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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (165734)	7/10/2005 4:42:31 PM
From: jlallen	Respond to of 281500

I haven't seen any evidence as yet to support your allegations...due process is more than just a couple of wprds to me....

To: geode00 who wrote (165734)	7/12/2005 6:19:20 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Rove Unfit for Public Office __________________________________________________ Whether the courts can and will punish Karl Rove for telling Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative should be beside the point. That's for the courts to decide. The real question is whether we want a person to occupy a high office in the White House when that person has cynically endangered US national security to take a petty sort of revenge on a whistleblower. Ambassador Joe Wilson, who once dared Saddam to hang him while wearing a rope around his neck while acting ambassador in Baghdad in fall of 1990, was the first to let the American people know that the Bush administration lied about Iraq's alleged attempt to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. Wilson went to that country, investigated the structure of the uranium industry (which is mainly in French hands anyway), and concluded it was impossible. Bush and Cheney had believed a set of forged documents manufactured by a former employee of Italian military intelligence. (In the US, the only major public intellectual with close ties to Italian military intelligence is pro-war gadfly Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute). In revenge, Rove tried to discredit Wilson and perhaps also punish him and his family. The purpose of such punishment is always to bully and terrorize other employees, as well as to shut up the whistleblower. Since the Bush administration has done so many illegal things, if Washington insiders started blowing the whistle, there could be a hundred Watergates. Rove let everyone in Washington know that he would destroy anyone who dared step forward. The White House also dealt with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil when he blew the whistle on the Bush planning for and Iraq War in January of 2001 (look at the date). They threatened O'Neill with jail time for revealing classified information, even though O'Neill had never been given any. He subsequently fell quiet. It is also said that the Bushies tried to prevent Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general, from getting any consulting gigs in Washington because he opposed the Iraq war. But Rove's revenge on Wilson was the ultimate. Plame was undercover as an employee of a phony energy company. She was actually investigating illegal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. When Rove blew her cover to the US press, everyone who had ever been seen with her in Africa or Asia was put in extreme danger. It is said that some of her contacts may have been killed. Imagine the setback to the US struggle against weapons of mass destruction proliferation that this represents. Rove marched us off to Iraq, where there weren't any. But he disrupted a major effort by the CIA to fight WMD that really did exist. Moreover, the whole thing only makes sense if Rove is a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to begin with. Why would it matter that Valerie Plame suggested to the CIA that they send her husband Joe Wilson to Niger? Wilson had excellent credentials for the mission, which the CIA immediately recognized. Rove can only have thought it would discredit Wilson to associate his missiion with the CIA if he viewed the CIA as the enemy. This is the Richard Perle line. If Wilson was sent to Niger on the recommendation of a CIA operative, then he was not an objective ex-ambassador but a CIA plant of some sort, attempting to undermine the Bush administration and the military occupation of Iraq. This theory is that of a crackpot. The actions are those of a traitor. What is the difference between Robert Hansen revealing key secret information for money to the Soviets and Karl Rove revealing it to the proliferators for political gain for the Republican Party and the Bush White House? Both are traitors who traded secrets for gain. A man who would do what Rove did should not be in the White House in any capacity. And no person who tolerates a man like Rove in the White House should be commander in chief of American security. juancole.com

To: geode00 who wrote (165734)	7/12/2005 7:01:41 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The real Rove scandal ___________________________________________________ By Robert Scheer Columnist Los Angeles Times July 12, 2005 If you can't shoot the messenger, take aim at his wife. That clearly was the intent of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in leaking to a reporter that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. To try to conceal the fact that the president had lied to the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, Rove attempted to destroy the credibility of two national security veterans and send an intimidating message to any other government officials preparing to publicly tell the truth. Rove's lawyer now says that Rove didn't break the law against naming covert agents because he didn't know Plame's name and therefore couldn't have revealed it. Perhaps he can use such a technicality in court, but in the meantime he should resign immediately — or be fired by the president — for leaking classified information, trying to smear Wilson and possibly endangering Plame's life. "The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "I trust they will follow through on this pledge." The background on this story is crucial. Ambassador Wilson had been honored as a patriot by President George H.W. Bush for standing up to Saddam Hussein in a face-to-face confrontation in Baghdad on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. But in 2003, Wilson committed an unpardonable crime in the eyes of the second Bush White House. He exposed its lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. In 16 now infamous words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, the president — desperate to gain support for an invasion he was dead set on initiating — tried to scare Americans into believing Iraq was close to making nuclear weapons. "The British government," he told the nation, "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But the key documents that the claim was based on had already been proved to be fakes, and other intelligence reports along these lines were extremely speculative. In fact, it was a CIA-organized mission by Wilson to the African country of Niger (where he had served as ambassador) that determined the reports were false. Wilson was therefore shocked to hear the uranium claims in the president's speech. When he exposed the chicanery in a New York Times commentary, Wilson became a prime target for a White House smear job. According to e-mails that Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper sent to his editor (which were revealed by Newsweek over the weekend), Rove told Cooper that Wilson's devastating expose should be discounted because the Niger fact-finding trip had been authorized by Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA. This was three days before Robert Novak, citing two White House sources, outed Plame as a CIA agent in his column and put forward the same notion: that Wilson's information was suspect because the CIA had hired him on the advice of his wife. In the end, though, what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it. It's ironic that the expertise of this couple should be turned against them by a White House that has demonstrated nothing but incompetence in dealing with the WMD issue. But clearly truth and competence are virtues easily shed by the Bush administration in the pursuit of political advantage, even when this partisan game jeopardizes national security. This is the most important issue raised by the Plame scandal. It has been unfortunately obscured by the secondary debate in the case: whether reporters should ever reveal their sources. Yet what the emerging Rove scandal demonstrates is the ease with which a wily top White House official can subvert the Bill of Rights' protection of the free press to serve the tawdriest of political ends. newsday.com