Rove & his boss are Unfit for Public Office

[Moses]

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 mission 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 Hanssen 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.





posted by Juan @ 7/12/2005 06:35:00 AM   

[Moses]

Some feel that Karl Rove's security clearance should be revoked and that he should be fired.

action.truemajority.org/campaign/rovemustgo

From Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan (USN, ret)





I saw combat in three wars and know that national security depends on people who are trusted with confidential information never using it for their personal agendas.



White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove recently acknowledged that he revealed the identity of a CIA operative [1], proving that he can’t be trusted with classified information.  For the sake of national security and to protect America’s defenders in the line of fire, President Bush needs to revoke his security clearance and get him out of the White House before he leaks another secret.

[Moses]

Sunday, July 17, 2005


Rove: It is all going to be Declassified
From Meet the Press with Tim Russert, 7/17:

We may conclusde from Mr. Cooper's statements that Karl Rove not only knew that Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, but also that she was working on the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue.

I conclude that he must have known that telling Time Magazine about her would negatively affect her ability to do her job with regard to WMD.

We may also conclude that Karl Rove knew that he was discussing classified information with Mr. Cooper. Why otherwise promise that the information would be declassified?

I know that Mr. Rove has alleged that he heard about Valerie Plame from a reporter. But you have to be very careful with Mr. Rove's statements. He lies in substance while telling the truth formally. Before the Cooper revelations, he said that he did not know Joe Wilson's wife's name and did not reveal it. We now know that he told Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, without naming her.

So when he says that he heard that she worked for the CIA from a reporter, you have to ask yourself. Did he hear that from a reporter after he had already informed the reporter of it? Or did he hear it from a reporter after Scooter Libby, Rove's colleague, had already told the reporter about it?

The question the talking heads keep forgetting to ask is, "Why tell Cooper that Wilson's wife was CIA?" Rove's memo has already answered that question. He was "warning Cooper off" a story. He was attempting to keep the press from taking Ambassador Wilson seriously. He was hinting around that Wilson's whole charge, that Bush used forged and false information in alleging Saddam was negotiating to buy Niger uranium just a couple of years before, was to be treated with suspicion because it might be a black psy-ops operation of the CIA's Weapons of Mass Destruction unit.
To tell you the truth, I still cannot understand why Rove thought Cooper would be dissuaded by this line of argument, or why Rove thought it was a decisive one.

Moroever, the reason for which Rove wanted to discredit Wilson was that he was afraid the false Niger story would become an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. Rove intended to paint Bush as a war hero who could be trusted with the nation's security. If Bush routinely went to war because he had gullibly swallowed a load of bull, then the American public might not put him back in. Wilson's credibility had to be destroyed.

The rightwing propaganda machine has geared up to insist that Wilson's findings of no plausible Iraqi purchase of Niger uranium were untrue. Hunh? There was no Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It had been dismantled shortly after 1991. There was no program, ipso facto there is no plausibility to reports of significant uranium purchases, purchases which did not occur. The Rove approach is to insist that there is evidence that some creature ate grass on a farm in Maryland, and that it has not been disproved that it was African elephants that did the eating. That there are no free-ranging African elephants in Maryland does not matter if you keep pointing to the grass and say, well, something ate it and it could have been elephants.

There was no Iraqi nuclear program, and Rove knew this in summer of 2003 when he outed Valerie Plame.

The whole history of forged documents and frauds related to Iraq's non-existent nuclear weapons program from 1995 has not yet been traced. Khidir Hamza was among the main agents of this fraud, planting false information with the London Times as early as 1995 and working closely with Paul Wolfowitz.

The forged documents on Niger, which underlay most of the assertions Rove appears to still have been defending in summer of 2003, have been put up with translations at cryptonome. The International Atomic Energy Commission falsified them immediately on examining them. They are signed by people not then in office, etc.

Vincent Cannistaro, a career intelligence professional, has some interesting ideas about where the Niger forgeries originated. He seems to think they emanated from rightwing thinktanks in the United States. They were forged by a former Italian military intelligence operative, Rocco Martini, and SISMI seems implicated in the fraud, along with, very possibly, the "Rockingham" cell in the British Ministry of Defense. But the question is who put whom up to all this.

See "Everything you Need to know about Michael Ledeen.

And once you consider the Neocon network, That Scooter Libby was the liaison to the CIA for the network that ran the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon becomes highly significant. Libby's network was in competition with the CIA and many members wanted to permanently weaken the agency in favor of the Pentagon, since they had much more influence there.





posted by Juan @ 7/17/2005 04:27:00 PM   

[Moses]

Ex-agents rip Bush on CIA leak
'Inaction' in Rove case hurts officers, senators are told
By Reuters  |  July 23, 2005

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's lack of action against a top aide involved in the disclosure of a covert CIA operative's identity sends ''the wrong message" overseas, former US intelligence officials said yesterday.

At an unofficial congressional hearing sponsored by House and Senate Democrats, the retired agents said US intelligence gathering had been damaged by the leak of Valerie Plame's name two years ago after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticized the White House's justification for going to war in Iraq.

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper testified to a federal grand jury that presidential adviser Karl Rove told him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, but did not disclose her name.
Cooper has also said he discussed the couple with Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

''What has suffered irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince an overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us," said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer.

He also criticized Republican efforts to minimize the damage caused by the leak.

''Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper-pusher, or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers, or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it's a disservice to this country," he added.

Bush pledged this week to fire anyone found to have ''committed a crime" in the controversy, backing away from a broader pledge to dismiss anyone found to have leaked information in the case.

Marcinkowski said that the criminal standard was too high and that Bush should take action against those involved.

''Inaction itself sends the message -- the wrong message," he said.

As controversy over the matter heated up in recent weeks, the White House has refused to answer questions about Rove, who is credited with being the architect of the president's election victories.

So far, the only person to suffer legal sanction in the case is New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who has been jailed for refusing to testify about her sources.

Congressional Republicans have rushed to defend Rove and criticize Wilson, who took a CIA-funded trip in 2002 to investigate a charge that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Africa, and later accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the Iraqi weapons threat. They said Rove is a ''whistle-blower" because Wilson told lies about the trip and he was trying to set the Time reporter straight.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who said he was a registered Republican, spoke harshly of the criticisms of Wilson and efforts to minimize his wife's job at the CIA.

''This is wrong. This should stop. And it could stop in a heartbeat if the president would simply put a stop to it -- he hasn't," Johnson said. ''That speaks volumes."

White House officials have sought to put the controversy behind them pending the outcome of a federal investigation.

Bush aide Karen Hughes, however, faced questions from reporters yesterday after testifying on Capitol Hill.

''There's an ongoing investigation," she said.

---

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

[wowposter]

Hi,Do you need advertising displays, digital signages, mp4 advertising players, digital sign and advertisement displays? Please go Here:www.amberdigital.com.hk(Amberdigital).we have explored and developed the international market with professionalism. We have built a widespread marketing network, and set up a capable management team dedicated to provide beyond-expectation services to our customers.
amberdigital Contact Us
website:www.amberdigital.com.hk
alibaba:amberdigital.en.alibaba.com[gbfecebihdghdg]