pryderi...you have yet to prove anything. the only thing you have done is provide more after-the-fact evidence that the intelligence being used was faulty. please provide some proof of deliberate misleading or lies.


....PROOF.....not some hairbrained thoery from some crazy broads blog

6/6/2005 5:33:47 PM

Im yet to be convinced that he knows how to prove anything or that he knows what the word actually means. I do think he is in love with the Downing Street Memo though.

6/6/2005 5:44:20 PM

haha....true....."BUT THE DOWNING STREET MEMO!!!!.... IT PROVES.....!!"

and no....he has no idea how to prove anything.....

6/6/2005 6:02:31 PM

Ok. First Bush needs to answer some questions under oath about the Blair's meeting minutes. Then an investigation should be made. Let's use the same standard that was used to investigate Clinton.

There are discrepencies between what the information that's provided by the Downing St. minutes and Bush's pre-war statements.

You guys are right. I can't argue for impeachment, until Bush testifies, and an investigation is completed.

[Edited on June 6, 2005 at 11:40 PM. Reason : .]

6/6/2005 11:40:30 PM

I'm all for a thorough investigation and getting everyone involved to testify.

Until then.....

STFU.

6/7/2005 9:49:24 AM

Quote :

"I'm all for a thorough investigation and getting everyone involved to testify. Until then..... STFU. "

6/7/2005 10:30:29 AM

My last post, until the investigation begins.

Quote :

"Fuck Saddam. we're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room. A year later,..."

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1004567,00.html

Quote :

"Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

July 2002
http://downingstreetmemo.com/memo.html

Quote :

"RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war Michael Smith THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html

Quote :

"The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections."

http://downingstreetmemo.com/memo.html
July 2002

Quote :

"Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option."

July 2002

http://downingstreetmemo.com/memo.html

6/7/2005 11:59:49 PM

[Edited on June 8, 2005 at 12:24 AM. Reason : nah]

6/8/2005 12:24:12 AM

Ok. The investigation is beginning.

John Conyers is having a congressional hearing regarding the Downing Street Memos starting at 2:30pm on C-SPAN3.

6/16/2005 1:58:07 PM

OK HERE WE GO!!!

6/16/2005 2:03:12 PM

you sit around mastubating to c-span don't you?

6/16/2005 2:09:17 PM

C-SPAN is the only way I can escape the conservative media.

6/16/2005 2:11:20 PM

so we impeach bush....and get dick

wonderful!

6/16/2005 3:24:46 PM

now you see the violence inherent in the system. HELP HELP I'M BEING OPPRESSED!

[Edited on June 16, 2005 at 3:31 PM. Reason : p]

6/16/2005 3:31:24 PM

Republicans attempt to disrupt hearing.

Quote :

"At approximately 2:15 PM, the Republicans scheduled 11 consecutive floor votes, lasting until approximately 4 PM. This is unprecedented in my memory, and if we had allowed it to, it could have ruined the hearing. But a hearty group of Democratic Members helped me carry on, and we were able to continue the hearings through the votes by essentially taking turns running back and forth to the House floor."

http://www.conyersblog.us/

6/16/2005 11:09:31 PM

More evidence of "fixing the facts and intelligence"

Quote :

"White House Iraq Group From SourceWatch Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, in the August 10, 2003 Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39500-2003Aug9?language=printer), seem to have broken the story of the White House Iraq Group, with credit to Josh Marshall for keeping the story alive (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002642.html): The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it. Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities." The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. "In September 2002, the White House was beginning a major press offensive designed to prove that Iraq had a robust nuclear weapons program. That campaign was meant to culminate in the president's Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati." [1]"

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=White_House_Iraq_Group

7/3/2005 1:54:38 AM

Quote :

"Monday, July 18th, 2005 The Nixon White House Would Blush Can there be any doubt after today that a president who rode into town promising “honesty and integrity” has brought our ethical standards to a new low? We now have a White House operation in place that is a pure, unadulterated political machine, with no discernible ethical scruples. They think nothing of baselessly attacking any and all political opponents – just ask Senators Max Cleland and John McCain. And they will circle the wagons around their key loyalists, no matter how culpable – see Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. We learned from Downing Street, that the White House was willing to “fix the facts around the policy,” no matter the cost in lives or our nation’s reputation. Rovegate involves the same modus operandi: When faced with a growing scandal before the election, Bush righteously promised to throw out any and all leakers. McClellan went so far as to tell us it would be “ludicrous” to accuse Rove or Libby of leaks. Now that there is no doubt that those statements are false and, presto, the standard has changed to “if someone committed a crime.” The powers that be at the White House really can’t be so naive as to believe that the American public will fall for this charade, so the only possible conclusion is that they have entered into a “save Rove at all costs strategy,” even if it means making earlier statements “inoperative” and eliminating any and all White House ethical standards short of criminal misconduct. Apparently, “Bush’s brain” is so central to the White House operation, that Bush is willing to bet his presidency on the outcome of Fitzgerald’s investigation. To me that is truly scary. Two articles out today to bring to your attention. First, the AP has a story on Bush’s changing the ethical rules in the middle of the game, including a quote by the undersigned. Second, the LA Times has an excellent overview of where we are and how we got here. There is really no doubt at this point that two key political operatives in the White House, namely Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby, set about to smear Joe Wilson. They used the media to out a CIA operative, vehemently denied they had done so, and now that they cannot deny it any more, Bush backtracked to change the standard for dismissal from leaking to criminal misconduct. Now they are simply hoping and praying that both the necessary level of legal willfulness cannot be shown and that the press and Democrats can be bullied or intimidated into thinking that ethics -- as well as internal security requirements -- don't matter. Look for the White House to try to change the subject very soon. Blogged by JC on 07.18.05 @ 09:58 PM ET [link] [1 Comment] Sunday, July 17th, 2005 Time Reporter Contradicts Rove's Alibi; Rovegate and DSM Continue to Converge Much More To Come Today's most important development is the Time Magazine Article (via Buzzflash) penned by Matthew Cooper contradicting Rove's somewhat ludicrous claim that he learned about Valerie Plame from the Press. Cooper states quite clearly that he learned for the first time about Plame from Rove, not the other way around. Rove also specifically stated that she worked at the CIA on WMD. So much for Friday's weak attempt by the GOP to spin their way out of this one. Second, I would also call your attention to Frank Rich's Op-Ed in the New York Times that Rovegate is really part and parcel of the ongoing deception in Iraq. Let me quote from the critical paragraph: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair." This is the same point I was making on Thursday in this blog -- DSM and Rovegate are converging into the same deception. If you cannot make the series of town hall meetings being held next weekend on the third anniversary of the DSM, I hope you will host or attend one of the house parties in your neighborhood that I am organizing, along with Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Randi Rhodes. These are critical tools to both educate the public and educate me about what people are saying and thinking about one of the critical issues of our day -- going to war under false pretenses. Stay tuned, I am sure there will be much, much more to come. "

http://www.conyersblog.us/

[Edited on July 18, 2005 at 10:47 PM. Reason : http://www.conyersblog.us/]

7/18/2005 10:47:16 PM

jesus christ shut the fuck up hippy.

7/18/2005 10:48:28 PM

are the democrats REALLY bitching about ethics? i mean, can anyone remember a previous president lying about a fucking blow job?

and about "changing the rules mid game," Gore had no problem with that in Florida, so let dubya do it all he wants. politics suck. both sides are full of shit. don';t act like either side is above it.

7/18/2005 10:57:49 PM

Interesting how nicely the investigation of the White House dovetails with the Downing St Documents.

This administration is the most corrupt one this country has ever seen, and Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever to hold the office. He's soiled his family's reputation, and ruined Jeb's chances of ever being anything more than governor of Florida.

7/18/2005 11:04:45 PM

Quote :

"This administration is the most corrupt one this country has ever seen, and Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever to hold the office. He's soiled his family's reputation, and ruined Jeb's chances of ever being anything more than governor of Florida."

And yet, he was elected AGAIN less than a year ago HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

7/18/2005 11:06:24 PM

soooo, they are most corrupt for doing the exact same things that previous well respected administrations have done? makes perfect fucking sense to me. might wanna lay off that michael moore "hair gel" for a while, dumbass.

7/18/2005 11:06:41 PM

Quote :

"And yet, he was elected AGAIN less than a year ago HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

Nixon was re-elected. My statement still stands.

7/18/2005 11:08:59 PM

Quote :

"My statement still stands."

Yeah, it still stands. It just makes no sense

7/18/2005 11:10:08 PM

Quote :

"Bush aide misled FBI, say reports Julian Borger in New York Saturday July 23, 2005 Guardian The investigation into the White House leak of a CIA agent's identity is now focusing on whether two top administration officials provided misleading statements to the FBI, it was reported yesterday. According to press accounts, Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, both provided testimony that was later contradicted by other evidence. The revelations come at a time when the burgeoning scandal over the outing of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, is threatening to engulf the White House. Ms Plame was the wife of a government critic, Joseph Wilson, who had questioned the justification of the Iraq invasion, and the leak is alleged to have been an attempt to discredit or intimidate him. In an initial round of interviews with investigators, Mr Rove is reported to have omitted to mention that he had discussed the agent's identity with a Time reporter in July 2003, a few days after Mr Wilson had published a highly critical article. According to a Bloomberg news agency report, Mr Libby testified that he had first heard about Ms Plame from an NBC television journalist, Tim Russert. But according to NBC, Mr Russert denied the claim in his evidence to a grand jury last year. A statement by NBC at the time said Mr Russert "did not know Ms Plame's name or that she was a CIA operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr Libby". The New York Times yesterday reported that at the time of the leak, Mr Rove and Mr Libby had been collaborating on the administration's response to Mr Wilson's central allegation that President George Bush had misled the American public in his January 2003 State of the Union address. In that speech, laying out the case for war, the president cited evidence of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger, west Africa. The claim was found to have been based on forged documents. George Tenet, the director of the CIA at the time, took responsibility for the false claim, helping to draw fire away from the White House, but yesterday's report suggests that Mr Rove and Mr Libby had a role in drafting his public admission. The news that the two senior officials were intimately involved in the issue added to scepticism about their claims to have initially heard about Ms Plame from journalists, rather than the other way round. Leaking the identity of an undercover agent is a serious crime under US law, but prosecutors would have to prove that the leaker was aware of the agent's covert status. However, the investigation, led by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, is reported also to be investigating possible charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, a parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents. They are known to have been passed to an Italian journalist by a former Italian defence intelligence officer, Rocco Martino, in October 2002, but their origins have remained a mystery. Mr Martino has insisted to the Italian press that he was "a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me", but has not specified who that might be. A source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved in possible collaboration with Iraqi exiles determined to prove that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear programme. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5245966-110878,00.html

Quote :

"PRESIDENT: In other words, you, your judgment as to where it stands, and where we go now--- DEAN: I think, I think that, uh, there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we're, we've got. We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself. Uh, that'll be clear as I explain you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and it basically is because (1) we're being blackmailed; (2) uh, people are going to start perjuring themself very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like. And that is just--and there is no assurance--"

7/22/2005 11:55:04 PM

Quote :

"I think, I think that, uh, there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we're, we've got. We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself. Uh, that'll be clear as I explain you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and it basically is because (1) we're being blackmailed; (2) uh, people are going to start perjuring themself very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like. And that is just--and there is no assurance--"

wow. just.... WOW. and people accuse DUBYA of stuttering and stammering? on second thought, those labels have to be wrong. that HAS to be dubya stammering there...

Even worse, whats all this bullshit fancy mumbo jumbo the man is yammering on about? "Growing geometrically?" wtf, man. this guy almost sounds like the whacko religious nuts that just use big words to sound all smart and theistic...

btw, the word is "exponentially." "exponentially," my friend... "exponentially"

7/23/2005 12:09:29 AM

Thanks for confirming my suspicions....again.

7/23/2005 12:13:34 AM

so, are the labels wrong? is dean asking the question and dubya answering?

7/23/2005 12:15:15 AM

That's an excerpt from the Nixon tapes. A conversation between John Dean and Richard Milhouse Nixon. Glad you see the parallels as clearly as I do.

[Edited on July 23, 2005 at 12:23 AM. Reason : .]

7/23/2005 12:22:50 AM

Quote :

"btw, the word is "exponentially." "exponentially," my friend... "exponentially""

Quote :

"Main Entry: geo·met·ric Pronunciation: "jE-&-'me-trik Variant(s): or geo·met·ri·cal /-'me-tri-k&l/ Function: adjective 1 a : of, relating to, or according to the methods or principles of geometry b : increasing in a geometric progression <geometric population growth>"

7/23/2005 12:24:08 AM

and who the fuck uses that word in that manner today?

anyway, pryderi, excuse me for not instantly recognizing an obscure part of a transcript(with no link for reference, mind you) of a scandal that occurred 30 fucking years ago which labels its parties as "President" and "Dean." Its not like "president" is ambiguous or "Dean" is the name of some big current political figure...

7/23/2005 12:48:54 AM

dude, you seriously need to start using a dictionary

you are really making youself look like an idiot

7/23/2005 12:50:48 AM

From Google:

Quote :

"Results 1 - 10 of about 992,000 for geometric growth"

It's still a common term.

7/23/2005 2:02:29 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Quote :

"July 24, 2005 Eight Days in July By FRANK RICH PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject. When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes." Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert. But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear. As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months. Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs. The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months. Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless. It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent. Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times. That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15, the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr. Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment. On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House communications shop" had given him that information. Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation." THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence. Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not. The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain. "

7/24/2005 12:17:57 AM

^ Goddamn right-wing media

7/24/2005 12:25:55 AM

Blast from the past.

Quote :

"• Failing to order employees to preserve evidence until three days after the Justice Department probe began. • Not delivering that order to all staff until the following day. • Waiting another day to extend that order to the Pentagon and the State Department. McClellan said Tuesday he had questioned White House political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Council aide Elliot Abrams and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff about the leak and was told "they were not involved." "

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/09/leak.main/

I smell a coverup.

What did the president know, and when did he know it?

7/25/2005 7:57:13 PM

As much as I dislike Rove, this is just a witchhunt. Of course the white house dragged their feet, they don't give a shit about it. If you want to oust the president you'll have to do a little better than this.

7/25/2005 8:01:41 PM

Quote :

"As much as I dislike Rove, this is just a witchhunt. Of course the white house dragged their feet, they don't give a shit about it. If you want to oust the president you'll have to do a little better than this."

The Valerie Plame outing ties directly into the whole issue of "fixing the intelligence" in order to invade Iraq. Bush lied to Congress in order to get permission to invade. Outing Joseph Wilson's wife was retribution for exposing the lie.

Without the Niger "yellow cake" claim, none of the administration could have used the, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" scare tactic that convinced
Congress to give Bush the power to go to war.

Also, let me restate that Nixon did not resign because of the Watergate break-in, he resigned because he was going to be impeached for obstruction of justice.

7/25/2005 9:37:58 PM

except that it is now fairly obvious that plaim wasn't "outed" in the normal sense of the word. Wilson was playing little more than partisan games. And this is little more than a witchhunt, just like Kenneth Starr's witchhunt on the clintons.

oh, and thank you for your bullshit reference to nixon. QUIT LIVING IN THE PAST!!! OMFG!!!!

7/25/2005 9:49:41 PM

damn those plaims.

7/25/2005 10:26:44 PM

Oh what a tangled web we weave....

Quote :

"Prosecutor In CIA Leak Case Casting A Wide Net White House Effort To Discredit Critic Examined in Detail By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, July 27, 2005; A01 The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case. Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed. Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials took place in 2004, the sources said. It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation. All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on. Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003 to determine whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S., intelligence. Fitzgerald has said in court that he had completed most of his investigation at a time when he was pressing for New York Times reporter Judith Miller to testify about any conversations she had with a specific administration official about Plame during the week before Plame's identity was revealed. Miller, who never wrote a story about the matter, is in jail for refusing to comply with a court order to testify. Court records show Fitzgerald is seeking information about communications she had with the Bush official between July 6 and July 13, 2003, when the White House was attempting to discredit Wilson and his allegations. Fitzgerald appears to believe that Miller's conversations may help him get to the bottom of the leak and the damage-control campaign undertaken by senior Bush officials that week. Using background conversations with at least three journalists and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post. Miller's role remains one of many mysteries in the leak probe. It is unclear whom, if anyone, she spoke to about Plame, and why she emerged as a central figure in the probe despite never having written a story about the case. Also murky is the role of Novak, who first publicly identified Plame in a syndicated column published July 14, 2003. Lawyers have confirmed that Novak discussed Plame with White House senior adviser Karl Rove four or more days before the column identifying her ran. But the identity of another "administration" source cited in the column is still unknown. Rove's attorney has said Rove did not identify Plame to Novak. In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury -- acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a "CIA source." Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said. Novak and his attorney, James Hamilton, have declined to discuss the investigation, as has Fitzgerald. Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed. Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified. In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name." Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy. Wilson unleashed an attack on Bush's claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence. Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said. On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed." A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement. The prosecutors have talked to State Department officials to determine what role a classified memo including two sentences about Plame's role in Wilson's Niger trip played in the damage-control campaign. People familiar with this part of the probe provided new details about the memo, including that it was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage who requested it the day Wilson went public and asked that a copy be sent to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to take with him on a trip to Africa the next day. Bush and several top aides were on that trip. Carl W. Ford Jr., who was director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time and who supervised the original production of the memo, has appeared before the grand jury, a former State Department official said. © 2005 The Washington Post Company"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/26/AR2005072602069_pf.html

Definately looks like the investigator is headed in the right direction! Back to when the Bush Admin purposely lied us into a war.

[Edited on July 27, 2005 at 1:23 AM. Reason : d]

7/27/2005 1:22:55 AM

Quote :

" Impeach Bush Now by Paul Craig Roberts The raison d’être of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America’s oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically. Bush’s single-minded focus on the "war against terrorism" has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of America’s most historic cities is under water. If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history. Prior to 911, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) in order to protect the strategic port, the refineries, and the large population. However, after 2003 the flow of funds to SELA were diverted to the war in Iraq. During 2004 and 2005 the New Orleans Times-Picayune published nine articles citing New Orleans’ loss of hurricane protection to the war in Iraq. Every expert and newspapers as distant as Texas saw the New Orleans catastrophe coming. But President Bush and his insane government preferred war in Iraq to protecting Americans at home. Bush’s war left the Corps of Engineers only 20% of the funding to protect New Orleans from flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. On June 18, 2004, the Corps’ project manager, Al Naomi, told the Times-Picayune: "the levees are sinking. If we don’t get the money to raise them, we can’t stay ahead of the settlement." Despite the dire warnings delivered by the 2004 hurricane season, the Bush administration made deep budget cuts for flood control and hurricane funding for New Orleans. The US Senate, alarmed at the Bush administration’s insanity, was planning to restore the funding for 2006. But now it is too late. Many multiples of the funding that would have saved the city now have to be spent to rescue it. Not content with leaving New Orleans unprotected, it took the Bush administration five days to get the remnants of the National Guard not serving in Iraq, along with desperately needed food and water, to devastated New Orleans. This is the slowest emergency response by the US government in modern times. By the time the Bush administration could organize any resources for New Orleans, many more people had died and the city was in total chaos. Despite the most dismal performance on record, Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, said on Thursday that the Bush administration has done a "magnificent job." The on-the-scene mayor of New Orleans sees it differently: "They’re feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying." "They’re thinking small man, and this is a major, major deal." It is a major deal, one that will affect Americans far beyond New Orleans. According to reports, 25% of our oil and gasoline comes through the New Orleans port and refineries, all out of commission. Needed goods cannot be imported, and exports will plummet, worsening an already disastrous deficit in the balance of trade. The increased cost of gasoline will soak up consumers’ disposable incomes, with dire effects on consumer spending. US economic growth will be siphoned off into higher energy costs. American lives far from New Orleans will be adversely affected. The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport – and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population. Bush’s pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe. The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost America’s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost America’s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply. Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed America’s interests to their insane agenda. The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now they must he held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted. What will it take for Americans to reestablish accountability in their government? Bush has got away with lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers, and now with the destruction of New Orleans. What disaster will next spring from Bush’s incompetence? September 3, 2005"

9/12/2005 2:52:59 PM

republicans bad.

9/12/2005 3:01:49 PM

Quote :

"Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury"

The author of the previous article is a republican.

Quote :

"Reagan changed the world Paul Craig Roberts (archive) June 7, 2004 | printer friendly version Print | email to a friend Send President Ronald Reagan's stature will grow as his achievements come to be more widely recognized. Few Americans realize that President Reagan's economic policy won the Cold War by rejuvenating capitalism. Members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with whom I spoke in Moscow during the Soviet Union's final months, agreed that it was President Reagan's confidence in capitalism, not his defense buildup, that caused Soviet leaders to lose their confidence."

[Edited on September 12, 2005 at 3:12 PM. Reason : http://www.townhall.com/columnists/paulcraigroberts/pcr20040607.shtml]

9/12/2005 3:09:24 PM

actually that article never says Republicans bad, it says Bush bad.

9/12/2005 3:18:13 PM

that statement was directed at pryderi, not the article.

9/12/2005 3:21:24 PM

ahh ok

9/12/2005 3:30:10 PM

The tipping point may well have been reached with alot of moderates and old-school (re:my parents) republicans with Bush. Seeing the way the Bush has handled the Katrina mess has rekindled all those lagging doubts about Bush when they voted for him in '04.

The FEMA head resigned today, Iraq is still a clusterfuck, deficits are going through the roof, and Bush is still giving platitudes and bumper sticker rationales. I'm a conservative, and sick of this kind of shit. If the republicans, which control all the branches of government, can't get it done then send some other idiots in.

/cleaning house

9/12/2005 3:34:48 PM

Quote :

"Prosecutor in Plame Case May Seek Conspiracy Charges NEW YORK Many observers of the unfolding Plame/CIA case lament the revelations in the federal grand jury probe but suggest it may all be in vain because the level of malfeasance may not produce a specific criminal charge. But that doesn't mean serious charges--including far-ranging ones, connecting the offices of Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney--could not be brought, via the "conspiracy" route. Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald may announce his intentions as early as this week, now that Judith Miller has testified. Speculation is rampant in Washington this weekend, with ABC's George Stephanopolous adding fuel to the fire Sunday morning, disclosing on the "This Week" program that "a source close to this told me this week that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions" involving Valerie Plame. In the Sunday article in The Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus (who has himself testified in this case), sketch out what Fitzgerald may, in fact, be up to: "Many lawyers in the case have been skeptical that Fitzgerald has the evidence to prove a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is the complicated crime he first set out to investigate, and which requires showing that government officials knew an operative had covert status and intentionally leaked the operative's identity. "But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. "They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose. "Lawyers involved in the case interviewed for this report agreed to talk only if their names were not used, citing Fitzgerald's request for secrecy. "One source briefed on Miller's account of conversations with [I. Lewis] Libby said it is doubtful her testimony would on its own lead to charges against any government officials. But, the source said, her account could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose. "Conspiracy cases are viewed by criminal prosecutors as simpler to bring than more straightforward criminal charges, but also trickier to sell to juries. 'That would arguably be a close call for a prosecutor, but it could be tried,' a veteran Washington criminal attorney with longtime experience in national security cases said yesterday." "

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nifea&&sid=a3z63_HrIvtc

Keeping the thread alive for the '06 elections.

10/3/2005 7:46:36 AM

Has he been impeached yet?

10/3/2005 9:45:14 AM