Bush ok'd the leak on Plame

[bxbomb]

oh this is going to get reallllllly good now

I love I lewis Scooter Libby keep spilling buddy

Does this mean George has to fire jhimself now since he promised and still hasnt delivered that ANYONE associated with a leak would be fired?

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame's CIA identity.

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The authorization came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

Libby's participation in a critical conversation with Miller on July 8, 2003 "occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate," the papers by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated. The filing did not specify the "certain information."

"Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller — getting approval from the president through the vice president to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval — were unique in his recollection," the papers added.

Libby is asking for voluminous amounts of classified information from the government in order to defend himself against five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in the Plame affair.

He is accused of making false statements about how he learned of Plame's CIA employment and what he told reporters about it.

Her CIA status was publicly disclosed eight days after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

In 2002, Wilson had been dispatched to Africa by the CIA to check out intelligence that Iraq had an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger, and Wilson had concluded that there was no such arrangement.

Libby says he needs extensive classified files from the government to demonstrate that Plame's CIA connection was a peripheral matter that he never focused on, and that the role of Wilson's wife was a small piece in a building public controversy over the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

Fitzgerald said in the new court filing that Libby's requests for information go too far and the prosecutor cited Libby's own statements to investigators in an attempt to limit the amount of information the government must turn over to Cheney's former chief of staff for his criminal defense.

According to Miller's grand jury testimony, Libby told her about Plame's CIA status in the July 8, 2003 conversation that took place shortly after the White House aide — according to the new court filing — was authorized by Bush through Cheney to disclose sensitive intelligence about Iraq and WMD contained in a National Intelligence Estimate.

The court filing was first disclosed by The New York Sun

[destruction]

What a stellar performance by Libby before the Grand Jury. His two concertos in both the key of B for Bush and in the key of C for Cheney surely brought down the house. HAHAHAHA!!! Keep singing Scooter. I'm sure there's a recording contract waiting for you.

Hey Igloo..... Got anymore propaganda to offer?

Hey DrMoron..... Do you think that calling me "scooter" sounds like a sour note now?

[destruction]

"If There Is A Leak Out Of My Administration, I Want To Know Who It Is. And If The Person Has Violated Law, The Person Will Be Taken Care Of" - G.W. Bush

Time to look in the mirror George.

[destruction]

Libby Sings

John Prados

April 07, 2006

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Just a few months ago defenders of the Bush administration were lambasting Justice Department prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald for engaging in a fishing expedition that might hurt President George W. Bush. The pundits considered Fitzgerald’s indictment for perjury of former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis (“Scooterâ€) Libby to be politically motivated and wrong.

To recap, Libby’s alleged perjury occurred during his testimony to a grand jury investigating the blown cover of CIA clandestine officer Valerie Plame Wilson, bound up in a White House bid to neutralize criticism of the Iraq war. The Plame affair started as an effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to look into charges that Iraq was buying uranium ore there. Wilson found nothing to substantiate the claim and subsequently became a critic of Bush’s resort to war. His wife was outed in an attempt to undermine Wilson’s charges.

Continued legal filings in the case now reveal Prosecutor Fitzgerald as a guardian of White House secrets and Scooter Libby plus his defense team as assiduously implicating President Bush. For those who questioned George Bush’s modus operandi in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq and afterwards these are perhaps not unexpected developments. But the gradual emergence of the contents of the Libby grand jury testimony is important not only because it contradicts the president’s public denials of the leaks, but also for potentially placing the president at the center of a smear campaign.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s April 5 response to the Libby team’s latest motion to compel discovery of a vast array of documents discloses that Vice President Dick Cheney told Libby that President Bush had “specifically†authorized officials in the summer of 2003 to reveal certain contents of the secret U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There will be an argument over whether Bush or Cheney actually had that authority (which is vested in the Director of Central Intelligence by a law on the books since 1949) but that is not the concern here. Rather, the disclosure of this deliberate Bush leak—given to Judith Miller of The New York Times and others—provides new evidence that the White House regarded the top secret NIE not as an intelligence appreciation but as fodder for political warfare. In fact on July 12 Cheney ordered Libby to speak to the press about the NIE.

The new evidence also says something about Bush secrecy. This administration has moved on many levels to restrict public—and even official—access to information. Cutting off flows of data formerly routinely provided to Congress or the public, defenestrating access to the records of former presidents mandated by the Presidential Records Act, curbing the Freedom of Information Act, refusing to describe to Congress its domestic communications interception program and most recently reclassifying documents in the public domain for years. Suddenly we see President Bush, without a care, releasing secret records he felt would bolster his case.

Moreover, the way in which this was done should send shudders down the spine: according to the Fitzgerald filing, Scooter Libby told the grand jury that “he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials—including Cabinet level officials—were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson’s trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003,†evidently a reference to the materials assembled by CIA officer Robert Walpole regarding Iraq’s weapons programs and used for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council a couple of weeks later. If Libby’s testimony is accurate, documents were to be simultaneously deemed secret and declassified, depending upon White House whim, convenience, or legal liability.

This is the same administration that is seeking to prosecute those who leaked information considered less favorable to its cause, such as the fact of the National Security Agency’s dubious domestic spying program or the existence of the CIA’s secret prison network. Under the interpretation of the Espionage Act the Bush Justice Department is using to prosecute two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, even reporters who gain access to such information, media that inform the public of it, or persons who merely possess the information are currently at risk, although the statute appears to criminalize only the act of leaking. Indeed, the law makes it necessary for the NIE data not to be classified in order for Libby to legally leak it. There may be an argument here that under the Bush interpretation of the statute the act of declassification to abet a leak could amount to a criminal conspiracy, in this case by President George Bush himself.

Those who contend that there was no Bush effort to make political use of intelligence in the months leading up to the war will now have an even harder time of it. At various points during those months there were similarly orchestrated leaks—of claims about aluminum tubes supposedly being used in an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and of alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to name just two. And there were carefully prepared occasions where Bush officials took advantage of those leaks to advance the cause of war. The events of July 2003 demonstrate that this was a standard administration tactic, not an aberration. Given the circumstances, the need for a “Phase II†investigation of the political use of intelligence for the Iraq war becomes inescapable.

The most important aspect of the new evidence is that it locates the center of the effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson, and of the actions taken to further that aim, squarely within the Oval Office. If that project rose to the level of a criminal conspiracy, or if anything done to further that goal was in fact illegal, it is George W. Bush who must be called to account. That is a very troubling development indeed. The censure motion introduced by Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold may turn out to be merely the opening salvo in a very intense political battle.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/07/libby_sings.php