Over the weekend, Catfish Cod whipped up this 32 page Plame timeline, completge with sourcing and quotes. Check it out (.rtf)
Plame Consensus
Not enough votes/revisions to go forward with yet, so here is #11 again:
11.) In a column on 1 October 2003, Novak described his sources. The first source “offhandedly” mentioned the link between Wilson and
his wife. The second source, contacted by Novak, stated, “Oh, you know about it.”According toa NY Times report on 15 July 2005, Rove was Novak’s second source. The report describes a phone conversation between Rove and Novak, initated by Novak, that took place on 8 July 2003. According to the NY Times report, that is when Novak informed Rove of Plame’s maiden name.
A third source described by Novak on 1 October 2003 was a CIA press official. This source denied that Plame motivated Wilson’s selection but agreed that Plame assisted with the selection. The source discouraged the use of Plame’s name. However, according to Novak, the source did not indicate that
the use of Plame’s name would be dangerous.
Yes, No, and revisions, please.
Playing the Doctor Card
The things we will do to curry favor with certain quarters:
Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and our politically ambitious neighbor to the south, has been hailed as a gifted physician. But the Harvard-educated, heart-lung transplant surgeon lost a lot of credibility in March when he misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo after watching some video clips. He said he didn’t believe she was in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors who had followed her case for years said otherwise, and an autopsy later confirmed that their diagnosis — not Sen. Frist’s — was right.
Now Sen. Frist is playing the doctor card again and risks losing even more credibility.
He has retreated from his eloquent words of four years ago, when he endorsed the promise of stem-cell science and urged colleagues to support it, even though that meant bucking “pro-life” orthodoxy.
Now he has adopted an alternative and fraudulent approach that President Bush and social conservatives might learn to love, but would continue to interfere with scientists’ stem-cell work. He wants senators to abandon the popular proposal to remove some existing restrictions and support instead a requirement that scientists get stem cells through techniques that, as Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, puts it, haven’t “been published in a single scientific journal” and haven’t “even cleared the peer review process (or) been tried in mice.”
Read the rest of the opinion piece.
WaPo Editorial
I am surprised this editorial has not seen wider attention. Probably because it has this about Wilson:
But much is still unknown, and Democratic demands that Mr. Rove be fired immediately seem premature given the murky state of the evidence. While we await more facts, it’s worth remembering some from the previous episodes of this strange story — including a few that have been mangled or forgotten.
Mr. Wilson made his trip in 2002 to look into reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. A year later, he publicly surfaced and loudly proclaimed that the Bush administration should have known that its conclusion that Iraq had sought such supplies, included in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address, was wrong. He said he had debunked that theory and that his report had circulated at the highest levels of government.
One year after that, reports by two official investigations — Britain’s Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee — demonstrated that Mr. Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency’s conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger. Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official. According to the Butler Commission, led by an independent jurist, the assertion about African uranium included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”
And then for a jab at Rove:
This gives the lie to White House denials that Mr. Rove was involved in the leak. Mr. Rove and White House spokesman Scott McClellan can fairly be accused, at the very least, of responding to questions about the affair with the sort of misleading legalisms and evasions that Republicans once rightly condemned President Bill Clinton for employing. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,” Mr. Rove told CNN last year. Technically true, perhaps, but hardly a model of straightforwardness and probity. Asked about the leak, Mr. McClellan waxed indignant: “That is not the way this White House operates,” he said. Or is it?
At the same time, Mr. Rove and other administration officials had a legitimate interest in rebutting Mr. Wilson’s inflated claims — including the notion that he had been dispatched to Niger at Mr. Cheney’s behest. It’s in that context, judging from Mr. Cooper’s e-mail, that Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame’s role. Whether Mr. Rove or others behaved in a way that amounted to criminal, malicious or even merely sleazy behavior will turn on what they knew about Ms. Plame’s employment. Were they aware she was a covert agent? Did they recklessly fail to consider that before revealing her involvement? How they learned about Ms. Plame also will matter: Did the information come from government sources or outside parties?
It may be that Mr. Rove, or someone else, will turn out to be guilty of deliberately leaking Ms. Plame’s identity, knowing that it would blow her cover. Or officials may have conspired to cover up a leak or lied about it under oath. For now, however, it remains to be established that such misconduct occurred.
A more straightforward depiction of events could not be found, IMHO.
Hussein Charged
Hussein charged for his crimes:
The Iraqi Special Tribunal set up to try Saddam Hussein said in a statement today that Mr. Hussein and three others will be referred to criminal court on charges related to the killings of about 150 Shiites in the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982. The tribunal said that investigations into millions of documents and the questioning of thousands of witnesses have been completed, and that the trial related to the Dujail killings was one of several Mr. Hussein and his top aides are expected to face.
Officials at the tribunal have said that they expect to put Mr. Hussein on trial by the end of the year. The tribunal’s chief investigating judge, Raed Jouhi, said at a news conference in Baghdad that a date for the trial would be set “within days,” Reuters reported.
Today’s statement represents the announcement of the first formal charges against Mr. Hussein. Other crimes for which Mr. Hussein is likely to face eventual prosecution in separate trials include the Anfal campaign of the late 1980’s, in which as many as 150,000 Kurds were killed; the chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988 that killed about 5,000; and the repression of a Shiite rebellion in southern Iraq in 1991, in which 150,000 people are believed to have been killed. Also under investigation by the tribunal are the executions of more than 200 Baath Party leaders after Mr. Hussein seized power in 1979.
Mr. Hussein’s convoy was fired upon in Dujail in July 1982. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, some townspeople were shot dead, but 143 – 9 of them ages 13 through 15 – were executed three years later by Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court. Townspeople say that many others remain missing.
Good. Now watch Democrats shoot themselves politically by running around saying things like “Sure Saddam Hussein was a bad person but was it worth _____________.”
Because you just know they will. They can’t resist. When you have your sightings of said behavior, document them here in the comments.
And, because someone will accuse me of being unfair to Democrats, and will inevitably say something snotty in the comments like “Well, what SHOULD they say,” here is what they should say:
“I am glad that Saddam Hussein will finally be made to pay for his horrible crimes.”
That is it. That is all they need to say, or some variation on that. There need be no killer ‘but,’ as there will be plenty of time to attack Bush and Republicans about the war later on. Instead, they will overstep (AGAIN), and look like a bunch of idiots.
Cooper on MTP
Certainly seems like Rove is now knee-deep in at least one lie, because Matt Cooper claims he learned of Wilson’s wife, but not her name, from Rove, and not the other way around. Unless I am just still groggy, Rove did claim that all he did was confirm what Cooper told him, right? I will post the transcript and commentary when I find it.
*** Update ***
And let me just add that Podesta’s feigned concern for the health of the administration falls short of credible- ‘Rove should resign because he is hurting the President…’
A Plame Contrast
Frank Rich and ‘Known Facts’:
WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there’s no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper’s e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove’s own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor’s race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.
Ann Coulter and ‘Known Facts’:
Karl Rove was right. The real story about Joseph C. Wilson IV was not that Bush lied about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa; the story was Clown Wilson and his paper-pusher wife, Valerie Plame. By foisting their fantasies of themselves on the country, these two have instigated a massive criminal investigation, the result of which is: The only person who has demonstrably lied and possibly broken the law is Joseph Wilson.
So the obvious solution is to fire Karl Rove.
Clown Wilson thrust himself on the nation in July 2003 when he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times claiming Bush had lied in his State of the Union address. He said Bush was referring to Wilson’s own “report” when Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
But that is not what Wilson says he found! Thus, his column had the laughably hubristic title, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” (Once I couldn’t find my car for hours after a Dead show. I call the experience: “What I Didn’t Find in San Francisco.”)
Discuss.