Lookin' good, FredGuy
Praising Roberts to the teeth and calling for pardoning Scooter?
Sign. Me. Up.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 4:21 PM
Pajama Guy
"You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
-Jonathan Klein, former CBS Executive
Contributors
Previous Posts
- Or maybe he's just lying
- Locke's Odds
- Psycho Analysis
- Reminder
- Funniest Sub-Head Of The Day
- What I Am Reading
- FredGuy
- Dissonance
- Do-gooders
- Somethin' funky
Monday, May 14, 2007
Sign. Me. Up.
12 Comments:
Hey Columbus Guy. What would you have said if someone in the Clinton administration had accidentally or intentionally exposed a CIA agent and endangered all the foreign agents who had had contact with that agent? Not to mention had eliminated any future value that such a highly trained agent might have had for the USA in the future? And if the Clintonians had done it in order to discredit the agent's spouse because of some criticism that spouse had made about one of Clinton's policies? Scooter may have been a bit of a fall guy, and there may be some technical reasons it was hard to get him on the underlying offense, but wouldn't you be arguing if the Clinton administration had done it that it was a cynical waste of an American asset for political purposes? Wouldn't you have wanted someone to pay?
Just curious about your level of self-knowledge.
1) Scooter Libby didn't out any CIA agents, the anti-war Richard Armitage did (published by the anti-war Robert Novak), except that everyone knew it already anyway.
2) The agent in question, who appeared with her husband in a photo shoot in Vanity Fair, was not a covert agent and was in no way covered by the law in question that the special prosecutor--who found no original violations of the law, but was able to bring one about--had as an alleged reason for his investigation.
3) The law itself about outing was condemned by the New York Times when first passed--as trampling our basic rights--and has regularly been condemned by the left until, oh, just a few years ago, for some reason.
4) Outing a non-covert agent isn't nearly as bad as publishing secret tactics we use in fighting the War on Terror (including tactics everyone agrees are legal), yet the New York Times and others have regularly released such secrets.
5) The only person who was definitely not telling the truth before the investigation was Joe Wilson, who got almost everything he said wrong, yet was able to publish a harmful and incorrect editorial in the New York Times against the Bush administration (while giving out classified information that one might think he had sworn to keep secret).
6) Wilson then said, among other questionable things, that his wife didn't get him the position where he got the information used in the editoral (information that the government believed and believes helps to confirm that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger)--and his wife, in telling her story about how she didn't get him the job, explained very clearly how she got him the job. The proper and legal response of the Bush administration should have been to hold a press conference announcing who she was and what she had done.
She had done covert operations in the past, and could have done again in the future, had her identity not been exposed for political purposes. While Armitage may have exposed her name to Novak, Libby clearly had similarly conversations with reporters and exposed her name and the fact that she worked for the CIA, and then lied about it. The real problem with prosecuting the case was that the law requires the exposer to know what he is doing, and I agree -- that level of competence has not been demostrated by members of the Bush Administration. Trying to blame the whole thing on the NY Times reaction to this law originally is diversionary in the extreme. So are factually empty claims, such as "everyone" already knew -- did you? I haven't heard a single reporter state that he or she knew before having one of these conversations with an adminstration official. As far as her "getting him the job," -- first she clearly did not have the authority to do more than put his name in for consideration, and secondly, who cares? All I am asking is what would you do if the parties were reversed? Be honest with yourself.
I'm being perfectly honest. She was not a covert agent and was widely known around Washington--by politicians, reporters and presumably spies--to work for the CIA. She had never even done "covert" work as understood by the law (and wasn't about to start for the first time in her life.) Furthermore, she didn't give her husband the job, but went out of her way to recommend him for it, and then she and he claimed she had nothing to do with it, and he just got the position because he had special expertise above other candidates (even though he did a poor job and didn't even seem to understand the meaning of his own report). Be honest with yourself--if you uncovered this as a reporter, isn't this news, and news that should be reported?
Furthermore, it's now clear--if you want to be honest with yourself--that the Bush administration felt (correctly) it was being smeared by Wilson, but even then there was no organized campaign to lie about him, or to release classified information, or even to out his wife.
Furthemore, it's the left that has regularly fought for more and more openness in government, editorializing that the press (and their informants) should be allowed to release classified information without fear of proseuction. They've even, in the past, supported the outing of agents who actually were covert. But suddenly, for the first time, there's something that can't be done--outing a non-covert agent, which even Fitzgerald knew could not be prosecuted.
The self-knowledge that I am talking about is the knowledge that, if things were reversed, you would be quoting the sources that say Valerie Plame was a NOC and was involved in numerous undercover investigations in European cities, posing as a "private energy expert" employed by private firm "Brewster Jennings & Associates," and that due to the clandestine nature of her work, the details are still classified. I am confident you have found sources to belittle her work, but those are not the sources you would be quoting if she had been outed by Democrats. We would have heard long ago how Bill Clinton had been guilty of treason for allowing this exposure and impeachment proceedings would have begun. We would hear how Democrats don't take security seriously, and that it is unforgiveable to expose a source for political reasons. We would hear how naive it is to downplay the importance of a single operative, and how many people to whom we owed good faith around the world had been betrayed.
Sorry, anonmymous, but your argument is unimpressive. I think you have a self-knowledge problem.
Anonymous #1- you have a very compelling argument- that facts that Scooter's defenders have to resort to a wall of words and squishy legalisms to show that "Contrary to your lying eyes, we really didn't do any thing wrong, if fact we did the right thing, yeah thats the ticket"
You don't Have to be a Hillary-lover to see these guys for the incomptent hypocritical boobs they are
Thanks, Former Repub. As usual, our biting knowledge of others exceeds our self-knowledge. I'll cop to that.
I'd rather not get dragged into this, but honestly, let's leave aside all the speculation about what would have happened if black was white and night was day, and look at this basic fact. No one in the Bush Administration called up a single reporter to say Valerie Plame works for the CIA! If I'm wrong, give me a single reporter who claims such a thing.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald knew from the start no crime had been committed (and that the Bush adminstration wasn't guilty of what the press was accusing it of), but I guess he was being so lionized that he couldn't stop, and decided to keep investigating hoping he could get a politicized jury and create a crime.
Mr. Longwinded identity:-OK lets look at the facts- you know no one in the Bush admin outed valarie plame and you know patrick fitzgerald knew there was no crime- do you work for CBS? I hear they have a place for people that know facts like you do
Judith Miller learned from Scooter Libby that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Before he told her that, she did not know it. In a second conversation, Libby told Miller that Wilson's wife worked for WINPAC -- a division of the CIA that deals with weapons of mass destruction. This was also the first she had heard of that. At this time, Libby had asked Miller to identify him, misleadingly, as a "former hill staffer." Miller has written in the same notebook the names "Valerie Plame" and "Valerie Flame." However, she "doesn't think" Libby told her the name -- she thinks it was from "another source," whom she "could not recall."
Richard Armitage was a member of the Bush administration when he identified Plame as a CIA agent to both Novak and Woodward. It clearly was a talking point within the administration at that time, given the number of reporters who were being fed little "tidbits." Armitage was less suave than the others.
Libby obviously was nervous about his actions in revealing what he did, because his misstatements about it were pretty blatant.
I'm not going to go over all the misrepresentations and mind-reading necessary to make the above comment (including reading Libby's mind, and then there's the sad Judith Miller story, where normally she would have been considered a big hero, but because she was a brave journalist who had the wrong politics, she was mocked by the left when she went to jail--disgusting)
The simple truth is the word got out through Armitage, and there was no concerted effort to send the message out--even though I think, as I said earlier, that they should have called a press conference to announce the Plame connection.
Armitage was a careerist in the State Department, and openly opposed the Iraq War. In fact, the State Department openly opposed the war, and regularly fed reporters state secrets about it. And what happened when they did? Was a special prosecutor called in? No, the reporters won Pulitzers, that's what happened.
But acccording to your theory, the brilliant Rove has officials who oppose him reveal Plame's identity to reporters who oppose him, so the word gets out. Then, even more insdiously, he sends out mind rays forcing people to ask him about Plame, and then brilliantly refuses to lie about something everyone already knows. This is the actual bizarre scenario of the people trying to blow up a non-scandal into a scandal (okay, there was a scandal, Joe Wilson's lies, but the Bushies were easy on him) and turn the truth-tellers into criminals.
Post a Comment
<< Home