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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsReporter Says He First Learned of C.I.A. Operative From Rove
By LORNE MANLY and DAVID JOHNSTON
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Mr. Cooper found himself in front of the grand jury on Wednesday morning, a week after a receiving "an express personal release from my source," sparing him a jail sentence for civil contempt of court. Another reporter facing the same punishment that day, Judith Miller of The New York Times, was jailed after refusing to disclose her source for an article she never wrote.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18rove.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
By Laurie Asseo - January 31, 2007
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper testified today that top presidential aide Karl Rove was the first person to tell him that an Iraq war critic's wife was a CIA official.
Cooper, testifying in Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby's perjury trial, also contradicted Libby's account of a conversation the two had the following day, on July 12, 2003, about war critic Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.
Libby, 56, Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, is accused of lying to investigators probing whether U.S. officials deliberately leaked Plame's identity to retaliate against Wilson for attacking the administration's Iraq war claims. Prosecutors say Libby falsely told a grand jury that, when Cooper asked about Plame, he said he heard about her from other reporters and didn't know if the information was true.
``I asked what he heard about Wilson's wife'' sending him to Niger to find out if Iraq sought to buy uranium there, Cooper said. ``Mr. Libby said words to the effect of `yeah, I heard that too.'''
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=alx7IIe2sXq0&refer=us
Did you support the Plame investigation?
The difference here is that phone records not reporters were targeted.
"The seizure of AP's phone records is legal"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022850071
ProSense
(116,464 posts)freshwest
(53,661 posts)ProSense
(116,464 posts)Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsfeld.
Gonzo was the funniest.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022846160
It's like he was telling a bedtime fable.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General_Gonzales
Oh, yes, let's take his word over that of Eric Holder.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)The AP matter involves much less weighty matters. A CIA operation that had already been wrapped up was disclosed after the fact. The double-agent who had penetrated the Yemen bomb cell had already been extracted. Disclosure did not threaten lives or the integrity of a CIA program - "the bad guys" already knew they had been had. In the Plame scandal, an entire division of the CIA was turned upside down because some officers refused to falsify WMD intel so the White House could invade Iraq.
This looks like a much smaller vendetta. The original AP report of May 7 spun the story so as to emphasize the White House and DHS had made misleading statements that there were no known AQ threats related to the anniversary of bin Laden's execution the previous September, when all this happened.
Convening a Grand Jury and subpoenaing the phone records of numerous reporters and Congressional staffers appears to be overkill after the White House went after AP. It was unnecessary, and makes Obama looks like Nixon. Let's not try to justify or diminish it's significance just because it was "our team" that did it if we are to have any credibility in our remaining outrage at gov't abuses.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"Convening a Grand Jury and subpoenaing the phone records of numerous reporters and Congressional staffers looks like overkill after the White House went after AP. It was unnecessary, and makes Obama looks like Nixon. Let's not try to justify or diminish it's significance just because it was "our team" that did it if we are to have any credibility in our remaining outrage at gov't abuses."
...subpoenaing phone records is worse than targeting reporters?
I mean, the whole frame of the current issue to make it seem worse than it is involves implying that the reporters were the target.
Why wasn't everyone who is outraged now outraged at the launch of the leak investigation?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022846070
leveymg
(36,418 posts)The White House target in the Plame affair was a division of the CIA. It's not really clear what metaphor you're trying to construct.
"Subpoenaing phone records is targeting reporters. It's not like Plamegate at all."
...are you saying that 'subpoenaing phone records is targeting reporters," but supoenaing reporters in Plamegate isn't targeting reporters?
Voice for Peace
(13,141 posts)for your posts today, & voice of sanity
ProSense
(116,464 posts)cherokeeprogressive
(24,853 posts)Isn't it more likely the phone records were subpoenaed in order to target reporters?
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"Does the DOJ plan to prosecute the phones? Are you saying the phones were the "target"?
Isn't it more likely the phone records were subpoenaed in order to target reporters"
...the leakers: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022846070
I mean, wouldn't Republicans and everyone hoping to impeach the President love to find out if the leakers are inside his administration?
Of course, there are other theories: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022848186
pacalo
(24,721 posts)in the DoD.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"I'm thinking that the leaker could be one of Cheney's puppets inside the CIA or in the DoD."
...it's going to take time to rid the Government of these cronies. Look at the IRS, it was headed by a Bush appointee until his term ran out in November 2012.
randome
(34,845 posts)[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
[hr]
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Most of the details revealed about that operation were revealed by WaPo and NYT reporters, not the original AP article that had little to say about the specifics of what happened in Yemen.
I believe we have a sufficient amount of information to make the judgment call that Plamegate involved far weightier issues.
DevonRex
(22,541 posts)forewarning us and the British about future terrorist attacks is weighty?
leveymg
(36,418 posts)There was going to be no more forewarning from that source. The AP story didn't tell AQ anything they didn't know.
DevonRex
(22,541 posts)"Although the double agent did hand the new underwear bomb technology to U.S. officials, "they had hoped the agent could do more [and] ... one consequence of the story is that this agent's identity was blown," she says.
Dina says the bomb was of special interest because of who made it Ibrahim al-Ashiri, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's master bomb maker.
..snip..
Ashiri is considered a genius at building bombs and authorities had hoped to use the double agent to get at him, Dina says:
"Officials tell us the plan was to reinsert the agent into al-Qaida's arm in Yemen after [authorities] got their hands on the bomb," but the AP leak made that impossible."
leveymg
(36,418 posts)They weren't going to send the SAME guy BACK. Especially after the bomb was never planted and al-Quso was droned. As for the super-genius bomb maker, none of his bombs ever did any damage, except to his brother who blew up prematurely in an apparent attempt to kill the Saudi defense minister.
What does Dina know? How can people be so naive as to believe this heavily back-filled CYA account?
DevonRex
(22,541 posts)Good fucking god. Tell that to Valerie Plame Wilson. I'm sure the NYT, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney all agree with you and thank you heartily. And they certainly had their own CYA accounts to tell. Or his behind privilege.
Al Qaeda thanks you, too. They also thank AP, without whom they'd still have a CIA op within their ranks.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)The double-agent was an expendable, unlike Plame who had career Non-Official Cover (NOC) as a manager in the Counter-Proliferation Division that was gutted by Cheney because they wouldn't go along with the Iraq WMD fabrications. There is no comparison.
DevonRex
(22,541 posts)Figure that out for yourself.
pacalo
(24,721 posts)Cheney's retaliation against the CIA is possible, but his primary motivation for outing Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson's NYT editorial.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)All of her agents were potentially exposed in the process. The Division within CIA where she worked was attacked by Cheney because it wasn't going along with the fabrications about aluminum tubes and other "evidence" the Bush Admin. was publicly raising as its rationale to attack Iraq.
Joe Wilson's NYT editorial that debunked the Niger yellowcake claims was just one in a series of push backs by CIA-Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) that pissed off the neocons.
galileoreloaded
(2,571 posts)tosh
(4,424 posts)Effin-A!
Dash87
(3,220 posts)He committed treason and yet somehow gets continued praise from the GOP idiots.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)I thought that was a real bad idea, although the only one to "blame" was really the IC. The "Right" thing would have been for Bush to order his staff to "release" their anonomous protections.
ProSense
(116,464 posts)"Judith Miller was a political apparatchik..."
...with the corporate media: They get to push bullshit and hide behind freedom of the press protections. It would be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but the media are GOP/corporate shills.
patrice
(47,992 posts)hughee99
(16,113 posts)Another difference is that a specific person was targeted, not two months worth of both personal and professional phone records for, if I understand correctly, about 20 people. This is exactly the sort of thing we would have condemned under * and called out the administration for trying to intimidate the press or at the very least, called it a fishing expedition.
As I've read, according to the Justice Department's strict rules,
"A subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period," according to the rules."
I think many people are having a hard time seeing how 2 months of 20 peoples home and work phones meets this standard.
I'm not arguing that the seizure of the records has necessarily broken any laws, but he administration has asserted that drone strikes are legal as well. That doesn't mean I support them.