Plamegate Update

The pieces of the puzzle continue to fall into place...and the picture that begins to emerge is hardly surprising ...

Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials....

The CIA Leak: Plame Was Still Covert
Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. [...] The new papers show Libby testified he was told about Plame by Cheney "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June—before he talked about her with Miller and Time magazine's Matt Cooper....

Where's My Subpoena? - Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, and me.
Part I
By John Dickerson
Slate

...Back when I was at Time, I co-wrote the July, 2003 story that has made the last two years of Matthew Cooper's life so difficult. After the special counsel went after Matt so enthusiastically, the arrival of men in trench coats asking what I knew seemed imminent. But I never got to try out any of my Dashiell Hammett lines on them. When my other former Time colleague Viveca Novak got tangled in Fitzgerald's hunt last year, I thought, OK, they're coming now for sure. Nope. No Fitzgerald; no FBI; no nothing.

But it turns out the special counsel was on to me all along....

Where's My Subpoena? - Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, and me.
Part II
By John Dickerson
Slate

...Since the attack on Wilson was not included in the printed magazine that came out Monday, Cooper thought we should put it online. All administrations discredit their critics through whispers to reporters, but we hadn't seen high-level Bush people do anything like this in the past. It suggested desperation and unsteadiness in a national security team that had often been heralded for its smooth competency....

Dickerson Speaks ... and Drops Some Bombshells
Firedoglake

...Dickerson does a good job of describing the Libby strategy in Part I, and then systematically pokes holes in it through his re-telling of events as he lived them in Part II. And in doing so, Dickerson paints a portrait of an Administration in full-out damage control mode -- willing to throw the CIA and George Tenet under a bus to save the President's butt -- and willing to toss out the name of a covert CIA operative without a thought to the consequences (Rove, Libby, anyone?), hoping to discredit her husband, whose criticisms could not be allowed to gain any more traction with the public, and shut up critics in the CIA who weren't comfortable taking the blame for the President's and other Administration officials' false public statements.

A whole lot of people in the Administration, including the President himself, tossing the CIA out the window...in a coordinated, press-forward effort.

That this was a planned, coordinated effort is obvious in reading Dickerson's two-part piece. And when you read it in concert with everything else we know about the Traitorgate case, you have to think that Fitzgerald is sitting on a whole lot of information we have yet to see. (If you are sensing a Cheshire cat grin on my face, you would be on the mark.) ...

Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
By Murray Waas
National Journal

...Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald....

Photo credit: Vice President Dick Cheney delivers a speech in Washington in this January 4, 2006 file photograph. Cheney on Tuesday resisted bipartisan appeals for changes in a hotly disputed warrantless eavesdropping program, saying he believed 'we have all the legal authority we need.' (Jim Young/Reuters)

Fitzgerald Eyes Plame-Niger Conspiracy
Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press - I think a few journalists - about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him."

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