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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (23123)	9/30/2003 3:07:17 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

"Another journalist yesterday confirmed receiving a call from an administration official providing the same information about Wilson's wife before the Novak column appeared on July 14 in The Post and other newspapers." "The journalist, who asked not to be identified because of possible legal ramifications, said that the information was provided as part of an effort to discredit Wilson, but that the CIA information was not treated as especially sensitive. 'The official I spoke with thought this was a part of Wilson's story that wasn't known and cast doubt on his whole mission,' the person said, declining to identify the official he spoke with. 'They thought Wilson was having a good ride and this was part of Wilson's story … .'" "An article that appeared on the Time magazine Web site the same week Novak's column was published said that 'some government officials have noted to Time in interviews . . . that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.' The same article quoted from an interview with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, saying that Cheney did not know about Wilson's mission 'until this year when it became public in the last month or so.'" One obvious implication of this is that the oft-press shy Libby was taking journalists' calls during the period when Plame's name was named, but, of course, that doesn't mean that Libby had anything to do with it. Of course, the Post printing that pretty much non-sequitarial paragraph COULD suggest two things: A. The Post has its suspicions … . B. Maybe Mr. Libby should have played nicer with the intel boys during the run-up to the Iraq war … . The Time.com story is also interesting because it demonstrates the clear animus that the administration felt toward Wilson contemporaneously with the leak of the name: " … Administration officials have taken public and private whacks at Wilson, charging that his 2002 report, made at the behest of U.S. intelligence, was faulty and that his mission was a scheme cooked up by mid-level operatives … ." LINK "George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took a shot at Wilson last week as did ex-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Both contended that Wilson's report on an alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, far from undermining the president's claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, as Wilson had said, actually strengthened it." And we really don't like to fight with Bob Novak — besides being a fellow journalist and Terps fan, he is our hero. But we don't understand why 1. Bob thinks it matters that he was told the name of Wilson's wife in a conversation he initiated, as he claimed yesterday. It is a classic political hit strategy, Bob, to take the call from the reporter, and work the negative information into the call. 2. Newsday quoted Bob on July 22 saying, "his sources had come to him with the information. 'I didn't dig it out, it was given to me,' he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.'" LINK ("I'd say the story's changed," says IF Stoner Josh Marshall.) 3. Bob seems to be somewhat mischaracterizing what Plame's job was. abcnews.go.com