’s attendance both n 2003 and 2005; interspersed in the slipshod grammar on that webpage is an allusion to a London terrorist incident which became the topic of Tenet’s speech to the media gathering. I understand this to mean 2005, as the botched subway bombings occurred in London in 2005. I wonder what topic Tenet chose in 2003 or if he gave an verbal presentation at all in 2003 at the gathering.

Though my research time is budgeted very slim currently, in the retracing the history of 2003 and 2005, above, I learned Tenet soon after resigning from the intell agency signed a contract thru 2008 at the School of Foreign Service in GU. One study center at the GU SFS is the Montara Center for International Studies; on the MCIS’s blog in March 2006 appeared this article entitled ’The $40. Billion Question’, the thesis of which is something like the Sy Hersh classic about neoCon stovepipes, written in October 2003. The interesting part of the ’$40.BN’ post is its protagonist is a long-suffering Republican ex-intell expert on Iraq who, like Tenet, migrated to GU-SFS to teach diplomacy students; the view expressed is the congress is wasting dough if intell produces facts but the executive eschews mature intell, in favor of opting for its preferred sourcing methods. The same protagonist the grad student writes about in the ’$40.BN’ article, being a recognized expert in mainstream foreign policy circles, naturally appears as well, there, a September 2006 five-cournered discussion, which in part examines the excessive contrivance necessary in 2003 to make a linkage between al-Q and Iraq, as US preIrqInvasion hype manufactured by the executive branch’s preferred sources. There is a lot more in these clustered links; Porter Goss’s name even appears. I think Bush has improved matters by selecting the individuals he has as replacements in some of the involved agencies. I even support strongly the merits of the design concept by which military has as its top executive civilians not military. Civilian control is one of the great strengths of US itell and military; and, as the aboveReferenced protagonist prof Pillar observes, civilian control has its pitfalls, as well; stovepiping being among the most grievous. I wonder what Bush would think now in retrospect, regarding some of his early management decisions. Reportedly he is fairly detached. And now there is an al-Q linkage to Iq; Pillar avoids lamenting this much, after the fact, but, speaking as a regional expert, is interesting to read on the utter disbelief rampant in the intell community when it realized that the administration’s propaganda machine was fabricating a linkage between al-Q and Iq in the prewar hype, and the administration sent requests to IC to start with the conclusions and work back to corroborative cherrypicked facts.

Prof. Carol Lancaster is the blog editor for the Montara Center for International Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at GU. I recommend reading some of her materials on those websites.

Now, back to my undisclosed location.