You have not yet heard these in the MSM and so we need to swarm around these and get them out there:
- Bush said ANY member of his administration who committed a crime would be fired. Yet Bush appointed and just promoted Eliot Abrams, who pled guilty in 1991 for lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra Scandal and was then pardoned by GWH Bush in 1992.
- On Sept 23, 2003, McClellan said directly that Bush knew that Rove was not involved in the Plame Leak at all, which we now know was not true. This could involve the President in an Obstruction of Justice charge.
- George Tenet and his Deputy Chief Pavitt bitterly complained in 2003 and 2004 about the Plame Leak and likely served as sources for the revelation that there 2 White senior officials called 6 reporters. If Tenet and Pavitt are giving Fitzgerald the full Damage Assessment on Plame and Brewster Jennings and Associates being uncovered, Bush and Cheney themselves are likely in the sights of Fitzgerald. That's why Cheney and Bush had to lawyer up a year ago, they could become targets of the investigation.
Supporting Material After the Flip:
#1
What could they possibly answer to Eliot Abrams?? This also brings up the whole Iran-Contra Scandal again, a secret government to make war in Central America, with officials telling lies to the COngress to cover it up. Then we would have Watergate remembered one week with the Mark Felt story, the next couple of weeks Iran Contra being compared to RoveGate and Bush refusing to let Eliot Abrams go! That could get interesting. It also brings up GWH Bush's pardons of the whole Iran Contra Gang just when Walsh was turning his investigation to the President himself.
From Democracy Now:
ROBERT PARRY: [Eliot Abrams] was in the job running the State Department's coverage of Central America at the time when Ollie North, who was then over at the National Security Council, was running the secret war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, support for the so-called Contra Movement that had been banned by Congress. There was something called the Bolen Amendment which prohibited this support going to the Contras. They were seen also as serious human rights violators. North continued that anyway, secretly. Elliot was privy to those secrets. After the Hasenfuss plane, the plane that was shot down in Nicaragua, and one survivor was Eugene Hasenfuss, and he began talking in October of 1986 about his involvement with this operation and the support from the White House. When Congress asked Elliot Abrams about these allegations, Abrams gave very deceptive testimony. He tried to be very narrowly accurate but was highly misleading and tried to create the impression that the White House was unaware of any such operation being run by Oliver North. So, that became the basis eventually after the Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open for bringing charges against Abrams. He eventually plead guilty to a lesser charge of withholding information from Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: So, it would not be fair to say he was convicted of perjury?
ROBERT PARRY: I think that would be a little strong. I think he certainly - that's what he was doing. He was providing false testimony, but he did plead guilty to a lesser charge.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened to that charge?
ROBERT PARRY: He was one of the six Iran-Contra defendants who was given a pardon by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992. This is after the election as Bush was heading out of office. He pardoned Abrams and five others, in part to protect himself. People do not realize this, I think, but the Iran-Contra investigation had begun to turn onto President Bush. He was being investigated at that point by Lawrence Walsh, the Special Prosecutor, for himself withholding evidence on the Iran-Contra scandal. So, when Bush gave those six pardons, he effectively was preventing himself from being caught up in the scandal that was still going on.
Parry Interview
#2
On Sept. 23, 2003, McClellan first said the WH knows nothing beyond the media reports, then says he talked to Karl and the President knows Karl was not involved.
Q He does not know whether or not the classified information was divulged here, and he's only getting his information from the media?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, we don't know -- we don't have any information that's been brought to our attention beyond what we've seen in the media reports. I've made that clear.
Q All right. Let me just follow up. You said this morning, "The President knows" that Karl Rove wasn't involved. How does he know that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. I saw some comments this morning from the person who made that suggestion, backing away from that. And I said it is simply not true. So, I mean, it's public knowledge. I've said that it's not true. And I have spoken with Karl Rove --
Q But how does --
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to get into conversations that the President has with advisors or staff or anything of that nature; that's not my practice.
Q But the President has a factual basis for knowing that Karl Rove --
MR. McCLELLAN: I said it publicly. I said that --
Q But I'm not asking what you said, I'm asking if the President has a factual basis for saying -- for your statement that he knows Karl Rove --
MR. McCLELLAN: He's aware of what I've said, that there is simply no truth to that suggestion. And I have spoken with Karl about it.
WH site
Also:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/12/cia.leaks.ap/
AND AMERICABLOG:
http://www.americablog.com/#112170162817203545
#3
Knight Ridder:
CIA Identity Leak Far Worse Than Reported
by Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers
October 11, 2003
WASHINGTON -- It's just a 12-letter name - Valerie Plame - but the leak by Bush administration officials of that CIA officer's identity may have damaged U.S. national security to a much greater extent than generally realized, current and former agency officials say.
Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson, was a member of a small elite-within-an-elite, a CIA employee operating under "nonofficial cover," in her case as an energy analyst, with little or no protection from the U.S. government if she got caught.
Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called "legends," including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.
Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency's chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.
Now, Plame's career as a covert operations officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations is over. Those she dealt with - whether on business or not - may be in danger. The DO is conducting an extensive damage assessment.
And Plame's exposure may make it harder for American spies to convince foreigners to share important secrets with them, U.S. intelligence officials said.
Larry Johnson - a former CIA and State Department official who was a 1985 classmate of Plame's in the CIA's case officer-training program at Camp Peary, Va., known as "the Farm" - predicted that when the CIA's internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end of the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people potentially may have lost their lives."
"This is not just another leak. This is an unprecedented exposing of an agent's identity," said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, who's now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich., and who also did CIA training with Plame.
The name suggested work in the energy field: The late Brewster Jennings was president of the old Socony-Vacuum oil company, predecessor to Mobil, now Exxon Mobil Corp.
A June 2000 listing in Dun & Bradstreet for a Boston-based "Brewster Jennings & Associates" names the company's CEO and only employee as "Victor Brewster" and says it had annual sales of $60,000.
While that might seem like flimsy cover, former intelligence officials say that in fact meticulous steps are taken to create a life-like legend to support and protect CIA officers operating under nonofficial cover.
It appears that the Brewster-Jennings front was more than what is called "nominal cover," and was used as part of Plame's espionage, Johnson said.
That means anyone she met with could be in danger now, said Johnson, who described himself as "furious, absolutely furious" at the security breach.
Researcher Tish Wells contributed to this article.
Knight Ridder Oct 11 2003
WAPO Article
The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.
Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.
"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.
Tenet or Pavitt or both would have had access to the CIA Internal Assessment of the Plame Leak and could have know the fact that 6 reporters were called by 2 WH officials. Both Pavitt and Tenet had just been blamed by the WH for Iraq Intelligence failures when we now know it was the WH that fixed the intelligence to their liking. Pavitt and Tenet were no doubt furious that Plame's name was leaked and Brewster Jennings blown, and many anti-Bush docs were leaked such as the NIE saying things don't look good for Iraq. They have likely told Fitzgerald EVERYTHING.
I have a diary on this:
Tenet Anyone?
Let's keep repeating these 3 talking points until we are blue in the face--and blue in the Congress and White House.