The Plame Page

Libby Defense May Highlight Infighting, by Pete Yost, Associated Press, March 18, 2006

Finally we get some more news about the Plame issue. Libby will have a new defense strategy that the administration most certainly isn't going to like: "There was so much other recrimination going on that I coudn't possbily have remembered something so comparatively insignificant as outing a NOC."

New legal documents raise the potential that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial could turn into a political embarrassment for the Bush administration by focusing on whether the White House manipulated intelligence to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

In a court filing late Friday night, Libby's legal team said that in June and July 2003, the status of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame was at most a peripheral issue to "the finger-pointing that went on within the executive branch about who was to blame" for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

"If the jury learns this background information" about finger-pointing, "and also understands Mr. Libby's additional focus on urgent national security matters, the jury will more easily appreciate how Mr. Libby may have forgotten or misremembered ... snippets of conversation" about Plame's status, the defense lawyers said.

Obviously, Scooter is not taking this lying down, and he will not be the sacrificial lamb for whatever administration higher-ups authorized this.

Further reading: Frontpage poster SusanG at Daily Kos comments on this issue.

Posted by hekebolos at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (159)

Vanity Fair's Judy Miller Rehab: Blame the Bloggers, by Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post, March 13, 2006

Arianna Huffington attacks Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article on the Plame case, calling the article an unconvincing apologia for Brenner's friend Judy Miller. Huffington complains that Brenner is too biased to write about Miller objectively, doesn't disclose the friendship until late in the article, leaves out many important facts from the Judy Miller story, and that

Brenner's central thesis is wrong. Her overarching premise is that that Judy Miller went to jail for a noble cause -- the ability of reporters to protect confidential sources -- but the public and the press (led by those nasty bloggers) failed her and now it's open season on the free press.

"Traditionally," she writes, "there have been two generally recognized exceptions to journalistic privilege: matters of life and death and imminent actual threat to national security." But there is a third exception that Brenner conveniently leaves out, an exception spelled out in the ethical guidelines of the New York Times: "We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack." This was unequivocally the case with Plamegate. And, as the Times' ethical guidelines make clear, there is a world of difference between sources using confidentiality to blow the whistle on government or corporate misconduct, and sources using it to promote a war -- or to smear a critic of that war.

Doesn't the Plame leak arguably fall into the first two categories as well, at least if the second category is interpreted broadly? How do we know the leak didn't harm national security? And it may well have been a matter of life and death--for Plame's sources on WMD proliferation.

Posted by Nick at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

WASH POST's Ben Bradlee Claims Plame Leaker Was Richard Armitage, Drudge Report, March 13, 2006

THE WASHINGTON POST's famous Watergate editor Ben Bradlee claims that it was former State Department Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage who was the individual who leaked the identity of CIA official Valerie Plame.

In the latest issue of VANITY FAIR: "Woodward was in a tricky position. People close to him believe that he had learned about Plame from his friend Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's former deputy, who has been known to be critical of the administration and who has a blunt way of speaking. 'That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption,' former WASHINGTON POST editor Ben Bradlee said."

'I had heard about an e-mail that was sent that had a lot of unprintable language in it.'"

Via Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who comments:

This makes eminent sense to me as Fitz has implied Woodward's source was an innocent who would not be charged, hence, his refusal to name him in pleadings in the Libby case.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire also comments on this development.

Posted by Nick at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Judy, Judy, Judy by Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake
"I was told last year that Vanity Fair was eagerly courting Judy Miller to write an article for them about her Traitorgate odyssey. According to today's Editor and Publisher, it doesn't seem they were able to get her and instead had to settle for her friend and apologist Marie Brenner (who also helped organize Judy's farewell dinner before she was shipped off to eagerly embrace her martyrdom)."

Preview of 'Vanity Fair' Article on Plamegate: Too Much of Nothing? by Greg Mitchell, March 11, 2006
"NEW YORK A massive Vanity Affair review of the Plame/CIA case coming to newsstands on Tuesday is notable for the absence of major revelations. The article, “Lies and Consequences,” covers all or parts of 17 pages but the money quote is merely a joke, from the normally bland Bob Woodward. He quips that while insiders argue the fine points of special counsel Patrick J. Fitzpatrick’s probe, those in the rest of the country “think Fitzgerald is the author of ‘The Great Gatsby.’" "

Posted by Suzanne Levi-Sanchez at 12:13 AM | Permalink

Market Predicts Libby In Orange Jumpsuit, by Justin Rood, TPM Muckraker, March 8, 2006

"...online traders are betting in favor of the former White House aide receiving a guilty verdict.

Futures contracts on a guilty verdict for Libby have soared to 57 percent in recent days on the web-based trading site intrade.com. The higher the figure, the more 'certain' the market is of an event coming to pass."

Posted by Nick at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (117)

"What the Hell has Happened to the News Media" by Daniel McKivergan, Worldwide Standard, March 7, 2006
"The March/April 2006 Columbia Journalism Review has a revealing profile of Walter Pincus, the Washington Post's leading national security correspondent."
The piece is not online, but McKivergan presents some excerpts. Pincus mentions his friendship with Hans Blix and his transition from WMD believer to skeptic just before the Iraq invasion. Here's his take on Plamegate:

...Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. "I don't think it was a crime," he says. "I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe" -- Wilson -- "by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it's got to be investigated -- never thinking that it was going to run around and bit them." The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.

The investigation has been a distraction? I don't get it. In some trivial sense, any given political issue is a "distraction" from every other issue, because time spent discussing X could be spent discussing Y. But has Fitzgerald's investigation done more to distract people from the administration's manipulation of intelligence on Iraq, or to draw attention to that manipulation, since the desire to cover it up it is what motivated the administration to leak Plame's name? And as important as questions about prewar intelligence misuse are, the exposure of a CIA agent for political purposes is a rather important issue in its own right, even if it might not have been technically illegal.

Posted by Nick at 11:29 PM | Permalink

Libby Responds to Fitzgerald's CIA Filing by Jeralyn Merritt, TalkLeft, March 8, 2006

Libby's lawyers have filed a response (pdf) to the CIA's affadavit. Merritt analyzes the argument and opines:

The thrust behind the pleading seems to be that Libby was distracted by hugely important national matters and couldn't be expected to remember his Plame conversations with reporters at the time he was questioned by FBI agents or the grand jury. Once, I might believe. But on four separate occasions? You'd also have to buy that Libby didn't prepare either for his two FBI interviews or his two grand jury appearances. I'm skeptical. Even if he hadn't lawyered up for the FBI interviews, he did so before his grand jury appearances and no lawyer lets his client go into a federal grand jury without prepping him, least of all a lawyer with a client as high-profile as Libby. And the media has consistently reported that Libby took copious notes.

It seems more likely to me that Libby intentionally misled investigators and the grand jury in an attempt to protect Cheney (see the timeline here), never dreaming that the reporters would be subpoenaed, and now in hindsight is trying to reconstruct not his memory but an alternative explanation for having lied.

Posted by Nick at 09:50 PM | Permalink

CIA Opposes Libby Access to PDBs by Firedoglake, March 8, 2006 "The CIA filed a motion on Friday opposing Scooter Libby's request for access to the Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs), citing substantial national security concerns at allowing any of the information contained therein become public. The motion was unsealed on Tuesday, according to the AP (via Forbes)..."

CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward by Jason Leopold, Truthout.org, March 6, 2006 Opinion piece...

Posted by Suzanne Levi-Sanchez at 08:45 PM | Permalink