Monday, July 11, 2005
Rove / Plame / Miller, etc: The latest is that we now know that Karl Rove was involved in leaking Valerie Plame's identity and her role at CIA before the information appeared in Robert Novak's column. The key detail now is whether Rove knew Plame was operating covertly. If so, then he’s in violation of statute. Novak apparently only used the term “operative” in his columns when he was referring to covert operations. The other rather bizarre distinction that Rove’s lawyer made is that Rove named “Joe Wilson’s wife”, but did not use her name. That’s a defense?
The Monday WaPost article:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.
The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.
To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001000.html
And, we should remember, unless he’s as out of the loop as I’ve portrayed, Bush has known all…i.e. Impeachment!
The Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff was the key (Sunday) release:
NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/
London Follow-up:
LA Times article on how the British authorities had an unspoken truce with potential ‘terrorists’ in their midst, that perhaps this was the work of a “new generation of homegrown jihadists who do not respect the deals struck by their elders.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-crossroads10jul10,1,4697130.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
[Not] Taking Care of Veterans. WaPost article on VA hospitals, in particular a notable one in New England.
According to documents released at recent meetings of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees, the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vt., was forced to shut its operating rooms temporarily because of a lack of maintenance funds to repair a broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Hospitals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas stopped scheduling appointments for many veterans. The VA medical center in San Diego, with a waiting list of 750 veterans, diverted $3.5 million in maintenance funds to partially cover operating expenses and delayed filling 131 vacancies for three months to cover operating expenses. The Portland, Ore., hospital delayed non-emergency surgery for at least six months, and 7,000 veterans who use the VA facility in Bay Pines, Fla., are waiting longer than 30 days for a primary care appointment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001058_pf.html
Bush Record on Transit Security: We knew little was being done.
Just three months ago, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled on a rail security case involving CSX Transportation. In his decision, Sullivan criticized the Bush administration for having no “consistent and comprehensive federal policy addressing the risks of terrorism on our interstate rail system,” despite the fact that “the federal government has the lead role in regulating the rails and that a community can intervene only when a subject cannot be addressed by national standards or rules.”
2005: JUST $115 MILLION IN RAIL SECURITY FUNDING: Bush’s 2005 budget allocation for train security was just $115 million, equal to what the U.S. spends on eight typical hours in Iraq. (The White House spent $15 billion on airline security, “though as many as 16 times more people ride rail lines than airplanes.”) http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/07/the-bush-record-on-rail-security/
Rail: Tom Oliphant comments:
Against industry (shipping as well as manufacturing) opposition and Bush's indifference, Biden and Markey have pushed separate legislation ideas that would give the government authority to reroute shipments of these extremely dangerous substances around major metropolitan areas and to force other security improvements on the profit-crazed industry.
But the best metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in the transit and rail sectors is an obscure court case here, involving an ordinance passed by the District of Columbia City Council. The local government had the temerity to ban shipments of the most dangerous chemicals from certain zones around the nation's capital, something the Bush people should have been doing on their own.
So what is the response? The shipping people (led by rail giant CSX Transportation) backed by the administration, files a lawsuit here to block the law's enforcement. They lost in US district court, but rather than accept the result they are appealing. Meanwhile nothing is happening.
The events in London provide all the evidence we need that terrorism is alive and functioning internationally nearly four years after 9/11.
It might be helpful if the government showed the same resolve as the terrorists, but it hasn't. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/10/americas_vulnerable_railways?mode=PF
Frank Rich: Reminds us that 1750 Americans didn’t die at ‘Watergate’
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
North Korea: Talks- “6-Party”- aimed at dismantling their nuclear weapons program. Some optimism. Most commentators cite South Korea’s promises of aid and new-found softer rhetoric from the Bush Administration. [Condi has ceased her references to their “tyrant” ruler.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070901136.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Allawi speaks: The ex-prime minister is under-confident as to the near-future.
IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.
“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.
In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1687910,00.html
World Tribunal: John Pilger’s pointed essay on what’s not being covered while we focus on the English attack, what he terms "Blair's bombs", and, “he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about ‘our way of life’, which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.”
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071005X.shtml
And, more bombings- at police headquarters, a car dealership, etc. and the main water supply was blown up for the third time in 3 weeks
Post G-8: As expected, the London attack curtailed the attention paid to poverty in Africa, global warming, the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As expected, the Administration blocked any efforts to establish specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases. 2 NY Times reports:
The bombings in London on Thursday knocked the meeting of major industrial nations off its carefully scripted focus on global warming and African poverty and turned it into a forum for President Bush and other world leaders to pledge unity in confronting terrorism…
Reflecting Mr. Bush's concern that too stringent a response to global warming could harm the American economy, the draft contained no specific agreement on concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a schedule. It contained a commitment to act with "resolve and urgency" on the issue, but also it contained broad caveats that some environmental groups said rendered it almost meaningless. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/international/europe/08summit.html?
Despite the public show of unity on the Group of 8's agenda, Mr. Bush remained at odds with other leaders over many of the details of how best to address the issues being debated and gave little ground on them.
Mr. Blair hailed a series of agreements to alleviate poverty in Africa, his signature issue, including commitments by the eight nations to double their aid to $50 billion a year by 2010, reduce trade barriers, cancel the debts of many countries and do more to fight diseases, including AIDS and malaria. The American aid pledge represents no new money beyond that which had already been promised. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/international/europe/09summit.html?pagewanted=print
Estate Tax: Upcoming (this week?) Repeal vote in Senate
The number of farms subject to the estate tax, always a minority, has fallen because Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to raise the threshold for estate taxes to $1.5 million, double that for married couples, for last year and this year. With simple planning, couples with children can shield several million more dollars from the tax.
In 2000, when the threshold was $675,000, taxes were owed by 1,659 farm estates, the study found. Had the current threshold been in effect, only 300 farms would have owed any tax.
Next year, when the threshold rises to $2 million per person, just 123 farms will be subject to the estate tax, the study found. And in 2009, when it rises to $3.5 million, only 65 of the nation's 2.2 million farms will be affected, the study said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/politics/10tax.html
Weather: Lots of intense rain, of late. Caused by ? Unclear, but as to hurricanes, we should remember this June 2005 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall, according to climate expert Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His paper, "Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming," appears in the Perspectives section of the June 17 issue of Science. http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/trenberth.shtml
-R
The Monday WaPost article:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.
The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.
To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001000.html
And, we should remember, unless he’s as out of the loop as I’ve portrayed, Bush has known all…i.e. Impeachment!
The Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff was the key (Sunday) release:
NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/
London Follow-up:
LA Times article on how the British authorities had an unspoken truce with potential ‘terrorists’ in their midst, that perhaps this was the work of a “new generation of homegrown jihadists who do not respect the deals struck by their elders.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-crossroads10jul10,1,4697130.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
[Not] Taking Care of Veterans. WaPost article on VA hospitals, in particular a notable one in New England.
According to documents released at recent meetings of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees, the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vt., was forced to shut its operating rooms temporarily because of a lack of maintenance funds to repair a broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Hospitals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas stopped scheduling appointments for many veterans. The VA medical center in San Diego, with a waiting list of 750 veterans, diverted $3.5 million in maintenance funds to partially cover operating expenses and delayed filling 131 vacancies for three months to cover operating expenses. The Portland, Ore., hospital delayed non-emergency surgery for at least six months, and 7,000 veterans who use the VA facility in Bay Pines, Fla., are waiting longer than 30 days for a primary care appointment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/10/AR2005071001058_pf.html
Bush Record on Transit Security: We knew little was being done.
Just three months ago, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled on a rail security case involving CSX Transportation. In his decision, Sullivan criticized the Bush administration for having no “consistent and comprehensive federal policy addressing the risks of terrorism on our interstate rail system,” despite the fact that “the federal government has the lead role in regulating the rails and that a community can intervene only when a subject cannot be addressed by national standards or rules.”
2005: JUST $115 MILLION IN RAIL SECURITY FUNDING: Bush’s 2005 budget allocation for train security was just $115 million, equal to what the U.S. spends on eight typical hours in Iraq. (The White House spent $15 billion on airline security, “though as many as 16 times more people ride rail lines than airplanes.”) http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/07/the-bush-record-on-rail-security/
Rail: Tom Oliphant comments:
Against industry (shipping as well as manufacturing) opposition and Bush's indifference, Biden and Markey have pushed separate legislation ideas that would give the government authority to reroute shipments of these extremely dangerous substances around major metropolitan areas and to force other security improvements on the profit-crazed industry.
But the best metaphor for the sorry state of affairs in the transit and rail sectors is an obscure court case here, involving an ordinance passed by the District of Columbia City Council. The local government had the temerity to ban shipments of the most dangerous chemicals from certain zones around the nation's capital, something the Bush people should have been doing on their own.
So what is the response? The shipping people (led by rail giant CSX Transportation) backed by the administration, files a lawsuit here to block the law's enforcement. They lost in US district court, but rather than accept the result they are appealing. Meanwhile nothing is happening.
The events in London provide all the evidence we need that terrorism is alive and functioning internationally nearly four years after 9/11.
It might be helpful if the government showed the same resolve as the terrorists, but it hasn't. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/10/americas_vulnerable_railways?mode=PF
Frank Rich: Reminds us that 1750 Americans didn’t die at ‘Watergate’
WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
North Korea: Talks- “6-Party”- aimed at dismantling their nuclear weapons program. Some optimism. Most commentators cite South Korea’s promises of aid and new-found softer rhetoric from the Bush Administration. [Condi has ceased her references to their “tyrant” ruler.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070901136.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: Allawi speaks: The ex-prime minister is under-confident as to the near-future.
IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.
“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.
In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1687910,00.html
World Tribunal: John Pilger’s pointed essay on what’s not being covered while we focus on the English attack, what he terms "Blair's bombs", and, “he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about ‘our way of life’, which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.”
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/071005X.shtml
And, more bombings- at police headquarters, a car dealership, etc. and the main water supply was blown up for the third time in 3 weeks
Post G-8: As expected, the London attack curtailed the attention paid to poverty in Africa, global warming, the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As expected, the Administration blocked any efforts to establish specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases. 2 NY Times reports:
The bombings in London on Thursday knocked the meeting of major industrial nations off its carefully scripted focus on global warming and African poverty and turned it into a forum for President Bush and other world leaders to pledge unity in confronting terrorism…
Reflecting Mr. Bush's concern that too stringent a response to global warming could harm the American economy, the draft contained no specific agreement on concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a schedule. It contained a commitment to act with "resolve and urgency" on the issue, but also it contained broad caveats that some environmental groups said rendered it almost meaningless. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/international/europe/08summit.html?
Despite the public show of unity on the Group of 8's agenda, Mr. Bush remained at odds with other leaders over many of the details of how best to address the issues being debated and gave little ground on them.
Mr. Blair hailed a series of agreements to alleviate poverty in Africa, his signature issue, including commitments by the eight nations to double their aid to $50 billion a year by 2010, reduce trade barriers, cancel the debts of many countries and do more to fight diseases, including AIDS and malaria. The American aid pledge represents no new money beyond that which had already been promised. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/international/europe/09summit.html?pagewanted=print
Estate Tax: Upcoming (this week?) Repeal vote in Senate
The number of farms subject to the estate tax, always a minority, has fallen because Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to raise the threshold for estate taxes to $1.5 million, double that for married couples, for last year and this year. With simple planning, couples with children can shield several million more dollars from the tax.
In 2000, when the threshold was $675,000, taxes were owed by 1,659 farm estates, the study found. Had the current threshold been in effect, only 300 farms would have owed any tax.
Next year, when the threshold rises to $2 million per person, just 123 farms will be subject to the estate tax, the study found. And in 2009, when it rises to $3.5 million, only 65 of the nation's 2.2 million farms will be affected, the study said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/politics/10tax.html
Weather: Lots of intense rain, of late. Caused by ? Unclear, but as to hurricanes, we should remember this June 2005 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Warmer oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere, and other factors suggest that human-induced climate change will increase hurricane intensity and rainfall, according to climate expert Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His paper, "Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming," appears in the Perspectives section of the June 17 issue of Science. http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/trenberth.shtml
-R
