Posted by
Christine Gates on Tuesday, March 06, 2007 8:59:11 PM
Originally published in Lenoir-Rhynean
newspaper Nov. 2006 (written Oct 27, 2006)
First Indictments in the CIA
Leak Case
By Christine Gates
This story is never ending… Lewis “Scooter” Libby resigned
as VP Chief of Staff after a twenty-two month investigation were he was
indicted on 1 count of obstruction of justice, 2 counts of giving false
statements to a grand jury, and 2 counts of perjury on Friday, October 28,
2005. (For those of you who are keeping
track of such things, Clinton made 267 provably “erroneous” statements to a
grand jury. No indictments were
filed.)
Libby was only
indicted, but US Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s wording to the press was
suspiciously strong and definitive as if he had just been convicted by a jury after a trail. In the press conference after the indictments
were announced, Fitzgerald did not use the typical legal verbiage like
“alleged…” or “the government’s case will demonstrate the law as broken in this
manner….” Instead, he said -----
After the indictments were handed down, a Washington
reporter asked federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about any leaks from
Libby. Fitzgerald replied that Libby’s
investigation was not about an outing of a Plame. Then what was the crime being
investigated?
This is then likened to someone giving you a test on all the things you did and said at work
for the last five years. Libby turned
over all notes and fully cooperated with the prosecutor and all grand jury
appearances. Libby is said to be an
excellent lawyer and should know the threshold for perjury. Surely, he would not perjure himself. Suppose Libby were given 500 questions to
answer about his job for the last five years and the test-giver has all of his
notes to compare every single answer to.
Libby missed 5 questions. Those
would be the one’s he was indicted on, because Fitzgerald officially stated on
Friday that Libby was not being investigated for outing Plame. This is terribly confusing and seemingly
unfair. Apparently, in Libby’s case,
there was no crime until Libby’s memory “failed” him.
However, the President’s top advisor Carl Rove, aka Bush’s
Brain, is still under investigation for involvement in the CIA Leak because the
grand jury did not indict Rove. But
Prosecutor Fitzgerald will have to convene a new grand jury since this one’s
term ended on Friday 10/28/05,
which, unfortunately for us, means this whole investigation may have to start
over.
(notes to my editor for submission.)
====== the story could end here for just the indictment news.
/
/
/ADD LATER:
/ AFTER 2 YEARS – NO GREATER INDICTMENTS THAN THESE
/
====== the rest is summarized history of the Leak Case –
Very interesting for me but I’m sure you’ll [my editor] yawn. I love this!!! My
editor at L-RC did not run this “history” part story. She felt it was boring and no one would
care. I loved doing this investigation
to see what was under those rocks. I
could easily make a living doing this kind of analysis. Or at least, doing the research for someone
else to do the analysis.
CIA Leak Case History
by Christine Gates
During a series of interviews in 2003 on WMD’s NewYork
Times Washington bureau
reporter, Judith Miller, asked many questions of Carl Rove and Scooter Libby, Dick
Cheney’s chief of staff, about details about the validity of WMD’s story. One question she had was who was sent to Niger
to investigate this for the U.S? The
answer was Joseph Wilson, husband of CIA employee Valerie Wilson-Plame. Months ago, Cheney said on Meet-the-Press he
referred to Plame as, “that woman who is married to Wilson
and works for the CIA” but he says he did not know her name. Her employment was common knowledge in all Washington
circles.
One reason why Miller was asking these questions was because
Robert Novak originally and used her name in a July 14, 2003, article in the New York Times. Novak
writes, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an
Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” He wrote a previous opinion article on July 8, 2003, asking the question why
Joseph Wilson was chosen for the CIA investigation when he was clearly
unqualified. Matt Cooper, a reporter for
Time magazine, also wrote a story
asking the same questions. He has also
been cleared of any wrong doing by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and
the grand jury.
But Miller spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court
because she would not divulge her source for identifying Plame by name. Now that she is out of jail and we find out
that Rove and Libby both gave her permission more than a year ago to discuss
the details of their interviews, I guess I really don’t know why she went to
jail unless she is protecting someone else.
It turns out now that
Miller is out of jail, her notebook read on a blank page Valerie “Flame,” not
Plame. The most mystifying part of this
whole story is that now she can’t
remember exactly who told her Plame’s name.
What? How could that be, she went
to jail 4 months instead of revealing her source. Was she able to remember the source’s name
before jail? Maybe she should have
written it down before she went to jail.
The media claims that CIA agent Valerie Plame was alledgedly
outted by either Rove, President Bush’s closest advisor, or Libby during interviews with Miller, Cooper
and/or Novak.
A guide to keep these “players” straight:
Robert Novak – reporter,
columnist, author; originally used her name in print
Matt Cooper – Time magazine reporter who worked on the
story before Judith Miller
Valerie Wilson-Plame – CIA employee whose current and
past employment is unclear
Joseph Wilson – diplomat and husband
of Valeria Plame
Judith Miller – New York Times reporter who is spent
time in jail to protect a source
Patrick Fitzgerald – Independent
Council in this case, a federal prosecutor
Carl Rove – Bush’s top aid
Lewis “Scooter” Libby – VP
Cheney’s Chief of Staff
Legal background –Victoia Tunseng, Ronald Reagan’s Chief Counsel,
drafted and negotiated the 1982 “Intelliegence Protection Law.” She has been on a few TV and radio news shows
and written numerous articles telling people for months that no law has been
broken in this case. Tunseng states that
the law was written so that intelligence reporting could still take place,
especially the reporting of wrongdoing by the government.
It has been said of Fitzgerald
that his “greatest talent is his creative ways to interpret laws.” Tunseng commented on this colleague’s description
of Fitzgerald this way, “This [creativity] is okay in civil law, but absolutely
wrong in criminal law where the law and crime are to be clear” so that the
government doesn’t contrive laws to arrest and prosecute individuals. Something our Founding Fathers took issue
with in the British government three hundred years ago and spelled out such
individual protections in our Constitution.
In an interview on October
26, 2005, Ed Meese, former Attorney General for Ronald Reagan, says
he is withholding judgment about the case, but he is very puzzled by the
investigation because on the surface he does not see where a law has been
broken.
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, US
prosecuting attorney, has kept the evidence in this case secret. All aspects of the investigation are
uncommented on by his office. So why is
this such a big story? All the
speculation on who and when someone will be indicted so silly, because we don’t
even know exactly what the focus of the investigation is.
According to Tunseng, who drafted this Intelligence Protection
Law, it is legal to print or report the name of non-covert CIA agents. It is legal for former covert agents to write
books and tell of their adventures in the CIA (with CIA approval). It is legal for the names of these former
covert agents to be reported in the media as long as they have not been
undercover for within the last five years and as long as the report does not
compromise national security. So where has
the law been broken?
If either Rove or Libby named Plame directly or indirectly,
she has not been undercover for eleven to at least 8 years and, according to
some who know her, she has or had no intention of going back under cover with
the CIA since she had her twins in 2000.
We know she has not been undercover, because Plame she is
not living under a false identity to protect her, her cover, and/or national
security; she uses her real name at work and at home. She drives herself to work at the CIA
headquarters and enters through the front doors. If she were still undercover she would never
openly enter the front doors of the CIA building. Her neighbors all knew she worked for the
CIA. The Washington
DC elite, party-goers all knew she worked
for the CIA. Her employment was not
secret. After the indictments on Friday,
most media is referring to her as “covert.”
If she were really covert, why did she posed for a January,
2004, Vanity Fair magazine story with
her husband the diplomat, Joseph Wilson?
This seems illogical, if she really were a covert CIA agent. According to many Republicans in Washington,
“Wilson is a known liar.” He claimed that Dick Cheney sent him to
investigate yellow-cake uranium mining in Niger,
then he retracted that statement later.
Cheney claims he has never met Wilson.
Now, this goes back to the Bob Novak story from 2003 about why Wilson
was chosen for this very sensitive assignment.
So what is the big deal about outing a CIA employee who is not covert? There must be more to this story than meets
the eye. It may be a political hack job
against the Bush administration. It may
be an Executive Branch cover-up to protect past officials and not necessarily
anyone from this administration. Maybe
this is an example of Judith Miller and the New
York Times trying to make news not just report the news. But after of the Friday indictments, it is
just confusing. Stay tuned there will be
to come. If you want to read any of the
archived articles, go to: http://www.factcheck.org/article337.html.