TR - I stand corrected on the facts of the Berger case. He should have a cell too. Period. This has never been a partisan argument on my part.

Sio - Even if she's no longer operating in a clandestine status, you still don't talk about her past activities as a field officer. As I said, a good CI officer can take the few leaked facts and through some good research unravel entire operations.

kgoerz - I'm well aware of different types of cover. I'm not going to go into it further for the same OPSEC reasons that you alluded to, but suffice it to say that (for the same reasons I just mentioned to Sio) this was indeed a potentially harmful leak in my judgement. Also, whether it actually resulted in harm isn't the point. The disregard for operations in favor of politics is. If they White House had ripped Wilson in the presss as a spotlight-seeking, partisan blowhard I wouldn't have said a thing other than "well, thats politics."

As for the rest, I think the circumstances of the case pretty well establish that there was some coordinated strategy to confront Wilson by leaking the name and that it did not originate with Libby. Who it originated with (Cheney, Rove, other?), no one can say for sure. I agree that they apparently didn't have enough evidence to charge anyone else and sadly thats the way the justice system works some time. To be clear, I'm not calling for any further legal action thats not warranted by evidence. I'm talking about what ethically should be, not what is legally practical.

82nd - If Wilson acted like that then he's an ass too. However, a) there's a little bit of a difference between outing your wife to fellow national security officials and outing her to the whole world and b) we're not talking about him, we're talking about Libby and the people responsible for the outing. The "but the other kids did it too" line is not a suitable defense.

I'm not defending Democrats in general. I'm not maligning Republicans in general. I'm talking about the Libby case in particular. I think the whole thing stinks and I think any President should hold his staff to a higher standard.

I understand, x-factor. My main, although meandering, point was that if the Libby case was truly about outing an operative, then Richard Armitage should be in jail, as he as admitted to "outing her."

X:

What specific activities involving Valerie Plame were actually discussed ? By anyone ? Libby, Armitage, Rove, Cheney, Bush ? Interestingly enough Joe C. Wilson apologizes to his wife in the front page of his book. What was he apologizing for ? and Why ? Merely a loving gesture on his part ? or was this apology a sub concious or concious effort on his part to clear the air in his own bedroom ?

While I admit to not reading every single piece of news regarding the Plame incident, I've alway's been under the impression that Valeries name was merely mentioned. If her past activities were something that had been published for counter intel guy's too see all one had to do was Google the name "Valerie Plame" and we quickly learned that she did in fact at the very least work under the cover status with the now defunct cover corporation of Bruster Jennings in counter proliferation.

Your an intel guy, working in northren Va. You've claimed to have deployed with two SF Groups and worked "closely" with them. Maybe your a spook, maybe your not. I cant speak for others on this forum, but I can only read what is available and try to read between the lines. My perspective is Joe Wilson is a blow hard and has been for some time. After all, they both sought attention from various magazines for such expose's as "heres our house" and "here's our antiques" Seems to me that Valeries cover was clearly last on the list of Joe C. Wilson concerns.

Maybe his apology to her in the preface of his book has more proof to it than has been given credit.

Within hours of the communtation of his sentence, Scooter Libby paid in full with a single money order the entire $250,000 (plus a $400 "special assessment").
So much for the "sting" of a "big fine." Do you think he will ever disclose who gave him the money for that?

Scooter Libby was rewarded and sheltered for doing exactly what his boss, the vice-president (if not the president), told him to do: "Disclose the identity of a CIA agent, lie your way out of trouble if you get caught. If you get convicted, I'll pardon you."

Libby is being rewarded for being faithful. Albert Speer was faithful, Alfred Krupp was faithful.

COMMENCE RANT, AT RISK OF THREAD HIJACK:

Alberto Gonzales is faithful. I have no doubt that if the President asked Alberto Gonzales to draft a position paper in support of "rounding up all the homo's and gassing them in gas chambers" Alberto would diligently research the Japanese Internment cases from the 1940's, add Supreme Court cases for compulsory medical teatment, add statistical correlations between homosexuality an HIV/AIDS, incorporate Center for Disease Control quarantine regulations, and produce a well written articulate memorandum of law in support of "rounding up all the homo's and gassing them in gas chambers." After all, he had no problem drafting memorandum describing just how much torture was acceptable.

Any true JAG officer with a set of balls would have told the president: "Read the Geneva Convention: Torture is torture. " What part about "NO" don't you understand? If you have to ask, then don't do it.

Colin Powell was faithful. He stood in front of the United Nations and made claims that were unproven and unprovable. Damn shoddy performance from a general officer.

END OF RANT (I could go on for a long time.)

I'll make this quick...to avoid continuing the hijack, but the Libby connection is in this. Consider the source and spin....

Not sure if you have seen this, but before we throw Colin Powell under the bus...I can not vouch for the comments and the opinions, but watching the program was interesting. I have included the text from the program.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/

RICHARD CLARKE: Powell gets a speech, written by Scooter Libby, sent to him. And he's told, "This is the kind of speech we would like you to give at the U.N." It's very strange for the vice president's senior adviser to be writing the speech and saying to the secretary Of State, "This is what you should be saying."

NARRATOR: Powell was skeptical of Libby's speech. He turned to tenet for help.

CARL W. FORD, Jr.: He took the initiative to tell his staff, INR and CIA, "We're going to have to got through this. I don't like this." So his mind was already attuned to the fact that he wanted to make it better than he saw it.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Chief of Staff, State Dept. 2002-05: Secretary Powell was not reluctant at all to throw things out completely. We threw the meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives in Prague out.

NARRATOR: Powell and his senior staff spent the weekend at CIA headquarters.

LARRY WILKERSON: I sat in the room, looking into George Tenet's eyes, as did the secretary of state, and heard with the firmness that only George could give it* and I don't mean terminology like "slam dunk," although he was a basketball aficionado and used that kind of terminology a lot* but I mean eyeball-to-eyeball contact between two of the most powerful men in the administration, Colin Powell and George Tenet, and George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting to the U.N. was ironclad.

NARRATOR: But even at that time, inside the CIA, there were serious doubts about the accuracy of a central part of Powell's speech. It, too, had come from the NIE.
"Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents. These facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable."
The source for this information was code-named "Curveball."

--------

NARRATOR: But as Curveball's allegations became a crucial part of the NIE, what few knew, including Secretary Powell, was that Curveball was the sole source for most of the information.

DAVID KAY: He was not told the truth when he was at the Agency. When he was going over the data, he was told this was based on not one source but multiple sources. One of the sources he was told it was based on was already known to be a fabricator. He was not told that the Germans had denied the U.S. access to it. He was not told that there had been warnings from the Germans that this guy was, to say the least, undependable, alcoholic. So all the* all the fine-grained stuff that might have caused him even then not to use it, he wasn't given an opportunity to hear firsthand.

NARRATOR: In February of 2003, Secretary Powell arrived at the united nations to put his personal prestige on the line.

ROBIN WRIGHT, The Washington Post: Colin Powell was the most powerful voice within the administration cautioning against the dangers of going to war and the costs* human, political, diplomatic. At the end of the day, however, Colin Powell is a team player. He wasn't going to walk away from the administration on the eve of going to war, which was not only abandoning his commander-in-chief, but also the troops, many of which he still knew.

COLIN POWELL, Secretary of State: [U.N., February 5, 2003] Let me turn now to nuclear weapons*

NARRATOR: Powell insisted George Tenet sit in camera range right behind him. The usual allegations were made.
----
DAVID KAY: From very early on I said, "Things are not panning out the way you thought they existed here." And it was specific cases, whether we were talking about the aluminum tubes or we're talking about the nuclear program, in general, or the biological program or the chemical program.

NARRATOR: Powell received the bad news directly from Tenet.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I remember these scenes where he would come through my door and say, "Well, George just called and he took another pillar out. Another substantial aspect of my presentation is gone." He took it like a soldier, but it was a blow. It was a blow to me. I mean, I wrote out my resignation. I put it in my center drawer, typed it myself. I wouldn't even make my staff assistant type it. "Dear President Bush, I've come to the point in my service where I no longer can serve, given the nature of your foreign policy," and so forth. "And therefore, I respectfully submit my resignation." And once a week or so, I would take it out and look at it and fold it back up carefully and put it back in my center drawer, never having the intestinal fortitude to submit it. You know, I won't speak for Colin Powell, but I'll tell you it really affected me.

Once the name is out in the open, it unlocks a whole bunch of other stuff. Your post is perfect example. From the name, they got the cover corporation. What do you think they might get from that? etc etc etc.

If I were undercover I wouldn't be posting here at all. I'm an analyst. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't mention which DoD agency I work for because its just better to not to give out info you don't have to.

Thats all I'm doing too. I form my political opinions based mostly on the unvarnished committee hearings and press conferences I listen to on CSPAN on the drive home and on the Sunday morning show interviews.

That Wilson is blowhard and/or moron I have no opinion on.

And here's where I'll disagree. There are no 'wink-wink-nudge-nudge' passes given for this. Either you keep your mouth shut, or you're culpable for whatever passes.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...al_crisis.html

July 06, 2007
Our Faux Constitutional Crisis
By Rich Lowry

Practically everything else in American life has been dumbed down, so why not constitutional crises? The braying over President Bush’s commutation of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence is that Bush has undermined the rule of law and the Constitution.

The Founders would be bemused at this, since — inconveniently for the Scooter-must-hang left — they included the pardon power in the Constitution. There it is in Article II, Section 2: The president “shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons.” They didn’t include a proviso that the power shall not extend to persons vilified by left-wing bloggers as the personification of “the case for war.”

Bush can hardly create a constitutional crisis by exercising a plenary constitutional power, and doing it in a way that has become almost routine. The first President Bush pardoned former CIA official Clair George (convicted of lying to Congress), former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (indicted for perjury), and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane (pled guilty to withholding information from Congress). Like the current Bush’s commutation, these Iran-contra pardons violated the Justice-department guidelines. And somehow, the republic survived.

President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of former Arkansas operator Susan McDougal (jailed for myriad offenses); former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros (caught up in an interminable independent-counsel investigation about whether he lied to the FBI); former CIA Director John Deutch (in the midst of a plea bargain over his mishandling of classified material); and eight people connected to the scandal around former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy (all of whom had been convicted of or pled guilty to illegal acts).

This leaves aside Clinton’s truly egregious pardons and commutations: sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists over the opposition of the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the international fugitive Marc Rich; one man convicted of mail fraud and perjury and another convicted of cocaine trafficking, each of whom had paid $200,000 to Hillary Clinton’s brother Hugh Rodman to represent them.

Bush’s commutation is nothing like those outrageous acts of clemency. It is perfectly in the mainstream of pardons throughout the past 20 years in cases that are considered politicized prosecutions by the aggrieved administrations. The Founders created the pardon power to grant relief from a justice system that might, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, be “too sanguinary and cruel.” It doesn’t serve that function so much anymore, but has turned out to be a safety valve in an era when each party criminalizes political disputes when it suits its purposes.

This creates a perpetual argument over whose perjury is worse. Liberals say that Libby’s perjury is more serious than Clinton’s because Libby lied about the war and Clinton lied only about sex. Actually, Libby’s case wasn’t about the war, but about whether or not he had misremembered when and from whom he first had heard that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. There also is an ambiguity to Libby’s case, with its complex assortment of conflicting memories, that didn’t exist in that of Bill Clinton, who admitted to testifying falsely under oath.

Regardless, except for the most blatant crimes, the political arena is the best forum for politically controversial charges of wrongdoing. Rather than commuting Libby’s sentence on grounds that it was excessive, Bush should have pardoned him altogether on grounds that the case had become a way to make one man pay for the alleged sins of the administration regarding the war. Our system of government provides a straightforward method to punish an administration without resorting to special prosecutors and criminal charges, which is to vote against the president or his party.

Just wait: The same people hyperventilating about Libby now will have exactly the opposite attitude about the criminalization of politics when a Democrat is back in the White House. Then, they will grow fond of Article II, Section 2 all over again.

Clearly I'm pretty mad about the whole Libby thing, but anyone calling it a constitutional crisis needs to reread the constitution cause its pretty much black-and-white on this.

I should have written, if any cover remained, if she and her husband broke her "cover" so much her neighbors considered it common knowledge I'd say it was accessible. Still the point is Libby was not convicted for outing her.


Richard Armitage revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in 2003. Karl Rove talked with two reporters about Plame but never supplied her name or CIA role. Of the three Libby gets the most attention from Fitzgerald, now why is that.

Comparing Libby to any pardon is ridiculous, Libby wasn't pardoned, his sentence was commuted, the conviction stands.

But why does Fitzgerald seem to focus on Libby. What does come to light regarding Clintons pardons is Marc Rich (Reich). Rich was charged with tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Libby was defense counsel and Fitzgerald and James Comey were prosecutors. Libby is credited for the legal groundwork that led to then President Clintons pardon, just before leaving office, of Marc Rich. This of course had nothing to do with the large donations given to the Democratic party and the Clinton library by Denise Rich.

Comey as Deputy Attorney General appointed Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak.

So the whole thing seems a poor example of honest judgment to me. This never was the case to set an example for exposing classified information. Especially when the only charges brought were perjury and obstruction.

FYI: Data on presidential pardons and commutations*
 

From the DoJ website.

Clemency Statistics

• Presidential Clemency Actions by Fiscal Year (1900 to 1945)
• Presidential Clemency Actions by Administration (1945 to present)

Clemency Recipients

• Pardons and Commutations Granted by Bush the Elder
  
• Pardons Granted by President Clinton
  
• Commutations Granted by President Clinton
  
• Commutations Granted by Bush the Younger
  
• Pardons Granted by Bush the Younger

In my experience, cutting and pasting into an email the full list of President Clinton's pardons will result in a deafening silence from the message's recipient.:p

_________________________________
* This necropost is brought to you by the Coalition of Over Caffeinated Insomniacs.

Well I'm hoping Raymond Phillip Weaver said thanks, probably with his mouth full of pancakes. Courts Martial in 1947 for stealing four pounds of butter from the Navy.:rolleyes:

In the "Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows Department" - one Clinton pardon was for former Arizona Governor J. Fife Symington III (back in the old days of Arizona - when I was in high school - we had governors with names like "One-Eyed Jack" Williams, not J. Fife Symington III :D). It seems that on a spring break while both were in college (Harvard for Symington and Georgetown for Clinton), Clinton swam out too far and was drowning. Symington swam out and saved him. At least that's the story I heard!