>>>The Wilsons have loved it from get-go....And Valerie has NEVER said, nor has Fitzgerald, exactly WHO approved Joe Wilsons' trip and who signed the expense vouchers.... Good ole' Joe said Cheney approved the trip, and in fact, Cheney knew nothing about the trip. Evidently this is why the documents were declassified. The WH needed the public to know that they did not approve his trip, while all the news outlets were saying Cheney approved it. There have been no papers from the Wilsons, or their attorneys showing anything like a signature from ANYONE, let alone Cheney.<<<
At issue are portions of the previously classified National Intelligence Estimate the White House made public on July 18, 2003 -- some ten days after prosecutors allege Mr. Libby discussed the information with a New York Times reporter. In that conversation, Mr. Libby also disclosed the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a Central Intelligence Agency official, according to his indictment. (Leaking the identity of a covert official can be a crime, but Mr. Libby isn't charged with that violation.)
online.wsj.com
Let's continue:
>>> On July 18, the Bush administration declassified a relatively small portion of the NIE and held a press briefing to discuss it, in a further effort to show that the president had used the Niger information only because the intelligence community had vouched for it. Reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells."
But White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, addressing the same issue, Bartlett said, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the President's Summary that informed him that both State's INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose.
(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary, Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified, according to an account provided by an administration official.) ....
.... Later that summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation of intelligence agencies to determine why they failed to accurately assess that Saddam had no viable programs to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion.
As National Journal first disclosed on its Web site on October 27, 2005, Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Saddam's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among those documents was the President's Summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.<<<
news.nationaljournal.com
So they're hiding the fact that the president reviewed, prior to his speech, the one-page summary adising that both State and Energy departments felt the Niger and tubes reports were "dubious."
Now, let's continue to the heart of your supposition that Cheney knew nothing of Wilson's trip:
>>>In written testimony, he [Vince Cannistraro, the Former Chief of Operations and Analysis, CIA Counterterrorism Center] said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim [WMD and Al Qaeda links]. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts.<<<
samefacts.com
And now a conclusion from the same link above:
>>>Other agency officials, who said they had been colleagues of Ms Plame when she was trained as a CIA agent, said the leak could do severe damage to the morale of the intelligence agencies. "The US government has never before released the name of a clandestine officer," said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer. "My classmates and I have been betrayed."<<<
Now my conclusion: KLP, had any of the above happened under Clinton you'd be writing 'red flags' all over the Internet. The fact that this happened under the Bush-Cheney watch causes you to defend the indefensible. I strongly recommend you reevaluate your position on all of this. Fare ye well! |
