Novak vs. Armitage: Was the Plame Leak Deliberate?

The book I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, has set off a dispute between conservative columnist Bob Novak and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

The book--which recounts the behind-the-scenes battles that went on within the CIA, the State Department, Congress and the White House over the administration's case for war before and after the Iraq invasion--discloses that Armitage was the original source for the Novak column of July 14, 2003, which outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction." (The book also reveals that Valerie Wilson was operations chief for the clandestine Joint Task Force on Iraq and oversaw espionage operations aimed at gathering intelligence on Saddam Hussein's supposed WMDs.) Following the book's release, Armitage publicly confessed and apologized to Valerie Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. He said that the leak had been an inadvertent slip, an act of gossip that came during an interview with Novak about Colin Powell and the State Department. Armitage claimed he had merely told Novak--in an off-the-cuff fashion--"I think his wife works out there," meaning the CIA.

In a column published on Wednesday, Novak accuses Armitage of not telling the truth. The former No. 2 at the State Department, Novak insists, "obscured what he really did." Novak writes:

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he "thought" might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

This account depicts Armitage as deliberately leaking information on Valerie Wilson. In our book, Isikoff and I raise the possibility that Armitage might have told Novak about Wilson's wife and her CIA employment to distance the State Department from the burgeoning Wilson imbroglio--as a way of saying, We here at State had nothing to do with that trouble-causing Wilson trip to Niger. Novak claims that Armitage "told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA's Counter-Proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband's mission." (Valerie Wilson's role in her husband's mission has been overblown; Isikoff and I lay this out in the book.)

Novak, as he acknowledges, did not take notes of this hour-long conversation, which might strike some reporters as odd, given that he had been endeavoring for years to snag an interview with Armitage. So outsiders are left with a he-said/he-said tussle. But Novak's latest account does seem to contradict an earlier version.

In his recent column, Novak contends that Armitage intentionally passed him information on Wilson and went so far as to suggest the material might be good fodder for a column. Yet in an October 1, 2003 column, Novak said of the leak,

It was an offhand revelation from this [unnamed] official, who is no partisan gunslinger.

"Offhand revelation" doesn't quite cover Novak's (current) depiction of the exchange as a deliberate leak. Novak's October 1, 2003 column--written days after the news broke that the FBI had launched a criminal investigation of the leak that was targeting the White House--seemed intended to downplay the leak as significant or intentional. (That article also stated, "It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.") Novak's recent column, written at a time when White House defenders are trying to dump all the blame on Armitage, claims the leak was purposeful. Which was it?

Novak's current account may well be an accurate recollection. There's no reason to take Armitage's quasi-face-saving version at face-value. But perhaps Novak can explain in yet one more column why he first called the leak an "offhand revelation"?

At the end of his new column, Novak excoriates Armitage:

Armitage's silence the next 2 1/2 years caused intense pain for his colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely accuse Rove of being my primary source.

Novak neglects to note that Karl Rove was the source he used to confirm the leak he had received from Armitage--and that Rove also leaked classified information on Valerie Wilson to Matt Cooper of Time magazine before the leak appeared in Novak's column. Nor does Novak mention that Scooter Libby leaked information on Valerie Wilson to Judith Miller of The New York Times weeks before Novak entered Armitage's office--and also confirmed Rove's leak to Cooper. (A source close to Rove is quoted in Hubris saying that Rove "probably" learned about Valerie Wilson from Libby.) Like Armitage, Rove and Libby kept silent, even as the White House claimed they were not involved in the leak. Maybe it's time for all leakers to come clean and tell what happened.

******

INFO ON HUBRIS: Tom Brokaw says "Hubris is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq." Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor of The New Yorker notes, "The selling of Bush's Iraq debacle is one of the most important--and appalling--stories of the last half-century, and Michael Isikoff and David Corn have reported the hell out of it." For more information on Hubris, click here

Comments (326)

1. i gotta go out and get this book

   Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 12:09am

2. Excellent interview with Isikoff and Corn on today's KGO afternoon show with right-leaning moderate host and Channel 7 newscaster Pete Wilson.

   Pete was much less antagonistic and aggressive with Michael and David than he normally is with the rest of the left-leaning Bay Area audience and like guests, and was actually quite respectful and seemed genuinely interested in the contents of "Hubris" (after, apparently, he actually read the book - more than I can say for anyone here, including me...)

   I enjoyed the interview and will be picking up a copy of my own.

   Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 01:18am

3. Let me ask a different question, and one likely weighing most heavily on the minds of those farther left than me.

   Forget "crime".

   Do you personally believe that Bob Novak and Karl Rove are good and honest men with zero ill intentions towards Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in particular, or Democrats in general?

   Forget "crime".

   Do you believe that Karl Rove wishes the "other side" the very best in life, health, and happiness?

   Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 01:25am

4. fitzgerald hasn't indicted more people, yet, because libby obstructed his investigation.

   Posted by pretzel at 09/14/2006 @ 02:35am

5. Do you believe that Karl Rove wishes the "other side" the very best in life, health, and happiness?

   No...and I think that's three distinct areas of common ground today.

   Posted by Thrawn at 09/14/2006 @ 02:36am

6. yeah rio, your favorite traitors outed valerie plame, who was in charge of a unit trying to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology. way to go there, "patriot".

   Posted by pretzel at 09/14/2006 @ 04:59am

7. THE OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS EXPOSED:

   http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?t=550

   This case with Rove, Miller, Libby, and so on, is linked to another scandal in the DOD. The Larry Franklin/AIPAC scandal. Where Israel was using DOD officials to hand over classified information to their Israeli lobby group who then passed it to the Israeli government. Now just how does it all fit together?

   KEEP READING…

   http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/911-graham-admits.htm

   PBS Interview:

   Senator: At Least One Foreign Country Assisted the 9/11 Terrorists

   GWEN IFILL: Are you suggesting that you are convinced that there was a state sponsor behind 9/11?

   SEN. BOB GRAHAM: I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down, make the further case, or find the evidence that would indicate that that is not true and we can look for other reasons why the terrorists were able to function so effectively in the United States.

   GWEN IFILL: Do you think that will ever become public, which countries you're talking about?

   SEN. BOB GRAHAM: It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now. And, we need to have this information now because it's relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing today.

   So which nation(s) was it? We mere mortals don't know, but we can make an educated guess about which countries it wasn't. It obviously wasn't any nation that the US government hates and would love to demonize. If it had been Iraq, for example, the report would not have been classified; it would've been personally faxed by Donald Rumsfeld to every reporter in the nation. No, the one or more facilitators of 9/11 were obviously allies, friendly countries, nations that the US doesn't want to alienate....

   I S R A E L

   D I D

   I T

   Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:00am

8. .

   "Every pretext for war is created by those with the capacity to profit from it."

   Plunger

   http://www.rense.com/general31/cyc.htm

   The CIA's "Operation Cyclone" - Stirring The Hornet's Nest Of Islamic Unrest FriendsOfLiberty.com 10-27-2

   Zbigniew Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorized $500 million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "de-stabilise" the Soviet Union... The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").

   Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" - terrorism.

   Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.

   In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.

   The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" - meaning the Taliban.

   The Wall Street Journal declared: "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."

   No American newspaper dares suggest that the prisoners in Camp X-Ray are the product of this policy, nor that it was one of the factors that led to the attacks of September 11.

   Nor do they ask: who were the real winners of September 11?

   The day the Wall Street stock market opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labor) and Lockheed Martin.

   As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.

   Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200 billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The greatest taboo of all, which Orwell would surely recognize, is the record of the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.

   This truth is virtually unknown by the American public and makes a mockery of Bush's (and Blair's) statements about "tracking down terrorists wherever they are."

   They don't have to look far.

   THERE IS NO OSAMA BIN LADEN.

   AL QAEDA IS MERELY AN IDEA.

   THERE IS NO "WAR ON TERROR"

   THERE IS MERELY TERROR, CAUSED DIRECTLY BY THOSE WHO GAIN THE MOST FROM IT.

   AFGHANISTAN'S OPIUM PRODUCTION IS AT ALL TIME HIGHS SINCE 9/11 AND OUR RESULTING INVASION.

   GEORGE HW BUSH'S CIA/DEA DRUG IMPORTATION OPERATIONS ARE AS PROFITABLE AS EVER.

   THE US IS LEADING THE "WAR OF TERROR."

   GOOGLE: "FALSE FLAG"

   .

   Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:01am

9. BEFORE 9/11...

   THE 200 ISRAELIS

   JANUARY – 2001

   Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities

   Drug Enforcement Administration Office of Security June, 2001

   Backgound:

   In January, 2001, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Office of Security Programs (IS), began to receive reports of Israeli art students attempting to penetrate several DEA Field Offices in the continental United States. Additionally, there have been reports of Israeli art students visiting the homes of numerous DEA employees. These incidents have occurred since at least the beginning of 2000.

   THEY TURNED OUT TO BE MOSSAD AGENTS.

   200 MOSSAD AGENTS.

   http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/deareportisraelispying.html

   SPRING – 2001

   THE US GOVERNMENT IS "RAMPING UP" A PLAN TO INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST

   VALERIE PLAME LED THE "JOINT TASK FORCE ON IRAQ"

   IN THE SPRING OF 2001 - SHE RECEIVED WORD TO "RAMP IT UP!"

   SOMETHING WAS COMING - A PRETEXT - THAT WOULD LEAD TO AN INVASION OF IRAQ

   THIS WAS KNOWN TO PLAME IN THE SPRING OF 2001

   WHEN 9/11 HAPPENED - SHE KNEW THAT THE GENERALS HAD ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE OF IT - AS THIS WAS INSTANTLY REVEALED TO BE THE PRETEXT FOR THE INVASION OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

   VALARIE PLAME KNOWS FOR A FACT THAT 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.

   DICK CHENEY ENABLED IT.

   MOSSAD IMPLEMENTED IT.

   http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/corn

   Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:02am

10. Stephen Engleberg, Judith Miller's former Editor at the New York Times, was on Countdown recently.

    Keith opened the segment by stating that there was a 9/11 Truth Movement convention under way in New York City, and the implication was made that a lot of people actually believe that the government helped to plan the events of 9/11.

    The story is now in the mainstream media - with the New York Times, AOL and Olberman covering it on the same day.

    The segment on Miller proclaimed that she had received "a tip from a White House insider" (that wouldn't be Scooter "connected-at-the-roots" Libby, would it?) - and that two "Al Qaeda Operatives" had been intercepted complaining that the US had not bothered to respond in any meaningful way to the attack on the USS Cole - while relishing the thought of the "Big Attack Coming Soon to the US."

    OK...STOP.

    Why would 2 Al Qaeda operatives be upset that the US had not retaliated against Arab countries in the aftermath of the Cole Bombing?

    Answer:

    They wouldn't be.

    Let logic take over here...

    Who would be upset that the US had not bombed an Arab country in the aftermath of a PURPORTED Al Qaeda Attack?

    What is Al Qaeda...really?

    Judith Miller was the mouthpiece for admitted Zionist Scooter Libby in his effort to plant FALSE information in concert with Chalabi in order to enable the Administration's invasion of Iraq.

    On whose behalf?

    The New York Times never ran the story about the warning of a major terror event in the months preceding 9/11.

    The New York times held the story of Domestic Espionage from the public for a full year - knowing full well it would have cost Bush the election if they had run it prior to the 2004 election.

    Scooter Libby writes a FAR TOO CLEVER letter to Miller with respect to the Plame outing - making reference to the Aspen tress growing in clusters - and recounting that they "turn together because their roots connect them."

    Both are staunch "Israel-Firsters." Both had inside knowledge. He could turn on her if she turned on him. He knew about 9/11. So did she.

    Both had prior knowledge of a "Big Al Qaeda Event coming to the US in advance of 9/11.

    Both had knowledge of the fact that Plame was outed at the request of Cheney - in order to destroy any real evidence about Iraq's WMD program and destroy Joe Wilson's credibility.

    Do the math, folks...

    Do the math.

    It's time to change the LEAD STORY to:

    "9/11 - An Inside Job?"

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:04am

11. .

    Cheney & Chalabi

    "HEROES IN ERROR"

    Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

    Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/19/wirq19.x ml

    CHENEY & CHALIBI:

    Standing of Former Key U.S. Ally in Iraq Falls to New Low

    By Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A20

    A year ago, as U.S. troops swept toward Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi and about 400 hastily assembled fighters were secretly airlifted into southern Iraq to rally other Iraqis and begin a march toward Baghdad to help topple Saddam Hussein, an operation that won the concurrence of U.S. officials all the way up to Vice President Cheney's office. Chalabi had predicted that he would become Iraq's Spartacus, cutting a wide swath through Iraq and mobilizing vast numbers behind him, according to U.S. officials.

    "It was the moment of truth for Chalabi, and it was literally a moment. It was over almost the minute it happened," said a senior U.S. official who worked with Chalabi and served in the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad. "Compared to [Charles] de Gaulle's march to Paris [to liberate France], Chalabi's march to Baghdad was a stone that went into the water without a splash."

    "The reality is that he was among a wide variety of Iraqi figures who made the case to an array of American officials over a period of time for the liberation of the Iraqi people."

    Yet no Iraqi leader has had more to do with the U.S. intervention in Iraq than Chalabi, from charming Congress into authorizing almost $100 million to back his fledgling Iraqi National Congress in the late 1990s and convincing Washington about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in 2002 to pressing for war last year, say both his supporters and critics.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43775-2004May20.html

    Bush & Chalibi

    "HEROES IN ERROR"

    Interview of the President by TVP, Poland

    For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary May 29, 2003

    Interview of the President by TVP, Poland The Library

    Q. But, still, those countries who didn't support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

    THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them. "

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:05am

12. MAY 2001

    DOV ZAKHEIM INSTALLED AS PENTAGON COMPTROLLER

    Dov Zakheim and the World Trade Center

    Perhaps not coincidentally Dov served at the Pentagon, it was an SPS (his firm's) subsidiary, Tridata Corporation, that oversaw the investigation of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. This would have given them intimate knowledge of the security systems and structural blueprints of the World Trade Center. From the '90s through 2001, WTC Security was handled by Securacom, a Kuwait-American firm, on whose board Marvin Bush, the president's brother, sat. After 9/11, Securacom was let go, changed its name to Stratosec, and was delisted from the Stock Exchange in 2002.

    JUNE - 2001

    ADVANCE WARNINGS

    The days and hours leading up to 9-11 were marked by a series of chilling warnings about impending terrorist plots involving hijacked commercial airplanes. It's worth mentioning at this point that months before 9-11, the US had already informed some of its allies of plans to go to war in Afghanistan. On June 26, 2001, News Insight/India Reacts, an Indian public affairs magazine, wrote:

    "India and Iran will "facilitate" US and Russian plans for "limited military action" against the Taliban if the contemplated tough new economic sanctions don't bend Afghanistan's fundamentalist regime. Indian officials say that India and Iran will only play the role of "facilitator" while the US and Russia will combat the Taliban from the front with the help of two Central Asian countries, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to push Taliban lines back to the 1998 position 50 km away from Mazar-e-Sharief city in northern Afghanistan. Military action will be the last option though it now seems scarcely avoidable with the UN banned from Taliban-controlled areas" 6

    JULY – 2001

    June 14, 2002 - Common Dreams website publishes an account from a former member of the 1/118th Infantry Battalion of the South Carolina National Guard: "My unit reported for drill in July 2001 and we were suddenly and unexpectedly informed that all activities planned for the next two months would be suspended in order to prepare for a mobilization exercise to be held on Sept. 14, 2001. We worked diligently for two weekends and even came in on an unscheduled day in August to prepare for the exercise. By the end of August all we needed was a phone call, which we were to expect, and we could hop into a fully prepared convoy with our bags and equipment packed." [Source: Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0614-02.htm

    AUGUST - 2001

    MOSSAD WARNS OF "200 TERRORISTS" INSIDE UNITED STATES

    The story of US military involvement in Afghanistan was reported months before 9-11 in Indian and British 7 publications but it was never reported in the US media. With the military plans already in motion since at least June of 2001, all that was needed was for an "incident" to take place to justify the US going to "war against Terrorism" in Afghanistan.

    Here are just a few of the advance warnings which were brought to light in the aftermath of 9-11:

    The London Daily Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001:

    "The Telegraph has learned that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the FBI and CIA to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama Bin Laden and told American officials that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement."

    Do you smell a "false flag" operation in the works? How is possible that the Mossad knew of the existence of these 200 terrorists but could not name or locate a single one? And how convenient for Israel that Saddam Hussein should be in cahoots with Osama Bin Laden, despite the fact that Bin Laden and Hussein hate each other!

    SEPTEMBER 1 – 2001

    Sept. 1-10 2001 - In an exercise, called Operation "Swift Sword" and planned for four years, 23,000 British troops are steaming toward Oman. Although the 9-11 attacks caused a hiccup in the deployment, the massive operation was implemented as planned. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation "Bright Star." All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the WTC. [Sources: The Guardian; CNN; Fox; The Observer; International Law Professor Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois.]

    http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_lucy.html

    SEPTEMBER 7 – 2001

    http://killtown.911review.org/oddities/2001.html#September7,2001-Jeb_Bus h

    "WHO KNEW IN ADVANCE? " JEB BUSH!

    Jeb Bush signed Florida TWO YEAR emergency order 4 days BEFORE ATTACK

    Immediately after the WTC's second tower fell, Jeb Bush declares a state of emergency in Florida with no termination date even though no acts of terrorism occur in his state.

    Bush, through Executive Order 01-261, had activated units of the Florida National Guard on Sept. 7, four days before the kamikaze assault on the Trade Center.

    INSIDER TRADING IN ADVANCE OF 9/11

    There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before Sept.11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.

    It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.

    Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

    Most of these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A.B.Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B."Buzzy" Krongard, who later became executive director of the CIA.

    More serious was an article in the Sept. 28, 2001 edition of the Washington Post stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings!

    SUBSEQUENTLY COVERED UP BY MOSSAD AGENT MICHAEL CHERTOFF:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR200512 2102327_5.html

    The White House and the FBI Killed Operation Greenquest, Michael Chertoff's Faux Search To Track The Funding For 9/11

    The strongest pushback came from the Justice Department, where the mention of DHS inspired jokes about duct tape and chartreuse threat levels. Justice officials believed DHS had "too much focus on marketing and not enough on substantive delivery," in the words of one aide to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. "They were consumed with their public perception," said Mark Corallo, an Ashcroft spokesman.

    Indeed, one of the new department's biggest intramural furors was a branding fight with the FBI. It began when the director of a new DHS agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- or ICE -- decided to keep the catchy acronym but change the name to Investigation and Criminal Enforcement. The FBI, it turned out, had some proprietary feelings about the word "investigation."

    At the FBI's insistence, the White House had already forced ICE to give up its Operation Greenquest program investigating terrorism financing -- and forced Ridge to sign a memo pledging to keep his department away from similar investigations. But Ridge thought this spat was just silly; nobody was going to mistake ICE for the FBI.

    Nevertheless, the White House told Ridge to back off.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:07am

13. http://www.madcowprod.com/01122004.html

    Michael Chertoff, appointed by President Bush to head the Homeland Security Department, may have shielded from criminal prosecution a former client suspected by law enforcement of having funneled millions of dollars directly to Osama Bin Laden while in charge of the U.S. Government's 9.11 investigation.

    SEPTEMBER 10 – 2001

    Missing Trillions Rumsfeld Buries Admission of Missing 2+ Trillion Dollars in 9/10/01 Press Conference

    On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

    The Comptroller of the Pentagon at the time of the attack was Dov Zakheim, who was appointed in May of 2001. Before becoming the Pentagon's money-manager, he was an executive at System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor specializing in electronic warfare technologies including remote-controlled aircraft systems. Zakheim is a member of the Project for a New American Century and participated in the creation of its 2000 position paper Rebuilding America's Defenses which called for "a New Pearl Harbor."

    http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/trillions.html

    Zakheim was/is a dual Israeli/American citizen and an ordained rabbi and had been tracking the halls of US government for 25 years, casting defense policy and influence on Presidents Reagan, Clinton, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. He is, as I described him earlier, the bionic Zionist. In fact, Judicial Inc points out that most of Israel's armaments were gotten thanks to him. Squads of US F-16 and F-15 were classified military surplus and sold to Israel at a fraction of their value.

    SEPTEMBER 11 - 2001

    THE DANCING ISRAELIS

    On September 11, five Israeli army veterans were arrested by the FBI after several witnesses saw them "dancing", "high-fiving", and "celebrating" as they took pictures of the World Trade Center disaster from across the river in New Jersey.

    http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:K2GhcamuDqoJ:www.serendipity.li/wot/ independent_investigation_of_911.doc+giuliani+dominick+suter&hl=en&gl=us &ct=clnk&cd=6

    When the photos were developed, they revealed that the dancing Israelis were smiling in the foreground of the New York massacre. 3 According to ABC's 20/20 attempted whitewash of the incident, in addition to their outrageous and highly suspicious behavior, the five also had in their possession the following items; box-cutters, European passports, and $4,700 cash hidden in a sock. 4 Why were these Israeli agents so happy about the horrible massacre that was unfolding right before their very eyes? What evil spirit could possess people who are supposed to be America's "allies", and who receive billions of dollars in financial and military aid from US taxpayers each year, to publicly rejoice as innocent people (including many American Jews) were burning to death and jumping out of 110 story buildings? Could it be that these happy Israeli army veterans were in some way linked to this monstrous attack? That's what officials close to the investigation initially told The Bergen Record newspaper of New Jersey.

    http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/12/WTC_Mysteries3.html

    FBI evidence of Mossad involvement in September 11 attacks on the U.S.

    The FBI believes that most of the arrested Israelis belong to an Israeli intelligence unit operating outside New Jersey, near where the Anthrax letters were mailed. They all worked for a U.S.-based company known as Urban Moving Systems.

    An editorial on whatreallyhappened.com states that an FBI SWAT team raided the New Jersey warehouse of the Urban Moving Systems and confiscated a number of computer hard drives and files. It further adds that the Israeli owner of the company, Dominick Suter, closed his business days after the Sept. attacks and returned to Israel. He was in such a hurry that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities.

    Behind closed doors, Israeli authorities were doing all what they can to get the men released and the FBI probe closed. Israeli lawmakers contacted their "friends" in the U.S. Congress, and the Mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Ohmert personally called the New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and asked him to intervene.

    An article on Power of Prophecy reported that a war brewed inside the FBI between the agents conducting the probe and their superiors, who warned that involving the Israelis in the attacks could be an "explosive political volcano." But the lower-level agents didn't buy it. They believed that the arrested Israeli Jews might just hold the key to the whole 9/11 debacle. "These Israeli guys knew what was coming down," one FBI veteran was quoted as saying. "We would be fools if we let them just fade away into the sunset and pretend they weren't involved."

    It was later confirmed that the five detained Israelis were in fact Mossad agents. However, FBI and Justice Department superiors succeeded in pushing aside the local FBI agents and the Israelis were released after spending just 71 days in U.S. custody. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information," a U.S. official told Fox News at the time.

    The compliant mainstream media completely ignored the Israeli connection. Rather it immediately blamed OSAMA BIN LADEN even though he had no record of doing anything on this scale. On the day of the attacks, CIA Director George Tenet said "You know, this has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it."

    But a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about BIN LADEN's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one CIA official said at the time. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone."

    BIN LADEN himself denied any involvement in the attacks. The BBC published his denial in which he clearly stated: "I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself…" (Most of us never heard that quote on our nightly newscast).

    To date, the only shred of "evidence" against bin Laden is a barely audible fuzzy amateur video that the Pentagon just happened to find "lying around" in Afghanistan.

    Blaming the horrible attacks on the Arabs was the best thing that has even happened to Israel. Now Washington, once again, solidly stands in the pro-Israeli camp, and "Palestinians be damned!"

    http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/conspiracy_theory/fullstory.asp?id=287

    WHEN WERE THE BOMBS PUT IN THE TOWERS?

    Ever wonder how the bombs were put in the towers? Did you know the President's brother had a moving company in the towers and building 7 in the weeks prior to 911? Did you know that that moving company was Israeli (Urban Moving systems).

    When were the bombs put in the towers? Ask yourself that. Then who was caught working for a fake moving company (a front for the Mossad) in New Jersey after they were spotted dancing and taking pictures of themselves smiling with the backdrop of the burning towers? What same moving company was in the WTC towers when the power was cut off for days prior to 911? Oh yes the power to the WTC was cut off prior to 911 and the security cameras were down. (think Al Qaeda did that?)

    They were released by the FBI when Ashcroft put a lid on it, and they went back to Israel. Their van had traced of explosives in it, box cutters, thousands in cash, and highlighted maps of New York. When tested they failed SEVEN polygraph tests - which are 98% accurate.

    Quote: According to Scott Forbes, a senior database administrator for Fiduciary Trust, Inc. – a high-net investment bank which was later acquired by Franklin Templeton – this is precisely what took place. Forbes, who was hired by Fiduciary in 1999 and is now stationed at a U.K. branch office, was working on the weekend of September 8-9, 2001, and said that his company was given three weeks advance notice that New York's Port Authority would take out power in the South Tower from the 48th floor up.

    http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?t=1326

    Sept. 11, 2001 - Gen. Mahmud of the ISI (see #16), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. He is meeting with the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., [Source: MSNBC, Oct. 7, 2001; The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002]

    Sept. 11, 2001 - Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the world's largest instant messaging companies with offices in New York, receive threat warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC less than two hours before the first plane hits. Law enforcement authorities have gone silent about any investigation of this. The Odigo research and development offices in Israel are located in the city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv that is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism, which eight days later reports details of insider trading on 9-11. [Source: CNN's Daniel Sieberg, Sept. 28, 2001; MSNBC Newsbytes, Brian McWilliams, Sept. 27, 2001; Ha'aretz, Sept. 26, 2001]

    SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

    Cheney was initially taken by the secret service to an underground bunker in the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

    From there, according to CNN, Cheney directed the US government's response to the unfolding attack.

    Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center with Vice President Cheney as Flight 77 approached Washington, D.C. On May 23, 2003 in front of the 9/11 Commission, Secretary Mineta testified:

    "During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

    As the plane in question hit the Pentagon, what else can we conclude but that the 'order' was not to shoot down the aircraft and to let it find its target.

    http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/080904wargamescover.h tm

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:08am

14. Sept. 11-12, 2001

    ANTHRAX PREPARATION

    Nearly a month before the first reported outbreak, White House officials start taking the powerful antibiotic Cipro to treat anthrax. By the end of the year it will be known that the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks against Sens. Leahy and Daschle was produced by CIA programs coordinated through Fort Detrick, the Batelle Memorial Institute and the Dugway Proving Ground. [Source: NBC; CNN; www.tetrahedron.org www.judicialwatch.org]

    REMEMBER THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS AGAINST CONGRESS AND THE MEDIA?

    RUMSFELD DID IT – USING MOSSAD FRONT URBAN MOVING IN NEW JERSEY

    Philip Zack of 911 anthrax fame was employed by Rumsfeld's biotech firm Gilead:

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/18147

    News Story identifying Dr. Philip Zack as the man caught entering the Anthrax storage area at Fort Detrick without authorization.

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/anthraxsuspect.html

    Conspiracy Flashback to the Ford Administration - and look who is running the ANTHRAX coverup...

    http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articulations/Script-CodeNameArtichoke. html

    HERE'S WHY:

    Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers AND DOMESTIC SPYING in U.S.

    By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 23, 2005; Page A04

    The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.

    Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2

    And then...a few weeks later...

    W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 1 A group of military scientists is feverishly examining the microscopic spores of anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle for clues to a mystery that could have profound implications for the United States and its ongoing war on terror: Who made it?

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92006&page=1

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:08am

15. URBAN MOVING EMPLOYED THE DANCING ISRAELIS

    TRACES OF ANTHRAX WERE DISCOVERED AT URBAN MOVING

    Wayne Madsen Report

    After the Israelis were detained for several months in Brooklyn as terrorist suspects, they were quickly deported to Israel. After the FBI questioned Suter on September 11, he fled the United States on September 14, 2001. The FBI was due to question Suter again before he fled the country. Later, Federal law enforcement agents discovered pipes, caps, explosive chemical materials, and traces of anthrax at the Weehawken warehouse. Suter's name and those of some of his moving employees turned up in a CIA database of foreign intelligence agents. Suter's name also appeared on an FBI 9-11 terrorism suspect list. Suter's year of birth is listed as 1970 with a social security number of 129-78-0926. His addresses before 9-11 are listed as 28 Harlow Crescent Rd., Fairlawn, NJ 07410; 312 Pavonia Ave., Jersey City, NJ 07302; and 15000 Dickens, Suite 11, Sherman Oaks CA. If Suter has been permitted to re-enter the United States, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and its chief Michael Chertoff have a lot of explaining to do.

    ABC 20/20 STORY ABOUT THE "DANCING ISRAELIS" (archived)

    http://web.archive.org/web/20030210083142/http://abcnews.go.com/sections /2020/DailyNews/2020_whitevan_020621.html

    SUNDAY HERALD ARTICLE ABOUT THE "DANCING ISRAELIS"

    http://www.sundayherald.com/37707

    Israeli Mossad & 9/11

    http://la.indymedia.org/news/2003/11/92910.php

    After reviewing the evidence, there can only be one logical reason as to why a group (perhaps multiple groups) of young Israeli men, in which some where found out to be Mossad agents, were celebrating, filming, and taking pictures of themselves on 9/11 with the burning WTC in the background; they were in on it.

    Five men detained as suspected conspirators

    Wednesday, September 12, 2001

    http://killtown.blogspot.com/2005/11/dancing-israelis-on-911.html

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:09am

16. A MILITARY AIRCRAFT STUCK THE PENTAGON

    Flight 77 is allegedly flown into the Pentagon by 28 year old Saudi Arabian Hani Hanjour who has never flown a Boeing 757 in real life, described by many of his former flight instructors as a "horrible pilot."

    "Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. "I'm still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon," the former employee said. "He could not fly at all." - New York Times (05/04/02)

    Experienced air traffic controllers thought that the alleged Boeing 757 that was flying towards the Pentagon flew like a "military jetfighter."

    "The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe."

    "And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second," says O'Brien.

    But the plane continued to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver." - ABC (10/24/01)

    "But just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver." "Aviation sources said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm, possibly one of the hijackers." - Washington Post (9/12/01)

    "Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes."

    "The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it's clear there was no fight for control going on. - CBS (9/21/01)

    Gilah Goldsmith, personnel attorney at the Pentagon:

    "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke," she said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke." - Jewish News Weekly (09/21/01)

    Don Perkal, deputy General Counsel, Office of the Secretary of Defense:

    "Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite."

    Cordite is a smokeless propellant explosive made by combining two explosives: nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin. It has commonly been used in firearms since the early 20th Century. It has also been used in solid fuel rockets.

    A3 SKYWARRIOR WITH CORDITE-POWERED SOLID-FUEL ROCKET MOTOR STRIKES PENTAGON:

    The A-3 Skywarrior that hit the Pentagon was owned by Raytheon.

    It was guided by Sysplan's (FTS) technology.

    It intercepted AA 77 and shadowed it so closely so as to appear to be a single aircraft on radar.

    http://www.team8plus.org/the-movement/radar/Radar.htm

    This A-3 was converted into a missile itself.

    The "plane" is a "missle."

    Against all protocol (and the law), the lawn of the Pentagon became a hive of activity as Government employees scurried to taint a crime scene (and the site of what would typically result in an FAA investigation), removing all essential evidence.

    The type of aircraft and engines used to attack the Pentagon.

    This shows the Raytheon connection to 9/11.

    THE ANSWER:

    http://www.rense.com/general70/safe.htm

    9/11 AND THE RAYTHEON CONNECTION:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/09/06/nbc-news-army-may-have-_n_28869 .html?p=2#comments

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:10am

17. ISRAELI SPY RING EXPOSED BY FOX NEWS 4 PART SERIES:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fm0_7jVqcE

    Oct. 10, 2001

    The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal gas pipeline project from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to Pakistan is now back on the table "in view of recent geopolitical developments."

    Nov. 25, 2001

    The Observer runs a story headlined "Victorious Warlords Set To Open the Opium Floodgates." It states that farmers are being encouraged by warlords allied with the victorious Americans are "being encouraged to plant as much opium as possible."

    LARRY SILVERSTEIN'S ROLE REVEALED:

    http://www.myspace.com/911CoverUp

    http://z8.invisionfree.com/AlQuranAndSunnah/index.php?showtopic=343&st=0 &#last

    http://www.wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm

    WTC Owner Larry Silverstein confessing to 9/11 DEMOLITION:

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7750532340306101329&q=silverste in&hl=en

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:10am

18. I T ' S

    A L L

    A B O U T

    T H E

    P R E T E X T

    If you retrace Bush 41s footsteps from the Reagan era forward, you'll see how a criminal enterprise was developed between Bush Senior and many co-conspirators (Primarily Israel and the Christian Coalition) whose primary motivation was power and greed.

    Former CIA Head and US President 41 was in bed with Israel and Mossad running tons of drugs.

    He was floored when he lost his power to the Sax-playing Governor from Arkansas with whom he had a secrecy pact that allowed for Bush 41's CIA drug shipments to Mena Arkansas:

    "I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people. . . . I personally was involved in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries. The CIA killed it."

    Former DEA Agent Michael Levine CNBC-TV, October 8, 1996

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/mena.html

    ARKANSAS GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH CIA DRUGS FOR GUNS CONNECTION

    http://www.ncoic.com/clinton.htm

    Mena began as the brain-child of CIA's Bill Casey, operated by CIA pilots flying out of NSA-controlled facilities. But the process became an NSA institution, a vast money-making enterprise by the nation's largest, best-financed intelligence agency. And they've been making too much money to stop.

    Why is the Mossad, like the White House, in panic mode over the reopening of the investigation into Foster's death? What is it they don't want the U.S. public to find out? Why did the operating code for a new computer developed by NSA-subcontractor E-Systems of Dallas, Texas, end up in the hands of the Israelis within one month? Did Vince Foster sell it to them? Why are two LAKAM representatives offering a fee of $75,000 plus 1 percent of the proceeds to recover money from Swiss Bank Corporation? Is it because Vince Foster is not around to release it for them? Or did the armed raid on Mossad headquarters by U.S. contract agents within the past year create so much confusion someone just forgot the authorization codes?

    http://orlingrabbe.com/part33.htm

    http://orlingrabbe.com/part34.htm

    http://orlingrabbe.com/vince_foster.htm

    N U C L E A R

    B L A C K M A I L

    One nation, ISRAEL, becomes a VIRTUAL NUCLEAR POWER.

    Missile launches take place in a virtual reality. Given the proper launch code, the missile will attempt to go to its programmed destination without further theological debate.

    A country possessing the launch codes and also targeting information for another country's nuclear missiles could become a virtual nuclear power. (The targeting information would be as important as the launch codes. For before you launched a missile, you would first want to know where it is going. After all, it could be aimed at you.) Getting your nuclear arms this ways would have obvious economic advantages: someone else would foot the military bill.

    Jim Norman states in Fostergate:

    "According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI counter- intelligence report, Maxwell was apparently allowed to sell two copies of PROMIS back to the U.S. weapons labs at Sandia and Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a hugely inflated price of $37 million. That would have allowed Pollard, if he was using the rigged program, to obtain U.S. missile targeting data long before Israel had its own satellite capability, thus making it a real nuclear threat to the Soviet Union."

    Well, yes, it could make Israel a real threat to the Soviet Union. But not from Israel's own puny missile program. Rather, Israel could be a threat to the Soviet Union because it would be able to launch our (U.S.) missiles at the Soviet Union. Being a virtual nuclear power would mean not having to say you are sorry. If a U.S. missile were launched at Russia, the defense system of Russia would, in its virtual view of the world, see the missile as coming from the U.S. It would launch a retaliatory strike against the U.S., because in its reality only the U.S. could be responsible. It wouldn't be programmed to recognize "Missile from U.S. not U.S.-intended action."

    Being a virtual nuclear power means you could blackmail people in both directions: you could blackmail the targeted city or area. More importantly, you could blackmail the U.S. If the U.S. doesn't go along with your demands, why, you could involve it in a nuclear war in which you would be a spectator, not a participant. The U.S. would know it has more to lose than you do, so it would give in to your demands.

    Vince Foster's NSA connections wouldn't give him access to such launch codes and targeting data. Not even with the help of Jonathan Pollard. It would take the cooperation of a small circle of friends--friends with Defense and Intelligence connections. People with access. People with authority.

    Would any of the U.S.'s own Defense Department or Intelligence personnel in the 1980s or the 1990s, people other than Jonathan Pollard, have been involved in such a transfer of information to a foreign power--whether to Israel or to anyone else?

    Surely not anyone connected to the account numbers KPFBMMBODB or KPFBMMBODE held at the Union Bank of Switzerland? Please, say it ain't so.

    http://orlingrabbe.com/part7.htm

    Why is it that the sale of bona fide national security secrets is tolerated, even rewarded with lucrative payments to Swiss accounts, while journalistic reports about THE LOOTING AND SALE OF U.S. NUCLEAR SECRETS are quashed as "national security"? Is the Pentagon run by lunatics and thieves?

    http://orlingrabbe.com/part8.htm

    Clinton had the goods on Bush 41, and was likely still receiving hush money from him as they ran against one another for President.

    Bush loathed the fact that Clinton was in the White House and sought to bring him down. Remember the vast Right Wing Conspiracy claim by Hillary. She knew what she was talking about. Bush Senior aligned himself with his Israeli drug-running partners to bring down the Democratic Party once and for all - with Israel as the promised beneficiary.

    The "VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY" of which Hillary spoke was a deal done between Bush 41 and Israel.

    The CIA and Mossad were already BUSINESS PARTNERS in the drug trade - under the protection of Bush 41s network. Both 41 and Israel had broader strategic goals - and a common purpose in pursuing them together. A critical third leg of the stool was America's Christian Coalition, who would serve to provide the moral authority for the criminal enterprise.

    The co-conspirators were impatient, and didn't want to wait 8 years for the popular Clinton/Gore White House to run its course, leaving Gore in position to retain it for 8 years thereafter. A PRETEXT was required to destroy the Clinton Presidency.

    First they launched a full blown investigation into the Whitewater land deal, and when that didn't stick, they looked to more extreme measures to accomplish their GOAL OF DESTROYING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

    S E X P I O N A G E:

    Sexpionage is so important to Israel, that it opened an office for this purpose right smack in the center of US political power -- Washington D.C. The office fronts as a post 911 anti-terrorism institute and is located at 3811 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 720 Arlington, VA 22203. The Chief of the office is non other thaN the former Director of the Israeli MOSSAD, Shabtai Shavit.

    http://www.aztlan.net/israeli_sexpionage.htm

    Mossad had just the agent for the job - and her name was Monica Lewinsky. The case of intern Monica Lewinsky is now history. It was one of the major factors in the destruction of the legacy of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

    Lewinsky was actually a "sexpionage agent" working on behalf of the Israeli government. She was, and probably still is, what the MOSSAD calls a "Swallow".

    It is believed that Lewinsky's primary mission was to sexually compromise Bill Clinton in order to bribe him to release the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. The timing and unfolding of the "White House Sex Scandal" coincided with the efforts and meetings by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu with President Bill Clinton in the White House.

    1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky's phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI's hunt for "Mega" (the code name of a top Mossad Operative inside the White House) is called off.

    The fact that Jerry Falwell's acknowledgment of how the Lewinsky affair was used as a club against Clinton--in tandem with "Bibi" Netanyahu's appearance at the White House, following the meeting with Falwell--was published in Vanity Fair is interesting in and of itself. That magazine is owned by the far-flung publishing empire of the billionaire Newhouse brothers ("Si" and Donald) whom Forbes dubbed the 25th richest family in America and who are known to be generous contributors to the Anti-Defamation League and other elements of the pro-Israel lobby.

    http://www.iamthewitness.com/by_MichaelCollinsPiper3.htm

    In an effort by Clinton to rid himself of the "Swallow", he transferred her to the Pentagon with the highest "security clearance" possible and which is only afforded to top brass and a few high level government officials. Soon Monica Lewinsky was cavorting with Admirals and Generals and became pregnant. She says she aborted the baby.

    No one knows what Pentagon secrets Lewinsky was able to pass on to the Zionists, but perhaps Paul Wolfowitz' great success in involving the USA in the War against Iraq may be the results of Monica Lewinsky's efforts on behalf of Israel. Sexpionage pays and it is paying big for Israel.

    AND REMEMBER PRESIDENT CLINTON'S FINAL ACT UPON DEPARTING THE WHITE HOUSE? THE PARDON OF MARC RICH.

    Rich was known to do business with Iran and Iraq as a means of supplying the Mossad and other Israelis with intelligence information.

    http://www.liesexposed.net/nfp/issue0109/israel.htm

    http://www.apfn.org/apfn/rich.htm

    And who are the agents of Marc Rich and Mossad in the White House?

    http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3005target_libby.html

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:11am

19. THE PLAN FOR THE MILITARY COUP TO OVERTHROW THE US GOVERNMENT UNDER THE FALSE-FLAG BANNER OF THE "CONSERVATIVE" REPUBLICAN PARTY – AND CHRISTIANITY.

    Lobbying for Armageddon

    By Sarah Posner, AlterNet. Posted August 3, 2006.

    Some influential evangelical leaders are lobbying for an attack on Iran. But it's not about geopolitics -- it's about bringing about the End Times.

    In a perfect world, a reporter at last week's press conference with George Bush and Tony Blair would have asked Bush, in the presence of his principal European ally, if he believes the European Union is the Antichrist.

    Although it sounds like the kind of Pat Robertson lunacy that makes even the wingnuts run for the nearest exit, it's a question Bush should be forced to answer. Bush and other leading Republicans have lined up behind a growing movement of Christian Zionists for whom a European Antichrist figures prominently in an end-times scenario. So they should be forced to explain to the rest of us why they're courting the votes of people who believe our allies are evil incarnate. Could it be that the central requirement for their breathlessly anticipated Armageddon -- that the United States confront Iran -- happens to dovetail so nicely with the neoconservative war agenda?

    At the center of it all is Pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee doesn't fear a nuclear conflagration, but rather God's wrath for standing by as Iran executes its supposed plot to destroy Israel. A nuclear confrontation between America and Iran, which he says is foretold in the Book of Jeremiah, will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to God's renewal of the Garden of Eden.

    http://www.alternet.org/story/39748/

    ENTER KEN LAY AND THE PRETEXT FOR OIL EXPERTS TO BE INSTALLED IN THE WHITE HOUSE…

    THE FAKE CALIFORNIA ENERGY CRISIS.

    Bush 41 and Ken lay conspired to create a pretext for the Republican Party to recapture the White House AND THEREAFTER – A SECONDARY PRETEXT TO JUSTIFY THE invasion of Iraq and Iran in order to acquire their oil. Their ISRAELI PARTNERS IN CRIME were hell bent on EXPANDING THE REALM OF ISRAEL TO INCLUDE ALL OF "ERETZ ISRAEL" - which conveniently overlapped the OIL MONGER's strategy. Getting the American Public behind such an invasion was just one part of the essential pretext to justify an invasion. An oil shortage in the US was a REQUIREMENT – and Mr. Lay's electronic oil trading platform was more than capable of creating a distribution log-jam in DEMOCRATIC California sufficient to sway voters to elect OIL EXPERTS to the White House. The plan was ALWAYS to have Dick Cheney be on that ticket.

    Wouldn't if be nice to learn the details of how Lay and Cheney were divvying up the oil fields in Iraq on a big map, even before 9/11?

    Wouldn't it be enlightening to hear that Lay knew for a fact that 9/11 was going to happen as the pretext for the war plan which he clearly had knowledge of prior to 9/11?

    Why would you sit around countless energy planning meetings dividing up the oil fields of Iraq in advance of 9/11 unless there were a plan in place to make it possible?

    Such a plan would by necessity be a war plan, and this war plan was actually in place prior to 9/11.

    Surely any good war plan requires at its core a starting point, a trigger if you will that provides a good "cover story" to implement it. Clearly you can't just go around invading countries without a good reason...you need to be attacked first, then retaliate.

    Was 9/11 simply part of the war plan?

    Why wouldn't it have been?

    You can't hit the "GO" button without a pretext.

    9/11 was the pretext for the invasion of the Middle East - all by design.

    9/11 - THE TERROR PRETEXT

    The term NeoCon roughly translates to "Israeli Spy." If you always assume that anyone referred to as a "NeoCon" is in fact an operative for the Zionists – you'll likely be correct.

    GIVEN A CHOICE, THE NEOCON WILL ALWAYS CHOOSE THE BEST INTEREST OF ISRAEL OVER THE UNITED STATES – AND LYING IS JUST PART OF THE EQUATION. Lying for Israel is the right thing to do.

    Whenever you hear that testimony is being given without the requirement of being sworn under oath – you can be certain a NEOCON is behind that decision.

    If one-half of the pretext required an apparent energy crisis in the United States, the other half of the pretext required TERROR. Bush 41 was well acquainted with false flag terror tactics, and knew full-well that Mossad were the experts. With Cheney and Rumsfeld firmly in control of the entire plan, and with the aid of their internal NeoZionist Operatives (Libby, Feith, Wurmser, Zakheim, Chertoff, etc.) running interference from inside the US Government, Mossad could be relied upon to recruit the operatives necessary to implement the PNAC's "NEW PEARL HARBOR," which would serve as the ESSENTIAL PRETEXT for the activation of their new business arrangement with Israel.

    Beginning in early 2001, Cheney and Lay began meeting with other top oil industry executives to iron out a strategy for how best to handle the acquisition of the oil fields in the Middle East.

    Although we recognize the need for executive privilege, it is hard to imagine anything related to something as non-national-security related a topic as our an energy policy, that would be such a threat to national security as to declare it off limits to all. By US Law this is public information, but Mr. "Shred the Constitution" Cheney has used every ounce of executive power in order to keep the lid on his meeting notes.

    What could they contain? Dealings with the Taliban; negotiating a pipeline perhaps? Enron deals? Does anyone remember that Bush used an Enron company jet to travel during his campaign and that one of his campaign platforms was to deal with the "energy crisis", which turned out to be nothing more that an Enron scam on California? Could it be details parsing out Iraqi OIL? Hmm? Must be some important stuff in there, Dickey;-)

    http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/cheney_s_secrets.html

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR200511 1501842.html

    For a full accounting of all of Cheney's lies relative to his plan to take over the oil fields of the Middle East, go here:

    http://www.judicialwatch.org/cgi-bin/search/exec/search.cgi?search=chene y+maps&perform_search=Search&skin=

    As Cheney was working to lay the groundwork for the enrichment of himself and his cronies (through the increase in oil prices and the requirement for replacing the infrastructure that he knew would be destroyed), other Operatives within the administration were busy knocking down any attempt to uncover the developing plot for 9/11.

    GW himself personally told the FBI to back off any and all investigations related to the Bin Laden Family, the Able Danger Unit was shut down and all of its files were destroyed, and field reports regarding suspicious foreigners at flight schools in Minnesota and Florida were magically buried.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:12am

20. ENTER MOSSAD SWALLOW #2 – CHANDRA LEVY

    Whereas the Monica Lewinsky case involved mere deviant sexual trysts in the Oval Office, the Chandra Levy case involving Democratic Congressman and senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Gary Condit, involved murder.

    As member of the committee, Condit was privy to highly classified information of much interest to Zionist Israel. The MOSSAD leaned on their "sleeper and sexpionage agent" Chandra Levy to obtain the secret US government information that the Israeli government needed. The MOSSAD arranged for Chandra Levy, than a US government intern, to meet Congressman Condit.

    Whatever classified information Levy was able to obtain, on her "sexpionage mission", was at the cost of her life. One day before she was to return to California, she disappeared without a trace.

    A spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, said Cheney met with Condit around the same time Levy was logging off her computer in her apartment May 1, 2001 – the day she disappeared.

    Juleanna Glover Weiss said the meeting happened between 12:30 p.m. and 12:50 p.m. in Cheney's office in the House of Representatives. The meeting was "at Condit's request," she said, and included Cheney and some of Cheney's staff discussing the California energy crisis.

    Had Condit informed Levy of a pending attack on the World Trade Center – or did she learn of it on her own? Remember it was Cheney's job to ensure that the TERROR PRETEXT come off without a hitch. If Levy knew, she had to be eliminated. She was about to fly home to California to visit her parents, and told them that she had some "BIG NEWS" to share with them.

    In 2001 it was discovered that US drug agents' communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence.

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm

    It is quite likely that Mossad had tapped Levy's call to her parents, and informed Cheney that the "Big Wedding" (9/11 plot) had been compromised. Levy's meeting with Cheney at the exact time of her disappearance was specifically designed to provide Condit with an alibi.

    Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th

    December 23, 2001

    For those who are able and willing to accept the way in which history actually works, the evidence provided by the U.S. events of Sept. 11th permitted but one concise conclusion: The crucial developments inside the U.S.A., between the bookends of approximately 08:45 and 11:00 h EDT, were a reflection of an attempted military coup d'état against the U.S. government of President George W. Bush.

    My detailed knowledge of the onrushing strategic crisis within which those attacks were situated, allowed no other conclusion, than that this was an attempted military coup d'état with a global strategic purpose of the most ominous implications imaginable.

    Once those facts are taken into account, two leading problems in subsequently adopted U.S. policies must be emphasized.

    First: Why, apparently, did senior professional military and intelligence professionals not advise President Bush against permitting the diversionary targeting of former U.S. special-warfare asset Osama bin Laden, as the alleged prime culprit in this affair?

    The second, related question, is: Why, despite the massive accumulation of relevant actual evidence since Sept. 11, do many official circles around the world still prefer to defend the consoling delusion, the current, officially blessed explanation of the events of Sept. 11, that "Osama bin Laden did it," even after months (years) of their failure to present the public with any solid proof of their allegation?

    For competent counterintelligence specialists, the first question posed by the bare facts of the attacks on New York and Washington, was: What was that continuing action waiting to be unleashed by the successful effect of those attacks? The coup-attempt could not have been mobilized without the presence of such pre-existing, more broadly based intentions. Those intentions are well known to all relevant authorities: a.) setting off a richocheting thermonuclear alert; and b.) the launching of a generalized state of religious and related warfare throughout most of the planet, with the ongoing actions of the current Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as its leading expression. Now, after the events of Sept. 11th, there is no reasonable doubt of such broadly-based intentions. Therefore, any competent counterintelligence investigation, and consequent strategic assessments, must be crafted accordingly.

    Therefore, the investigation must judge the plot behind Sept. 11th as crafted as a means to an end; it is that end on which our attention must be focused, and against which the effort must be concentrated. As in war, once the plot itself has failed, the plotters will become vulnerable to exposure, and their complicity can be reviewed safely, calmly, relatively at leisure.

    http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2002/2901zbig_sept11.html

    Zbigniew Brzezinski

    The Grand Chessboard

    American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives

    Key Quotes From Zbigniew Brzezinksi's Seminal Book

    "In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last."

    As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

    "The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."

    "It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

    http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:12am

21. COMVERSE INVESTIGATION TIED TO REPORTER'S BEATING AT THE HANDS OF HOMELAND SECURITY GOONS AS POLICE LOOK ON?

    Christopher Bollyn, investigative journalist for American Free Press, was beaten and arrested on trumped-up charges at his home in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

    Excerpt:

    Apart from my un-disclosable investigation, the other calls were about how Jacob "Kobi" Alexander was able to flee with more than $60 million dollars last week, several months after it was public knowledge that he and the other Israelis working with Comverse Technology, Ltd. had swindled hundred of millions through fraudulent stock options trades. This has been going on for years, and The Wall Street Journal and Globes (Israel) reported the names and the amounts last March. For crying out loud, my newspaper, American Free Press, reported it in April 2005.

    I wanted to know from the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's office how this Kobi Alexander was able to wire $60 million to his account in Israel and flee New York without any body stopping him.

    http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?noframes;read=91920

    WHAT ROLE DID COMVERSE PLAY IN THE EVENTS OF 9/11?

    Well, according to this 4 part investigative series by FOX News, plenty:

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm

    It turns out that Odigo, the paging system owned by Comverse, was used to alert Israeli Nationals to steer clear of the World Trade Towers fully two hours before the attacks of 9/11.

    Comverse is also the company that handles all of the back-end billing for virtually every phone company in the United States – having built-in a backdoor to wiretap nearly every call made.

    Israel had spies crawling all over the United States at some of our most sensitive facilities prior to 9/11:

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/deareportisraelispying.html

    Bollyn had also revealed in a prior article that Michael Chertoff is actually a citizen of Israel:

    CONTROLLED PRESS HIDES CHERTOFF'S ISRAELI ROOTS

    Posted By: ChristopherBollyn Date: Friday, 4 March 2005, 1:32 p.m.

    http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=66175

    Remember that Chertoff had been tasked with tracking the funding behind 9/11 under the name "OPERATION GREENQUEST." In reality – this was an effort to coverup the funding trail:

    "The FBI-Justice move [to take over the investigation], pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau [Chertoff] of sabotaging Greenquest investigations--by failing to turn over critical information to their agents--and trying to obscure a decadelong record of lethargy [actually criminal obstruction] in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.

    "They (the FBI) won't share anything with us," said a Homeland Security official. "Then they go to the White House and they accuse us of not sharing … If they can't take it over, they want to kill it."

    So Who Is This Chertoff Guy?

    If you're a 9-11 researcher, then you already know that: "Chertoff's Cousin Penned Popular Mechanics 9/11 Hit Piece." The cousin goes by the name of Benjamin Chertoff, whom the Hearst (yellow journalism inc.) publication Popular Mechanics made the "senior researcher" for the piece. This Popular Mechanics article was so ridiculously bad, that it claimed:

    Popular Mechanics: "In the decade before 9/11 NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999."

    If you're not laughing out loud, it's probably because you're crying out loud.

    http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=2872

    IT WAS CHERTOFF WHO SET FREE FIVE ISRAELI 9/11 SUSPECTS:

    It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots of the dancing Israeli Mossad agents

    "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."

    US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report.

    In fact, he said, the nature of the investigation changed after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives, he said. At that point, he said, the bureau took control of the investigation and launched a Foreign Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI.

    FBI investigations into possible links to the September 11 attacks are usually carried by the bureau's counterterrorism division, not its counterintelligence division.

    "An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that it was handled at a very high level and very tightly," the former official said. That view was echoed by several former FBI officials interviewed.

    According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal -- and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.

    The men all underwent at least two polygraph tests each, the lawyer added. He said one of the Israelis took the test seven times, a very unusual total according to several polygraph experts interviewed by the Forward. All failed their tests.

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html

    http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm

    http://killtown.blogspot.com/2005/11/dancing-israelis-on-911.html

    LA Times: "When President Clinton took office, he fired all the U.S. attorneys who had served under his Republican predecessor except one: New Jersey U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff."

    That's some exceptional guy, as the article shows. It reveals something quite out of the ordinary about Michael Chertoff.

    Not a word from anyone in power about Chertoff's successful defense of a known bin Laden financier. Even though the Bergen Record newspaper had published the facts of the case in a series of articles. This news was never picked up nationally -- somehow not being newsworthy enough to rate a few lines in the major press -- and they call this "freedom" and "democracy," ad nauseum.

    Michael Chertoff was confirmed by the senate in a vote of 98-0.

    http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/2005/10/butcher-of-new-orleans.html

    http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm#_ftn24

    Think back to the Katrina debacle. remember how Bush stepped out in front of Chertoff and said "blame me" - not Chertoff?

    Bush was protecting Chertoff. What does Chertoff have on the Bush family?

    CHERTOFF CREATED TERROR PRETEXTS FOR US POLICE STATE

    http://www.newswithviews.com/Briley/Patrick4.htm

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:13am

22. The leaking of Plame's identity destroyed the undercover Brewster Jennings WMD surveillance operation – and quite likely resulted in the death of dozens of covert operatives, about whom you will never hear.

    Brewster Jennings likely had proof that the Pentagon was arranging delivery of WMD into Iraq for the invading US forces to "discover."

    Additionally, Brewster Jennings likely had evidence of the Administration's complicity in the events of 9/11.

    Finally, Brewster Jennings could confirm that Iran was TEN YEARS away from having a functional nuke – which would totally screw-up the Israeli-led Pentagon plan to invade the entire Middle East under false pretense.

    TREASON

    IMPEACH

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:23am

23. Closing down our best source of covert intelligence on WMD in the Middle East by making its covert status public - during a time of war - is akin to revealing troop movements and positions to the enemy - during a time of war.

    It's TREASON on it's face.

    Doing so for POLITICAL reasons is IMPEACHABLE.

    BUSH, CHENEY, ROVE & LIBBY all knew that Plame was a covert agent - and a key enemy if their lies were to succeed. Everyone in the WHIG knew. They all conspired to prevent the truth about WMD from being made public

    When referring to Wilson, each of them at one time or another referred to him as "a Democrat."

    That's POLITICAL.

    That's ILLEGAL.

    still not a word from these remaining supporters of Bush - the president stood in front of reporters more than once and claimed to have no idea where the leak of information to for example Judith Miller came from. In fact, the president knew, as he stood there, that he had specifically and authorized the exact leak in question, for the purposes of a vendetta with Joe Wilson.

    the president hugely abused his authority and powers, wrongfully, and he stood in front of cameras and reporters and lied about it, willfully, repeatedly. he engaged in a willful conspiracy to go after Joe Wilson for debunking the lie about uranium, and he happily burned down a CIA operative and her operations with a LEAK of information. if there was a declassification, it was certainly not recorded or documented or communicated, and, in all likelihood, was made up after the fact once the Fitzgerald investigation got going.

    This same president has deployed the NSA and who knows which other components of the national intelligence apparatus against the American people in direct violation of federal law.

    he has abused and abused his trust and the power of his office, and it is time for him to leave that office.

    .. "I don't know of anyone in my administration who has leaked," Mr. Bush told reporters in Chicago. But, he added, "If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing."

    The president added, "There's too much leaking in Washington. That's just the way it is. We've had leaks from the executive branch and leaks from the legislative branch. I want to know who the leakers are." ...

    George Bush, lying about his own leak: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/01/national/main575986.shtml

    Donald Rumsfeld on Leakers of Secret Information:

    ... No, I'll tell you about leaks. When a person takes classified information and gives it to someone who is not cleared for classified information, whether the person's from the Pentagon or any department of government, they're violating federal criminal law. And they ought to go to jail. That's not complicated.

    Kalb: What are the laws they are violating? Just --

    Rumsfeld: The laws relating to classified information are quite strict as to who may be given access to that information. And so to the extent that people violate the rules with respect to classified information, they are breaking federal criminal law.

    Now, they are also potentially putting people's lives at risk, and that's a very -- it's a terrible thing to do ...

    http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t04102002_t0410sd.html

    Scott McClellan, lying about Bush's leak:

    "If someone in this administration leaked classified information, they will no longer be a part of this administration, because that's not the way this White House operates."

    It's the modern Republican way. Commit a crime today; legalize the act tomorrow.

    Here is what Scott McClellan had to say on July 18, 2003:

    Q: When was it [the NIE Report] actually declassified?

    MR. McCLELLAN: It was officially declassified today.

    According to Fitzgerald's court paper - Libby disclosed information from the NIE to Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 - ten days earlier.

    So, what was the official status of the report for those 10 days? If it was declassified prior to or on July 8, why was it only shared with Judy Miller, and not released "officially" until July 18?

    Posted by HMAN23 04/07/2006 @ 4:56pm | ignore this person

    When King George begins to form a thought in his mind about the prospect of declassifying information, even if during sex or while sleeping, the Classified Information in question begins to change status. The more he thinks about it, the less Classified the information becomes.

    The instant the thought takes form in his mind and manifests itself to the world in words, even if it occurs while he's alone, say, taking a dump or shaving in the morning, at the very moment that he hears himself say the words: "I think I'll declassify that" - the Classified Information comes flying back into the universe as "Officially Declassified."

    The King's minions then run frantically to go through the quaint details of preparing the burdensome documentation necessary to create a good cover story for the media about how and when the information changed form, but really it's just window dressing.

    "It's good to be King...it's good to be an anus!"

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:26am

24. Why did Bush make it such a point to proclaim that he had DECLASSIFIED HER STATUS, if she was not covert?

    Libby Says Bush Authorized Leaks

    By Murray Waas, National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Thursday, April 6, 2006

    Libby also testified that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own.

    The White House had no immediate reaction to the court filing.

    Although not reflected in the court papers, two senior government officials said in interviews with National Journal in recent days that Libby has also asserted that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with the Vice President, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war.

    In yet another instance, Libby had claimed that President Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack," a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war.

    Bush and Cheney authorized the release of the information regarding the NIE in the summer of 2003, according to court documents, as part of a damage-control effort undertaken only days after former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged in an op-ed in The New York Times that claims by Bush that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger were most likely a hoax.

    According to the court papers, "At some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

    Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA officer at the time, and Cheney, Libby, and other Bush administration officials believed that Wilson's allegations could be discredited if it could be shown that Plame had suggested that her husband be sent on the CIA-sponsored mission to Niger.

    Two days after Wilson's op-ed, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and not only disclosed portions of the NIE, but also Plame's CIA employment and potential role in her husband's trip.

    Regarding that meeting, Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance... to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller" because Vice President Cheney believed it to be "very important" to do so, the court papers filed Wednesday said. The New York Sun reported the court filing on its Web site early Thursday.

    Libby "further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE," the court papers said. Libby "testified that the Vice President had advised [Libby] that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose relevant portions of the NIE."

    Additionally, Libby "testified that he also spoke to David Addington, then counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

    "[Libby] testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials-including Cabinet level officials-were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003." It is unclear from the court papers what the January 24, 2003 document might be.

    Although the special prosecutor's grand jury investigation has not uncovered any evidence that the Vice President encouraged Libby to release information about Plame's covert CIA status, the court papers said that Cheney had "expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

    One former senior government official said that both the president and Cheney, in directing Libby to disclose classified information to defend the administration's case to go to war with Iraq and in formally declassifying portions of the NIE later, were misusing the classification process for political reasons.

    Although the court papers filed Wednesday revealed that Libby had testified that Bush and Cheney had authorized him to disclose details of the NIE, two other senior government officials said in interviews that Libby had asserted that Cheney had more broadly authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq as part of an administration effort to make the case to go to war.

    In another instance, Libby had claimed that Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack."

    In a Feb. 17, 2006 letter to John D. Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., wrote that he believed that disclosures in Woodward's book damaged national security. "According to [Woodward's] account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison services."

    http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0406nj1.htm

    Nowhere does anyone in the Adminstration claim that Plame was NOT a covert CIA agent prior to Armitage/Libby/Rove disclosing it.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:27am

25. The Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission states the following:

    "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

    "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," said Zelikow.

    The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.

    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0329-11.htm

    Philip D. Zelikow is Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9-11 Commission.

    There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel.[1] (http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209) Here are just a few of them:

    * He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.

    * A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."

    * The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group [2] (http://www.aspeninstitute.org), a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice's mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.

    * Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age [3] (http://www.markletaskforce.org)under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel - The National Commission on Federal Election Reform - with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)

    * After the 2000 election, Zelikow and Rice were reunited when George W. Bush named him to his transition team for the National Security Council. Rice reportedly asked Zelikow to help organize the NSC under the Scowcroft model, which was insular and steeped in Cold War worldview.

    * Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke says he briefed not only Rice and Hadley, but also Zelikow about the growing al-Qaida threat during the transition period. Zelikow sat in on the briefings, he says.

    * A month after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, President Bush appointed Zelikow to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is chaired by Scowcroft.

    * Zelikow's regular job, the one he'll return to after the commission releases it final report in late July, is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center is dedicated to the study of the presidency, and maintains contact with the Bush White House, which fought the creation of the commission.

    Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a "clear conflict of interest." And she suspects he is in touch with Bush's political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.

    Phillip David Zelikow was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on October 8, 2001, by President George Walker Bush.

    Zelikow (http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2001/zelikow-oct-8-2001.html) has served as Director of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs since 1998. He is also White Burkett Miller Professor of History. He was director for European security affairs at the National Security Council from 1989 to 1991. In this position, Zelikow advised current PFIAB Chairman Brent Scowcroft and President George Herbert Walker Bush "on European issues, including the unification of Germany and the multinational coalition against Iraq."[4] (http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2001/zelikow-oct-8-2001.html)

    "After serving in government with the Navy, the State Department, and the National Security Council, he taught at Harvard before assuming his present post in Virginia to direct the nation's largest research center on the American presidency. He was a member (2001-2003) of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford, as well as the executive director of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.

    "Zelikow's books include The Kennedy Tapes (with Ernest May), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Condoleezza Rice), and the rewritten Essence of Decision (with Graham Allison). Zelikow has also been the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute."

    He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[5] (http://www.americanpresident.org/action/about/philipzelikowbio.article. shtml)

    According to Melvin Goodman, Zelikow "headed a case study project at Harvard and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA. He used CIA documentation and produced case studies that exonerated the CIA from any charges of politicization of intelligence, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union." [6]

    http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_D._Zelikow

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:29am

26. "Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks."

    The beneficiaries of September 11 were the Bush Administration itself, the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, various intelligence agencies, and Israel. With every day of Bush misrule we learn of more corruption and deception. Is it all that difficult to contemplate that the whole Official Story of 9-11 is just another lie?

    On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked how they could affect Israeli-U.S. relations. His quick reply was: "It's very good…….Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)".

    Israeli Prime Minister ARIEL SHARON reportedly said: "Now we and the Americans are in the same fight."

    "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

    (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:35am

27. .

    CHENEY, HALLIBURTON, THE BUSH FAMILY, AND ASBESTOS

    Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Inc., and, reportedly, the Bush family are surprisingly well acquainted with asbestos-related concerns. [7]

    On December 18, 2002, CBS News reported that Halliburton "has agreed to pay about $4 billion in cash and stock to settle hundreds of thousands of asbestos claims against it." Reportedly, Halliburton inherited its asbestos liability from Harbison-Walker, a unit of Halliburton's subsidiary Dresser Industries, and from Halliburton's Kellog Brown & Root subsidiary.

    On December 13, 2001, the World Socialist Web Site reported that "During the 2000 election campaign critics noted that in the last several years Cheney and Halliburton had contributed $157,500 to congressional candidates who had co-sponsored legislation to cut off victims' rights to a fair recovery when injured or killed as a result of asbestos exposure."

    And on August 11, 2002, The Olympian (from Olympia, WA), carried a Washington Post article noting that:

    "Dresser had close ties to a family Cheney knew well: the Bushes. Cheney's boss while he served as Secretary of Defense, President George H.W. Bush, was once being groomed to run Dresser, a company that Bush's father and grandfather had reshaped decades earlier.

    When Dresser went public in the 1920s, it turned to W.A. Harriman & Co., whose president was George Herbert Walker, grandfather and namesake to former president Bush. Prescott Bush, the former president's father, helped organize Dresser and select its new president, H. Neil Mallon. Prescott Bush eventually sat on the board and by 1941, still held 1,900 shares of Dresser stock. Mallon was so close to former president Bush that he described him in his autobiography as "surrogate uncle and father-confessor." One of his sons, Neil Mallon Bush, is named after him. After World War II, Mallon employed George H.W. Bush and Dresser executives expected him to take over the company, according to journalist Darwin Payne, who wrote a history of Dresser. Instead, the former president left to prospect for oil.

    While Cheney saw sound business reasons for acquiring Dresser, there was a problem in its past -- the use of asbestos in Harbison-Walker division products."

    GW included the issue in his State of the Union speech in 2005.

    "To make our economy stronger and more competitive, America must reward, not punish, the efforts and dreams of entrepreneurs. Small business is the path of advancement, especially for women and minorities, so we must free small businesses from needless regulation and protect honest job-creators from junk lawsuits. (Applause.) Justice is distorted, and our economy is held back by irresponsible class-actions and frivolous asbestos claims -- and I urge Congress to pass legal reforms this year."

    ASBESTOS AT GROUND ZERO?

    WOW, WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

    WHAT WOULD THE DEMO COST HAVE BEEN TO DISMANTLE THE TOWERS IN ANY OTHER WAY - GIVEN THAT THEY WERE FULL OF ASBESTOS?

    WOW, WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7750532340306101329&q=silverste in&hl=en

    WOW, WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:37am

28. That story about Halliburton acquiring the asbestos liabilities of Dresser Industries raises an interesting point...

    Cheney KNEW that Dresser had the most massive liability issue on planet earth (he had to have known) yet decided to pay good money to bring Dresser's problems under Halliburton's tent.

    This raises the question...who were the largest shareholders of Dresser - in need of a lifeboat to save their own personal bacon? Anyone named Bush? Anyone named Carlyle?

    The deal went like this:

    Cheney agrees for Halliburton to take on the Dresser asbestos liability.

    It is determined that Bush and Cheney will be (s)elected, and that the PNAC plan will be implemented - using 9/11 as the essential pretext.

    Ken Lay plays his role using his Enron smoke and mirrors tactics to create a faux energy crisis in California, causing the public to demand an energy-savvy administration be elected.

    With the asbestos liability and other matters hanging in the balance, the election of 2000 simply had to be rigged in order for the plan to go in to effect.

    Following the appointment of Bush and Cheney, the secret energy planning meeting established which oil companies would reap the rewards of the pending invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

    The timing and the pretext were predetermined, and 9/11 was greenlighted for 9/11/2001. Cheney outsourced the implementation to Mossad, and ran the show from his bunker on D Day under the cover of preplanned drills simulating the exact attack that was proscribed, with NORAD as coconspirator. At least 50 administration officials and countless foreign agents were in on it.

    Once the entire charade was concluded, the Administration generally, and Cheney specifically, had every reason in the world to blame Iraq.

    The Afghanistan mission could not provide Halliburton with enough revenue to offset the massive asbestos liability claim. Iraq and Iran are essential wars in order to provide cover for the infusion of the billion of TAX DOLLARS necessary to both profit Halliburton for its actual work AND cover the massive asbestos liability claims.

    Now you know why Halliburton was awarded the contracts without the need to bid for them. This was all prearranged.

    NOTE: Private enterprise pushed its legal/financial obligations onto tax payers using war as the excuse.

    The asbestos liability claims of Dresser Industries were ultimately paid by you and me, and our troops in the field, all to ensure that the investors in Dresser didn't take the multibillion dollar loss.

    Just one piece of a very large chessboard.

    Hang them for TREASON.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:39am

29. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/01/cheney.halliburton/

    Given what we know about VP Cheney's direct financial ties to Haliburton, isn't it clear that he has committed a fraud against the United States for the purpose of illegal financial gain, in accordance with the following statute? Couldn't the same be said of any US official who knowingly made false statements to advance the cause of war, while owning shares of companies that stood to gain substantially from that war? Cheney was acting specifically on behalf of the Contractor, Haliburton, to ensure no-bid contracts were awarded, based on knowingly fraudulent information generated by his own Office Of Special Plans. It might also be construed that any official who had a relationship to the Carlyle Group was also lying on their behalf - for their own financial benefit.

    Section 1031. Major fraud against the United States

    (a) Whoever knowingly executes, or attempts to execute, any scheme or artifice with the intent - (1) to defraud the United States; or (2) to obtain money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, in any procurement of property or services as a prime contractor with the United States or as a subcontractor or supplier on a contract in which there is a prime contract with the United States, if the value of the contract, subcontract, or any constituent part thereof, for such property or services is $1,000,000 or more shall, subject to the applicability of subsection (c) of this section, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

    (1) the gross loss to the Government or the gross gain to a defendant is $500,000 or greater; or

    (2) the offense involves a conscious or reckless risk of serious personal injury.

    http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/18/parts/i/chapters/47/se ctions/section_1031.html

    The financial links between those who lied, and those who benefitted as a direct result of the lies (primarily in the oil and military industries) are clear. The evidence that the President's speech knowingly included a lie about the Niger Yellow Cake is proveable in a court of law under oath.

    That the Vice President knew for a fact that the claim was based on a forgery in advance of the President's speech is a given. That he instructed others to ensure that the sentence made it into the speech is also a given. What did the Vice President know, and when did he know it?

    Everytime the Vice President knowingly lied to the American People to advance the cause of war, he committed a crime against the United States which both directly harmed other US citizens and directly enriched himself.

    Indict Dick Cheney for Fraud.

    http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/politics/main575356.shtml

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030711-7.html

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030714-4.html

    The outing of Valarie Plame falls into precisely the same category, as it was specifically designed to ensure that the lead up to war continued apace...

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031001-6.html

    Consummate diplomats like Wilson typically do not speak of "lies." So outraged was Wilson, though, that this bogus story had been used to "justify" an unprovoked war, that he made a point to note that the already proven dishonesty begs the question regarding "what else they are lying about."

    It was a double whammy. And, as is now well known, the White House moved swiftly-if clumsily (and apparently illegally)-to retaliate.

    It was clear from the start that Vice President Dick Cheney and Kemosabe (Amer. Indian for "Scotter") Libby, as well as Karl Rove, were taking the lead in this operation to make an object lesson of Wilson and his wife.

    http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10202005.html

    But there is abundant evidence that senior White House officials were aware of the CIA's doubts regarding the Niger story long before the State of the Union. Nearly a year earlier, in February 2002, the CIA had dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate the claim about uranium purchases. When the CIA debriefed him in March, his findings were emphatic: As Wilson explained in a New York Times op-ed on July 6, "It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." CIA Director George Tenet claimed on July 11 that Wilson was sent to Niger by junior nonproliferation experts at the CIA acting "on their own initiative" and that senior administration officials were unaware of his mission. But this is not true. Wilson was told by CIA officials that the mission had been specifically requested by the office of the vice president. Indeed, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told Time magazine that Cheney had "asked a question about the implication of the [uranium] report." And, as Wilson tells The New Republic, "When an executive agency is tasked to find something out and it gets an answer, it goes back to the person who requested it." For the White House to suggest that Cheney's office was unaware of the results of Wilson's inquiry strains credulity.

    Moreover, there is strong evidence that the CIA clearly conveyed its doubts about the Niger allegation to the White House on more than one occasion prior to the State of the Union. When Bush wanted to include the claim in an October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Tenet personally intervened, imploring Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council (NSC) deputy, Stephen Hadley, to cut the allegation from the speech, which he did. The idea that no one involved with the State of the Union was aware of this earlier, emphatic intervention is implausible. And when the latter speech was being written, the CIA again raised questions about the Niger assertion. According to The New York Times, when NSC proliferation staffer Robert G. Joseph called his CIA counterpart, Alan Foley, to ask about including the allegation in the State of the Union, Foley told Joseph the CIA was not confident about the information.

    http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030728&s=editorial072803

    CHENEY OUTED A CIA OPERATIVE FOR PERSONAL FINANCIAL GAIN.

    Indict Vice President Cheney. Put him under oath.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:41am

30. http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx/2005/12/18/afx2400383.html

    This Forbes article quoting Cheney is interesting:

    'It's the kind of capability if we'd had before 9/11 might have led us to be able to prevent 9/11,' Cheney said in an interview with ABC's 'Nightline' program."

    Mr. Cheney and Mr. Forbes have something in common...

    Now ask yourself what interest Mr. Forbes might have in providing cover for the Administration...give up?

    Let's take a look at the list of signatories to the PNAC, shall we?

    Steve Forbes actively participated in the following events:

    September 2000: PNAC Report Recommends Policies That Need New Pearl Harbor for Quick Implementation:

    PNAC drafts a strategy document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," for George W. Bush's team before the 2000 Presidential election. The document was commissioned by future Vice President Cheney, future Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, future Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Governor Jeb Bush (Bush's brother), and future Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby. [Sources: Rebuilding America's Defenses]

    The document outlines a "blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests."

    PNAC states further: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

    PNAC calls for the control of space through a new "US Space Forces," the political control of the Internet, and the subversion of any growth in political power of even close allies, and advocates "regime change" in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran, and other countries.

    It also mentions that "advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."

    However, PNAC complains that the changes are likely to take a long time, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor." [Los Angeles Times, 1/12/03] Notably, while Cheney commissioned this plan (along with other future key leaders of the Bush administration), he defends Bush's position of maintaining Clinton's policy not to attack Iraq during an NBC interview in the midst of the 2000 presidential campaign, asserting that the US should not act as though "we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments." [Washington Post, 1/12/02] A British member of Parliament will later say of the report: "This is a blueprint for US world domination--a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world." [Sunday Herald, 9/7/02] Both PNAC and its strategy plan for Bush are almost virtually ignored by the media until a few weeks before the start of the Iraq war (see February-March 20, 2003).

    People and organizations involved: Aaron Friedberg, Steve Forbes, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, Henry S. Rowen, Vin Weber, Eliot A. Cohen, Hasam Amin, William J. Bennett, Midge Decter, George Weigel, John Ellis ("Jeb") Bush, Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard ("Dick") Cheney, Project for the New American Century, Paula J. Dobriansky, Frank Gaffney, Donald Kagan, Steve Rosen, Saddam Hussein, Peter Rodman, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, Dan Quayle, Syria, China, United States, Lybia, North Korea, Iraq, Fred C. Ikle

    http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-2624

    Well lookie there!

    Mr. Cheney and Mr. Forbes BOTH signed the strategic document which, when implemented, enabled the largest build up in the history of defense contracting, while simultaneously implementing the Energy Strategy plan that was secretly developed in the company of none other than Ken Lay.

    And what a coincidence that ABC News is playing its part in helping to push the Cheney agenda. Actually, it didn't even require wiretapping to catch some of the coconspirators with foreknowledge of 9/11, and ABC News' crack 20/20 investigative team knows the entire story:

    http://www.antichristconspiracy.com/HTML%20Pages/ABCNEWS_com_Were_Israel is_Detained_Sept_11_Spies.htm

    Oh look! We've come full-circle to the DANCING ISRAELIS!

    Any coincidence theorists on the board?

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:43am

31. WILD CORNERED ANIMAL STAGE IS UPON US.

    The co-conspirators never expected to find themselves in this position.

    WMD were going to be planted in Iraq, but Plame's Brewster Jennings uncovered the plan, and their essential justification for the invasion of Iraq was lost.

    They never shifted to a strategy that included VICTORY in Iraq. They had always intended to instigate the Civil War - but their original plan always relied on the justification of WMD.

    Now they are stuck - implementing a plan that did not account for the absence of a justified pretext for the war.

    Now their backs are to the wall, and they need to bomb Iran soon in order to create yet another distraction.

    They are now desperate for a Pretext - in time to prevent the elections from occurring - the result of which will surely include investigations, arrests, and hanging for treason - if not war crimes trials at the Hague.

    WILD CORNERED ANIMALS will do ANYTHING to protect their own skins.

    Cheney is plotting a False Flag Terror Attack on US Soil - to occur in October - in time to justify the declaration of Martial Law, the bombing of Iran, and the cancellation of elections.

    ARREST DICK CHENEY.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:47am

32. If this doesn't prove that the US Government is controlled by Israel, nothing will.

    Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, December 22, 2003.

    Q Is the President in favor of international inspection of Israel's nuclear arsenal, which is pretty well known?

    MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know that I agree with that, the premise of your question. But the United States has a longstanding position of universal adherence to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. That has been our longstanding position --

    Q They never signed it.

    MR. McCLELLAN: -- and that is universal adherence. Well, we have urged all states that have not yet adhered to the treaty to do so, and to accept the IAEA safeguards on nuclear activities that would come with it.

    Q Are we trying to persuade Israel to sign it, and to be open to inspection?

    MR. McCLELLAN: I think that, one, in terms of specifics about the Israeli government, you need to refer those questions to the Israeli government.

    Q No, no, I'm asking our position.

    MR. McCLELLAN: And I've told you that the long held position of the United States is the universal adherence to the nonproliferation treaty.

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/briefing.html

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:56am

33. Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You bet it does

    http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=8827

    excerpts:

    The goal of using the Nazi analogy is to suppress any realistic debate about the pluses and minuses of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and to make sure any American raising questions about U.S. support for Israel is seen as siding with the "Islamofascists," the heirs of Nazism. Any person who knows the least bit about Islam – and the Israelis know a great deal – knows it is not Nazism, yet the Internet is rife with such titles as "A Manifesto Against Islamofascism" and "Islamofascism's Creeping Coup in Turkey." The best capsule description of the threat posed by Islamofascists is provided by Frank Gaffney in a recent issue of The Intelligencer, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Listen to Mr. Gaffney, and you will almost hear Muslim jackboots striking the pavement.

    "We are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World. This is a fight to the death with Islamofascists, Muslim extremists driven by a totalitarian political ideology that, like Nazism and Communism before it, is determined to destroy freedom and the people who love it."

    The drive to make Islamofascist the term of choice in describing America's Muslim enemies is meant to still U.S. debate about Israel and, indeed, to limit questions about any aspect of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world. After all, why would anyone in their right mind care what people think, unless they are blindly and unthinkingly opposed to Islamofascism?

    The reaction from American elites has been that of Captain Renault in Casablanca – they are shocked, shocked, that anyone could even think that there is such a thing as an Israeli lobby. The elites demand that Americans believe there are no such things as Israel-suborned American-citizen spies stealing U.S. national security secrets, pro-Israel U.S. media publications routinely savaging any American questioning the perfect and eternal mesh of U.S. and Israeli interests, and U.S. politicians from Pelosi to McCain to DeLay to Rice groveling at AIPAC's annual conference, each willing to compromise U.S. security if they can garner pro-Israel votes and pockets stuffed with cash from pro-Israel contributions.

    Astoundingly well done, Israel, good for you! The impact of your covert political action activities in America are all that you could have hoped for: Truth is negated, dissent is suppressed, and opponents are intimidated and defamed, and all this is done by prominent U.S. citizens.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 05:58am

34. .

    T H E

    E N E M Y

    O F

    P E A C E

    M I C H A E L

    L E D E E N

    Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.

    Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled "Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism," for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, "the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon."

    With a group of other conservatives, Ledeen recently set up the Center for Democracy in Iran (CDI), an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran.

    Quotes from Ledeen's works reveal a peculiar set of beliefs about American attitudes toward violence. "Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history," he proclaims in his book, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago." In an influential essay in the National Review Online he asserts, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically ... it is time once again to export the democratic revolution."

    Iraq, Iran and Syria are the first and foremost nations where this should happen, according to Ledeen. The process by which this should be achieved is a violent one, termed "total war," a concept pioneered by the 19th century Prussian general, Karl von Clausewitz in his classic book "On War."

    Ledeen's take on this idea is wedded to ideology. In summarizing his book "The War Against the Terror Masters" on the American Enterprise Institute Web site, he writes: "We wage total war because we fight in the name of an idea, and ideas either triumph or fail ... totally." In his reckoning, force is the only reliable strategy to enforce our ideology on our enemies. In the same summary he claims, drawing inspiration from Machiavelli: "We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater."

    http://www.alternet.org/story/15860/

    A fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. While being investigated as a security risk by his supervisor, Noel Koch, it was learned from the CIA station that Ledeen had been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.

    After having his access to classified materials blocked he ceased working there. He next appeared at the National Security Council as a consultant working with NSC head Robert McFarlane. Ledeen was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair -- an adventure that he documented in the book "Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair." A prominent member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) board of governors and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), he advocates "total war" inline with the "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" which advocates "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot and Egypt as the prize." Ledeen is presently a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, he has since 2001 been employed as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans OSP). He is involved in the handling of classified materials and has high-level security clearances. He was also involved in election rigging of the 2000 election.

    http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html

    .

    Conflicts and power

    From an outstanding interview with Professor Ilan Pappe of Haifa University (my emphasis):

    "I think that neo-conservatism is mainly a product of the Cold War, and I think as happened in Israel, so in the US, a lot of people benefit economically, sociologically, politically, from a situation of conflict which begins with the producers of arms, and it ends with the people who have a hold on the decision-making apparatus in the name of national security. And of course this was all lost in a way when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the cold war ended. And I think this group of people were looking for a new bogey man, a new threat to the national security of the US and they found it because of the very strong influence, I think, of Israel among other things, in the Arab world and the Islamic world. Of course, movements such as the Islamic Al-Qaeda did not help. They provided the pretext, and the context for even pushing these ideas even further. And what we have now is the same people, a next generation, who would do all they can to perpetuate the conflict, because they benefit from the conflict. They benefit from situations of wars, of conflicts, and so on, and I think this is what enforces their hold over the American policy making in the world at large, and in the Middle East in particular."

    We often wonder why people like Ledeen seem to be so interested in creating conflict for the sake of conflict. One reason is that people who are aware of the timing of a conflict are in a position to make money off it. Another reason is that this constant conflict constitutes the sole reason why these people have any power. They create an escalating series of problems, and then have to remain in power to ‘solve' them. Of course, the solutions continue to lead to more conflicts. We can understand all the the talk about Iran as another example of creating a conflict which gives these characters something to do. While a civil war in Iraq benefits Likudniks in the American government and in Israel, it also benefits a guy like Cheney, whose only interest is in creating more power for Cheney. The United States has fallen into a vicious cycle where the jobs of the neocons and their fellow travelers like Cheney and Rumsfeld are dependent on their cleaning up the messes they have already started. An end to conflict would put them out of power, so we'll never see an end to conflict.

    http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:02am

35. REMEMBER,

    WHEN BUSH WAS FINALLY FORCED TO ALLOW FOR AN INVESTIGATION OF 9/11, HIS FIRST CHOICE TO LEAD THE COVERUP WAS HENRY KISSINGER:

    Want a Cover-Up Expert? Kissinger's Your Man

    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021216/scheer20021203

    http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=176

    The Bush Crime Family: Four Generations of Wall Street War-Making and War-Profiteering August, 2004

    http://www.communitycurrency.org/BushCrimeFamily.html

    Henry Kissinger

    http://www.henry-kissinger.com/

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1101061,00.html

    Henry Kissinger: War Criminal or Old-Fashioned Murderer?

    http://www.eclipse.net/%7Etgardnet/kiss/kisskill.html

    THE CASE AGAINST HENRY KISSINGER The making of a war criminal

    http://www.eclipse.net/%7Etgardnet/kiss/hitchens.html

    Manhattan's Milosevic How You Can Do What the Government Won't: Arrest Henry Kissinger

    http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0133,ridgeway,27288,1.html

    Wanted If Henry Kissinger isn't guilty of war crimes, no one is. A Vietnam War whistleblower on Christopher Hitchens' case against the former secretary of state.

    http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kissinger/index.html

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:06am

36. .

    LIEBERMAN FUNDED BY ROVE AND GOP.

    GUILTY OF ACCEPTING BRIBES

    http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/Lieberman2.htm

    Issue Date: www.insightmag.com - Sept. 5-11, 2006, Posted On: 9/5/2006

    GOP secretly channeled millions to Lieberman

    "FIFTH COLUMN MOVEMENTS"

    In the context of the United States, the term "Fifth Column" does not apply to traitors within the government - it applies to those attempting to expose the traitors within the government and bring them to justice. That is representative of just how infiltrated our government has become. A foreign power ALREADY CONTROLS IT - therefore the "Fifth Column Movements" that Lindsey Graham warned Alberto Gonzalez about refers to those who oppose AIPAC, Lieberman, and the nest of spies and traitors who inhabit the halls of Congress and other institutions of government.

    B R I B E R Y

    Lieberman's acceptance of Rove's money is in fact BRIBERY. Rove's use of the White House as a base for GOP operations is ILLEGAL. That Rove is nothing more than a POLITICAL OPERATIVE necessitates that his security clearance be revoked and that he be removed from OUR PUBLIC PROPERTY.

    JOE LIEBERMAN IS A SPY FOR ISRAEL.

    Lieberman is not just a spy for the GOP, he is a spy for the AIPAC CRIME SYNDICATE - which itself controls the GOP through both bribery and blackmail.

    Lieberman has been funded by many with no ties to Connecticut. He accepted $2,000 from a known Mossad Agent.

    Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, the Israeli founder of Comverse Technology, one of the leading Mossad companies involved in the terror attacks has fled justice in the United States and escaped to Israel with at least $57 million of ill-gotten gains.

    Kobi Alexander should be arrested and interrogated about his knowledge of the events of 9/11. His company acquired the other Mossad firm, Odigo, shortly after it was revealed that Odigo employees had been forewarned of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

    This is the tip of the Israeli criminal mafia who is behind the terror attacks on 9/11. Kobi Alexander is a fugitive:

    http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=68985

    http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=91721

    Sleuthing the trail of a fugitive CEO EX-COMVERSE HEAD, SOUGHT IN SCANDAL, DROPS FROM SIGHT

    http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/15368320.htm

    LIEBERMAN'S SPYING:

    Lieberman works directly for AIPAC as an AGENT of Israel. Remember the Lewinski scandal? Clinton was SET UP and Lieberman was right in the midst of it. Lewinski was not in her job by accident, she was PLACED there. Lewinski was a Mossad Agent - a "Swallow" - whose job was to compromise the President of the United States to enable Sexual Blackmail to the benefit of Israel.

    It worked.

    Kobi Alexander's systems had been used to wiretap Clinton's phone sex with Lewinski. Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn't resist bragging and finally admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu did conspire--at a critical time--to trip up President Bill Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank.

    http://www.iamthewitness.com/by_MichaelCollinsPiper3.htm

    Israel BLACKMAILED Clinton - which serves to explain Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich upon his departure from office.

    Lieberman rushed to the Senate Floor to heap scourn on Clinton for accepting the advances of a MOSSAD AGENT whom Lieberman had helped to place in her job.

    THE CONDIT AFFAIR:

    Chandra Levy was yet another MOSSAD AGENT "SWALLOW" who looked incredibly similar in many respects to Lewinski. When Levy disappeared, it was revealed that Congressman Condit had been having an affair with her.

    July 22, 2001 Posted: 6:07 PM EDT (2207 GMT)

    Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, said it wouldn't be productive to focus on Condit's conduct. In 1998, Lieberman was the first prominent Democrat to criticize Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

    Lieberman said the two matters are different and he declined to say whether Condit should resign, as two Republican lawmakers have said.

    "The Chandra Levy case is a missing persons case. And I think we all ought to let the law-enforcement authorities focus on finding Chandra Levy and relieving the terrible trauma and nightmare that her family and friends have gone through," Lieberman told Fox News Sunday. "And when that is over, politicians can begin to speak out."

    Saturday, a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, said Cheney met with Condit around the same time Levy was logging off her computer in her apartment May 1.

    http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/07/21/missing.intern/index.html

    THE SMOKING GUN OF 9/11 FOREKNOWLEDGE:

    Condit was on the Intelligence Committee, and he and his intern, Levy, had access to classified information.

    In the spring of 2001, with the planning for 9/11 in its final stages, Levy likely stumbled upon information that showed the government's role in planning 9/11. Levy phoned her parents to inform them of the BIG NEWS that she had uncovered, which she said she would reveal to them when she flew home to visit. The call was wiretapped, and she was killed shortly thereafter.

    WHO ORDERED THE HIT ON CHANDRA LEVY?

    DICK CHENEY DID.

    What are the odds that at the very moment Chandra Levy was logging off of her computer for the last time prior to her death, at that very moment, Gary Condit would have an iron-clad alibi - not just any alibi - but a meeting in the office of Vice President Cheney? Note that Condit was Cheney's alibi too.

    Cheney was at that time overseeing all of the planning to implement the attack of 9/11, and the entire operation would have been compromised by Levy had she talked.

    Remember, Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta testified before the 9/11 Commission that he personally witnessed Cheney instruct a subordinate to allow the plane to strike the Pentagon on 9/11. Cheney was running the purported "DRILL" that morning, which was actually just cover for the 9/11 attacks.

    http://newsmine.org/archive/9-11/norad-faa-response/cheney-stand-do

    http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Heari

    LIEBERMAN RUSHES TO CONDIT'S DEFENSE:

    "Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, said it wouldn't be productive to focus on Condit's conduct. In 1998, Lieberman was the first prominent Democrat to criticize Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky."

    Who is this Lieberman character and why is he always out front when matters pertaining to espionage come to the fore?

    REMEMBER JACK ABRAMOFF?

    Abramoff was right in the middle of the AIPAC CRIME SYNDICATE which included Mossad's drug running operations in Florida – in concert with the BUSH CRIME FAMILY.

    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/10/326565.shtml

    Bush 41 is still effectively running the CIA – which just happens to be the WORLD'S LARGEST DRUG DEALER, with government owned private jets flying tons of drugs into Florida all the time – all under the cover of Secret Service security.

    THE SHEER SIZE OF THE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY ENSURES ITS SUCCESS

    Literally everyone is tainted – they are ALL GUILTY of receiving bribes. ALL OF THEM.

    I wrote the following a year ago, before Lieberman's recent political fortunes had changed, but I suspect most of it is still relevant even today:

    With every passing day, it becomes more clear that Lieberman works for Israel - as does Michael Chertoff, and most of the Neocons who worked within Cheney's "Office Of Special Lies", and about 2/3 of all Congressman and Senators – whom are either being bribed, blackmailed or both.

    Think back.

    Did Israel benefit from the downfall of the Clintons? Remember when Hillary mentioned the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?" It was Chertoff who ran the Whitewater Investigation. Who was Monica ("The Swallow") working for? And Linda Tripp? And Lucianne Goldberg?

    Who tapped the phones at the White House?

    Hillary said "Right Wing," but meant "Zionist."

    http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3497

    Neocon = Zionist.

    AIPAC = Kingmaker.

    Conversely, they will destroy all who oppose them.

    Lieberman has clearly been selected by those in positions of REAL POWER (above the President's pay grade) to move into THE power position. McCain is clearly part of the strategy too...in the role of the "Useful Idiot" - a.k.a. "Gentile."

    Through whatever means are required, Lieberman will ultimately be appointed President Of The United States, and unless AIPAC is stopped from conducting its dishonest business on US shores, there's not a damn thing we can do to prevent it.

    If they use useful-idiot McCain as cover to put Lieberman in as VP, it just means that President McCain's security detail will have their work cut out for them - as useful idiots are disposable.

    Hillary will be selected as the useful idiot to lose to them in the faux-election. All of the money spent on advertising the purported candidates in the faux election will go into the hands of those who own the mainstream media, who in turn are tools of the Zionists.

    The whole Republican vs. Democrat thing is a smoke screen. Stop falling into their trap.

    No Democrat can fix this problem. A coup has already occurred in the United States. A foreign power controls America.

    http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/10/Sharon3.html

    Occupied Jerusalem: 3 October, 2001 (IAP) -- According to Israel radio (in Hebrew) Kol Yisrael, [Shimon] Peres warned [Ariel] Sharon Wednesday that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and "turn the US against us."

    At this point, a furious Sharon reportedly turned toward Peres, saying "every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it."

    The radio said Peres and other cabinet ministers warned Sharon against saying what he said in public because "it would cause us a public relations disaster."

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm

    http://antiwar.com/israeli-files.php

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html

    On the day of the 9-11 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked what the attack would mean for US-Israeli relations. His quick reply was: "It's very good…….Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)"

    Climb aboard the Way-Back Machine, to the days just prior to September 11, 2001:

    http://www.alternet.org/story/11427

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/goldstein.html

    JOE LIEBERMAN IS A SPY AND A TRAITOR.

    ALL OF THEM ARE

    THE BIG LIE IS REVEALED.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:10am

37. .

    D E S P I T E

    T H E

    F A C T

    T H A T

    N O N E

    O F

    T H E

    L O N D O N

    S U S P E C T S

    H A D

    P U R C H A S E D

    A I R L I N E

    T I C K E T S

    A N D

    S O M E

    H A D

    N O

    P A S S P O R T S

    T H E

    A T T A C K

    W A S

    C O N S I D E R E D

    T O

    B E

    A N

    I M M I N E N T

    T H R E A T

    R I V A L I N G

    9 / 11

    T O T A L

    B U L L S H I T ! ! !

    .

    According to the US State Department, the definition of TERRORISM is not confined to the physical act of killing.

    Terrorism occurs when a state utilizes fear tactics against its own people to accomplish political objectives.

    The mere act or announcing a falsely construed terror alert - or overplaying the significance of a plot known not to be viable - is itself terrorism.

    Tom Ridge admitted that many of the Terror Alerts announced under his command were in fact phony.

    Remember the run on duct tape?

    That was a clear case of state sponsored terrorism by the Government of the United States under the direction of Karl Rove against the people of the United States to achieve a political objective.

    Karl Rove is a Terrorist under the definition ascribed by the US State Department.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:12am

38. .

    F A K E

    N E W S

    "You can't tell any more the difference between what's propaganda and what's news."

    FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein 15 August, 2006

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/16/national/main1900602.shtm

    Karl Rove INVENTED the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) for one purpose. TOTAL MESSAGE CONTROL.

    Rove is a genious...an evil genious.

    He can only be effective when he knows literally everything. He is the REALITY CREATION ARCHITECT.

    At any given time he can take a set of actual facts and use each of them to stitch together a totally false reality.

    Rove knew that the truth was the enemy of their conspiracy to conquer the Middle East (the PNAC plan). His job, every single day, is to convince you, me and the rest of the world that you didn't just see and hear what you just saw and heard...or if you did, it doesn't mean what your logical mind is attempting to tell you - because "we're in a post-9/11 world now" and black is white.

    Karl Rove is the single most destructive force in the US Government...the enabler of the entire evil scheme...THE ARCHITECT.

    The scheme includes 9/11 as the essential pretext. "9/11" ... how clever, Karl! Only someone with American sensibilities would select the number we have all memorized to call in the event of life threatening emergency as the date for this evil....

    KARL ROVE.

    The war plan to invade Iraq was written BEFORE 9/11. The Secret Energy Task Force meetings that Cheney had with Ken Lay and the other OIL HOGS during which they all decided how to divide up the oil fields of the Middle East...all of that was BEFORE 9/11.

    Now you see why Cheney insisted the substance of those talks remain SECRET.

    All of their schemes and conspiracies REQUIRED 9/11 as the essential trigger.

    Cheney outsourced the implementation of the FALSE FLAG OPERATION to Mossad...the FALSE FLAG experts. This explains why over 200 Mossad agents were operating in the United States prior to 9/11. This explains why five of them were arrested, having been observed filming the planes hitting the towers and their subsequent collapse - celebrating our worst nightmare.

    9/11 was not a bad day for those involved in the Conspiracy. It was their shining moment...their PRETEXT.

    One of them washed out...couldn't cope with the guilt. Ari Fleisher had to be replaced, and disappeared. Not dead, but out of sight.

    The outing of Plame was designed to destroy the best WMD intelligence the US had at its disposal regarding Iraq. Plame knew for a FACT that Iraq had no WMD. It was HER JOB to know. Therefore Rove perceived Plame (the truth) as his WORST ENEMY, and conceived of a plan to silence her. Rove is the individual who insisted that Wilson be sent to Niger.

    GUARANTEED.

    This was the only way to launch a smear program which appeared to be aimed at Wilson, but was intended solely to shut down the entire Brewster Jennings operation and bury their WMD evidence.

    THAT IS ALL ROVE.

    He invented WHIG:

    The group's members included Rove, Bush advisor Karen Hughes, Senior Advisor to the Vice President Mary Matalin, Deputy Director of Communications James Wilkinson, Assistant to the President and Legislative Liaison Nicholas Calio, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

    Every single one of these individuals is a co-conspirator in a concerted effort to defraud America into committing its troops and its treasure to invade a foreign country to the sole benefit of BIG OIL AND ISRAEL.

    The pending invasion of Iran is the next phase of the very same conspiracy. Karen Kwiatkowski let us know that Larry Franklin had set up an IRAN desk in the midst of the Pentagon's IRAQ planners. Larry Franklin has pled guilty for passing Top Secret Iranian Intelligence to AIPAC (Israel). Israeli Generals were free to come and go from the Cheney/Rumsfeld Office Of Middle East Invasion whenever they pleased, without need to sign the guest register.

    IT'S ALL THE SAME CONSPIRACY.

    9/11 - Afghanistan - Iraq - Iran - Syria.

    READ THE PNAC.

    A "New Pearl Harbor" was a REQUIREMENT for its implementation.

    Rove is running the entire PsyOps Machine to enable it.

    Hang them for TREASON.

    http://dailydocket.blogspot.com/2006/01/propaganda.html...

    But whereas Hitler was a true master of propaganda, and his minister a far less talented functionary, today the situation is reversed: our propaganda minister is the master, and our leader his functionary. Karl Rove is so confident of his strategy that he now announces it to the public! In January of this year,

    Rove noted that we face "a ruthless enemy" and "need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in."

    Here's more:

    "[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

    -- Karl Rove (oops!) Hermann Goering

    Karl Rove had advance knowledge of EVERY TERROR ALERT since Bush took office in 2000.

    Because he creates them.

    "T H E

    A R C H I T E C T"

    O F

    T E R R O R

    I S

    K A R L

    R O V E

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:14am

39. .

    THE ARMAGEDDONISTS ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM.

    GREATER ISRAEL - MORE TERRITORY BEING ACQUIRED DAILY

    http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/israel/greater-israel-maps. htm

    READ AND LEARN:

    http://dublin.craigslist.org/pol/192560711.html

    So there are two sides to this, yes - it takes two to tango - but the sad truth of the matter is that Arab antipathy to Zionism, in the first place, was nothing more than a reaction – the inevitable Hegelian Antithesis, to the Zionists' stated agenda of taking the terrain from the "River of Egypt to the Euphrates." This is revealed in the text of Alfred Lilienthal's famous interview with King Saud of Saudi Arabia, back in 1954.

    http://www.alfredlilienthal.com/greaterisrael.htm

    Today, in 2006, it is the in hardliners of the Likud, and ideological factions in Israel, like Bead Artzein,

    http://utenti.lycos.it/Delenda_Carthago/israel_010904.html

    and the [Rabbi] Kook faction - the "Greater Israel," tradition within the Orthodox,

    http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/gush_underground.html

    who support this latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, which must, given the desperate straits of their situation, represent their final – and last - attempt to achieve a Jewish Empire in the Middle East. This time, it seems, they are about to "go for broke."

    The hardliners in Israel, to whom Ariel Sharon was a "sell-out," still speak of Lebanon as the Lebanon – not a sovereign nation, but as a territory to be assimilated, and incorporated into Greater Israel. These folks are energetically supported by an "unholy alliance" with millions of American Christian fundamentalists, who believe that at any given moment now, they will be "Raptured" to heaven without having to die.

    "… It is interesting to note that the popular edition of the Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1917 coinciding with the Balfour Declaration and in the words of Lord Cecil, 'the rebirth of a nation'; the youth edition of Scofield with the War of Independence in 1948; and the 'new' edition of Scofield with the occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967."

    http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/history1.html

    This is the subtle root of why the "Rapturists" & the "Christian-Zionists," who have been brainwashed by decades of preaching emanating from this corrupt fountain, justify every dark deed that is done by the Israeli Defense Forces. By all means read the article, " Why Judeo-Christians Support War." There is deep information therein:

    http://www.serendipity.li/zonism/carlson01.htm

    The roots of what is common in the ideologies of the Darbyites and the Likudniks reach back into the past. But 1977 was the year of their "coming out."

    But Alas, the terrain from the Brook of Egypt ( perhaps the Suez - there is some debate on this point ) to the Euphrates, is already inhabited by the descendants of Abraham – for the most part, Arabs. The hard-liner Likudniks want - and their "Christian Zionist" allies expect, it to be inhabited by the "chosen" descendants, that's all. And, in concert with the current agenda of the Oil Cartels, they anticipate the whole Middle East to be largely depopulated of its troublesome natives, and be turned, conveniently, into a pumping station for Big Oil, which Israel will then control a cut of. Something in it for you - something in it for us - but a formula for Genocide. To accomplish this, Iran must be drawn out, and baited into a confrontation. Persia, after all, is one of the players in the Gog-Magog War against Israel.( Ezekiel 38 :5 )

    After the mess is all over, those Palestinians who survive will be "transferred" to their new "state" beyond the Euphrates, in what is left of what is now Iraq. I kid you not. Such things are on the table at the State Department, and are being seriously advocated and promoted, behind closed doors, no less, by members of the Jewish lobby (AIPAC) in Washington. Such things are well known throughout the Middle East.

    http://mideastchristians.virtualactivism.net/newsarticles/bookreviews/bo okreview.htm

    The Israelis have technology that is exotic, and under-reported. - Lazar-guided "vacuum-bombs," such as were successfully experimented with, and fired from F-16's - and which utterly imploded and disintegrated whole apartment buildings in Beirut - during the first invasion of Lebanon by the Israelis, in 1982.

    http://www.inminds.co.uk/from-beirut-to-jerusalem.html

    Something tells me that Damascus and Amman and Riyadh, and no doubt, Mecca and Medina have already been "wired for sound" by the Mossad, with Neutron-disintegration bombs, which can turn cities back into the dust of which they are made – And that these devices may, at the "correct" historical moment (the "Sampson Option") be detonated by merely flicking a few switches in that big bunker on the road south of Beth Shemesh, and - Poof – there will go Damascus, turned back into desert sand. But, conveniently, fulfilling the prophesy in Isaiah, 17 : 1, " Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a heap of ruins."

    http://www.escapeallthesethings.com/damascus-israel-isaiah-nuke.htm

    - Which, doubtless, will play BIG in Peoria... After all - these things are known, and believed, religiously, to be God's Will, by millions of Christians in America, who, like the plebeians of ancient Rome, conditioned and fed on bread and circuses, see the conflict in the Middle East as if it were a big Football match, and will always root for Israel. - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1665741/posts

    and,

    www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1664483/posts

    ...As American Christian fundamentalist pilgrims, and local Jewish Orthodox in Jerusalem, told me back in 1984, over and over again, " The next items on the prophetic calendar are Isaiah 17 and Ezekiel 38, & 39..."

    This next war will fulfill Prophesy, the dominionist radio preachers in America never tire of hollering. And they are correct on that point, though morally, I believe, they are on shaky ground, both because the power brokers among them, as "God's little helpers" - and the power elite with whom these cadres are allied - have done their damnedest to bloody well make this next war happen, and also because they, collectively, are already complicit in the blood-guilt that the on-going war in Iraq has engendered, because they fully approve of the Crusade aspect of Bush's War On (of) Terror, casualties be damned. On this point, check out the book [published in 1983] by the late Grace Halsell, "Prophesy and Politics – Militant Evangelicals On the Road to Armageddon." And,

    http://members.aol.com/gracehalsell/forcinggods.html

    READ AND LEARN

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:21am

40. Falwell Confirms Lewinsky Affair Linked to Israeli Lobby Intrigue

    By Michael Collins Piper

    Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn't resist bragging and finally admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu did conspire--at a critical time--to trip up President Bill Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank.

    Falwell's confession didn't make national news--as it should have. Instead, the preacher's confession came buried in a lengthy story in the December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. Entitled "American Rapture" the article (by Craig Unger) described the long-standing and still-flourishing love affair between American dispensationalist evangelicals such as Falwell and the hardline Jewish extremist forces in Israel then under the leadership of Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.

    The admission by Falwell confirms precisely what this author first revealed in a story published in The Spotlight on February 9, 1998 and later recounted in a lecture before the Arab League's official think tank, the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, in March of 2003.

    Although, following the lecture at the Zayed Centre, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a lobby for Israel, denounced as a "bizarre conspiracy theory" the assertion by Falwell that the public unveiling of the Lewinsky affair forced Clinton to pull back on pressuring Israel confirmed exactly what was reported in documented detail in The Spotlight in an international exclusive.

    Regarding Falwell's recounting of how he worked with Netanyahu in undermining Clinton's pressure on Israel, Vanity Fair reported:

    On a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before [Netanyahu's] scheduled meeting with Clinton. "I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi [Netanyahu] and he spoke to us that night," recalls Falwell. "It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton." . . . The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. "Bibi told me later," Falwell recalls, "that the next morning Bill Clinton said, ‘I know where you were last night." The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal . . . . Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel." (END OF VANITY FAIR EXCERPT)

    What Falwell did not mention--at least as reported by Vanity Fair--is that his meeting with the Israeli leader took place on the very evening before the mass media in America broke open the Monica Lewinsky scandal with much fanfare. Nor did Falwell mention--as this author pointed out at the time-- was that one of Netanyahu's leading American media publicists, neo-conservative power broker, William Kristol, the first American media figure to publicly hint (in the days before the scandal was officially unveiled) that there were forthcoming revelations regarding a White House sex scandal that was about to be unleashed.

    In addition, this author pointed out that at least six days before the first news of the Lewinsky scandal began breaking in the media at midnight on Tuesday, January 20, 1998, an advertisement appeared in the January 15 edition of the distinguished Washington Jewish Week newspaper accusing President Clinton of having "turned his back on Israel."

    What made the advertisement so striking was that it used a rear view of President Clinton (first captured on video in 1996) that had never been published but which, in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, became very familiar. It was a view of the president, his back to the camera, clearly taken from the video in which he was seen hugging the soon-to-be infamous Miss Lewinsky when she was in a receiving line at the White House some two years before. This was an image that Miss Lewinsky had bragged about among her associates prior to the time that the scandal broke. So clearly, Clinton's critics among the hard-line pro-Netanyahu forces in the United States--who sponsored the advertisement in question--were already tuned in to the fact of the Lewinsky-Clinton liaison and of the fact that it was soon to be unleashed against the president to undermine him.

    This author can now reveal, for the first time, that two figures at the very highest level of the Clinton White House were personally given copies of The Spotlight's articles regarding these matters and that, at the time, they quietly acknowledged that the articles were "probably right."

    The fact that Jerry Falwell's acknowledgment of how the Lewinsky affair was used as a club against Clinton--in tandem with "Bibi" Netanyahu's appearance at the White House, following the meeting with Falwell--was published in Vanity Fair is interesting in and of itself. That magazine is owned by the far-flung publishing empire of the billionaire Newhouse brothers ("Si" and Donald) whom Forbes dubbed the 25th richest family in America and who are known to be generous contributors to the Anti-Defamation League and other elements of the pro-Israel lobby.

    http://www.iamthewitness.com/by_MichaelCollinsPiper3.htm

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:22am

41. .

    SOCIAL ENGINEERING:

    While social engineering can be carried out by any organization - whether large or small, public or private - the most comprehensive (and often the most effective) campaigns of social engineering are those initiated by powerful central governments.

    Extremely intensive social engineering campaigns occurred in countries with authoritarian governments. In the 1920s, the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of Tsarist Russia with a new Soviet culture, to create the New Soviet man. The Soviets used newspapers, books, film, mass relocations, and even architectural design tactics to serve as "social condenser" and change personal values and private relationships. Similar examples are the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution" program and the Khmer Rouge's plan of deurbanization of Cambodia.

    Non-authoritarian regimes tend to rely on more sustained social engineering campaigns that create more gradual, but ultimately as far-reaching, change. Examples include the "War on Drugs" in the United States, the increasing reach of intellectual property rights and copyright, and the promotion of elections as a political tool. The campaign for promoting elections, which is by far the most successful of the three examples, has been in place for over two centuries.

    Social theorists of the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany like Theodor Adorno had also observed the new phenomenon of mass culture and commented on its new manipulative power, when the rise of the Nazis drove them out of the country around 1930 (many of them became connected with the Institute for Social Research in the United States). The Nazis themselves were no strangers to the idea of influencing political attitudes and re-defining personal relationships. The Nazi propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels was a synchronized, sophisticated and effective tool for creating public opinion.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_%28political_science%29

    A number of techniques which are based on social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. A few examples are: Flag-waving, Glittering generalities, Intentional vagueness, Oversimplification, Rationalization, Red herring, Slogans, Stereotyping, Testimonial, Unstated assumption.

    In the West, the term propaganda now overlaps with distinct terms like indoctrination (ideological views established by repetition rather than verification) and mass suggestion (broader strategic methods).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

    As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." (The US dictionary definition has gotten somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been bought up by multinational corporations.)

    Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

    "You can't tell any more the difference between what's propaganda and what's news."

    FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein 15 August, 2006

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/16/national/main1900602.shtm

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:24am

42. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

    Creeping Fascism

    The voices of the past, on Recognizing the Unrecognizable…

    "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

    "Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.'"

    "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,' your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about--we were decent people--and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

    "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it--please try to believe me--unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures' that no ‘patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

    "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in--your nation, your people--is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    "Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary' to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

    How ironic then that the persecuted have become the persecutors, using the tactics of their former oppressors to destroy those they wish to control and/or exterminate. 9/11 was their Reichstag Fire (a near-perfect False Flag Operation - but for the "Dancing Israelis"), the pretext to launch their plan – rooted in revenge and greed. But they have taken it one step farther, compelling others to do the job on their behalf.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:25am

43. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060630/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_powers;_ylt=Ahdx bF_5yQkIIeLVTtoJb5OyFz4D;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-

    From the article:

    The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) said newspaper editors don't claim to be infallible. "However, the First Amendment makes it clear no person or branch of government has the prerogative to usurp any American's right to speak or print what he or she believes is important and relevant truth. We believe honorable debate would focus on the issues raised by the reporting, not on attacks on the truth-tellers," it said.

    AMEN.

    Now how about revealing the truth of 9/11 and the fact that, according to the FBI, the purported Bin Laden confession video tape that we were subjected to in the aftermath of 9/11 has been deemed NOT CREDIBLE by the FBI, AND that the WANTED poster for Bin Laden DOES NOT include any offenses related to 9/11.

    Is there a bigger story than this?

    Headline:

    "Bin Laden NOT WANTED In Connection With 9/11 - FBI SAYS"

    Where are the Newspaper Editors on THIS STORY?

    Google: Fake bin laden video

    Google: FBI most wanted bin laden

    The Washington Post is intentionally misleading you about Bin Laden:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR200608 2700687.html

    That the administration felt compelled to encourage the Washington Post to publish this story is direct evidence of the blogosphere's influence.

    We've been seeing this story repeated countless times right here in these threads.

    It was likely as a direct result of those continued efforts that Keith Olbermann featured it as part of his "Worst Person In The world" segment a week ago - which has subsequently led Rove to try to knock the story down now before it gathers more steam.

    The fact is that the purported Bin Laden Confession video sited in this article is itself a blatant forgery. The FBI fails to confirm its authenticity.

    The Post knows this to be the case, but intentionally used false information to dissuade further investigation into the fact that BIN LADEN WAS NOT INVOLVED IN 9/11.

    The Post knows that there is an actual Bin Laden statement that was issued in the aftermath of 9/11 during which Bin Laden stated emphatically that he had nothing to do with 9/11.

    The Post is performing Government PsyOps with this story - further evidence of the Administration's complicity in 9/11.

    It's not going to work, Karl.

    We know.

    Have you actually LOOKED at the person in the fake Bin Laden video?

    http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html

    The FBI declines to confirm its authenticity.

    http://www.physics911.net/kevinbarrett.htm

    Top Bin Laden Expert: The Tapes are Fakes Kevin Barrett

    As a PhD in Islamic and Arabic Studies, I hate to say this, but I'll say it anyway. The events of 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. The war on terror itself is as phony as the latest "Bin Laden tape."

    Compare the nose of the actor in the video tape with that of Bin Laden:

    http://www.911blimp.net/vid_fakeOsamaVideo.shtml

    This is NOT BIN LADEN.

    Repeat this information often.

    LOOK AT THE VIDEO - IT'S FAKE.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:29am

44. Coincidences that seem to have led to a World War...

    9/11 (9:00 am) - The CIA began an exercise to simulate a plane crashing into one of it's buildings.

    Ann Tatlock, a CEO at Fiduciary Trust located in the South WTC Tower, is on her way to an early morning charity event at the U.S. Strategic Command Center at Offutt AFB in Nebraska -- where Bush later flew to for "safety" -- hosted by billionaire Warren Buffett and is escorted by military officers into an officer's lounge with a TV and watches the 2nd hijacked plane crash right into her offices.

    WTC Owner Larry Silverstein is not in his office on the 88th floor of the North Tower because of a "doctors appointment."

    Donald Rumsfeld is in his office at the Pentagon talking about missile defense and the risk of terrorism and predicts there will be a terrorist attack two minutes before the first plane crashes into the WTC.

    FAA memo says Flight 11 passenger was shot who happened to be a multi-millionaire elite Israeli military commando who understands Arabic and who happened to be sitting directly in front of one of the alleged hijackers.

    On the morning of 9/11, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) and Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) -- the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- along with Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) and some other members of the House Intelligence Committee are in a meeting at the Capital building with the director of Pakistani intelligence (ISI), Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, who authorized a $100,000 wire transfer to alleged lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta.

    The instant messaging service Odigo, says that two of its workers at their Israeli facility received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen.

    The WTC 7's fire alarm system is placed on "TEST" mode for an eight hour period for "maintenance or other testing" in which any alarms that are received from the system are not shown on the operator's display and are considered the result of the maintenance or testing and are ignored.

    NORAD was in day two of a week long exercise called "Vigilant Guardian" in which some of it's military participants thought the first reports of the hijackings later on in the day were "part of the exercise."

    A Pentagon rescuer mentions how "eerie" it was that the Pentagon's MASCAL emergency plane crash plan that he had trained twice for was "very similar to what actually happened".

    Personnel from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center who helped the rescuing efforts at the Pentagon also say that it was "eerie" how an emergency situation they went through just two weeks before the attack helped prepare them for the Pentagon crash.

    A group of young men were witnessed on top of a white van celebrating while they were filming themselves with the burning WTC in the background in which they were later arrested and identified as Israeli citizens -- some later found to be Israeli spies -- with one saying upon being arrested, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." They were found with large amounts of cash, a box cutter, multiple foreign passports, maps linking them to the blasts, and a bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if detecting explosives in their van.

    Within minutes of the explosion at the Pentagon, the FBI confiscates security videos that had captured the crash from a nearby gas station and hotel.

    9/11 (10:31 am) - The commander of NORAD says he didn't receive the presidential order to shoot down any of the hijacked planes until after Flight 93 crashed and the 9/11 Commission report confirms NORAD didn't get this order until 28 minutes after the crash.

    Video coverage shows Palestinians rejoicing over news of the 9/11 attacks, but later the celebrations were found out to have been staged.

    Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, said he decided that the smartest thing to do to the WTC 7 was to "pull it" when a NYFD commander told him that he wasn't sure they were going to be able to contain the fire in the building and said after they made the decision to "pull" the WTC 7, they "watched the building collapse." The term "pull" was used to describe the demolition of the WTC 6 days later.

    White House staff are given the powerful anthrax antibiotic Cipro, a full month before the first cases of anthrax were reported.

    When Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel and elite special forces member for the IDF, was asked what the 9/11 attacks meant for relations between the United States and Israel, he replied, "It's very good."

    President Bush's cousin, Jim Pierce, escaped death from the WTC thanks to a "schedule change" the night before.

    FEMA in NYC prior to 9-11 for Project TRIPOD terror drill, scheduled for 9-12

    As of this writing, June 2, 2004, the transcript of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony to the 9-11 Commission during the May 18-19, 2004 hearings in New York is the only transcript of that hearing omitted from the Commission website (http://www.9-11commission.gov).

    Did Rudy say something wrong?

    "... the reason Pier 92 was selected as a command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill, it had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was gonna be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there, so we were able to establish a command center there, within three days, that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed."

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 06:33am

45. . PTECH ?

    http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=6427

    Mossad: RSA Security & Ptech Run US Govt Computers Posted in the database on Monday, June 19th, 2006 @ 12:41:33 MST (38 views) by Christopher Bollyn American Free Press

    Photo: Amit Yoran, the Israeli "Cyber Security Czar" appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003. Yoran has held various positions since the 1990s in which he oversaw computer security for the Dept. of Defense computers.

    The most critical computer and communication networks used by the U.S. government and military are secured by encryption software written by an Israeli "code breaker" tied to an Israeli state-run scientific institution.

    The National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence agency with the mandate to protect government and military computer networks and provide secure communications for all branches of the U.S. government uses security software written by an Israeli code breaker whose home office is located at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

    A Bedford, Massachusetts-based company called RSA Security, Inc. issued a press release on March 28, 2006, which revealed that the NSA would be using its security software:

    "U.S. Department of Defense Agency Selects RSA Security Encryption Software" was the headline of the company's press release which announced that the National Security Agency had selected its encryption software to be used in the agency's "classified communications project.

    RSA stands for the names of the founders of the company: Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman. Adi Shamir, the lead theoretician, is an Israeli citizen and a professor at the Weizmann Institute, a scientific institution tied to the Israeli defense establishment.

    "My main area of research is cryptography – making and breaking codes," Shamir's webpage at the Weizmann Institute says. "It is motivated by the explosive growth of computer networks and wireless communication. Without cryptographic protection, confidential information can be exposed to eavesdroppers, modified by hackers, or forged by criminals."

    The NSA/Central Security Service defines itself as America's cryptologic organization, which "coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information."

    The fact that the federal intelligence agency responsible for protecting the most critical computer systems and communications networks used by all branches of the U.S. government and military is using Israeli-made encryption software should come as no surprise. The RSA press release is just the icing on the cake; the keys to the most critical computer networks in the United States have long been held in Israeli hands.

    AFP inquired with the NSA about its use of Israeli-made security software for classified communications projects and asked why such outsourcing was not seen as a national security threat. Why is "America's cryptologic organization" using Israeli encryption codes?

    NSA spokesman Ken White said that the agency is "researching" the matter and would respond in the coming week.

    American Free Press has previously revealed that scores of "security software" companies – spawned and funded by the Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence agency – have proliferated in the United States.

    The "security" software products of many of these usually short-lived Israeli-run companies have been integrated into the computer products which are provided to the U.S. government by leading suppliers such as Unisys.

    Unisys integrated Israeli security software, provided by the Israel-based Check Point Software Technologies and Eurekify, into its own software, so that Israeli software, written by Mossad-linked companies, now "secures" the most sensitive computers in the U.S. government and commercial sector.

    The Mossad-spawned computer security firms typically have a main office based in the U.S. while their research and development is done in Israel.

    The Mossad start-up firms usually have short lives before they are acquired for exaggerated sums of money by a larger company, enriching their Israeli owners in the process and integrating the Israeli directors and their Mossad-produced software into the parent company.

    RSA, for example, an older security software company, acquired an Israeli-run security software company, named Cyota, at the end of 2005 for $145 million.

    In January 2005, Cyota, "the leading provider of online security and anti-fraud solutions for financial institutions" had announced that "security expert" Amit Yoran, had joined the company's board of directors.

    Prior to becoming a director at Cyota, Yoran, a 34-year old Israeli, had already been the national "Cyber Czar," having served as director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division.

    Yoran had been appointed "Cyber Czar" at age 32 by President George W. Bush in September 2003.

    Before joining DHS, Yoran had been vice president for worldwide managed security services at Symantec. Prior to that, he had been the founder, president and CEO of Riptech, Inc., an information security management and monitoring firm, which Symantec acquired in 2002 for $145 million.

    Yoran and his brother Naftali Elad Yoran are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at Westpoint. Elad graduated in 1991 and Amit in 1993. Along with their brother Dov, the Yoran brothers are key players in the security software market. Amit has also held critical positions in the U.S. government overseeing computer security for the very systems that apparently failed on 9/11.

    Before founding Riptech in 1998, Yoran directed the vulnerability- assessment program within the computer emergency response team at the US Department of Defense.

    Yoran previously served as an officer in the United States Air Force as the Director of Vulnerability Programs for the Department of Defense's Computer Emergency Response Team and in support of the Assistant Secretary of Defense's Office.

    In June 2005, Yoran joined the board of directors of Guardium, Inc., another Mossad-spawned "provider of database security solutions" based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

    Guardium is linked with Ptech, an apparent Mossad "cut out" computer security company linked with the 9/11 attacks.

    Ptech, a computer software company in Quincy, Mass., was supposedly a small start-up company founded by a Lebanese Muslim and funded by a Saudi millionaire.

    Yet Ptech's clients included all the key federal governmental agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Naval Air Command, Congress, the Department of Energy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, NATO, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and even the White House.

    The marketing manager at Ptech, Inc. when the company started in the mid-1990s, however, was not a Muslim or an Arab, but an American Jewish lawyer named Michael S. Goff who had suddenly quit his law firm for no apparent reason and joined the Arab-run start-up company.

    Goff was the company's information systems manager and had single-handedly managed the company's marketing and "all procurement" of software, systems and peripherals. He also trained the employees. Goff was obviously the key person at Ptech.

    In the wake of 9/11, during the Citizens' Commission hearings in New York, Indira Singh, a consultant who had worked on a Defense Advanced Research Project, pointed to Ptech and MITRE Corp. being involved in computer "interoperability issues" between the FAA and NORAD.

    At this time Ptech's ties to Arabs was the focus, and Goff was out of the picture.

    "Ptech was with MITRE Corporation in the basement of the FAA for two years prior to 9/11," Singh said. "Their specific job is to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force in the case of an emergency. If anyone was in a position to know that the FAA – that there was a window of opportunity or to insert software or to change anything – it would have been Ptech along with MITRE."

    The Mossad-run Guardium company is linked with Ptech through Goff Communications, the Holliston, Mass.-based public relations firm previously run by Michael S. Goff and his wife Marcia, which represents Guardium. Since being exposed in AFP in 2005, however, Michael's name no longer appears on the company website.

    Although he and his brother reportedly grew up in Pound Ridge, New York during the 1970s and 1980s, the heads of the Jewish community told AFP that they had never heard of him. One said that she had conducted a survey of the Jews living in the small village of Pound Ridge in the 1970s and she would have remembered if a wealthy Israeli family named Yoran had been found.

    Why did the locals in Pound Ridge NOT remember the Yorans?

    Probably because they were NOT in Pound Ridge - but in Israel. The Pound Ridge address was used to give the appearance that the Yorans were Americans. I spoke with Elad and he has a distinctive Israeli accent - not what you would expect for a guy who grew up in a posh Yankee village.

    So who are the Yorans? Who are their parents and why did they come to the United States? To raise a couple high-level moles to infiltrate the most sensitive U.S. computer networks? How could they have lived for 20 years in Pound Ridge and NOT be remembered.

    _______________________

    Read from Looking Glass News

    Israeli Chief of CIA's Investment Group Mysteriously Resigns - AGAIN!

    Posted in the database on Monday, April 24th, 2006 @ 16:20:41 MST (53 views) by qrswave The Truth Will Set You Free

    The new chief of the CIA's venture capital organization, In-Q-Tel, has resigned after just four months on the job. [!!!]

    I didn't know the CIA had a venture capital group.

    Amit Yoran, who was the government's cybersecurity chief until he left that job in 2004, said Monday he stepped down for personal reasons.

    The role of In-Q-Tel's chief executive requires significant travel, and Yoran and his wife - a U.S. government lawyer - have three young daughters.

    Yeah, right. And no one told him before he started that this was part of the job description? Maybe he and his wife just recently adopted their daughters wholesale. Or maybe, just maybe, something more sinister is going on.

    The man making sure US computer networks are safe and secure has resigned after only a year in his post.

    Amit Yoran was director of the National Cyber Security Division within the US Department of Homeland Security created following the 9/11 attacks.

    The division was tasked with improving US defences against malicious hackers, viruses and other net-based threats.

    Reports suggest he left because his division was not given enough clout within the larger organisation.

    [His] division was charged with thinking up and carrying out action to make US networks more impervious to attack and disruption by the viruses, worms and hack attacks that have become commonplace.

    In the last 12 months Mr Yoran oversaw the creation of a cyber alert system that sends out warnings about big hitting viruses and net attacks as they occur.

    The warnings also contained information about how firms and organisations could protect themselves against these attacks.

    The Cyber Security Division also audited US government networks to discover exactly what was sitting on which network.

    The next step was to be the creation of a scanning system to identify vulnerabilities that made federal networks and machines susceptible to attack by malicious hackers and virus writers.

    Mr Yoran's division was also doing work to identify the networks and machines that had been broken into by cyber criminals.

    Despite this success Mr Yoran left his post abruptly at the end of last week, reportedly only giving one day's notice to bosses at the Department of Homeland Security.

    ONE DAY'S NOTICE?!! And he subsequently gets appointed CHIEF of the CIA's capital venture group?!! That's insane!

    Even now, after twice bailing on the government, Yoran remains on the payroll.

    Yoran said he agreed with In-Q-Tel's board to continue working as a consultant and adviser.

    In-Q-Tel - named for "Q," the fictional inventor of spy tools and toys for James Bond - makes about a dozen such investments annually with roughly $60 million it receives from the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

    Something's VERY fishy about this.

    Perhaps, this has something to do with the recent effort to hand an intelligence security contract to an Israeli company.

    Or maybe, the Mrs. 'senses' that something's about to happen in the Justice Department.

    Go to Original Article >>>

    The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Looking Glass News. Click the disclaimer link below for more information. Email: editor@lookingglassnews.org.

    Thursday, March 02, 2006 the corpo-political matrix unravels

    Isn't the internet amazing? Had it not been for the accessibility of this information to diligent bloggers, these facts would have never so quickly surfaced in the mainstream media. Indeed, they might not have surfaced, at all.

    The [Israeli] company was told U.S. officials feared the [acquisition of its US rival] could endanger some of the government's most sensitive computer systems.

    The objections by the FBI and Pentagon were partly over specialized intrusion detection software known as "Snort," which guards some classified U.S. military and intelligence computers.

    Snort's author is a senior executive at Sourcefire Inc., which would be sold to publicly traded Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. in Ramat Gan, Israel.

    The 45-day investigation into the Israeli deal still under way is only the 26th ever conducted in 1,600 business transactions reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States.

    * * *

    [A] former senior U.S. official who participated in reviews under President Clinton, said the Israeli sale involves more dire security issues than the administration's recent approval for a Dubai-owned company to take over significant operations at six major American ports.

    "This raises a lot more important issues," said Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary. "The most important case is where we're making an irrevocable technology transfer to a foreign party. Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."

    Check Point and Sourcefire declined to comment. Officials at the Defense Department, FBI and Justice Department also declined to comment.

    Draw your own conclusions. Blessed is the internet that connects and informs us.

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 07:09am

46. .

    DIEBOLD BUSTED!

    Circulate far and wide.

    http://getintheirface.blogspot.com/2006/09/princeton-university-creates- virus.html

    If the Dems don't focus on this with all of their energy, we'll know that the two-party system is merely an illusion.

    .

    Posted by plunger at 09/14/2006 @ 07:58am

47. I'm thinking that if David writes anymore blogs for the Nation, he's going to have to replace the T-H-E N W B-O- K- I- C- W-R- T keys on his keyboard.

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 08:00am

48. What part don't you get here, rio? We are upset because a woman whose job it was to go out and find wmd proliferation and help stop it had that job ruined for political gain. You are happy about that? You think that was patriotic? You think that was in line with stopping Iran? Do you remember that when Dick cheney was working back in the Ford admin he was IN FAVOR of giving Iran nukyoolar technology, and did business with them in the 90's when he was with Halliburton. And Iraq too, BTW.

    Chip, rememeber the tale of replaced "ws" at the white house after Clinton left? A lie. Just like the "Iraq has a reciept from Niger" claim.

    You guys sure have a phobia of Truth, don't you?

    Posted by crabwalk at 09/14/2006 @ 08:29am

49. Luvvy, for the hundreth time, no indictments because Fitz probably could not prove "intent". Why was your boy indicted for lying and obstructing? Why do you hate the Ten Commandments?

    Posted by crabwalk at 09/14/2006 @ 08:32am

50. Crabwalk What ARE you going on about? Never mind. This a little off topic, but I heard a news broadcast this morning early that described a drone flying over a group of 180-190 Taliban officials standing at a funeral. The drone took photographs, let everyone who needed to know that they were there, and the people who should/could have gotten them couldn't get approvalto do so. Lawyers and bureaucrats checking on rules of engagement. If this is true, I'm done. May as well pull everbody home and just wait for'em to hit us again. Unbelievable.

    Anybody else heard this?

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 08:36am

51. Mr Corn scrambling to salvage "Plame-gate"....and 90% of the posts are RESE and PLUNGER discussing Wayne Madsen (who claimed Bush and Blair were secret gay lovers) saying that NUKES took out the WTCs.

    Not sure I can discern which is more pathetic.

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 08:47am

52. Why then are there no indictments for Armitage, Novak, or Rove? It's a simple question; shouldn't be too difficult to answer since you have all of this "inside information" revealing a supposed crime.

    Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 12:39am

    Luvvy

    It's an easy question to answer dummy. The only law they could be charged with is outing an undercover CIA agent... and they know she's undercover.

    With the white house circulating the classified status of Wilson on unclassified memos, they pretty much covered there own ass before the first leak went to the first reporter

    And this is how despicable you and every other evangelic conservative are.

    Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 09:01am

53. Not sure I can discern which is more pathetic.

    Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 08:47am

    first... look inside yourself. There you will find a standard to meausure against

    Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 09:06am

54. Posted by CHIP THORNTON 09/14/2006 @ 08:36am

    Yeah, it's amazing that Americans, who hold out the hope that we can be a beacon of freedom and civility, would actually follow the rules and not drop bombs on a cemetary!

    Does mean that the US military is full of "liberal" pansies? No, it means that in this instance those in charge did not step across another line that would have further enraged those who already hate us, and might have created even more attacks against Americans. Sure, it would have been nice for all those scumbags in the cross hairs to be taken out, but if we don't follow any rules of engagement, how the hell can we scream about the terrorists not following rules of engagement? If we beat the enemy by becoming the enemy, then the enemy has won.

    Posted by Turk33 at 09/14/2006 @ 09:10am

55. Posted by WILL C. 09/14/2006 @ 09:06am

    Not sure why YOU're defending it, WILL. Again, you said Armitage should be indicted, same as Rove and Libby.

    Yet again, Mr Corn is trying to DEFEND Armitage here.

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 09:32am

56. To the Turk,

    Whatsamatter, bud, you afraid those dead bodies in the graves would get offended? And no, there are not liberal pansies. They are just plain idiots, no party affiliation, for letting these guys get away, if this is the whole story. We should have killed them all, we blew it, and if we are not going to do it right we may as well not be there.

    From The Mongol

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 09:49am

57. Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 09:32am

    Defending Armitage? Maybe I can't read between the lines enough to see a defense. What I got out of the article is an indictment of all the liars involved, who seem to be creating a cloud of confusion in order to avoid accountability. Perhaps you could cite the page number of the book where Armitage is absolved of wrongdoing?

    Posted by Turk33 at 09/14/2006 @ 09:52am

58. Posted by CHIP THORNTON 09/14/2006 @ 09:49am

    So you're all for unlimited warfare? Really? You think that removing all constraint from our armed forces will make things better? Yeah, that's a great idea - accuse the terrorists of savagery and then do the same freakin' thing! I'll repeat, although I don't think it will penetrate your fear - If we beat the enemy by becoming the enemy, then the enemy has won.

    Posted by Turk33 at 09/14/2006 @ 10:07am

59. There's a big difference between dropping a couple cluster bombs & wiping out 180 terrorists who, if left alive long enough, will set off nukes and chems and kill thousands of us. Yes Tuk, outside of Torture, I hope we do everything to kill them all. And I don't apologize for it. We need the will for it, too, the same will that enabled that sick son-of-a-bitch to slice, SLICE not cut the head off of Nick Berg. You ever see that film? THATS what we're up against. Get Real

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 10:13am

60. Sorry, thats TURK, not Tuk CT

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 10:14am

61. Posted by TURK33 09/14/2006 @ 09:52am

    Re-read Mr Corn's first four paragraphs in this article.

    In criticizing Novak's "new" version of events, he states that he and Michael Isikoff raised the possibility that Armitage leaked the name to "distance State" from the Niger trip imbroglio. Seems a bit of an "excuse" for Armitage, rather than a condemnation.

    And why criticize Novak at all, if Novak is going after Armitage...unless to deflect blame AWAY from Armitage, and to concentrate it back on the targets Mr Corn wants....Rove and Libby (and by extension Cheney).

    Which he does later in the piece with this..."Novak neglects to note that Karl Rove was the source he used to confirm the leak he had received from Armitage--and that Rove also leaked classified information on Valerie Wilson to Matt Cooper of Time magazine before the leak appeared in Novak's column. Nor does Novak mention that Scooter Libby leaked information on Valerie Wilson to Judith Miller of The New York Times weeks before Novak entered Armitage's office--and also confirmed Rove's leak to Cooper."

    Mr Corn HAS to have Rove and Libby be "the first ones" to leak Plame's name...because that's what he's been saying for two years now. He also have to give a pass, if slight, to Armitage...because Richard Armitage is more than just an opponent of the neo-con ideology, but strongly anti-Bush and anti-Cheney. To suck him into the same "circle of conspiracy" as Rove and Libby dilutes its ideological bent...and is impossible to maintain as a "conspiracy to smear Joe and Valerie", given that OBVIOUSLY was not Armitage's plan.

    Nuances and intricacies aside....the basic fact is Armitage told Novak who Plame was. And it pre-dates everything else. AND Novak's column was the start of the whole "Plame-gate" thing, with Chuck Schumer raising it as an issue.

    So, after two years, and on the eve of a mass book tour (which extends to almost every column Mr Corn is writing this month...hehe)....Fitzgerald has Libby for obstruction, but not leaking. No indictment of Rove. And a "Left-sympathetic" Richard Armitage "outed" as the first "leaker".

    And it is apparent to all but the most devoted fans of Mr Corn that....two years later, "Plame-gate" is a bust, perhaps on an order of magnitude as "Whitewater" was.

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 10:17am

62. Once again Cornholio rambles on about the same tired old story in a vain attempt to promote the sale of his book. Can't blame him though as Darla and New Dawn have professed their desire to go buy it.

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 10:23am

63. Sorry Chip, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I think that in this case, escalating what is acceptable will only bring more pain and suffering to all involved. Desecrating holy land would create more hatred of the US and would create more people who see the US as evil. I can't see how that is a good thing. Yes, we would have killed some very bad people - and in the process created uncountably more very bad people. You don't put out a grease fire with water - it only causes it to spread. You don't eliminate terrorists by expanding the rules of engagement. You reduce terrorists through intelligence and common sense - boy are we in trouble!

    Posted by Turk33 at 09/14/2006 @ 10:29am

64. two years later, "Plame-gate" is a bust,

    tell it to the man who is under indictment, Libby.

    who was indicted in the whitewater investigation?

    Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 10:29am

65. I also believe this article is simply an ad to sell the doomed book, since the story is dead and we don't use door stoppers any more..

    hey, maybe the teachers unions could buy it and make it manditory for every teacher to read in class?

    ATTENTION TEACHERS UNIONS

    That would help sales and the publisher wouldn't have to sue to get their money back or wouyld even considewr another book by the corn man.

    Posted by john maasch at 09/14/2006 @ 10:52am

66. I guess your right about agreeing to disagree. I just don't know how to use common sense and intelligence with people who don't look at the concept of life and death the way we do.

    My Dad who fought in the Pacific, used to tell me that they would have loved to induce a Japanese not to fight through the use of logic, then wondered "How do you REASON with someone who, because they know they can take you with them, is TRYING to kill themselves?

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON at 09/14/2006 @ 10:52am

67. Whitewater was a waste of time and money and so it Liddy.

    Posted by john maasch at 09/14/2006 @ 10:53am

68. who was indicted in the whitewater investigation?

    Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 10:29am

    Of course, that is true...technically. But the McDougalls, Web Hubbell, and Jim Guy Tucker certainly wouldn't have been indicted for their unrelated charges, if the Whitewater Investigation hadn't started up.

    But like Libby, none of them were indicted on the ORIGINAL malfeasence charge, but on charges raised by the investigation.

    And like "WW", this was supposed to "go all the way to the top" (not just Rove, but Cheney, too...remember?).

    And just like "WW", when it turned out to be a bust....the guys who promoted it (Limbaugh for "Whitewater", Mr Corn for "Plame-gate") ....refused to admit there was little or nothing to it!

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 11:07am

69. who was indicted in the whitewater investigation?

    Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006

    No one... too many witnesses "disappeared" ;)

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 11:09am

70. nobody on this thread has the credentials to question corn. so, give it up.....

    Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:10am

71. there was little or nothing to it!

    too soon to tell. in this case there is a TRIAL coming up.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 11:10am

72. Nuances and intricacies aside....the basic fact is Armitage told Novak who Plame was. And it pre-dates everything else. AND Novak's column was the start of the whole "Plame-gate" thing, with Chuck Schumer raising it as an issue. Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 10:17am

    Which he does later in the piece with this..."Novak neglects to note that Karl Rove was the source he used to confirm the leak he had received from Armitage--and that Rove also leaked classified information on Valerie Wilson to Matt Cooper of Time magazine before the leak appeared in Novak's column. Nor does Novak mention that Scooter Libby leaked information on Valerie Wilson to Judith Miller of The New York Times weeks before Novak entered Armitage's office--and also confirmed Rove's leak to Cooper."

    Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 10:17am

    Well, which is it, Mask? "Armitage told Novak" predates everything else, or "Scooter Libby leaked information on Valerie Wilson to Judith Miller of The New York Times weeks before Novak entered Armitage's office"?

    Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 11:29am

73. too many witnesses "disappeared" ;)

    oh really? citation?

    Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 11:34am

74. nobody on this thread has the credentials to question corn. so, give it up.....

    Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006

    Darla, out of curiosity.... what exactly are Cornholios "credentials"????

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 11:35am

75. oh really? citation?

    Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006

    Come on. The little ";)" was right there. To clarify, I was kidding... trying to be funny with the idiotic conspiracy crap that was tossed out by the far right during the whole WW fiasco.

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 11:37am

76. john, i don't even even to answer that question. or any of your other questions elsewhere on this site......he's a professional journalist, john. you are just someone who's curious, who reads what HE writes, not the other way around.

    Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:39am

77. There's a big difference between dropping a couple cluster bombs & wiping out 180 terrorists who, if left alive long enough, will set off nukes and chems and kill thousands of us. Yes Tuk, outside of Torture, I hope we do everything to kill them all. And I don't apologize for it. We need the will for it, too, the same will that enabled that sick son-of-a-bitch to slice, SLICE not cut the head off of Nick Berg. You ever see that film? THATS what we're up against. Get Real

    Chip

    Posted by CHIP THORNTON 09/14/2006 @ 10:13am

    I've seen it. Seen them all, in fact, as well as a thousand other terrible videos of terrible deeds.

    You seem little different than them, Mr. Thornton. You see no limits, no sense of decency, no sense of restraint.

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 11:45am

78. John B. -

    "Cornholio"?

    C'mon, man. Grow up. The man is a professional journalist.

    You... aren't.

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 11:47am

79. john, i don't even even to answer that question. or any of your other questions elsewhere on this site......he's a professional journalist, john. you are just someone who's curious, who reads what HE writes, not the other way around.

    Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006 @ 11:39am

    A professional journalist? What exactly does that mean? That he took some writing classes? That his opinions are somehow greater than mine? Does he actually research what he writes or does he simply write to inflame his ardent followers? Isn't that why he continues to pump this idiotic story that has NO MERIT?

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:07pm

80. Obviously there's some disagreement here on the most important issue concerning "Plame-gate"...the prime one, that I've taken from all of Mr Corn's recent articles about it, seems to be....

    "The book I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War"

    After all, in every story he's written about Rove, Libby, Novak, Armitage, etc. over the past few weeks....THAT key thing emerges time and time again, often 4-5 times in the same article.

    Not the "damage" done to the Plames (that may pop in once and a while)...or the "leaking of classified info" (maybe one reference)....or even the motivations of Richard Armitage or even Karl Rove (one or two)....

    but THE BOOK....that shows up over and over and over again.

    So obviously THAT, not the details of the "scandal", must be the most important thing....since it's the only thing that is CONSISTANTLY and NUMEROUSLY referenced in all the articles!

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 12:10pm

81. John B. -

    "Cornholio"?

    C'mon, man. Grow up. The man is a professional journalist.

    You... aren't.

    Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006

    I'll ask you the same question... WHAT makes him a professional? That he took some writing classes? He is NO different than you or I. He is intelligent and he spouts his opinions. That is it.

    The Cornholio is childish. No question. Don't know why it got stuck in my head today, but somehow it did and out it came. I am sure it will happen from time to time. Especially when CORN continues to act like a child, refusing to let this non-story die because he wants to sell more copies of his book.

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:11pm

82. BTW, I love DARLA doing her Eric Cartman impersonation...

    "Respect David Corn's authori-tah!"

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 12:11pm

83. wow, typos again. I wonder WHAT JB thinks of Bob Novak?

    Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006

    He is a journalist. Has had some good articles and tends to actually research what he writes about (hence getting confirmation on Plame prior to printing). Not saying he is perfect by any means, as none of us are. But he is certainly not an op-ed "journalist" like Corn. Corn is like Hannity, O'Reilly, Franken. (and yes, I know many on this site hate it when I lump Franken in with Hannity and O'Reilly, but since I am evil, I did it anyway)

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:15pm

84. " Corn is like Hannity, O'Reilly, Franken. (and yes, I know many on this site hate it when I lump Franken in with Hannity and O'Reilly, but since I am evil, I did it anyway)"

    Corn is like Hannity?!

    ok, john b next on the 'ignore' list.....

    Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 12:19pm

85. Pearl Harbor was the result of a fear Japan had of an oil embargo

    that embargo was not their fear, but reality, for four months before the attack.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 12:23pm

86. Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 12:10am

    Obviously, you're backing off your previous claim that "Armitage outs Plame to Novak" pre-dates everything else.

    Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 12:24pm

87. WHAT makes him a professional?

    he has a book out, for which he gets paid. You ain"t, B.

    Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 12:25pm

88. Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 10:29am

    tell it to the man who is under indictment, Libby.

    Under indictment for what, lying about a crime that was never committed? Fitzgerald is under a cloud of prosecutorial misconduct as it is, for letting this charade get as far as it has. The Libby indictment will be made to disappear, the only reason why it hasn't been dismissed already is that it hasn't made it to court. Mark my words, Libby's indictment is going absolutely nowhere, just like I said Karl Rove would never be implicated in anything close to morally wrong, much less criminal. So give it up already, and go bay at a different moon.

    Posted by pontificus at 09/14/2006 @ 12:28pm

89. Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 12:24am Where in the Gospels does it say you should go ahead and bomb suspected enemy fighters in a cemetery?

    Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 12:30pm

90. Corn is like Hannity?!

    ok, john b next on the 'ignore' list.....

    Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006

    That is certainly your choice to make. But yes, Corn is an OP-ED journalist. Just because you agree with Corn's positions (which I tend not to) and despise Hannity (which I also do) does not change the fact that they are both Op-Ed "journalists".

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:30pm

91. John B. -

    "Does he actually research what he writes or does he simply write to inflame his ardent followers?"

    Are you serious, John?

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:30pm

92. So obviously THAT, not the details of the "scandal", must be the most important thing....since it's the only thing that is CONSISTANTLY and NUMEROUSLY referenced in all the articles!

    Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 12:10am

    Yes, you managed to make that the focus. I hope you aren't proud of yourself, though I suspect that you are.

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:31pm

93. Maybe you need some TP for your bunghole.

    Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006

    Probably so. That is what I get for watching MTV's Beavis and Butthead. Crap like 'Cornholio' sticks with me.

    Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:31pm

94. none of you is qualified to extend on what corn has to say. corn is one of few journalists who has been on this story since the beginning. and, who isn't a bush supporter.

    zero has asked the only relevant question: what is the path to more indictments?

    cheney, rove, bush, libby, armitage: they're all talking. they're all guilty by association.

    Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 12:34pm

95. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 12:29am

    No...it's doing it itself.

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 12:35pm

96. http://www.davidcorn.com/author.php

    I challenge any poster here to post such a resume of writing credits and accomplishments.

    And I find nothing "childish" about using a public pulpit to put forth your opinions for profit. Thousands of journalists, commentators, pundits, and professionals do it.

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:35pm

97. WHAT makes him a professional?

    he has a book out, for which he gets paid. You ain"t, B.

    Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 12:25am

    Uh, JOHANN....if THAT is the criteria....doesn't that make Ann Coulter a "professional"? (Insert "professional whore" joke here)

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 12:36pm

98. And I find nothing "childish" about using a public pulpit to put forth your opinions for profit. Thousands of journalists, commentators, pundits, and professionals do it.

    Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006 @ 12:35am

    Mr Cotton's Parrot....same question (as I asked JOHANN)

    Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 12:36pm

99. For New Dawn and Turk,

    You attack on Chip for suggesting that it is perfectly acceptable in war to kill an enemy who is gathered in a cemetary. I don't recall in WWII that we gave sanctuary to the Nazi's if they happened to be in a cemetary during the war; nor they to us. Where do you get that somehow being gathered in a cemetary gives you a safety timeout from battle? Where is the legal standing for your position? It is not applicable to the Geneva Convention, nor is it found in the Hague Convention on the laws of War on land

    http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm

    I know they certainly don't extend that kind of timeout to us.

    Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 12:24am

    I did not "attack" Chip.

    And not bombing them in the cemetary is not "my" position. It is the current position of the United States military. Neither Turk nor I called bomber pilots and said "No, you can't bomb them there, because Turk and I say so".

    They were made to stand down by U.S. military command. LL's self-proclaimed long and illustrious background with military infrastructure should have informed him of this, that our current military rules of engagement prohibit such an act. That is why we did not bomb them at the cemetary. Barring that, watching the news yesterday could have filled him in...

    Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:40pm

100. Are you serious, John?

     Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006

     100%. Now to be fair, I have only seen his work for a few months. He seems to spout the traditional talking points of the left, but I have yet to see an informative piece from him. I do not limit my opinion of poor journalism to Corn alone. I think it is a problem that has increased over the past decade where in the rush to get the story, many forget to actually verify the story they write is correct.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 12:41pm

101. Probably so. That is what I get for watching MTV's Beavis and Butthead. Crap like 'Cornholio' sticks with me.

     Posted by JOHN B 09/14/2006 @ 12:31am

     Hey, I f'ing LOVE B & B, as well as South Park and many other irreverent, offensive sources of humor.

     But John, you're above that when arguing politics. I know you are. That's all I was saying.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:43pm

102. Mask, your handle should really be strawman. I said nothing about Coulter. she is a professional writer and a journalist, as she is published in journals. as is Corn.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 12:45pm

103. WHAT makes him a professional?

     he has a book out, for which he gets paid. You ain"t, B.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 12:25am

     Uh, JOHANN....if THAT is the criteria....doesn't that make Ann Coulter a "professional"? (Insert "professional whore" joke here)

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 12:36am | ignore this person

     And I find nothing "childish" about using a public pulpit to put forth your opinions for profit. Thousands of journalists, commentators, pundits, and professionals do it.

     Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006 @ 12:35am

     Mr Cotton's Parrot....same question (as I asked JOHANN)

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 12:36am

     No idea what the fuck "Mr. Cotton's Parrot" is supposed to mean, but yes, Ann Coulter is a professional, I suppose. As a commentator, okay. As a pundit, sure. As a journalist - not even close.

     She is also enormously childish.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:49pm

104. Are you serious, John?

     Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006

     100%. Now to be fair, I have only seen his work for a few months. He seems to spout the traditional talking points of the left, but I have yet to see an informative piece from him. I do not limit my opinion of poor journalism to Corn alone. I think it is a problem that has increased over the past decade where in the rush to get the story, many forget to actually verify the story they write is correct.

     Posted by JOHN B 09/14/2006 @ 12:41am

     Thank you for the honest clarification of your position. Because before, asking if he "even researched" what he writes seemed just silly.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:51pm

105. Mask, your handle should really be strawman. I said nothing about Coulter. she is a professional writer and a journalist, as she is published in journals. as is Corn.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 12:45am

     I'll even go so far as to revise my earlier comment anc concede that by Johanne's definition above, Ann Coulter is indeed a "journalist".

     Now, I need to go find some Bactine for the teeth marks in my tongue.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 12:54pm

106. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 12:38am

     Ponti, I know you are another Limbaugh dittohead but Valerie Plame was outted. That's been established by a grand jury

     Non sequitur, Frank. Define what you mean by 'outed'. Are you giving up on the 'covert' angle, because whatever you mean, it was Armitage who did it. As I have been saying for months, Plame was not covert at the time it became publicly known she worked for the CIA. As proof, if it was criminal, why isn't Fitzgerald prosecuting - there can be only one reason - because it was not criminal, otherwise Fitzgerald would not be doing his job. And you, like HMAN, can hang your hat on the idea that all of this will change, but you're just wasting your time. You do know that to this day, Fitz still has not claimed that Plame was covert, correct?

     and the resultant investigation and indictment of Libby for obstructing that investigation is the result so far.

     And the only result, and, as I said, that result will not be lasting, because the charge is nonsensical. How can you obstruct an investigation into a crime that never occurred? But you don't have to believe me - just watch as this whole kerfuffle fades away into nothingness, and you read in the paper a few months from now how the Libby case is resolved quietly and with little import to anyone.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/14/2006 @ 12:55pm

107. NEW DAWN....rent "Pirates of the Caribbean"

     JOHANN and NEW DAWN....

     you guys listed "books published" and "writing credits" as "professional" bona fides for David Corn....okay, so...if THOSE are the qualifiers, doesn't Ann Coulter qualify?

     Even more so, since the Leggy Lib-basher has sold MORE books than Mr Corn has?

     How about if we use the "Pulizter Prize" as a standard?

     Ooops, wait.....David Broder of "The Washington Post" has won it, and he called upon "Plame-gaters" like Mr Corn to APOLOGIZE TO ROVE!

     David Corn is not "God", nor an "angel", nor even a "saint". He is no more or less qualified to "the Truth" than any other journalist, pundit, or ideological writer (a better description of him, since he works...not for a striving-for-objectivity newspaper or news network...but for an ADMITTEDLY partisan magazine).

     His opinion....holds the same weight as....Robert Novak.

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 1:03pm

108. ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz. . .

     Posted by habiba at 09/14/2006 @ 1:12pm

109. How can you obstruct an investigation into a crime that never occurred?

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/14/2006 @ 12:55am

     Easy, you are charged with obtructing the INVESTIGATION. Whether a formal charge comes out of the investigation or not is immaterial. Otherwise, a message would be sent that it is ok to obstruct an investigation if you roll the dice and get lucky that there are no charges at the end of the day. Your logic makes no sense and would actually encourage people to obstruct investigations even more - the incentive being that if they obstruct it enough, there will be no charge against them (and under your logic) no charge for obstruction either. It makes no sense.

     Libby is also charged with perjury and lying to federal agents. But I guess you feel that these are bogus too, because there is no underlying charge. Curious, do you feel that way about the perjury allegations against Clinton?

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 1:12pm

110. John B.

     Sidepoint - Bob Novak is a columnist and an op-ed writer. he is not an investigative journalist.

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 1:14pm

111. MASK -

     As someone who points out the hypocisy in everything, funny how you seem to ignore the biggest one in Corn's article - Novak's Oct. 2003 column with what he is saying now. Care to wield your sword in THAT direction anytime soon?

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 1:15pm

112. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 1:02pm

     I beleiev that at the time of his announcement of Libby's indictment, Fitz indicated that Plame was indeed of covert status. You'll have to look it up for yourself though. I'm busy.

     You believe wrong, Frank. Fitzgerald has never at any time charged that Plame was covert. He did imply prior to the indictment that she may have been covert, but since then he has made a positive statement to the effect that explicitly refuses to say that she is.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/14/2006 @ 1:17pm

113. Frank,

     Good luck getting a simple answer to a simple question from the Bushbots.

     I've been asking for days about what we're going to do about our Embassy in Syria being attacked by "Islamofacsists". I mean Clinton's lack of response to attacks on our enemies was the real cause of 9/11 according to the people that like to put their fingers in their ears and close their eyes. So based on their logic....we have to do something to avenge the Syria Embassy attack or Bush is a Clintonesque appeaser.

     Unfortunately I've had no real answer.

     Posted by freedomplease at 09/14/2006 @ 1:21pm

114. Posted by HMAN23 09/14/2006 @ 1:12pm

     Easy, you are charged with obtructing the INVESTIGATION. Whether a formal charge comes out of the investigation or not is immaterial.

     Still hanging on like grim Death, eh HMAN?

     Ever been interrogated by a prosecutor, HMAN? I'm willing to bet that under interrogation, even Mary Poppins could be made to make statements that aren't 100 percent true, or make factual errors due to faulty memory. This is, I believe, more like than not the case with Libby, because why else would someone lie other than to cover up someting? And what would Libby have to cover up other than the 'covert' agent exposure crime, which up to this point has not materilized? And if there is no known crime, and no other motive to lie is found, just how likely is it that anyone would purposely give false statements (i.e., lie) to an investigator in Libby's situation?

     Otherwise, a message would be sent that it is ok to obstruct an investigation if you roll the dice and get lucky that there are no charges at the end of the day. Your logic makes no sense and would actually encourage people to obstruct investigations even more - the incentive being that if they obstruct it enough, there will be no charge against them (and under your logic) no charge for obstruction either.

     Well, that's true. But I'm willing to bet that my first point applies; when a judge and/or jury looks at Libby's indictment, they'll take one look and strongly encourage the prosecutor to drop it.

     Again, this is a prediction, not an opinion. Let's just see who's right, shall we?

     Libby is also charged with perjury and lying to federal agents. But I guess you feel that these are bogus too, because there is no underlying charge.

     Not bogus, just of doubtful merit. But like I said, let's just see what happens. If it all goes as I predict, rest assured I will be here to bury your nose in it.

     Curious, do you feel that way about the perjury allegations against Clinton?

     No, because Clinton as President is held to a different standard than simply not breaking the law. He perjured himself in sworn testimony (or lied, if you wish to use Clintonian terms) in order to avoid the embarassment of admitting the truth. His motive to lie was that he was covering up a pattern of sexual relations with his employees in a case predicated on a charge of sexual exploitation. In contrast, Libby had nothing to cover up, that we know of. That's the difference.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/14/2006 @ 1:31pm

115. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 1:08pm

     Actually FRANK, you pick up on another salient point on Mr Corn's lastest articles and shameless plugs for "Hubris"....

     most of them have been concerning "Plame-gate"...not the lead up to the war in Iraq (less the previous one "Cheney, 9/11, and the Truth about Iraq"). Of the four articles Mr Corn has written since August 27 and pre-promotion for "Hubris".....ONE (the "Cheney, 9/11" oen) was about pre-war intell....the other THREE were about Armitage and "Plame-gate".

     Now....why is that?

     I suppose the cynical person (hmmm?..do I know any?) might say because the revelation of Armitage, not Rove, as the initial leaker to Novak (and YES, NATHANHALE, I stick with that "pre-dates" thing, since it was Novak's column that inspired Chuck Schumer to call for a special prosecutor....not Judith Miller)....hurts Mr Corn's rep and one of the main focuses of the book, more than another round of "There were no WMDs/no Al Queda connections".

     Which is odd, because THAT part is the hardest for any detractors to detract from.

     But if the "Plame-gate" card gets pulled away....I suppose Mr Corn feels that the "Hubris" "house" might come tumbling down after it.

     In the end, it really doesn't matter. Joking aside about Mr Corn's endless self-promotion of late, "Hubris" is another "hymnnal to the choir" (as in "preaching to the..") book, which will garner no more and no less an audience than the liberal base of the Democratic Party which ALREADY believes everything that David Corn and Michael Isikoff "prove".

     So what will it change?

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 1:44pm

116. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 1:27pm

     PONTI,

     Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson's employment status was classified.

     I'm willing to stipulate that during the entire course of Plame's employment with the CIA, her status was 'classified', as are, most likely the parking lot attendants at Langley. It's only the question of whether she was covert that matters. And the prosecutor assigned to the case has not even charged that she was covert. People cannot, generally, be convicted of a crime before they are even charged, can they? I mean, outside of the Nation website.

     Prior to that date, her affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community.

     Meaninglessly vague, Frank.

     Disclosure of classified information about an individual's employment by the CIA has the potential to damage the national security in ways that range from preventing that individual's future use in a covert capacity, to compromising intelligence-gathering methods and operations, and endangering the safety of CIA employees and those who deal with them, the indictment states.

     Yeah, that's all very well and true, but it was Armitage who did whatever leaking there was to be done, not anyone from the Bush inner circle.

     "When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government.

     All obviously true, but of little import here. Armitage is not even being prosecuted for his central role in the debacle. Fitzgerald himself knew that Armitage had leaked Plame's status. So what was he even questioning Libby for?

     As I said, this whole thing is going to go away, and Fitz has some questions to answer regarding his conduct.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/14/2006 @ 1:45pm

117. 5. Why aren't Wilson and Plame revising their lawsuit to include Armitage?

     Text of the Wilson/Plame Lawsuit

     http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/iraq/wilsonlibby71306cmp.html

     Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 1:46pm

     They did it yesterday.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 1:49pm

118. Apologies to everyone else but LVL among dozens of outlandish claims has claimed to have been in pentagon procurement (I think), so I don't want the argument to close just because the "Iraq for Sale" thread has closed.

     LVL

     LVL,

     1. I am aware of DFAR. Are you aware that it contravenes our acceptance to the WTO? Would we (and by that I mean Raytheon, Grummand, Lookheed et al) like it if every other Nation passed such bullshit, protectionist, anti-trade legislation? 2. The Army spin that Trophy doesn't "spin" is utter baloney and you know it. Trophy is at least 5 years ahead of Raytheon's system and if you're trying to tell me it will take the Israeli's 5 years to figure out how to mount the bloody thing on a swivel you are as retarded as the Army hopes you are!

     Posted by FREEDOMPLEASE 09/13/2006 @ 4:39pm

     First of all the Buy American Act was first passed in 1933 by a Democratic Congress and President. It has been refined and expanded in every decade since as a means of ensuring more American jobs, something I thought you liberals were in favor of.

     Secondly, where is your evidence that the General is lying? I say put up or shut up.

     Here is additional information on why the Army did not go with Trophy:

     Army faced mounting criticism about not considering the Trophy system for the protection of its armored vehicles deployed in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A, Sorenson, the Army's deputy for acquisition and systems management explained the decision (AFPS) saying the Israeli system is not a "produceable item." The Israelis have been working on the Trophy system for 10 or 11 years, Sorenson said. "If this thing was ready to go, my question would be, why wasn't it on the particular tanks that went into Lebanon?" he said. No Israeli Merkava tanks carried the Trophy system, he said.

     Other problems include the fact that the system right now has no reloading capability. Once it fires, that side of the vehicle is vulnerable. Which brings up another shortcoming: the Trophy can only be mounted to protect one axis. This means officials would have to mount multiple missile systems on every vehicle. The Quick Kill missile has 360-degree capability and a reload capability.

     Another worry is collateral damage, he said. "In a tight urban area, the Trophy system may take out the RPG, but we may kill 20 people in the process," Sorenson said. "That is a concern we have that we haven't fully evaluated."

     http://www.defense-update.com/products/t/trophy.htm

     Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 12:11am | ignore this person

     LVL,

     Yes the original version of DFAR was passed during the depression and just like the Smoot Hawley tarrifs it undoubtedly exacerbated the depression. But all that is ancient history.....you know something to learn from and not do again!

     As I am sure you are aware, the WTO rules could care less about existing legislation no matter what year it was instituted or else the participating countries would all just pass domestic legislation prior to the next round and then say.....nope can't comply to that because we have a law.....and then WTO wouldn't exist in either spirit or reality.

     Army people lying?? Did you find the $9Billion that Paul Bremmer lost yet? $9B goes "missing" / unaccounted for, if you prefer and you think everyone involved is just a good soldier?

     The Israeli's have been working on Trophy for 10-11 years (as admitted in US Army press releases) and Raytheon is just starting. The Israeli system is not yet field ready (as evidenced by their non deployment in Lebanon). The Israeli system is at testing stage (as admitted by US Army tests that showed it effective 30 of 30 times). Raytheon's own biased admission claims their system will be at test stage in 2010-2011. Not operational by 2010-2011 just at the stage the Israli's are already at. Even if Raytheon gets to the testing stage in 5 years (which is unlikely) it is still 5 years behind Trophy.

     The swivel capability is preposterous as a 13 year old could mount a system that is capable of going around in a circle.

     The reload capability is more technically difficult....although I will say that once an RPG is airborne the approximate location of the RPG launcher is known so it's not like an armoured vehicle (or whatever is under assault) is going to sit there just fielding incoming RPG's all day (at least not from a single battery source). In other words, while it's nice to be able to take out more than one RPG, the first is definitely the most important. And it would be infinitely better to be able to take out the first very shortly and then wait another 5-10 years for Raytheon to come up with a better system.

     Why, other than corporate pressure, does the procurement of the two systems have to be mutually exclusive?

     Posted by FREEDOMPLEASE 09/14/2006 @ 11:24am | ignore this person

     Posted by freedomplease at 09/14/2006 @ 1:57pm

119. Frank... sorry for the delay, but I was away.

     1) I hate Hannity and I agree he is a total hack of an op-ed journalist. My brief experience with Corns writing tell me he is on the other side of the fence, not as bad as Hannity, but also a partisan op-ed guy. (again, this is based on my brief experience of him on this site... so I reserve the right to change my opinion of him as I become more familiar with his work)

     2) Yes, leakers of classified info should be prosecuted. If it is shown someone did so, then they should be in jail.

     to answer the question directly... yes, I think Plame was outed as an agent, but not as a covert agent.... not 100% on the legalities as I keep hearing conflicting reports.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 1:58pm

120. WHAT makes him a professional?

     he has a book out, for which he gets paid. You ain"t, B.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006

     Paris Hilton has a book out... for which she gets paid. Enough said.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 2:00pm

121. WHAT makes him a professional?

     he has a book out, for which he gets paid. You ain"t, B.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006

     Paris Hilton has a book out... for which she gets paid. Enough said.

     Posted by JOHN B 09/14/2006 @ 2:00pm

     My sincerest apologies to Johanne, but John...

     That shit was truly fucking funny. Thanks for the grin. :)

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 2:06pm

122. Gee, funny how things change, hm?

     I'd suggest that those accusing David of "keeping the story alive" are wrong - it is, after all, an ongoing legal investigation, with new information surfacing as late as recent days.

     But if you don't like that, you can always keep repeating "no, it isn't"...

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 2:23pm

123. B, paris Hilton had a ghost writer, apples and oranges, and really tedious.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 2:32pm

124. YES, NATHANHALE, I stick with that "pre-dates" thing, since it was Novak's column that inspired Chuck Schumer to call for a special prosecutor....not Judith Miller).... Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 1:44pm

     But Mask, Corn's thesis is that there was some manner of conspiracy in the White House to "fight back" against Joe Wilson's allegations in his NYT op-ed, and, in substantiation of that claim, points to the "outing" of Plame to multiple reporters.

     So, in this global struggle of good-versus-evil, moral-versus-immoral, which side does the Bush administration come down on when it is leaking to multiple reporters? And, why should it matter which "leakee" served as the catalyst for the investigation?

     Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 2:32pm

125. That shit was truly fucking funny. Thanks for the grin. :)

     Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006

     I do what I can. At least one of my attempts at humor worked.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 2:32pm

126. B, paris Hilton had a ghost writer, apples and oranges, and really tedious.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006

     Fine... then Sean Hannity wrote a book... which he gets paid for... yet he remains a political hack... far from a professional.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 2:41pm

127. Posted by NATHANHALE 09/14/2006 @ 2:32pm

     Let's look at the implications of that "conspiracy" to "fight back Joe Wilson by outing Valerie"....

     It means that Armitage, no Bush/Cheney fan, unwittingly and be sheer happenstance...did what Rove "planned" to "get back at Joe Wilson"....i.e. outed Valerie.

     Isn't that sort of like saying that "Lee Harvey, who actually liked Kennedy, accidentially discharged his Mannlicher-Carcano out the window of the Book Depository while cleaning it, but the real bullet came Howard Hunt shooting from the Grassy Knoll?"

     I don't think even RESE and PLUNGER would buy Wayne Madsen trying to sell them that!

     If NEW DAWN is correct, and NOW the Wilsons and Melanie Sloan (of CREW) are going after Armitage, I guess maybe they'll try to link him to the "conspiracy" now (whereas they gave him a pass just 2 weeks ago?!??!).

     To "save" the scandal (and their reps), poor ol' Richard probably going to be slowly turned into a "Rove flunky and neo-con Bush'bot"...despite the evidence to the contrary by those who are now HEAVILY invested in this thing turning up something.

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 2:42pm

128. If what Novak is saying is true, then Armitage quite intentionally put this story on the front page (or wherever Novak's columns go - I wouldn't know...)

     Let me say that I do not care if Armitage is anti-Bush/Cheney. If he outed Plame intentionally, that's a problem.

     And when Bush and his supporters ran with that info and tried to destroy the Wilsons politically, personally, and professionally, it was reprehensible, not to mention obvious.

     And since only Thrawn - faaaaar from a lefty - honestly responded to me (thank you, Thrawn), I'll post this again:

     Let me ask a different question, and one likely weighing most heavily on the minds of those farther left than me.

     Forget "crime".

     Do you personally believe that Bob Novak and Karl Rove are good and honest men with zero ill intentions towards Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in particular, or Democrats in general?

     Forget "crime".

     Do you believe that Karl Rove wishes the "other side" the very best in life, health, and happiness?

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 2:47pm

129. New Dawn,

     Karlikins is a lovely boy and would never do anything wrong....

     Signed Karl's Mom

     Posted by freedomplease at 09/14/2006 @ 2:50pm

130. Isn't that sort of like saying.... Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 2:42pm

     You and I both know it's nothing like saying that. If the Plame leak case falls solely in Armitage's lap, then why didn't the Fitzgerald investigation wrap up in the week after Novak testified to the Grand Jury? Why the need to call Libby and Rove to testify at all?

     Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 2:50pm

131. For the dim, like Mask:

     If I hated someone for making me look like a fool, and a third party (even unintentionally) disclosed something nasty about my opposition to me, is it beyond the realm of possibility that I might subsequently use that information to harass and impugn the integrity of my opponent?

     Did I have to have had a devious plan in place to do so? Nope. Just took advantage of the "newly" available information...

     And for the record, I have never argued that this was all part of a pre-planned conspiracy, but it's clear to anyone who's looked that the right-wing extremists have indeed mobilized in their entirety to discredit, defame, and destroy the Wilsons politically, professionally, and personally, ever since this flap began.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 2:54pm

132. Perhaps you could cite the page number of the book where Armitage is absolved of wrongdoing?

     Posted by TURK33 09/14/2006 @ 09:52am

     You mean read a book before commenting on it's contents...hahaha...I mean (hehe).

     ----------------------------------------

     "hey, maybe the teachers unions could buy it and make it manditory for every teacher to read in class?"

     Posted by JOHN MAASCH 09/14/2006 @ 10:52am

     Why? Scholastic won't make a study guide for this book?

     -------------------------------------------------

     LL:

     "I have always favored reinstating the draft as I believe all able males except genuine conciencious objectors should serve."

     Define "genuine" conciencious objectors.

     Is my objection genuine, if my logic differs from yours? (Let's ignore the males only part for now. I am really curious as to how you define the term you used.)

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/14/2006 @ 3:01pm

133. One thing I could never quite understand about the whole "Plame affair" is, how does it impugn Wilson's findings if his wife suggested he go to Niger...? Isn't that like saying that Dick Cheney is a sexual deviate because his wife writes lesbian porn...?

     Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 3:16pm

134. Posted by NATHANHALE 09/14/2006 @ 2:50pm |

     Why? Why didn't Fitzgerald just "wrap it up", after learning it was Armitage?

     Gee....I don't know....why did Ken Starr not just "wrap it up", when he figured out that "Whitewater" was going nowhere?

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 3:38pm

135. Earlier I made reference to the new ad against George Allen. It's put out by a veteran's group.

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 3:28pm

     inflammatory ads? and a "veteran's group"?...

     Hmmm....that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 3:40pm

136. Talk about "dim"

     "And for the record, I have never argued that this was all part of a pre-planned conspiracy, but it's clear to anyone who's looked that the right-wing extremists have indeed mobilized in their entirety to discredit, defame, and destroy the Wilsons politically, professionally, and personally, ever since this flap began."---Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006 @ 2:54pm

     It's not a "conspiracy", but they're "mobililzed in their entirety".

     Another fine, subtle "difference" from NEW DAWN

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 3:42pm

137. PONTIFICUS -

     Hanging on like grim death to what? Not talking about Rove here - just responding to your ridiculous questions like "how can you obstruct an investigation into a crime that never occurred?"

     And by the way, the Libby case IS before the court - in the form of an indictment. As far as dismissal goes, Libby has to move for it, not whenever the court feels like getting around to the issue.

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 3:57pm

138. LVL,

     Can we establish the groundrules of whether you think THIS Supreme Court decision is valid constitutionally.....given that virtually any Supreme Court decision that has been shown to you (by people here), you have claimed illegitimate based on your world view (and your whacky & selective interpretation of the Constitution).

     On another note, are you ever going to answer why the US Army wants to kill its recruits for at least five years longer than they need to to help out Raytheon?

     Posted by freedomplease at 09/14/2006 @ 3:59pm

139. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 3:12pm

     "Regarding Plame's status as covert or not, the fact remains that there is nothing to have precluded her from re-entering covert status at sometime in the future"

     The difference is that if she wasn't covert at the time, then to my knowledge it is not a crime, however immoral it might be.

     "save for the injustice that was foisted upon her and for which she is now seeking legal redress in civil court. Her outting cost her that opportunity and may very well have placed some prior contacts of hers in danger for their lives. We'll naver know."

     For the above mentioned reasons, that is why this now belongs in the cival courts, not criminal.

     "The agency thought it was important enough an issue to call for the investigation which they did."

     True, and the results of that investigation led to the indictment of Libby, but no criminal charges.

     "The principles involved were less than forthcoming. Fitzgerald has nothing to answer for. He's doing his job and quite well at that despite the efforts of the conspirators to cover their tracks."

     Great, another conspiracy theory.

     "All real Americans who value the work of our intelligence should want to see those who perpetrated this outting brought to justice. If you don't, than you really need to examine what your own motivation is in not seeking justice for Valerie and the valuable asset she once was to American Intelligence. I think we all know where you people are coming from. You're not fooling anyone here."

     Tell me Frank... where is the outcry to find out the leakers of intelligence gathering information? Two secret programs leaked.... yet I do not hear you calling for those leakers to be brought to justice... why is that?

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 4:03pm

140. Talk about "dim"

     "And for the record, I have never argued that this was all part of a pre-planned conspiracy, but it's clear to anyone who's looked that the right-wing extremists have indeed mobilized in their entirety to discredit, defame, and destroy the Wilsons politically, professionally, and personally, ever since this flap began."---Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006 @ 2:54pm

     It's not a "conspiracy", but they're "mobililzed in their entirety".

     Another fine, subtle "difference" from NEW DAWN

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 3:42pm

     "Mobilized in their entirety" "since this flap began" is not the same as a pre-existing "conspiracy", idiot.

     Nuance isn't exactly your forte, Mask. I'll excuse you for not seeing the difference.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 4:04pm

141. Gee....I don't know.... Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 3:38pm

     Is it that you don't know (as it relates to Fitzgerald's investigation), or is it that it's just so much easier to pull the old Mask trick of changing the subject?

     Posted by nathanhale at 09/14/2006 @ 4:14pm

142. How do you know there wasn't a conspiracy?

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 4:12pm

     NEW DAWN just told us it wasn't.

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 4:16pm

143. Posted by NATHANHALE 09/14/2006 @ 4:14pm

     Not changing the subject, NATHAN....just didn't blatently say:

     "Because Fitzgerald is an ambitious prosecutor, and bringing down Libby, Rove, possibly Cheney, maybe the whole Administration would be big ol' feather in his cap"

     Going out two weeks later and saying "Sorry, folks, nothing to it. It was Richard Armitage and he did it by accident"....doesn't get you your time in the spotlight.

     And Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and Investor's Business Daily all seem to agree on the fact that Fitzgerald has as much an "out of control" prosecutor as Ken Starr was back in the 90s.

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 4:20pm

144. How do you know there wasn't a conspiracy?

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 4:12pm

     NEW DAWN just told us it wasn't.

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 4:16pm

     No, I didn't. And you're fucking lying AGAIN.

     "I have never argued that this was all part of a pre-planned conspiracy,"

     "Mobilized in their entirety" "since this flap began" is not the same as a pre-existing "conspiracy", idiot."

     Not the same to me.

     Am I your new last word on the facts of a matter, Mask? If so, take this to the bank.

     You are a lying piece of shit.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 4:26pm

145. Two secret programs leaked.... yet I do not hear you calling for those leakers to be brought to justice... why is that?

     Posted by JOHN B 09/14/2006 @ 4:03pm

     The "two secret programs" are:

     1) A system of overseas CIA prisons that exist solely so that we can get away with torture for a while, the existence of which the government falsely denied for the better part of a year, and then admitted as part of an electoral strategy to dampen criticism of the Guantanamo prison.

     2) A domestic spying program which could only work if supported by a huge, pervasive, and permanent data mining capability, all executed in secret by the government and requiring the cooperation of all telecommunications companies, with absolutely horrendous long-term implications for privacy and identity protection.

     Any worthwhile conservative would oppose both of these. They're completely un-American. Junk like this is what leaking to the press was made for.

     Contrast this with the leak we don't like, where very high level officials played fast and loose with classified information for absolutely no other reason than to make a man who had stumbled onto on the administration's biggest lie look like a buffoon in the press.

     Posted by MyParadigm at 09/14/2006 @ 4:31pm

146. Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 3:44pm

     Umm...none of your links work.

     Try telling me what you actually think. All I get from your other references, is that you believe only religious objection to war is valid. Does this mean all athiests, for and against, must fight and die in wars started by peoples religious point of veiws. But, true believers don't have to die for the beliefs of the leaders they elect?

     Are non-believers expendable, or worthless, in your eyes?

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/14/2006 @ 4:35pm

147. Posted by NEW DAWN 09/14/2006 @ 4:26pm

     I'm sorry...so what you meant was "it was a conspiracy"....but not a "pre-planned or pre-existing conspiracy"?

     Please feel free to explain THIS

     Posted by Mask at 09/14/2006 @ 4:40pm

148. Liberty -

     I'll take a stab at some of Feldman's questions. Most are simple.

     If Fitzgerald knew by January 12, 2004 who the leaker was and that it wasn't Libby or Rove, why did he later call them to testify before the grand jury?

     To do a thorough investigation. One does not wrap up an investigation simply because one factor leads in one direction. There were other reporters besides Novak involved here. The crime is for disclosing the identity of a covert operative (and perhaps Fitzgerald was also investigating revealing classified information too), not being merely the first one to do so. Rove disclosed the information to Novak as well as Armitage. Fitzgerald is certainly entitled to probe into the circumstances of Rove's communication with Novak. Rove also spoke to Cooper before Novak's story. Libby not only spoke to Cooper, he spoke to Judy Miller WEEKS before Armitage spoke to Novak. The investigation does not begin and end with Novak.

     If Fitzgerald knew by January 12, 2004 who the leaker was and knew it wasn't Libby, why in August of 2004 did he represent to the Court that Miller's testimony was "essential to determine whether or not Lewis Libby... has committed crimes involving the improper disclosure of national defense information or perjury"?

     Again, Libby was speaking with Miller weeks before Armitage spoke with Novak.

     If Fitzgerald has known since January 12, 2004 of the name of the leaker, why is he still protecting him, and why is he treating the leaker's (that is, Armitage's) source ... as an impartial witness to the events?

     Good question. Fitzgerald likely has a reason. My guess is that Fitzgerald concluded very early on that Grossman did not speak with reporters (it does not appear that he did); his communications appear to be with people who had clearance - thus, he did not take any overt action in furtherance of the alleged cirme and did not have any intent.

     Finally (and I hope to report more fully on this soon) what role, exactly, did former Deputy Attorney General Comey, who set up this extra-statutory (and I think unconstitutional) appointment of his friend Patrick Fitzgerald, play in steering Fitzgerald toward the mistaken notion that Libby was lying, not Wilson or the CIA?

     None. Libby's statments to the grand jury and to investigators stand on their own. Whether Wilson told the truth in his NYT op-ed is immaterial. It is not an either or situation.

     How hard did his office work to ascertain the truth of the essential elements of the referral--that Plame was covert and that there had been harm to national security in the disclosure of her name--when the prosecutor fudged those issues in the indictment and at the press conference announcing it and has since backed off of those claims at all?

     This question has many mischaracterizations. Reading into Fitzgerald's press conference the notion that he "backed off" the claim that Plame was covert is misguided. That press conference concerned Libby's charges. Plame's exact status is not an element to those charges. Like any prosecutor, he kept his public statement confined to the four corners of the indictment. As far as vetting Plame's status before the investigation, I assume that was done. Feldman can raise no facts showing it was not. In filings before the court, Fitzgerald DID make that allegation and I trust he would not do so unless he had the evidence to back it up. Otherwise he is violating several ethical rules, AND because he put the allegation in his own affidavit, he would be setting himself up for perjury if he knowingly put fasle facts within it. I do not see Fitzgerald risking his whole career for this case to be a possibility.

     Did the statement of Congressman Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed in the New York Times, to the effect that the Plame case was a set up by an anti-Administration clique in the CIA finally persuade Fitzgerald that he's been badly misled once again into indicting an innocent man?

     That's a big leap considering Libby has not been aquitted (or convicted) yet. And what does he mean by "misled again?" When was the first time he was so misled? In the end, I am sure that Fitzgerald does not take into account the opinions of politicians - even if they are suggesting a conspiracy. If this was all a set-up and there was never any crime there, why did Libby not tell the truth?

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 4:42pm

149. John B.

     You do know that conspiracy in certain cases is a crime. When Frank talks about conspirators, it does not have to mean UFO freaks and JFK addicts.

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 4:45pm

150. "Somehow, I feel the case is that actually the Nation Mag. and its website and blog actually stand in diametric opposition to our national intrest and the best intrest of the world! It would rather squander its resourses denegrating our nations leaders, political parties, and the U.S.A. to serve its own divergent intrests and profit motivations!"

     oh, yeah. clearly. couldn't agree more. brilliant.

     i mean, i even heard that the nation is going to move towards a glossy format, with perfume inserts, and half naked torsos on the cover. cuz, obviously, that would be in the best interests of the country. clearly, this country needs more journals that, first of all, support the president no matter what. and second of all, we need americans to focus more on sex and fashion, get them back in line with the national self-interest. whatever we do, though, we must make sure that we never inform americans of anything the bush administration has done wrong. distract them. that will make this country better.

     bravo liberty! you are a certifiable genius!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 4:54pm

151. You do know that conspiracy in certain cases is a crime. When Frank talks about conspirators, it does not have to mean UFO freaks and JFK addicts.

     Posted by HMAN23 09/14/2006

     I did not mean to imply that Frank was a UFO/JFK freak. But to say they were "conspirators" when that has not been shown to be the case is ... a conspiracy theory.

     Posted by John B at 09/14/2006 @ 4:56pm

152. LVL,

     Novak reported. He doesn't have access to government classified documents. If he's given access or given government documents the crime has been committed.

     Posted by freedomplease at 09/14/2006 @ 5:02pm

153. rio- iran wants to enrich uranium for nuclear power purposes. outside of the US, nuclear is much more common. France for example uses alot of it. Iran's economy is shit. so they want to sell the oil and use as much nucelar as possible. with oil what it is now, it's a good plan. If they want a nuclear weapon, which they very well may, they probably want it to keep us from invading them, which we have been insisting is "on the table" for going on two years now. My sense is there is no playing chicken with iran. They've made their stand and simply don't care what we say or think. I wish every country in the middle east was like them in this regard.

     and hezbollah isn't really a terrorist organization. not like these nutballs out in Iraq with the insignias and torturing people and stuff. they arne't sweet nice guys but they arne't like crazy bandit people.

     meanwhile, this has nothing to do with the topic. I don't think anyone owes rove or libby an apology, they're lies on the stand preclude them from getting any of that, but they are innocent. if armatige hadn't opened his mouth no one would know about this stuff. that rove and libby felt she was "fair game" because she was out there is understandable. Rove, in particular i think had no clue. he's a campaign guy. he's not a policy guy. but the lesson is you play with fire you get burned. if rove had said "wait a minute bob novak, that's foul to talk about the guys wife" maybe they could have figured out what they were setting themselves up for. Bob Novak also wins an award for being especially stupid. If you saw the 60 minutes thing, he actually outed brewster jennings on the air. for what reason i don't know. yu'd think at that point he'd realize he'd stumbled into an "area".

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/14/2006 @ 5:10pm

154. I'm sorry...so what you meant was "it was a conspiracy"....but not a "pre-planned or pre-existing conspiracy"?

     Please feel free to explain THIS

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 4:40pm

     Please find where I claimed "it was a conspiracy", you lying fucking piece of shit.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/14/2006 @ 5:16pm

155. the whole thing could have been avoided if Bush had had some actual evidence instead of aluminum tubes and mobile bio weapons labs that turned out to be dead ends. there would have been no joe wilson column at all if Bush had shown us some pictures of saddam at an al queda training camp. or video of WMD being lowered in to a bunker in TIKRIT.

     wilsons original charge, that the bush admin was "twisting" intelligence toi make the case for war was dead on. how else would you explain this sentence "the british government has learned that iraq has sought significant quanities of uranium from Africa"?

     the british government? what about OUR government? "sought" did they GET any? what were the "significant quantities"? africa? what country?

     it is the most parced worked over sentence in history.

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/14/2006 @ 5:19pm

156. Liberty -

     You'd have to ask Fitzgerald why he did not indict Armitage. Probably based on the difficulty in establishing the requisite intent. As you all like to point out, nobody else was indicted either, so maybe this element was the major hurdle througout. As for Libby, perhaps if he would have told the truth, he would not have been indicted. Since Armitage was not indicted for obstruction or perjury, I assume Fitzgerald thought he was forthright and honest in his testimony.

     As for your previous post, I think I did address the fundamental question. The problem is that Feldman's questions are loaded. Libby and Rove were not the leaker? Like I said, simply b/c Armitage spoke first to Novak doesn't abosolve Libby or Rove talking to others before Novak's column was printed.

     Posted by Hman23 at 09/14/2006 @ 5:40pm

157. the bushies live in "fantasy land". they have ZERO credibility.

     anyone looking to debate with them is screwed....

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 5:43pm

158. Frank, I like that commercial very much, it doesn't pull any punches. if the dems had run attack ads like that, John Kerry would be president.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 6:05pm

159. "Just as Bush did not drive up the price of oil yet got most of the blame, he is not responsible for driving down the prices yet will not get much if any credit. Gets the blame and none of the credit."

     liberty, this is nonsense. just read it again. he has nothing to do with up or down, according to you, yet you bitch that he doesn't get credit for down. pure nonsense.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 6:10pm

160. "if the dems had run attack ads like that, John Kerry would be president."

     and therein lies a crucial difference between dems and repubs. dems just aren't as repugnant.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 6:10pm

161. LL,

     I will take your non-response as an affirmative, unless you care to clarify.

     BTW, none of your links work. Apparently, you have signed up for a service that links don't work to nonsubscribers.

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/14/2006 @ 6:48pm

162. Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006 @ 6:10pm

     In principle, I agree. Though, I wonder if this isn't their problem sometimes.

     Sometimes, you have to hit the bully back.

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/14/2006 @ 6:51pm

163. Four more soldies killed today and one last night. 2,678. At this rate we'll unfortunately hit the 3000 mark by election day. But what the hell, it's just a number, right?

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 4:10pm

     I think it's a very important number to Bush. It's my opinion that one of his ambitions is to kill more Americans than Osama Bin Laden.

     Posted by fromredbird at 09/14/2006 @ 6:56pm

164. fine post Lester. it should read "parsed"

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 7:08pm

165. Two secret programs leaked.... yet I do not hear you calling for those leakers to be brought to justice... why is that?

     Posted by JOHN B 09/14/2006 @ 4:03pm

     Those two programs you are talking about are violations of American law by the US Government. "Exposing" something legal would be rather pointless, wouldn't it?

     If you find something wrong with exposing that you would also have to find something wrong with an American reporting a rape in progress to the police.

     Valerie Plame wasn't doing anything illegeal. She was doing her job. It was a job of great importance to the American people, nuclear weapons proliferation. Our highest officials are expected to support her in that, not ruin her work by exposing her, her related cover organizations, and endangering the lives of her sources.

     What's wrong? Do you have some kind of paranoia that too much thought will wear out your brain?

     Posted by fromredbird at 09/14/2006 @ 7:09pm

166. you really have to wonder why Bush has this hard on for torture. he can't really protect those who broke the law in the past, as we don't allow retroactive laws. I think it's a smoke screen to cover other shit he's trying to sneak under the radar. any other ideas on this one?

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 7:10pm

167. "Thank God for McCain, Warner, Graham, and Powell. The men understand the stakes."

     and that's stating the obvious. it's not like their enlightened or anything. it's common sense.

     but i do commend them for breaking with the administration.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 7:17pm

168. bush: "i'm going to do everything i can to protect the american people"

     reporter: "but what if what you're doing is illegal, under domestic and international law?"

     bush: "look, i'm not at liberty to discuss the details of how we protect americans"

     reporter: "i'm not asking for details, i asked whether the program is legal"

     bush: "look, you asked me about your family, you want protection. i will protect your family."

     reporter: "oh, never mind. it's impossible having a conversation with you."

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 7:24pm

169. every time bush opens his mouth, i cringe. i feel sorry for him. he's an absolute embarrassment.

     and to every conservative here who doesn't have the courage to criticize him:

     you're even worse!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 7:25pm

170. snow is laughable, a total joke. either that, or he has the worst job in the country. i'd rather shovel shit than spew lies all day, and pretend to be serious.

     i love when bush says things like,"the concept i have just outlined for you." yeah, like bush really "outlines" anything in his speech. and i don't think he grasps the meaning of the word, "concept."

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 8:20pm

171. for him to "outline" something would mean saying it exists. that's it.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 8:21pm

172. Not sure why YOU're defending it, WILL. Again, you said Armitage should be indicted, same as Rove and Libby.

     Yet again, Mr Corn is trying to DEFEND Armitage here.

     Posted by MASK 09/14/2006 @ 09:32am

     sorry dummy. I've never said armitage should be indicted.

     grow a brain... come back and make it interesting for me

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 8:32pm

173. "This a little off topic, but I heard a news broadcast this morning early that described a drone flying over a group of 180-190 Taliban officials standing at a funeral."

     Chip: did your drone check personal identification to make sure that each and every one at the funeral was "Taliban". Did the Taliban participate in activities, anywhere, anytime which could be construed as "terrorism"?

     If your answers to the above is no, then, what the hell is your point?

     Posted by doumer at 09/14/2006 @ 8:37pm

174. 1. President's don't really affect the price of oil and gasoline up or down.

     Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 8:31pm

     Sure they do luvvy.

     Say for instance a president invaded a few Muslim countries, planted our army down on top of the world's second largest oil reserve in the world. Proceeded to pump less oil from that country then before it was invaded, and then proceeded to threaten other oil producing nations in the region and fired up a lot of terrorist activity and civil war...

     The first is just supply and demand issue: less supply more demand, higher prices.

     The second is a fear issue: the oil markets respond to fear because they are nothing more than people buying and selling oil. If they are afraid that the oil might not be there because of civil wars or terrorism threatening the supply... the price goes up.

     So to sum up, I gave you examples of two ways that a president can affect the price of oil.

     And lucky us... we have that president...in office... right now

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 8:48pm

175. Davis said that Democrats and others who undersestimate the intelligence of George Bush do so at their own peril.

     Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 8:35pm

     yes.. the actions of this administration are a wonderful example of chimpy's intelligence.

     (if only we could force feed him some)

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 8:50pm

176. "We need the will for it, too, the same will that enabled that sick son-of-a-bitch to slice, SLICE not cut the head off of Nick Berg. You ever see that film? THATS what we're up against. Get Real"

     Chip

     Posted by CHIP THORNTON 09/14/2006 @ 10:13am

     Naw Chip. I don't get off watching snuff films. Do you?

     In your mind, you will uphold the righteousness of beating some poor schmuck to death in Abu Graib...one kick at a time! Think about it. You are atypical of ethically and morally challenged americans. Only american deaths count..right? Get real dude.

     Posted by doumer at 09/14/2006 @ 9:11pm

177. "2. Neither the media nor especially the liberals who charged that Bush drove prices up are now willing then to give him credit for them coming down. I just am pointing out that they can't have it both ways."

     Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006

     LL: Can you tell me why "they can't have it both ways"? When and if you do, I will tell you why you're wrong.

     Posted by doumer at 09/14/2006 @ 9:26pm

178. "President's don't really affect the price of oil and gasoline up or down."

     oh, brother. whoever said this is living on pluto, which by the way isn't even part of our solar system anymore.

     the president doesn't affect the price of oil? the thought just brings a smile to my face....

     man, let's say that again, "the president doesn't affect the price of oil"

     oh god. that's painful.

     if that were true, then why do other presidents in other countries do so?

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 9:32pm

179. You're talking to someone who is saying that a major conflagration at the site of oil production has no effect on the price of oil.

     There's only one unanswered question- what's the point of talking to someone who would say something so profoundly stupid?

     Posted by fromredbird at 09/14/2006 @ 10:06pm

180. the undisputed king of oil production, the president of the largest oil consuming nation on planet earth, with unlimited military power and divinely ordained constitutional strength, has no affect on the price of oil!

     yeah!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 10:12pm

181. Sent to the head of the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Intelligence by a senior aide to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the letter said an August 23 committee report contained serious distortions of IAEA findings on Iran's activity.

     It said the report falsely described Iran to have enriched uranium at its pilot centrifuge plant to weapons-grade level in April, whereas IAEA inspectors had made clear Iran had enriched only to a low level usable for nuclear power reactor fuel.

     "Furthermore, the IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA opted to remove a senior safeguards inspector for supposedly concluding the purpose of Iran's program was to build weapons, it said.

     The letter said the congressional report contained "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion" that the inspector was dumped for having not adhered to an alleged IAEA policy barring its "officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.

     Diplomats say the inspector remains IAEA Iran section head.

     "This (committee report) is deja vu of the pre-Iraq war period where the facts are being maligned and attempts are being made to ruin the integrity of IAEA inspectors," said a Western diplomat familiar with the agency and IAEA-U.S. relations.

     http://tinyurl.com/l4ll4

     Question: how many representatives from the Democratic Party signed off on these baldfaced lies whose only purpose is to promote more homicide?

     Posted by fromredbird at 09/14/2006 @ 10:31pm

182. "I wish that our kids would stop joining the service until this president is replaced. It's really a reckless decision"

     well no shit! why do you think they stifle debate? why do you think rumsfeld and cheney state that people who question their wisdom are "appeasers" on the level of nazis and al qaeda?

     olbermann is exactly right. he's saying what all of us are thinking. bush, cheney and rumsfeld are arrogant crooks, they all deserve to be jailed. and prosecuted.

     impeachment? that's about the minimum we should go for. if more people were as educated as the nation readers, this administration would be in jail.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 10:44pm

183. liberty, it looks more like you wish to have it both ways. there are however some scenarios where Bush influences oil prices. the saber rattling vs Iran is such an instance. the invasion and war in Iraq has influenced oil prices. when Bush announces diplomatic overtures, that too has an influence on oil FUTURES. and there's the rub. prices are controlled by buying and selling, by speculation. that's what's happening with house prices too, they've gone down and may drag the entire economy down with them. and no Bush doesn't have any power there.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 10:48pm

184. I think it's phony to blamer liberals for the criticism Bush received when gas was rising. that criticism came from ALL over the political spectrum. and that's where our right wing posters are so dishonest, and the so-called pres is dishonest too. a great deal of ALL criticism of Bush comes from the right, as well as the left. you will see that increase, as the repubs MUST find some daylight between themselves and the failed president.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/14/2006 @ 10:51pm

185. " and no Bush doesn't have any power there."

     are you totally insane? if bush truly had no power to affect the price of gasoline, then why would the united states have intimate relations with the saudis? why would we care to station more military presence in the region than any other country? energy policy is the very essence of the american economy, i hate to admit it.

     to suggest that bush has no affect on gas prices, is akin to suggesting that temperature has no affect on hurricanes.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 10:58pm

186. "I think that everyone on this thread should stand up and applaud McCain for standing up for our troops, especially now. Think of how it must feel for a young kid of say 20 years old over in Iraq or Afghanistan, hearing that his Commander In Chief wants to water down the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Imagine then what it does to his moral, realizing that his CIC is not interested in what happens to him if he captured. Then there's John McCain. I'm proud as hell of him tonight. I hope he doesn't back down or compromise. I don't think he will. I think that any military leader current or retired should speak out in support of the troops. Shame on them if they don't stand up now. This is a defining moment in the morality of our nation. This one's a no-brainer."

     now that you put it that way, i'll stand with you.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 10:59pm

187. No wonder Americans have had enough.

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 11:00pm

     i hope you're correct on that one bro

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 11:02pm

188. we know what water boarding is.

     if we are using water boarding, we are betraying core american values.

     all americans should oppose the betrayal of any american value.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:05pm

189. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 11:04pm

     I'm doing great frank.

     nobody can vote for bush again. Have you ever asked your sister how she wil vote this midterm?

     her local congress person isn't bush. yet he or she does rubber stamp the bush agenda

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 11:08pm

190. maasch says, "they are head choppers"

     bin laden says, "they are water boarders"

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:09pm

191. Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006 @ 11:09pm

     Maasch is a kook

     bin laden is an evangelic conservative

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 11:11pm

192. hmmmmm......

     texas.....saudi arabia? now why would these people have an interest in each other? hmmm.....

     why would a texas oilman have any interest in the middle east? hmmmm.......

     why would an american president be concerned about oil, when his citizens drive more than any other country on the planet? hmmmm........

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:12pm

193. do you think that bush might be concerned about the price of oil? even if he wasn't too concerned about how much americans were paying for it?

     i mean, seriously folks, do you actually think bush CARES about how much we pay for oil? even when, like, you know, all his buddies are, like, doing really really really fine? i mean, like, REALLY FINE?

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:14pm

194. Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 11:12pm

     what's amazed me coming from some of the hamsters is that when the going got tough, they couldn't dump bush fast enough from any and all things conservative.

     and that's the dodge(or the lie they tell themselves) . If they can't make the connection that the hamster congress is and has been nothing more than an appendage of the bush administration, they will still vote republican.

     even though doing so means they are still supporting bush

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 11:18pm

195. "Yeah, he actually had the nerve to get in front of a microphone, (his first mistake), the other day and say he was doing something in finding ways to get us off oil dependency."

     am i just paying attention to much or did this seem like the biggest bald faced lie in the history of lie telling? i mean, did anyone else fall of their chair when they heard him utter this totally ridiculously outrageous bull shit fucking lie?

     ok, bush, step down, bro. you SUCK dude!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:20pm

196. speaking of bed time.... night everybody

     Posted by Will C. at 09/14/2006 @ 11:20pm

197. "The Republican donor who helped bankroll the Swift Boat attacks on Democratic Sen. John Kerry's war record has given $5 million to a new group targeting Democratic candidates."

     this could very well read: "former asshole decides to be an asshole again"

     Posted by darladoon at 09/14/2006 @ 11:45pm

198. If we've learned anything about republicans over the past few years, it's that they don't know what the hell to do with power. They cannot govern even when all the cards are stacked in their favor. These are not good times to be a republican. They have nothing to show of six years of rule except for tax cuts for the super wealthy and a couple of wingnut Supreme Court justices. No wonder Americans have had enough.

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 11:00pm

     I'll never forget that after they got control of Congress with the "Contract With America" subterfuge the first thing they did was start running around the halls of Congress excitedly saying that they were going to legalize hunting in National Parks. They're hardwired for antisocial stupidity. Is it finally beginning to sink in with the electorate? It's the same A-holes as last time, just different faces.

     Posted by fromredbird at 09/15/2006 @ 01:06am

199. Johanne writes:

     "[Liberty], it looks more like you wish to have it both ways. there are however some scenarios where Bush influences oil prices. the saber rattling vs Iran is such an instance. the invasion and war in Iraq has influenced oil prices. when Bush announces diplomatic overtures, that too has an influence on oil FUTURES. and there's the rub. prices are controlled by buying and selling, by speculation. that's what's happening with house prices too, they've gone down and may drag the entire economy down with them. and no Bush doesn't have any power there."

     And Darla replies:

     " and no Bush doesn't have any power there."

     "are you totally insane? if bush truly had no power to affect the price of gasoline, then why would the united states have intimate relations with the saudis? why would we care to station more military presence in the region than any other country? energy policy is the very essence of the american economy, i hate to admit it. to suggest that bush has no affect on gas prices, is akin to suggesting that temperature has no affect on hurricanes.

     Darla -

     Can you, like, totally read?

     Johannes was saying Bush has no effect on "house prices" (not oil) dragging the economy down, and you knee-jerk again and ask him if he's insane. You realize Johannes is not right-wing, right? I'd even venture to guess that he put that on record before some wacko winger jumped down his neck accusing him of saying such a thing...

     Darla, do you even care anymore who you jump on? You seem to jump on your fellow liberals a lot without even reading what they wrote.

     I find that habit really annoying, and would guess that I'm not alone in that...

     Just an observation.

     Jesus, people, both sides, pay attention to what someone says before you dispute what you imagine they said.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 02:28am

200. I was sure you would Darla. I'm interested in hearing what some of our adversaries have to say on the subject.

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006 @ 11:02pm

     Alas, Frank, when that decorated and brave war hero was vilified and treated by his party like his party is treating the rest of the world right now, and he crawled back to them and stood beside the very men who shit on him with a smile on his face, I lost all of my respect for him.

     That makes me very sad, but it's so.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 02:31am

201. we know what water boarding is.

     if we are using water boarding, we are betraying core american values.

     all americans should oppose the betrayal of any american value.

     Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006 @ 11:05pm

     And then, you turn around and say something that I agree with with every ounce of my soul...

     You're quite the conundrum.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 02:32am

202. A decent time-line from Robert Parry:

     Armitage Myth

     Beyond the specific evidence of a White House campaign to out covert CIA officer Valerie Plame and the broader Republican hostility toward anyone who gets in Bush's way, there is also the notion that Armitage, long considered a tough team player, was an independent soul who would never help the administration discredit a troublesome critic.

     Though Armitage may not have been one of Bush's intimates nor a leading enthusiast for invading Iraq in 2003, the Washington press corps is exaggerating both Armitage's independence and his anti-war credentials.

     Virtually forgotten in all the news coverage was the fact that in 1998, Armitage was one of the 18 signatories to a seminal letter from the neoconservative Project for the New American Century urging President Bill Clinton to oust Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary.

     Armitage joined a host of neoconservative icons, such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Many of the signers, including Donald Rumsfeld, would become architects of Bush's Iraq War policy five years later.

     There is also evidence that Armitage was part of a classic Washington scheme to slip Plame's identity into the newspapers, albeit with plenty of deniability for all involved.

     The evidence about Armitage's role in leaking Plame's identity - and thus destroying her CIA career as an undercover counter-proliferation operative - now includes Novak's account of their July 8, 2003, interview as Novak described it in his Sept. 14, 2006, column, entitled "Armitage's Leak."

     Toward the end of the hour-long meeting, Novak wrote, he asked Armitage, the then-Deputy Secretary of State, why former Ambassador Wilson, had been sent on the trip to Africa. (Novak doesn't say whether he was one of the journalists who had been urged by the White House to pursue that line of questioning.)

     Novak wrote that Armitage "told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA's Counter-proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband's mission. As for his current implication that he [Armitage] never expected this to be published, he noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson's role fit the style of the old Evans-Novak column - implying to me that it continued reporting Washington inside information."

     In other words, Novak acknowledges two significant points: that he asked why Ambassador Wilson was chosen and that Armitage knew that Plame held a sensitive CIA position, yet still wanted her exposed.

     Deniable Leak

     What is not clear from Novak's account is whether anyone in the administration planted the idea of asking about Wilson's trip in Novak's head, knowing that the Plame information had been distributed sufficiently at senior levels of the administration that it likely would be divulged by someone.

     Rather than Broder's claim that this idea of an orchestrated leak is some kind of "conspiracy theory," it actually is a fairly common Washington technique for getting out damaging information about an adversary, spreading the news around the government and then urging reporters to ask about it.

     Plus, there is solid evidence that the White House conducted just such an operation.

     A month before Wilson's Iraq-Niger Op-Ed article appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney already was anticipating possible trouble from the former ambassador whose trip to Africa had helped disprove the bogus claims that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.

     So, Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby requested a report on Wilson from Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, a neoconservative ally. In violation of the strict rules against jeopardizing the covert identity of CIA officers, Grossman's report, dated June 10, 2003, tossed in a reference to "Valerie Plame" as Wilson's wife.

     CIA Director George Tenet also divulged to Cheney that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had a hand in arranging Wilson's trip to Niger - information that Cheney then passed on to Libby in a conversation on June 12, 2003, according to Libby's notes as described by lawyers in the case. [NYT, Oct. 25, 2005]

     Those two facts - Plame's work for the CIA and her minor role in Wilson's Niger trip (which was approved and arranged at higher levels of the CIA) - were transformed into attack points against Wilson, to suggest nepotism and to question Wilson's manhood.

     On June 23, 2003, still two weeks before Wilson's article, Libby briefed New York Times reporter Judith Miller about Wilson and, according to a later retrospective by the Times, may then have passed on the tip that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

     The anti-Wilson campaign gained new urgency when the ex-ambassador penned his Op-Ed article for the New York Times on July 6, 2003.

     As Cheney read Wilson's article, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," the Vice President scribbled down questions he wanted pursued. "Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?" Cheney wrote. "Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

     Though Cheney did not write down Plame's name, his questions indicated that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her husband's assignment to check out the Niger reports. [Cheney's notations were disclosed in a May 12, 2006, court filing by special prosecutor Fitzgerald.]

     On that morning of July 6, 2003, Wilson appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" to elaborate on the Niger dispute. Later that day, Armitage arranged for a copy of Grossman's memo to be sent to Air Force One, where Secretary of State Colin Powell was accompanying President Bush and other senior officials on a state trip to Africa.

     On July 8, 2003, two days after Wilson's article, Libby gave Judith Miller more details about the Wilsons. Cheney's chief of staff said Wilson's wife worked at a CIA unit responsible for weapons intelligence and non-proliferation. It was in the context of that interview, that Miller wrote down the words "Valerie Flame," an apparent misspelling of Mrs. Wilson's maiden name. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

     On that same day, Novak elicited the information from Armitage about the role of Wilson's wife in arranging the Niger trip.

     Planted Question

     Meanwhile, Time magazine correspondent John Dickerson, who was on the presidential trip to Africa, was getting prodded by other administration officials to ask about the seemingly insignificant question of who had been involved in arranging Wilson's trip.

     On July 11, 2003, as Bush was finishing a meeting with the president of Uganda, Dickerson said he was chatting with a "senior administration official" who was tearing down Wilson and disparaging Wilson's Niger investigation. The message to Dickerson was that "some low-level person at the CIA was responsible for the mission" and that Dickerson "should go ask the CIA who sent Wilson."

     Later, Dickerson discussed Wilson with a second "senior administration official" and got the same advice: "This official also pointed out a few times that Wilson had been sent by a low-level CIA employee and encouraged me to follow that angle," Dickerson recalled.

     "At the end of the two conversations I wrote down in my notebook: 'look who sent.' … What struck me was how hard both officials were working to knock down Wilson." [See Dickerson's article, "Where's My Subpoena?" for Slate, Feb. 7, 2006]

     Back in Washington on July 11, 2003, Dickerson's Time colleague, Matthew Cooper, was getting a similar earful from Bush's political adviser Rove, who tried to steer Cooper away from Wilson's critical statements about the "twisted" Niger intelligence.

     Rove added that the Niger trip was authorized by "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency [CIA] on WMD issues," according to Cooper's notes of the interview. [See Newsweek, July 18, 2005, issue]

     Cooper later got the information about Wilson's wife confirmed by Cheney's chief of staff Libby, who had already been peddling the information to Miller.

     On July 12, 2003, in a telephone conversation, Miller and Libby returned to the Wilson topic. Miller's notes contain a reference to a "Victoria Wilson," another misspelled reference to Wilson's wife. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

     Two days later, on July 14, 2003, Novak - having gotten confirmation about Plame's identity from Karl Rove - published a column, citing two administration sources outing Plame as a CIA officer and portraying Wilson's Niger trip as a case of nepotism.

     But the White House counterattack against Wilson had only just begun. On July 20, 2003, NBC's correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Wilson that "senior White House sources" had called her to stress "the real story here is not the 16 words [from Bush's State of the Union speech about the Niger suspicions] but Wilson and his wife."

     The next day, Wilson said he was told by MSNBC's Chris Matthews that "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says and I quote, 'Wilson's wife is fair game.'"

     "Given to Me"

     When Newsday spoke with Novak - before he decided to clam up - the columnist said he had been approached by administration sources with the information about Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Novak said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." [Newsday, July 22, 2003]

     More than three years later, in his Sept. 14, 2006, column, Novak is reiterating that early claim, indicating that Armitage was one of those who pushed Plame's identity. But also note Novak's use of the plural in referring to the administration officials who gave him the Plame information: "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name."

     Novak's comment and the wealth of other evidence suggests that he was, indeed, just one cog in a broader campaign to get Plame's name into the press. It wasn't a case of some tidbit casually mentioned by "gossip" Armitage and then reluctantly confirmed by "poor" Karl Rove, which is the current "conventional wisdom" of Washington.

     Novak's contemporaneous comment to Newsday fits with the pattern of facts that is now established about the administration's organized leak of Plame's name, as well as with a common-sense understanding of how this White House operates when Bush faces criticism.

     In a court filing - after indicting Libby on five counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice - special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said his investigation had uncovered government documents that "could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson" because of his criticism of the administration's handling of the Iraq-Niger allegations.

     Without doubt - based simply on the public record - the evidence clearly supports Fitzgerald's conclusion.

     Beyond the Plame leak, the White House also oversaw a public-relations strategy to denigrate Wilson. The Republican National Committee put out talking points ridiculing Wilson, and the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading claims about his honesty in a WMD report.

     Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay - and for reporting accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims - the Bush administration and its many media allies sought instead to smear the former ambassador.

     The Republican National Committee even posted an article entitled "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements," which itself used glaring inaccuracies and misstatements to discredit Wilson. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Novak Recycles Gannon on 'Plame-gate.'"]

     Meanwhile, with her undercover work and her career in ruins, Plame quit the CIA. She and her husband have since filed a lawsuit against some of the administration officials implicated in the leak.

     Yet, David Broder and many other Washington journalists either still don't get it - how the administration set out to destroy this couple and make them an example for other potential critics - or perhaps the pundits are as willfully obtuse as the corrupt prison warden in "Shawshank Redemption."

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/15/2006 @ 07:40am

203. Do you neo-cons feel safer with Plame NOT doing wmd proliferation research? Is the country better off now? Are we united behind our Dear Leader?

     do you feel proud to be Americans that do not support the troops?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/15/2006 @ 07:44am

204. thank you, New Dawn. since I have Darla on ignore, too much verbiage in the service of too little thought, I missed that broadside.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/15/2006 @ 08:09am

205. BTW, I heard somewhere about Mr Corn having a new book out....any chance he will mention whether that's true or not in his next post?

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 09:01am

206. i just misread it, my apologies.

     i thought he said oil prices.

     don't insult me for not being able to read every single line of every single thread.

     we all do it...

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 10:41am

207. Posted by DARLADOON 09/15/2006 @ 10:41am

     NEW DAWN snottiness is nothing "new", DD

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 11:10am

208. Still running your mouth, liar?

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 11:40am

209. i just misread it, my apologies.

     i thought he said oil prices.

     don't insult me for not being able to read every single line of every single thread.

     we all do it...

     Posted by DARLADOON 09/15/2006 @ 10:41am

     Darla -

     With all due respect, ma'am, no one said anything about reading every line of every thread.

     But reading every line of the posts you respond to with insults shouldn't be too much to ask.

     At least you had the integrity to acknowledge it and apologize. I respect you for that.

     Unlike others...

     For instance, the liar Mask has the unmitigated gall to lie for three days, then offer no real acknowledgment or apology, even when he hypocritically dares say things to others like:

     "Thanks for your "admission" of error, FRANK ("Whatever. It is not important"). Takes a real gentleman to off-handedly and obtusely admit he was wrong!"

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 11:48am

210. Posted by NEW DAWN 09/15/2006 @ 11:48am

     Figured out the "difference" yet between a "pre-existing conspiracy" and a plain ol' ordinary conspiracy, yet?

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 12:26pm

211. I said:

     "Mobilized in their entirety... since this flap began" is not the same as a pre-existing "conspiracy", idiot.

     Nuance isn't exactly your forte, Mask. I'll excuse you for not seeing the difference."

     Have you yet figured out, Mask, what "honesty", "truth", "dignity", or "shame" mean?

     Your disingenuousness has led me to believe that there is no other way to deal with you, liar, than to include the following disclaimer at the beginning of my responses to you:

     You want your point answered, the one you posed then tried to put in my mouth. I get it. You lied your ass off, repeatedly creatively edited my words, and played your juvenile game. I see that, as do we all. I called you on it, and now everyone knows you're a lying little punk who comes here to put words in people's mouths, stir shit, derail discussions in favor of arguments for fun, then play dumb and innocent as a new-born babe. We got it. We all got it. You're a liar and a patently dishonest debating partner. We understand.

     So, here's the answer to your question.

     Main Entry: con·spire Pronunciation: k&n-'spI(-&)r Function: verb Inflected Form(s): con·spired; con·spir·ing 1 a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : SCHEME 2 : to act in harmony toward a common end

     Did the Bush administration have a "pre-existing" conspiracy, meaning one planned in advance of the leak of Plame's name (by whomever) in place to discredit the Wilsons?

     I don't know, never claimed to, and neither do you. I even argued against such a thing myself, but you choose to continue playing games and ignore that I said as much.

     And now, my question for you (not that I expect any semblance of honesty, but I'm happy to help you show, yet again, that you are a patently dishonest debating partner and a liar).

     Have the Bush administration and its familiars jump on the bandwagon together, at any point in time, in a concerted effort to defame, deride, dismiss, vilify, and damage Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame professionally, personally, and politically?

     And is that not then, by definition as outlined above, a conspiracy, but not a pre-existing one?

     Maybe you aren't playing dumb after all, Mask. Maybe you really are simply one stupid motherfucker, as well as being a lying, shit-stirring little punk.

     The jury is still out on that one.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 1:27pm

212. Frank, I like that commercial very much, it doesn't pull any punches. if the dems had run attack ads like that, John Kerry would be president.

     Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/14/2006 @ 6:05pm

     Really??? I thought Bush/Rove/Reps stole the election? If so, it really wouldn't matter what ads Kerry ran.

     Posted by John B at 09/15/2006 @ 1:46pm

213. Hey Will, how's it goin'? Well even my sister, who's as rightwing as they come said she wouldn't vote for Bush againg. He's turned out to be an embarrassment. Those were her words, not mine. But of course I agreed.

     Posted by FRANKGRITS 09/14/2006

     somehow I doubt ANYONE will be voting for Bush again. Of course, that is in large part due to the fact that he cannot run again.

     Posted by John B at 09/15/2006 @ 1:56pm

214. Jesus, people, both sides, pay attention to what someone says before you dispute what you imagine they said.

     Posted by NEW DAWN 09/15/2006

     too logical, will never happen.

     Posted by John B at 09/15/2006 @ 1:59pm

215. See, Mask, John is a shit-stirrer, too...

     (but at least he's honest, and often pretty funny, when he does it)

     I cannot help but like you, John. Damn it. ;)

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 2:03pm

216. "See, Mask, John is a shit-stirrer, too..."

     Mainly just on Fridays.

     (but at least he's honest, and often pretty funny, when he does it)

     I cannot help but like you, John. Damn it. ;)

     Posted by NEW DAWN

     feeling is mutual ND. group hug.

     Posted by John B at 09/15/2006 @ 2:30pm

217. Posted by NEW DAWN 09/15/2006 @ 1:27pm

     it's a REAL easy question, ND....sure they have. and no it isn't.

     Is it some "secret" that Limbaugh, Hannity, the right-wing pundits have "impugned" Joe Wilson (or simply called him to task for some "errors" he made between his public statements and what the Senate inquiry revealed)?....no. They were pretty honest about it.

     But you want the "conspiracy"...and you want it NOT involving Richard Armitage (since he doesn't "fit the profile" of a "Bush'bot neo-con") and you can't have both.

     And like everything else you say and get countered on, you want what you said to be BOTH things as well....1. that you "never said it was a conspiracy" and 2. that it IS a conspiracy, just "post-dated" from Armitage.

     And I don't really care what names you call me....because you prove time and time again that it's YOU who are the dishonest one, who won't stand by things you say, when they are pointed out as ridiculous (like Japanese internment was 'no worse' than Bush having color codes and making terror pronoucements) where any objective person can see the sheer inanity of such comments.

     And where, as I noted before, a truly honest person would have backed away from such a stupid comment, or offered a PURE clarification of it, you DEFEND it, first by denying you meant what you said, then REITERATING it. Saying "I did NOT say Japanese internment wasn't as bad as Bush's color codes" and then "But yes, Bush's color codes have lasted for 5 years and Japanese internment lasted for 'only' 3 years"....as if the AMOUNT OF TIME was the point...and not recognizing the WORST part (rounding up American civilians) and trying to equate it with (at worst) simple propaganda.

     I also notice that you can't even follow your OWN demands....put ME on Ignore, if you don't wish to see my responses....instead of demanding that I stop responding to you.

     What are you, a teenager? Or just another "blog bar loudmouth drunk"?

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 2:31pm

218. Mask, sorry I left unanswered your reply yesterday about how the "making his bones" prosecutor Fitzgerald was using his extraordinary powers in Plamegate. It would help if you could remind me of who recommended Fitzgerald for U.S. Attorney, as well as what kind of changes were made to the investigative powers of a Special Prosecutor since the Monica-gate investigation...

     Posted by nathanhale at 09/15/2006 @ 2:33pm

219. Posted by NATHANHALE 09/15/2006 @ 2:33pm

     He was appointed by Acting AG Comey, I believe, after Ashcroft recused himself.

     And the ONLY reason, after so much failure and now the revelations of Armitage (that Fitzgerald knew two months into the investigation) to think that Fitzgerald wasn't just as "out of control" and "zealous" as Starr is....partisanship.

     The fact that the Wilsons and their lawyers first exonerated Armitage...and now seek to include him in their civil suit...shows that this has been political, not legal from day one.

     If Libby hadn't stupidly lied....it would have been a TOTAL bust.

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 2:53pm

220. And Mask -

     Still continuing your lies and misrepresentations about my words over at "Cheney, 9/11 and the Truth about Iraq", continued here, and never acknowledged or apologized for.

     Now, you're even trying to add in the lie that I am in favor of ignoring people, even though I wrote a long post (on this very thread, if I recall right) decrying that very sort of thing.

     I invite everyone to look back at our conversations on the two relevant threads before continuing discourse with Mask.

     He remains a lying, shit-stirring punk and a patently dishonest debating partner, with a gross penchant for creating quotes out of whole cloth and putting words into people's mouths whenever he isn't twisting what people actually did say just so he can attract attention to himself and argue, which he thinks is "fun".

     You're gross, Mask. Vile. Repugnant.

     And wholly transparent.

     Fuck you, buddy.

     Posted by New Dawn at 09/15/2006 @ 3:02pm

221. Who knows if there was ever anything rotten in Denmark, but there seems to be something rotten in the Wilson-Plame-Rove-Armitage-Libby-Novak...affair.

     Novak was on CSPAN this morn with Brian Lamb and two things were interesting - one because it was exceptional and the other because it wasn't. Lamb, the Sphinx, acted like he'd rather have been doing anything else but hosting a program with Novak on it. Novak, the sleeze-ball, non-answered pointed questions from callers by ridiculing the caller. When asked a general question involving the "affair" he non-answered by slamming Wilson or Plame or both. Did a lot of visible squirming too. Not an up-lifting half hour.

     Posted by felicity at 09/15/2006 @ 3:53pm

222. Posted by LVLIBERTY1 09/14/2006 @ 4:44pm

     Since Frank ignores me, maybe someone will educate him on supply and demand being the primary driver for prices of gasoline;

     As part of my field work on the politically insane here at The Nation, LL, I have noticed that leftists consider the workings of the market system to be, generally, a conspiracy concocted by powerful white men to hold the world in permanent thrall. Explaining the workings of the market system to them, in my experience, only annoys them, and shows that you, the explainer, 'don't get it'.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 4:26pm

223. Posted by DARLADOON 09/14/2006 @ 10:44pm

     well no shit! why do you think they stifle debate?

     Stifle debate? What do you mean? We can and do call you folks on the left cowardly, gutless, brainless, spineless, traitorous, treasonous, America-hating appeasers, because that's what most of you are, but we would never stifle debate! Not like, say, on a college campus! That would be un-American. We like you folks to speak up loud and clear, so we know who you are.

     why do you think rumsfeld and cheney state that people who question their wisdom are "appeasers" on the level of nazis and al qaeda?

     Because, generally, they are appeasers?

     olbermann is exactly right. he's saying what all of us are thinking. bush, cheney and rumsfeld are arrogant crooks, they all deserve to be jailed. and prosecuted.

     Don't you think they should be charged with a crime first? Or are you planning on that later, after you sentence them?

     impeachment? that's about the minimum we should go for.

     Sure, and if only you had the guts to make it a campaign promise. But Reid and Pelosi are too smart for that. Sigh.

     if more people were as educated as the nation readers, this administration would be in jail.

     LOL!

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 4:46pm

224. Posted by MASK 09/15/2006 @ 2:53pm

     If Libby hadn't stupidly lied....it would have been a TOTAL bust.

     How do you know Libby lied, Mask? He's been indicted, but he says he's innocent. Shouldn't we wait for the trial before we come to such conclusions? I have predicted that this will be plea-bargained away if not dropped completely (sometime after the next election), and I stand by it. It's all a tempest in a teapot.

     WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA leak investigation is "not over," special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said Friday after announcing charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

     Fitzgerald said he will be keeping the investigation "open to consider other matters." But, he said, "the substantial bulk of the work in this investigation is concluded."

     Libby resigned Friday after a federal grand jury indicted him on five charges related to the leak probe: one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements. (Charges explained)

     Libby said in a written statement he is "confident that at the end of this process I will be completely and totally exonerated."

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 4:55pm

225. Ah, the questions are starting to be asked out loud, now. Armitage's admission is starting to unravel this whole charade. Specifically:

     Joseph Wilson. In July 2003, when he demanded an investigation of a White House cabal for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "outing" his wife, Mr. Wilson knew Ms. Plame did not meet the factual requirements for covert status under the act. She was neither covert at the time of publication nor had a covert foreign assignment within five years. He acknowledged so in his book: "My move back to Washington [in June 1997] coincided with the return to D.C. of a woman named Valerie Plame." As the Senate negotiator for this 1982 act, I know a trip or two by Ms. Plame to a foreign country while assigned to Langley, where she worked in July 2003, is not considered a foreign assignment. I also know covert officers are not assigned to Langley.

     • Richard Armitage. Mr. Armitage now claims he knew only on Oct. 1, 2003 that he was Mr. Novak's source. We should question that claim in light of Mr. Novak's account this week that Mr. Armitage "made clear he considered [the information about Ms. Plame] especially suited for my column."

     Mr. Armitage also knew he had met with Bob Woodward on June 13, 2003, telling him about Mr. Wilson's wife's CIA employment and her role in her husband's trip to Niger. But when the FBI interviewed Mr. Armitage on Oct. 2, he admitted to the Novak conversation only, notably forgetting meeting with one of our country's premier investigative reporters. By attributing his longtime silence to Mr. Fitzgerald's request, Mr. Armitage must have forgotten Mr. Fitzgerald was not appointed until Dec. 30, 2003. If Mr. Armitage had come forward during those three months, there might never have been a special counsel.

     • Patrick Fitzgerald. What Mr. Fitzgerald knew, and chose to ignore, is troublesome. Despite what some CIA good ol' boys might have told Mr. Fitzgerald, he knew from the day he took office that the facts did not support a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; therefore, there was no crime to investigate. Although he claimed in Mr. Libby's indictment that Ms. Plame's employment status was "classified," Mr. Fitzgerald refuses to provide the basis for that fact and, even if true, can point to no law that would be violated by revealing a "classified" (not covert) employment. It was this gap in the law that created the need to pass the act in the first place.

     http://tinyurl.com/l2msu

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 5:06pm

226. And questions are starting to be asked regarding Mr. Corn, as well. Seems David Corn is the first known journalist to say that Ms. Plame was covert. And where did he get that idea?

     The first journalist to reveal Ms. Plame was "covert" was David Corn, on July 16, 2003, two days after Mr. Novak's column. The latter never wrote, because he did not know and it was not so, that Ms. Plame was covert. However, Mr. Corn claimed Mr. Novak "outed" her as an "undercover CIA officer," querying whether Bush officials blew "the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in . . . national security." Was Mr. Corn subpoenaed? Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Mr. Wilson to attest he had never revealed his wife's employment to anyone? If he had done so, he might have learned Mr. Corn's source.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 5:32pm

227. yep, the righties are still trying to cover up and excuse treason. no surprise, there.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/15/2006 @ 6:14pm

228. if fitzgerald was partisan, there would be leaks all over the place, just like in the starr investigation. This is just another sleazy rhetorical tactic by the right wing to cover up treason.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/15/2006 @ 6:16pm

229. now novak is calling armitage a liar. hey, they are republicans--they are both lying.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/15/2006 @ 6:22pm

230. Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/15/2006 @ 4:55pm

     being generous, PONTI

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 7:20pm

231. they are republicans--they are both lying.

     Posted by PRETZEL 09/15/2006 @ 6:22pm

     Here's a logic paradox....two men say two opposite things, but both are "liars"....how is that possible?!?!?!

     If one is speaking the truth, he's not a liar, but if both are lying and yet saying opposite things, ONE MUST be telling the Truth, and is not a liar.

     Think this is where the Logic Professor says "flawed premise"...hehe

     Posted by Mask at 09/15/2006 @ 7:22pm

232. "Stifle debate? What do you mean?"

     oh no, you wouldn't stifle debate ever. on the contrary, you continually encourage it. well, why else would you make statements like:

     "talking about the war emboldens the terrorists"

     and bush, although he's doing his best to push the torture bill through, doesn't wanna talk about the details......

     ponti, i sincerely hope you don't have children.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 8:28pm

233. how's this for encouraging debate:

     "We can and do call you folks on the left cowardly, gutless, brainless, spineless, traitorous, treasonous, America-hating appeasers, because that's what most of you are"

     pontificus, bush's cheerleading squad

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 8:39pm

234. Posted by DARLADOON 09/15/2006 @ 8:28pm

     oh no, you wouldn't stifle debate ever. on the contrary, you continually encourage it. well, why else would you make statements like:

     "talking about the war emboldens the terrorists"

     You must be talking about what Cheney said, because I never said that. And what Cheney said, if I get it right, is that it is a conscious, public strategy for the terrorists to murder as many innocent civilians as possible, because they believe that it strengthens the left in America and elsewhere and undermines our effectiveness. I would actually go further than Cheney, and state that a significant portion of the blood of terrorists is on the hands of the left, for the same reason.

     and bush, although he's doing his best to push the torture bill through, doesn't wanna talk about the details......

     What details doesn't he want to talk about? I think he's been pretty upfront about everything, and everything he's talked about I support. Including all the things that get your panties in a twist, like wiretapping terrorist phone calls, and taking out mass-murdering dictators like Saddam Hussein. I know if it was up to you liberal, compassionate folks, he would still be in power killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of people, but I'm pretty glad he's gone, even if George Bush did do it.

     ponti, i sincerely hope you don't have children.

     Oh, I do have children. Why do you think I believe it is so important to keep the left and Democrats out of power? Naivete, pacifism and self-loathing didn't work before WWII or during the Cold War, and it won't work now.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 8:45pm

235. Posted by DARLADOON 09/15/2006 @ 8:39pm

     "We can and do call you folks on the left cowardly, gutless, brainless, spineless, traitorous, treasonous, America-hating appeasers, because that's what most of you are"

     Well, I guess I was just thinking of Jane Fonda and Cindy Sheehan when I wrote that, and how I have never, ever heard a single leftist disavow any of their positions. Like Jane Fonda, mugging on a North Vietnamese AA gun being used to kill American pilots, which is a traitorous act if I ever saw one. Like John Kerry accusing American troops, including himself, of war crimes. Or Cindy Sheehan, who says this country is not worth fighting for, not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but anywhere, anytime, and anyplace. Perhaps if you're willing to disavow these cretins...but I'm not holding my breath.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 8:55pm

236. uh, mask, novak has changed his story several times. armitage is lying about it being unintentional gossip. it isn't always an either or situation.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/15/2006 @ 9:09pm

237. "is that it is a conscious, public strategy for the terrorists to murder as many innocent civilians as possible, because they believe that it strengthens the left in America and elsewhere and undermines our effectiveness"

     -no, it's the exact opposite: cheney said that "discussing the war" emboldens the terrorists. he posited a direct causal relationship, pontificus.

     "What details doesn't he want to talk about? I think he's been pretty upfront about everything, and everything he's talked about I support. Including all the things that get your panties in a twist, like wiretapping terrorist phone calls, and taking out mass-murdering dictators like Saddam Hussein."

     -apparently you don't read the papers or watch television. bush has been obstinate in the face of questioning from reporters regarding the treatment of prisoners. in fact, he said just today that common article 3 is "vague", when in fact, it's quite clear: no hypothermia, no 'long standing', no water boarding, etc.

     -on wiretapping: dude, you are clueless, i don't even have the time to go into this......court order? ever heard of it? you need it. it's that simple. bush is currently operating outside the law, and plans to retroactively absolve himself of FISA.

     -hussein? no connection to 9.11. that is fact. so why did we go into iraq, ponti?

     your 8:55 statement is simply horse shit.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 9:16pm

238. and you do have children? oh, my, do i feel for them......

     send 'em over to darla's to get stoned, quick!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 9:17pm

239. john kerry didnt say that. i doubt that cindy sheehan said what you ascribe to her, either. i agree fonda was completely out of bounds, but she didnt do nearly as much damage to America as the gang of corrupt, treasonous weasels that you support with every twisted half truth you utter.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/15/2006 @ 9:17pm

240. and does jane fonda have ANYTHING to do with the so-called 'war on terror', or bush's catastrophic military escapades, his homophobia, his extreme right wing stance on women's health, his egregious constitutional transgressions.....

     i don't think pontificus has too much critical studies education. anyone with an education naturally questions bush's policies.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/15/2006 @ 9:29pm

241. actually Novak is a democrat.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/15/2006 @ 11:12pm

242. If one is speaking the truth, he's not a liar, but if both are lying and yet saying opposite things, ONE MUST be telling the Truth, and is not a liar.

     Think this is where the Logic Professor says "flawed premise"...hehe

     Posted by MASK 09/15/2006 @ 7:22pm

     the logic professor would ask how many choices there are dummy

     Posted by Will C. at 09/15/2006 @ 11:18pm

243. i doubt that cindy sheehan said what you ascribe to her

     Transcript of Pro-Stewart Rally April 27, 2005

     The following is a transcript of comments made by featured speakers at a pro-Lynne Stewart rally held on Wednesday, April 27, 2005 at San Francisco State University. Among the sponsors of the event were the National Lawyers Guild, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the International Socialist Organization, and the Campus Antiwar Network.

     Cindy Sheehan (Military Families Speak Out; Goldstar Families for Peace; her son Casey was killed in the Iraq War)

     I take responsibility partly for my son's death, too. I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I'm going all over the country telling moms: "This country is not worth dying for. If we're attacked, we would all go out. We'd all take whatever we had. I'd take my rolling pin and I'd beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. {applause} We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if {applause}. 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 11:20pm

244. Kerry's testimony in 1971, where he accused Americans in Vietnam of committing war crimes on a day-to-day basis, war crimes that were committed with the full knowledge 'of all levels of command', thus accusing the entire American Army of being complicit in war crimes:

     http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=Testimony

     I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

     It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

     They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 11:31pm

245. Shall we talk about Jane Fonda? I'm not going to provide you links, you leftist geniuses should be able to use a search engine all on your own.

     And Darla, this has a lot to do with you and the rest of the American left. This is your traitorous pedigree. Jane Fonda is part and parcel of the American left. Just ask yourself who on the left has disavowed Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, or any of a greater number of America-hating retards like Chomsky, Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, ad nauseum who, continue to stink up this country with their presence even while they hate it.

     The most prominent example of a clash between private citizen protest and governmental military policy in recent history occurred in July 1972, when actress Jane Fonda arrived in Hanoi, North Vietnam, and began a two-week tour of the country conducted by uniformed military hosts. Aside from visiting villages, hospitals, schools, and factories, Fonda also posed for pictures in which she was shown applauding North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners, was photographed peering into the sights of an NVA anti-aircraft artillery launcher, and made ten propagandistic Tokyo Rose-like radio broadcasts in which she denounced American political and military leaders as "war criminals." She also spoke with eight American POWs at a carefully arranged "press conference," POWs who had been tortured by their North Vietnamese captors to force them to meet with Fonda, deny they had been tortured, and decry the American war effort. Fonda apparently didn't notice (or care) that the POWs were delivering their lines under duress or find it unusual the she was not allowed to visit the prisoner-of-war camp (commonly known as the "Hanoi Hilton") itself. She merely went home and told the world that "[the POWs] assured me they were in good health. When I asked them if they were brainwashed, they all laughed. Without exception, they expressed shame at what they had done." She did, however, charge that North Vietnamese POWs were systematically tortured in American prison-of-war camps.

     To add insult to injury, when American POWs finally began to return home (some of them having been held captive for up to nine years) and describe the tortures they had endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Jane Fonda quickly told the country that they should "not hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars." Fonda said the idea that the POWs she had met in Vietnam had been tortured was "laughable," claiming: "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." The POWs who said they had been tortured were "exaggerating, probably for their own self-interest," she asserted. She told audiences that "Never in the history of the United States have POWs come home looking like football players. These football players are no more heroes than Custer was. They're military careerists and professional killers" who are "trying to make themselves look self-righteous, but they are war criminals according to law."

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 11:41pm

246. It's a wonder why, with our supposedly 'unbiased' media, that people have not heard more, in particular, about the utterances of Cindy Sheehan.

     The fact is, about 90 percent of the mainstream media are Democrats, and they simply don't consider it news when Cindy Sheehan says this country is not worth fighting for. So people don't know about it. Just think of what else they're not telling you.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/15/2006 @ 11:59pm

247. well, for one, kerry's testimony is accurate. sheehan? who really cares? fonda, the same.

     pontificus, are you actually so shallow, so extraordinarily out of touch, as to conflate the opinions of the so-called "american left" with those of cindy sheehan, jane fonda and john kerry?

     do you dispute that there is reasonable, and even legal, dissent in this country? dude, there are members of your own party who disagree with the president on a whole host of issues.

     ponti, you're not even worth talking to. i'm just so bored tonight, i have nothing else to do. you are, to be frank, extraordinarily unattractive. i don't think i have ever met someone so incredibly out of touch with modern, cosmopolitan values.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:16am

248. ponti, if the media is so liberal, then why did americans vote for bush, not once, but twice?

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:17am

249. actually novak is not a democrat. he has been supporting republicans since the late 60's. he apparently may register as a democrat, but based on his columns he has been voting republican for 30 years. and pompousfax, the quote from kerry doesn't support your position on him at all. and mask, remember, it's not an either or choice. see if you can wrap your little wingnut mind around that.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/16/2006 @ 05:45am

250. pompous, try reading the sentence from sheehan starting, "...if were attacked...". sheehan has her own opinions, she doesn't speak for the left anymore than jane fonda. so why are you discussing them? obviously, to deflect attention from the treason perpetrated at the highest levels of the bush administration.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/16/2006 @ 05:49am

251. pompous would much rather talk about what some ditz actress did almost 40 years ago, than republican treason today. gee, i wonder why.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/16/2006 @ 05:53am

252. Posted by DARLADOON 09/16/2006 @ 12:16am

     well, for one, kerry's testimony is accurate.

     The hell it is. He's charging the entire American Army with being war criminals. He's full of shit. It's a filthy lie, and an outrage that he gets away with it. And the fact that no one on the left speaks out against him, and Sheehan, and Fonda, except Hitchens, means they implicitly support them.

     sheehan? who really cares? fonda, the same.

     I care. Too bad for Cindy Sheehan for losing her son, but he went to defend this country in spite of what she taught him, not because of her, regardless of her lies about that. Read about her, she's been an San Francisco leftist America-hater from the tiem before her son ever joined the military. And any group of people, like the left, that welcomes such people in their ranks without disputing the lies and hate that these people spew, are no better. You cannot deny that Cindy Sheehan was given almost universally positive coverage and spin by the liberal media with all that 'Camp Casey' crap. And they don't report her America-hating diatribes, either, as Pretzel's ignorance shows. I've never heard a negative word from a leftist about Sheehan. Or Fonda. Or Kerry. That's implicit endorsement, in my book.

     pontificus, are you actually so shallow, so extraordinarily out of touch, as to conflate the opinions of the so-called "american left" with those of cindy sheehan, jane fonda and john kerry?

     Absolutely. They are famous people that are members of the leftist movement. You cannot disavow their actions unless you actually bother to say so. When someone famous on the right goes off the deep end, like Pat Buchanan did, they are publicly disavowed. I would consider that Lieberman has been disavowed, at this point, by the American left. You cannot say the same for Kerry, Fonda, and Sheehan. There's the difference.

     do you dispute that there is reasonable, and even legal, dissent in this country?

     No, I do not dispute that. I just don't believe that the motivation or the intent of the left uis to be 'loyal opposition', but rather is disloyal opposition. As Ann Coulter has said, 'the left loves America like OJ loved Nicole', and truer words were never spoken.

     Leftists don't love America, they love their vision of what they want America to be, which is far different in nature from what America ever was or ever will be. The intent of the left is to tear down and destroy any American institution that stands in the way of the leftist agenda, and most dissent they present is not a good faith attempt at making this country safer or better, but rather destroying those that oppose them, like Bush or Lieberman.

     You cannot disagree that the left has a blind, unreasoning hatred for anyone that stands in their way. As soon as Bush leaves office, the next Republican President will become the focus of their hate.

     More broadly, the left holds values that are inimical to the traditional values that make this country great. Leftism is a kind of moral dry rot that destroys everything in its path. Overseas, leftist societies like France and Germany are mediocre at best economies that breed demoralized, shrinking societies. Here in the US, most blue states are economically in trouble, with shrinking populations (Massachusetts is a perfect example).

     dude, there are members of your own party who disagree with the president on a whole host of issues.

     Yeah, and so what? I myself disagree with Bush on some things.

     ponti, you're not even worth talking to. i'm just so bored tonight, i have nothing else to do. you are, to be frank, extraordinarily unattractive. i don't think i have ever met someone so incredibly out of touch with modern, cosmopolitan values.

     Darla, leftist values are neither modern nor cosmopolitan. Leftism has been around for a long time, and it never fails to fail in practice. Nothing is more cosmopolitan than the ideas of life, liberty, and property, ideas which are continuously compromised in any leftist society, from France and Germany to Cuba and North Korea. For a discussion of this, see:

     http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050506I

     Leftist ideals are naive, overly simplistic, nihilistic, and unworkable values that naive people are typically impressed with in college, and these views generally change if and when people are exposed to the realities of the natural world, when they see how the real world works, and when people are faced with the task of holding a job and raising a family. Most people who raise families learn that leftist values are unworkable in practice.

     And don't worry about my supposed unattractiveness, Darla. I get plenty of interest from attractive women, even though I'm married and, sometimes regrettably, unavailable.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 07:05am

253. Posted by DARLADOON 09/16/2006 @ 12:17am

     ponti, if the media is so liberal, then why did americans vote for bush, not once, but twice?

     People vote for Bush in spite of the media spin they hear so constantly, not because of it. Many knowledgeable media observers attribute the liberal media effect as 5 to 15 points for the Democratic candidate in any national election. But it's not enough anymore, because the country is becoming more conservative.

     The traditional media is mostly far to the left of the public at large, which is why it is declining in popularity now that choices are available. More scary for the left, people are starting to wake up to the constant stream of propaganda they have been hearing for decades from the likes of Dan Rather and his ilk in the major networks, CNN, the WaPo, and the NYT. And the people are not happy.

     Movies absolutely suck, in general, because the values of Hollywood are out of touch with America in general, and most writers haven't a clue as to how to connect with the audience. Hence all the mindless, gratuitous, and worst of all boring violence and sex - they can't think of anything else. And then they can't figure out why nobody wants to pay $12 to see these movies.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 07:19am

254. Posted by WILL C. 09/15/2006 @ 11:18pm

     How many did PRETZEL offer?....hehe

     (BTW, again thanks for "always being there for me", bud!)

     Posted by Mask at 09/16/2006 @ 08:18am

255. As far as Cindy Sheehan goes...

     I'd advise anybody to read the "CS" article at www.uncyclopedia.org.

     Think they nailed it pretty well...especially the "Category" they had her under.

     Posted by Mask at 09/16/2006 @ 08:19am

256. BTW, I'm really concerned that when Mr Corn posts his next article....

     I'm going to lose the link to www.amazon.com to his book.

     (hmm...maybe I don't need to worry about that...huh?)

     Posted by Mask at 09/16/2006 @ 08:20am

257. Pretzel, we have secret ballots in this country, so you don't know how Novak has voted. if he's registered as a democrat, he IS a democrat

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 09:11am

258. How many did PRETZEL offer?....hehe

     (BTW, again thanks for "always being there for me", bud!)

     Posted by MASK 09/16/2006 @ 08:18am

     you're welcome mask

     and since pointing out your foolishness puts a smile on my face, (see... :) I'll always be there for you dummy

     Posted by Will C. at 09/16/2006 @ 09:13am

259. 1st off, Ponti, I feel sorry for you. (and rio, luvvy, barry, maryb) You have this deep seated fear and loathing for 1/2 the country. Most of which seems to come from the acts and words of a few people, most of whom have never wielded any real power. If you think Kerry's words are so off try reading the Toledo Blades reports on Viet-Nam and the atrocities that took place there. It happened. You may not want to admit it, but american troops engaged in wonton rape, torture and killing of men, women and children. Not all of our troops, not even the majority. But it happend and it happend a lot. It took courage for him to speak out when he did, I don't know when he lost that courage.

     the "left" has torn down some of Americas most beloved intstitutions alright, such as only men voting, segragation, child labor, slave-type wages for workers, dangerous working conditions in factories and mines. I could go on and on, but why? You have all the info before you but you choose to pick Fonda as the spokesperson for your hatred, instead of seeing all of the good things that have come out of your feared left. All sides have wackjobs that say and do stupid things, that does not mean the entire movements are rotten. If you have kids, let them go to work at age 9, let them eat food that has not been inspected or approved for consumption, use DDT on your garden, feed your milk cows some PCB's. That would slap the left in the face good.

     Now we are faced with a group of people holding the reigns of power that want to undo 800 years of habeaus corpus, undo the Geneva Convention, use hearsay in trials, torture people (both bad and the innocent), who have declared war on a whole country that was no threat (against the very laws of the country you CLAIM to love so much). We used to be a beacon of hope and freedom. If you guys have your way we will be Soviet-lite in ten years. Gulags spread throughout the world, secret police running around picking up anybody you call up and claim is a terrorist, occupying 2 or more countries (unable to finish the job) wages lowered to the bottom so the top 1% can maximize their profits and purchase a flacid Politburo-congress.

     In your minds, what makes America great? What are you fighting for?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 10:05am

260. 2nd, I note a column in my local paper that says 11,000 men and women have been kicked out of the Armed Services during this monumental, like no other conflict we are in. Something like 500 Arabic speaking soldiers have been releaved of duty. The reason? They are gay. Apparently you are willing to run rampant over the laws of the country, murder and torture to make you feel safer but don't want to have your life saved by a faggot. Bizarre.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 10:10am

261. 3rd, I am re-evaluating Armitage. New reporting coming out sheds new light. Turns out he may not have "gossiped" anything. Timelines point to a concerted effort to punish Wilson and Plame, from the State Dept to the White House. Punish them for trying to get the truth out about the lies of Chimpy and Birdshot Cheney.

     So sing again oh neo-cons. Sing some songs of WMD's and links to AL-Qaida. Sing some songs about how we defeated the Soviet Union, fought the Koreans, and led the world for 60 years with the Geneva Convention in place, but now when 3000 loonies want us dead we need to change EVERyTHING to defeat this new enemy. sing us songs about how the Bill of rights is quaint and inadequate for the New America. Sing us some songs about how wanting a secret judge to look over chimpies shoulder is helping the enemy. sing about how the JAGS that oppose your beleifs are America haters.Sing some songs about how Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld never lied. How they have a good plan in place, how if it were not for freedom of the press and freedom of speech we would be winning in Irag and Afghanistan.

     It is a sad tune you play.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 10:21am

262. 4th, while drinking and hunting Cheney SHOT A MAN IN THE FACE! Then chased the police away. Fonda has lasted 30 years, how long do I get to bring this up?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 10:27am

263. Posted by CRABWALK 09/16/2006 @ 10:05am

     1st off, Ponti, I feel sorry for you. (and rio, luvvy, barry, maryb) You have this deep seated fear and loathing for 1/2 the country.

     No, what I have a deep seated fear of is the essence of leftism, and only about 1/6 of the country is leftist.

     Regarding your "1/2 the country" remark, you are deluding yourself. Most Democratic voters vote for Democrats for reasons other than leftism. Blacks, about 1/3 of the Democratic Party, vote for Democrats not because they are leftist, but because they simply don't vote for Republicans. And most Democrats are not Nation readers, only leftists are, so I feel like I'm speaking to the left on this site.

     Most of which seems to come from the acts and words of a few people, most of whom have never wielded any real power.

     I see you missed my point completely. Yes, there are wackjobs across the political spectrum. The difference is, on the right, we repudiate the wackjobs, and practice tolerance for those who disagree (e.g., Giuliani, McCain). On the left, there is only silence regarding their wackjobs and only people who fail to toe the party line are excommunicated, like Lieberman. See the difference?

     If you think Kerry's words are so off try reading the Toledo Blades reports on Viet-Nam and the atrocities that took place there. It happened. You may not want to admit it, but american troops engaged in wonton rape, torture and killing of men, women and children. Not all of our troops, not even the majority. But it happend and it happend a lot.

     Again, you're missing the point. It's one thing to charge that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam. Undoubtedly, some did, because people were tried, convicted, and jailed for their crimes. Can I answer for every American soldier in Vietnam, and know for sure that not a single one of them committed atrocities that were unanswered for? No, and I never said I could, because atrocities happen in almost every war.

     But it's another thing for Kerry to accuse the entire American chain of command to be knowledgeable and silent about war crimes, and thus, to charge them with all being war criminals. Without evidence to support this charge, he is not better than a slanderous liar, giving hate speeches for lefty groupies and giving propaganda aid and comfort to socialist enemies and others who fear and and loathe his own country.

     See the difference?

     It took courage for him to speak out when he did, I don't know when he lost that courage.

     It didn't take courage, he was playing to his own base of America-haters. No courage there, and therefore none to lose. He's a gutless, lying gigolo who's never earned an honest nickel on his own, but rather by telling people what they want to hear. If he keeps himself in the public eye, I hope the swift boaters continue to expose him for the lying bounder that he is.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 10:32am

264. But it's another thing for Kerry to accuse the entire American chain of command to be knowledgeable and silent about war crimes, and thus, to charge them with all being war criminals.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/16/2006 @ 10:32am

     kerry never accused the entire chain of command of anything. he did say this

     testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/15/2006 @ 11:31pm

     I'd ask you too repudiate yourself but since you're a nation reading whack job leftist...

     Posted by Will C. at 09/16/2006 @ 10:44am

265. It didn't take courage, he was playing to his own base of America-haters. No courage there, and therefore none to lose.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/16/2006 @ 10:32am

     you know it's funny. Chimpy's entire governing strategy is about playing to his his own base of america haters.

     that might explain why he's a first class coward

     Posted by Will C. at 09/16/2006 @ 10:47am

266. or how did you put it?

     He's a gutless, lying gigolo who's never earned an honest nickel on his own, but rather by telling people what they want to hear?

     yup much better

     :)

     (and he skipped out on the vietnam war too... let's not forget that)

     Posted by Will C. at 09/16/2006 @ 10:49am

267. "If you guys have your way we will be Soviet-lite in ten years."

     you're off by about ten years, we are that now. fine posts as usual.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 10:50am

268. does anyone else concur that pontificus is just a wee bit extreme? john kerry, an "america hater"? volunteered to fight in vietnam, became a respected US senator, nearly beat the incumbent for the presidency? this is an "america hater"?

     people with courage and conviction, who dare question disastrous foreign policies, that have killed and maimed millions of innocents?

     kissinger admitted, in the late 1970s, that vietnam was a "useless war". scores of decorated men on both sides of the aisle are now admitting that iraq is an absolute "disaster". 3 top republican senators (all vets), and one former secretary of state, have written a letter to the president in opposition to the torture bill.

     on another level: we are the only industrialized country in the world whose citizens still do not have health care. egregious tax cuts for the very wealthiest people in the WORLD have wrought fiscal disaster for our government's historical obligation to care for its people.

     the neoconservative agenda is monstrous, even kafka-esque, in scope and substance. the entire world, save a few very wealthy foreign technocrats and diplomats with clear financial ties to american interests, is so clearly opposed to american military capriciousness.

     precisely what this country needs is more "america haters". and i'm not talking about the government, or the people, i'm talking about bush, cheney, rumsfeld, rice, the entire GOP, and some of the Democratic party. they need a serious wake up call.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 11:28am

269. .

     If you really want to learn the truth about 9/11, study EVERY CONNECTION between Pakistan's Intelligence service, the ISI, and Israel's MOSSAD.

     http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/01-05-05/discussion.cgi.71.html

     Charlie Wilson's War: ISI, CIA, 9/11 CONNECTION!

     Charlie Wilson's War - The Israeli Jihad Connection.

     KEY QUOTE:

     "The Israeli/Pakistan connection was crucial to the success of the Afghan campaign against the Soviets, and provided Israeli intelligence with a very secure footing inside Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI."

     One problem I have had with theories connecting Israel with the September 11 attacks is the obvious centrality of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI. This was the agency that recruited bin Laden and created his persona as an Afghan warlord and terrorist; it was the ISI that funded the hijackers. ISI agents predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center and the collapse of the towers well in advance. Surely the ISI was pulling the strings, but who was pulling THEIR strings? Why would leaders of an Islamic state perpetrate an outrage that could only wreak terrible damage on the Islamic world? I thought that this lead could only point to the CIA, which, since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had cultivated the ISI as their most important client and agent. A direct connection from Israel to the ISI seemed highly unlikely to me. Boy, was I ever wrong.

     Snip

     Flashback to the CIA's first Afghan campaign:

     Getting the Appropriations assignment as a junior congressman was an amazing political maneuver because his own Texas delegation opposed it; they backed a Texan with more seniority ... It was Wilson's Jewish friends who made it possible. (Crile, pg. 33)

     His Jewish friends had helped get him onto the committee; once there, Chalie learned from these master politicians how to influence budgets and policies. When he won a seat on the Foreign Operations subcommittee, which allocates all U.S. military and economic assistance, he was suddenly positioned to champion Israel's annual $3 billion foreign-aid package. (Crile, pg. 77)

     ********** QUOTE OFF **********

     CIA officer Milton Bearden says that in this period Dick Cheney played a key role in getting Wilson appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which may suggest that Cheney was an important player in the pro-Israeli network even at this point ("The Main Enemy", Milton Bearden, Ballantine Books, NY, 2003. pg. 277).

     As soon as he had gained access to the key Congressional positions, the "Israeli commando" became obsessed with funding and controling the CIA's Afhan jihad against the Soviets. In the words of Milton Bearden, the CIA Field Officer in Afghanistan at the time, "More than any other member of either house, Charlie fashioned Congress into the engine that drove the CIA's program for Afghanistan." (Bearden, pg. 277). Given what George Crile has revealed about Charlie Wilson's career, we can substitute "the Mossad" for "Charlie" in the previous statement. The fingerprints of the Israelis are all over Wilson's Afghan projects from start to finish. For example, the famous anti-helicopter missile system Wilson had specially built for the Mujahideen was designed by the Israelis. Crile notes in this respect,

     ********** QUOTE ON ***********

     Charlie Wilson was marching himself into a true forbidden zone. Congressmen are not allowed to commission a foreign power to design and construct a weapons system. Nor do they have the authority to commit the Pentagon to pay for such a weapon. But these were minor outrages compared to Wilson's potentially explosive attempt to bring the Israelis into the Muslim jihad that the CIA was funding against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

     Bringing the Israelis into the CIA's Muslim jihad was not what Avrakatos considered a reasonable option. There were many reasons why he was adamantly opposed to dealing with Israel. To begin with, it would risk alienating the Saudis, who were putting up half the money for the program. Beyond that, why risk alienating the legions of Muslim hotheads around the world who would draw the most extreme conclusions if it became known that the CIA was sneaking Jewish weapons into the jihad? (Crile, 391)

     ********** QUOTE OFF **********

     But the Israelis had a trump card in Charlie Wilson in that he controled the money.

     ********** QUOTE ON ***********

     [Wilson] was certain of one thing: it would be easy to get more money for the CIA program. In fact, he suspected that he could get his committee to appropriate more money whether Langley wanted it or not. In reality, what he was already plotting with the Pakistanis was far more radical than anything [CIA Station Chief] Hart could have imagined. (Crile, 149)

     ********** QUOTE OFF **********

     So in summary, the Israelis were very major players in the Afghan jihad, providing crucial technology and weaponry. They accomplished this not by interfacing with the CIA, which opposed their involvement, but by interfacing their own intelligence agencies directly with the U.S. Congress, and using Congressional delegations to establish their own direct connections to the government and intelligence services of Pakistan. The Israeli/Pakistan connection was crucial to the success of the Afghan campaign against the Soviets, and provided Israeli intelligence with a very secure footing inside Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.

     Israel the ISI & 9/11:

     We have always known that Israel had strong motive to perpetrate an outrage like September 11, provided that blame could be placed on Arab terrorists. From the Lavon Affair, among other things, we know that they have an inclination to perpetrate such "false flag" attacks. Now we know that they had the means and opportunity to launch the September 11 attacks as well, using their connections in the ISI.

     This is a remarkable piece you posted -- I knew nothing about Charlie Wilson and his Israeli connections until you posted it. Let me focus on this point:

     So in summary, the Israelis were very major players in the Afghan jihad, providing crucial technology and weaponry. They accomplished this not by interfacing with the CIA, which opposed their involvement, but by interfacing their own intelligence agencies directly with the U.S. Congress, and using Congressional delegations to establish their own direct connections to the government and intelligence services of Pakistan. The Israeli/Pakistan connection was crucial to the success of the Afghan campaign against the Soviets, and provided Israeli intelligence with a very secure footing inside Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.

     This is the same method by which Israel just accomplished a wholesale purge of their "enemies" in the CIA -- and there has not been a word about this aspect of the affair in any of establishment American media. Why? Because Israel substantially controls those media, in the same way it controls the Congress.

     The average American hasn't got a clue about what is going on. Any insider who dares to spill the beans is instantly shot down by one means or another, and his or her message never sees the light of day, at least not in the mass media.

     Notice the multiple enticements and inducements the Israelis used to control and manipulate Wilson. They've expended even greater effort on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in cultivating them as useful tools (useful idiots). This is why we are now in Iraq and are on an apocalyptic collision course with most of the world. How so many American leaders can be so weak and dim in looking out for American interests and in doing the right thing boggles the mind.

     I blame Americans more than the Israelis for the current state of affairs. The Israelis can't be blamed for pursuing what they perceive to be their best interests, and in outwitting a Charlie Wilson, a Porter Goss or a George W. Bush. Is it a sin to have a relatively high IQ?

     With regard to Israeli connections to 9/11 through ISI -- the hard evidence is still exceedingly thin, don't you think? One can speculate reasonably, of course, but it's difficult to get beyond the speculation phase. If these connections exist, and exist substantially, who is more to blame: the Israelis or those Americans in the U.S. government who provided Israel with the means to play the Pakistanis? I vote for the Americans.

     I wonder how central a figure Porter Goss has been in all this, both in 9/11 and in the Israeli-instigated purge of the CIA.

     60 Minutes Producer Crile is an amazing example of the end product of generations of full bore brainwashing by the US media on the subject of Israel. They're like an army of zombies now.

     Well, here's where I think things stand. First I think it's pretty much certain that the Pakistanis (ISI) were involved. It's certain that there is a massive coverup by the US government and the US media.

     So the short answer is, yes this is speculative, but I will not apologize for that. With this new piece of the puzzle a major gap in our understanding has been filled in, I believe. I have now officially moved the Israelis to the top of my list of suspects, and I firmly believe this is well supported by the evidence currently available.

     .

     Posted by plunger at 09/16/2006 @ 11:43am

270. Darla,

     " they need a serious wake up call"

     You neeed a wake up call or an elementsry school lesson on civics and government..

     example

     ": we are the only industrialized country in the world whose citizens still do not have health care..."

     we have the best health care system in the world..no one is turned away...you just don't like the fact that you need to pay for it...yourself..this is not and never has been the governemnts job from Founders on down to a few years ago when libs decided otherwise..

     example 2

     .." egregious tax cuts for the very wealthiest people in the WORLD have wrought fiscal disaster for our government's historical obligation to care for its people. "

     You are to care for yourself...governemnt is not your mommy or daddy..government should help protect conditions where you work things out for you.....responsibility, not day care.. you seem to think it is a giant meals on wheels...Agregious taxes is what the government DOES to those who earn it..

     Posted by john maasch at 09/16/2006 @ 11:44am

271. actually, john, it's you who needs a civics lesson:

     governments are not fixed entities, they evolve via the participation of its citizens. the republican party is fundamentally opposed to participation (i.e. they don't want people to vote, organize, or educate, because if they do, they'll realize how abhorrent the republican party really is. why do you think horowitz wants to 'clear out' the "liberal influence" on college campuses?)

     "You are to care for yourself...governemnt is not your mommy or daddy..government should help protect conditions where you work things out for you.....responsibility, not day care.. you seem to think it is a giant meals on wheels...Agregious taxes is what the government DOES to those who earn it.."

     -and for those who can't "earn" that protection from the government? who are born at rock bottom? who are disabled? who are sick? who are about to die? it's an absolute joke that we have the best health care system in the world, when 46% of the country does not have care. "no one turned away"? TOTAL 100% BULL SHIT! yes, you can get some stitches, or a hep b vaccination, but can you get chemo? can you get radiation?

     maasch, you are woefully ignorant of just how LOW many americans are.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:09pm

272. do you even have ANY experience in health care? or health care issues?

     obviously not.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:11pm

273. maasch must be one of those idiots who finds welfare an enviable position. he just distorts the reality with 'meals on wheels', when many people simply need medication. food. a place to sleep.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:14pm

274. aren't you the champion of 'unintended consequences'?

     well, perhaps your agenda of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' doesn't really work, john?

     you bonehead

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:15pm

275. if national health care is SUCH a bad idea, then why is san francisco considering it?

     why is the democratic party pushing for it?

     why is it on the minds of almost every major news outlet?

     because it's a reality for millions of people, john.

     anyone sitting at home, twiddling their dicks, and thinking of ways to intellectually justify preventing someone from getting medical treatment, for whatever reason, is certifiably cruel and inhuman. no, subhuman.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:19pm

276. here's another reason why idiot maasch needs a civics lesson:

     in no proposed national health care plan would the maasch's have to opt out of their high-end private plan in omawhore or omaha, or wherever they live. nothing would change for them

     just like nothing would change for him i could marry my lover, or if i can legally grow kind bud, or if i could burn an american flag in my garden.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 12:31pm

277. we have the best health care system in the world..no one is turned away...you just don't like the fact that you need to pay for it...yourself..this is not and never has been the governemnts job from Founders on down to a few years ago when libs decided otherwise..

     er not exactly, not the best if you're poor. while they may not get turned away, you sit in a clinic all day to get a doctor to look at you. many other countries have lower infant mortality rates, to mention just one marker. as you yourself have pointed out, nothing is free. free healthcare is supported by taxes, which many other countries choose to spend in service of their people, instead of at the service of the military. as far as what is the gov't's job, it certainly isn't to make Iraq a democratic country.

     2. to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy while running huge deficits is ruinous and the bill will come due. we always hear about how great the economy is, well if I were able to borrow without limit, my own personal economy would be humming to.Maasch you are so programmed in your responses, a well trained monkey could write them. your brain has not just been washed, it has been drycleaned. that last one is a quote from a movie, he who guesses correctly which movie, shall win the virtual gold ring.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 1:48pm

278. not day care..

     Maasch, you always bitch about the bad state of our educational system. well it turns out the best way to improve education and help eliminate poverty is free universal day care and pre school.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 1:50pm

279. "Most people who raise families learn that leftist values are unworkable in practice."

     you should have said: "most american people who raise families......"

     the united states is the only non-socialist country in the western hemisphere. therefore, every non-american family has learned that leftists values are, on the contrary, quite workable in practice. the entire foundation of western liberal values is predicated on a socialist philosophy.

     this is the only sustainable governing philosophy that we know of, one that marx had thoroughly researched, debated and tested through scientific and philosophical inquiry. what we are currently witnessing in the united states is a radical departure from socialist values. as a result, the obscenely rich have hijacked the government, through tax cuts and deregulation, and through a complicit media apparatus which has systematically ignored labor. the entire oeuvre of daily newspapers has not a single section devoted to 'labor' or 'workers'. it's all about 'money' or 'investment' or 'management'. who cares about these issues? the owners, not the workers.

     the key to a sustainable governing philosophy is to strengthen the workers, as well as keep in the super wealthy in check through more regulation and taxes. otherwise, they will run away with everything, and the workers will eventually revolt. if ALL labor moves overseas, what then for us?

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 1:55pm

280. "Maasch, you always bitch about the bad state of our educational system. well it turns out the best way to improve education and help eliminate poverty is free universal day care and pre school"

     exactly!! we are the only industrialized country in the world who does not have this. we treat mothers like crap in this country.......72% of new mothers are working, still.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 1:57pm

281. whenever the GOP says, "investment opportunities" through "tax cuts"......are good for everyone.

     that is propagandistic horse shit that all workers should ignore.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 1:59pm

282. from Founders on down to a few years ago when libs decided otherwise..

     er, not exactly, universal health care has been suggested at least as far as the Truman administration. and it will come here, that is for sure. the corporations are no longer able to provide health care and pensions.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 2:01pm

283. Ponti, You did not answer the main question: What is it that you love about America? What makes it great? What are you fighting for?

     I love America because it lets me call our CIC Chimpy without going to jail. Because I can make blue dress jokes. Because reporters can get up and ask cheney if he is a liar (in theory at least). Because if I get accused of being a criminal I will get a pretty fair trial. Because I can open a business without having to bribe local and province officials. Because we used collective funds to build a marvelous highway system. Because the courts have ruled that my gay friends should not be strung to a fence for doing some fudge-packin'. Because the people spoke out and ,after a long struggle, companies no longer can pump massive amounts of toxic waste into my air and water. Because I don't have to proclaim a religion or get stoned (the bad kind) to death. Because if my wife catches me with my cock where it don't belong she can get 1/2 of my stuff for me being a jerk. I love America because women/African Americans/Latinos/Irish Catholics and everyone else can vote. It used to be I could count on that vote meaning something. Not so much anymore. I love America because if my neighbors teenager gets knocked up she has the freedom to choose her future. I love America because there is supposed to be other entities making sure the politicians are doing things legally. Because COINTELPRO got exposed. And WaterGate, and Irangate, and Koreagate.

     I love America because in theory a republican, Bush42 appointee can get up in public and say "The president lied!" and his wife would still be fighting terrorist regimes.

     What do you love?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 2:02pm

284. oops, Bush41, not42. Poppy. The appeaser.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 2:11pm

285. Leftist ideals are naive, overly simplistic, nihilistic, and unworkable values that naive people are typically impressed with in college, and these views generally change if and when people are exposed to the realities of the natural world, when they see how the real world works, and when people are faced with the task of holding a job and raising a family. Most people who raise families learn that leftist values are unworkable in practice.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/16/2006 @ 07:05am

     WOW! You must be omniscient.

     And stupid.

     Care to tell us again how "leftism" leads to slavery? How fair wages lead to the downfall of families? How clean air kills children? How the 2nd half of the 20th century was the worst part of americas path through time?

     How many hippies raped you when you were a kid?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 2:27pm

286. Crabwalk, complete nonsense on Ponti's part. go to a peace march and see who's there.

     Posted by johannesrolf at 09/16/2006 @ 3:29pm

287. I read larry c johnsons post about this. I like his blog "no quarter" but I don't see how rove and co are liable anymore. it's a stain on their record that they lied under oath, but it was just garden variety self preservation, not some insidious plot. you work for the president of the US, you want to stay in there. you are an important person.

     let rove and libby off the hook. they've had enough.

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/16/2006 @ 4:33pm

288. Posted by JOHANNESROLF 09/16/2006 @ 3:29pm

     In my little town the peace march has been there every Sunday since OIF started. We had/have Methodists, Catholics, Quakers(according to the warmongers the 70 yr old Qauker ladies are "Fucking pussies" ) Atheists, Lutherans, pacifists, veterans, parents of soldiers, dems, independents, greens, libertarians. Recently I have been told some repubes have been showing up, their eyes open and their anger up.

     We peace folks were told how Saddam had nukes, how chimpy saved our lives, how Saddam and Usama were working to bring down America, that we were in Iraq because of there attack on the Twin Towers.that we would pack up and admit we were wrong in weeks, not years. Sound like familiar tune?

     Didn't know hamsters could sing, did you?

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 5:19pm

289. Ponti, help me out here. Exactly what lefty notions are you afraid your children may adopt if left to their own way? What are some of the steps on the Dark Path?

     1/6, huh? Hmm.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/16/2006 @ 5:22pm

290. Posted by CRABWALK 09/16/2006 @ 2:02pm

     Ponti, You did not answer the main question: What is it that you love about America? What makes it great? What are you fighting for?

     I love America because it guarantees me and everyone else here a right to life, liberty, and property; the right to be left alone to do as I want, so long as I don't harm other people. This is the basis of the American system, and the basis of all its prosperity.

     More broadly, I love America because it is a winner, and I prefer winners over losers (e.g., socialism). America shows me that the greatest resource of any country is the native talents of its own people, talents that only flourish in a free society. Thus, America's system of free enterprise, coupled with guarantees of basic God-given human rights, has created the powerful machine of wealth creation the world has ever known. This has created the highest standard of living, and the greatest degree of happiness here that material wealth can provide. I can think of very few, if any, scientific achievements in at least the last 100 years that did not come from America. Everyone in the world, from our greatest friends to our greatest enemies, depend on American technological advances to keep up their own standards of living.

     Now let's look at the left's role in America and why I think it's such a bad thing.

     Socialism is the antithesis of the capitalist system, not a complement. Socialist countries seriously compromise all three basic rights, not as an incidental fact, but as a modus operandi. To the degree that a country is socialist, it is a failure. Socialist states consume their own human capital. This is why all socialist systems end in failure, either realtively quickly, like the Soviet Union or North Korea, or slowly, over many generations, like France and Germany.

     Leftists in the states have hijacked the natural corrective mechanisms of the free market system and falsely claimed them as their own. The native mechanisms of reform inherent in the American system, exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt in busting trusts, creating the national parks, and initiating the first concerns for conservation, have been suborned and distorted by leftists to point where it is difficult to discern true needed reforms from the poisonous agenda of the left. The social security and medicare systems, invented and sustained by the left, and protected from any meaningful reform, are a looming fiscal catastrophe. Public schools, which have been subordinated to a leftist agenda and protected from any and all attempts at reform, systematically miseducate the nation's children (except the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the politicians who created it).

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 5:38pm

291. I love America because it guarantees me and everyone else here a right to life, liberty, and property; the right to be left alone to do as I want, so long as I don't harm other people. This is the basis of the American system, and the basis of all its prosperity.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/16/2006 @ 5:38pm

     The basis of the American system is the US constitution.

     what it gives the people is the ability to take their country in any direction they wish while working inside the framework of the articles and the amendments, with the ideals laid out in it's preamble as it's stated agenda

     And it doesn't guarantee you the right to life, liberty, or property or the right to be left alone so long as you don't harm other people

     But if you would like it too... See article five for the proper procedures on amending it

     Posted by Will C. at 09/16/2006 @ 5:55pm

292. pontificus- "the left" under bill clinton favored much smaller government than Bush, especially abroad. and what was big was under much tighter checks and balances ( example: FEMA). I agree that socialism and socialist governments are failures but our budget this year is 2.8 trillion. to me thats socialism. and it's no coincidence that as that budget grows our civil liberties are under attack. that's what always happens. there is rarely a big and also nice government. hugo chavez's venezuala is a hell of a lot more stable than Bush's america right now. despite the obvious handicaps of a socialist economy / society

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/16/2006 @ 7:17pm

293. "I love America because it guarantees me and everyone else here a right to life, liberty, and property; the right to be left alone to do as I want, so long as I don't harm other people"

     -does this mean i can sleep with women and smoke herb, ponti? so long as i don't bother anyone, right? lots of men watch football (harms a lot of people, takes up a lot of space, causes noise pollution and air pollution) and drink alcohol (causes fights, car wrecks, domestic abuse).....seems to cause a lot of harm to other people. but me? what does lesbian sex and pot cause? anything?

     "This is why all socialist systems end in failure, either realtively quickly, like the Soviet Union or North Korea"

     -seems like someone needs an economics class: since when were north korea and the soviet union 'socialist' countries? and why are countries like france and germany (two economic powerhouses) on the "decline"?

     "This has created the highest standard of living, and the greatest degree of happiness here that material wealth can provide."

     -here's another wonderful ponti quote. are americans really happy? happier than the japanese or the italian? if so, can you actually show me some data?

     "I can think of very few, if any, scientific achievements in at least the last 100 years that did not come from America"

     -oh brother, how dumb, nay how arrogant (!), can one get? ponti, are you that delusional? "few, if any"? holy sh*t this guy is classic! do you actually think that our geographic borders, and the universities and scientific foundations within them, lay claim to some sort of ordained capacity to "discover"? that american-born scientists are somehow genetically superior to their colleagues abroad? or that scientists from all over the world don't share knowledge within a tightly regulated system of peer-reviewed and privately funded research?

     ponti, you are now going back on the ignore list. why do so many morons live in this country? northern california? cool, no problems here. but what is it with those darn red states?

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 7:32pm

294. Posted by DARLADOON 09/16/2006 @ 7:32pm

     Me: "I love America because it guarantees me and everyone else here a right to life, liberty, and property; the right to be left alone to do as I want, so long as I don't harm other people"

     You: -does this mean i can sleep with women and smoke herb, ponti? so long as i don't bother anyone, right? lots of men watch football (harms a lot of people, takes up a lot of space, causes noise pollution and air pollution) and drink alcohol (causes fights, car wrecks, domestic abuse).....seems to cause a lot of harm to other people. but me? what does lesbian sex and pot cause? anything?

     You got me here, Darla, because I'm pretty much a libertarian when it comes to that stuff. As far as I'm concerned, that's all good with me, what you do in your private life with other consenting adults is none of mine or anyone else's business. I'm sure you've noticed that reasonable private pot smoking is defacto legalized in this country, especially in California. And I don't think you're going to find many red-blooded men arguing against the idea of two attractive women in bed together, which I'm sure you know is actually a turn-on for most guys.

     I'd be willing to bet, though, that there are just as many liberal Democrats as Republicans who are in favor of banning drugs like pot.

     -seems like someone needs an economics class: since when were north korea and the soviet union 'socialist' countries?

     I think most educated people know that North Korea and the Soviet Union were socialist countries. That is, unless you were 'educated' (brainwashed, more like it) by some professor in college who holds the belief that no socialist system could be truly socialist if it failed, which is the operative fallacy on the left these days.

     and why are countries like france and germany (two economic powerhouses) on the "decline"?

     They're not economic powerhouses any more, Darla. Their unemployment rates are over 10 percent and rising. Their populations are declininig, just like American blue states, so much so that they have to import massive numbers of immigrants, which they house in segregated ghettos. In 50 years, if current demographic trends persist, France and Germany will cease to exist as European nations. That's what I call decline.

     Me: "This has created the highest standard of living, and the greatest degree of happiness here that material wealth can provide."

     You: -here's another wonderful ponti quote. are americans really happy? happier than the japanese or the italian? if so, can you actually show me some data?

     I said Americans are as happy as material wealth can make them. Absolute happiness is a different story, but at least we have the time to reflect on such things; our ancestors didn't have that luxury, they were too busy trying to survive.

     "I can think of very few, if any, scientific achievements in at least the last 100 years that did not come from America"

     -oh brother, how dumb, nay how arrogant (!), can one get? ponti, are you that delusional? "few, if any"? holy sh*t this guy is classic! do you actually think that our geographic borders, and the universities and scientific foundations within them, lay claim to some sort of ordained capacity to "discover"? that american-born scientists are somehow genetically superior to their colleagues abroad? or that scientists from all over the world don't share knowledge within a tightly regulated system of peer-reviewed and privately funded research?

     I was just making an observation of the facts, Darla. Unlike you, I don't have to consult my ideology before I decide which of the plainly obvious facts of life I am ready to believe. In this case, it is plainly obvious that I can think of very few scientific advances that have made life better for everyone on the planet that did not come from America. Am I saying that Americans are genetically superior? Hell no, that's your own straw man, although there may be some immigration-related artificial selection at work that improves the American gene pool. You're missing the thesis of my argument, i.e., that it is the American system of free enterprisers that unlocks the creativity of the human spirit that accounts for the scientific advances of the world.

     ponti, you are now going back on the ignore list. why do so many morons live in this country? northern california? cool, no problems here. but what is it with those darn red states?

     Gee Darla, I'm sorry if I upset you. It seems a little strange that you can put up with all the profanity on this site, but if I give you a few ideas that jar your world, that's when you become proactively ignorant.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 10:39pm

295. Posted by WILL C. 09/16/2006 @ 5:55pm

     The basis of the American system is the US constitution.

     what it gives the people is the ability to take their country in any direction they wish while working inside the framework of the articles and the amendments, with the ideals laid out in it's preamble as it's stated agenda

     And it doesn't guarantee you the right to life, liberty, or property or the right to be left alone so long as you don't harm other people

     But if you would like it too... See article five for the proper procedures on amending it

     Ah, spoken like a true 'modern' constitutional theorist who believes the constitution should mean what ever we want it to mean. No, Will, the Constitution was originally written to protect the life, liberty, and property of the American people, and that's what the general idea has always been. Sure, the left is always trying to curtail all of those things for 'the greater good', but leftist ideas are still generally rejected by the American people.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 10:46pm

296. Posted by LESTER1/2JR 09/16/2006 @ 7:17pm

     "the left" under bill clinton favored much smaller government than Bush, especially abroad.

     Clinton wasn't a leftist, he was DLC. Why do you think people on the left hate the DLC so much? The only thing Clinton cared about was his penis and his power. The best thing about Clinton was that he ignored his wife and did very little of anything during his 8 years in power, except for welfare reform and free trade. True, he raised taxes, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, we had that much leeway in the economy because we weren't throwing away money on weapons. Much of the growth restraint in government, however, you have to give credit for to the Republican Congress during his terms.

     our budget this year is 2.8 trillion. to me thats socialism.

     I totally agree. I think the whole country is fed up with the vast overspending of the Bush Administration and the porky Congressman on both sides of the aisle. But in this case, we have a choice of bad (Bush) or much worse (Kerry or Gore). I'll take bad.

     and it's no coincidence that as that budget grows our civil liberties are under attack. that's what always happens.

     To the extent that our civil liberties are 'under attack', it's because we have a serious war situation on our hands. I think most Americans understand that we are, in fact, at war, notwithstanding the wishful and/or ingenuous thinking you find on leftist websites dedicated to the destruction of Bush.

     there is rarely a big and also nice government. hugo chavez's venezuala is a hell of a lot more stable than Bush's america right now. despite the obvious handicaps of a socialist economy / society

     Totally disagree. I think Venezuela is in for some major upheavals. Chavez has extended his term (extra constitutionally, after packing the courts) to 2011, and he has hinted he may extend it indefinitely. Venezuela has just become a leftist dictatorship with lots of money and human capital to squander. That's never a good portent of things to come.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/16/2006 @ 10:56pm

297. "In this case, it is plainly obvious that I can think of very few scientific advances that have made life better for everyone on the planet that did not come from America"

     pontificus, that is probably the dumbest thing you have ever written. scientific advances come from all over the industrialized world. england, australia, japan, germany (!!), russia, scandinavia. they come from all over, dude. you talk about 'life better for everyone'? uh, dude, are you living on the same planet that i am???? name a good american-made washer/dryer? name a good car?! name a good airplane that was invented in america? how about a cell phone? how about the fucking genetic code, pal?! you are a MORON, dude!

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 11:21pm

298. "They're not economic powerhouses any more, Darla. Their unemployment rates are over 10 percent and rising. Their populations are declininig, just like American blue states, so much so that they have to import massive numbers of immigrants"

     -this sort of statement is testament to you idiocy. france and germany are not economic powerhouses?!?! again, what planet are you living on, dude?! france is the world's 5th largest economy, and germany is, what, 4th? their unemployment rates are around 10, but that's not very bad at all. certainly not a sign of a country "in decline". germany's workforce is FAR more educated than our own (not even close).

     your comments are non-sensical, ponti......

     Posted by darladoon at 09/16/2006 @ 11:28pm

299. Posted by DARLADOON 09/16/2006 @ 11:21pm

     pontificus, that is probably the dumbest thing you have ever written. scientific advances come from all over the industrialized world. england, australia, japan, germany (!!), russia, scandinavia. they come from all over, dude.

     Not really, most new inventions come from the United States, and they have been for the last 100 years or more. And it is scientific inventions, if you know anything about history, that have been the single most important factor in raising the quality of life for everyone on the planet since the discovery of fire. It's what gives you the leisure time to waste your brain smoking pot.

     you talk about 'life better for everyone'? uh, dude, are you living on the same planet that i am???? name a good american-made washer/dryer? name a good car?! name a good airplane that was invented in america? how about a cell phone?

     Making good cars and good washer/dryers or any other product is an entirely separate issue from inventing them (although I'll wager Airbus would attest that Boeing makes a pretty good airplane). Actually, Americans have made the best airplanes in the world (usually) since they invented them.

     how about the fucking genetic code, pal?!

     Well, see, now you did name one signficant scientific advance. But that makes for a mighty short list, so you've reinforced my point. And virtually all of the companies that are commercializing that knowledge are in the US.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 07:26am

300. Methinks the writer doth protest too much.

     Questions are starting to be asked my friends.

     Corn Denies Charge in 'WSJ' That He Outed Plame

     By E&P Staff

     Published: September 15, 2006 10:20 PM ET

     NEW YORK David Corn, co-author with Michael Isikoff of the new book "Hubris" that has made so much news lately, today heatedly denied what he called an old and false charge in the Wall Street Journal that he -- not Robert Novak -- outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

     In the Journal on Friday, Victoria Toensing, the attorney, wrote in a column, "The first journalist to reveal Ms. Plame was 'covert' was David Corn, on July 16, 2003, two days after Mr. Novak's column. The latter never wrote, because he did not know and it was not so, that Ms. Plame was covert. However, Mr. Corn claimed Mr. Novak 'outed' her as an 'undercover CIA officer,' querying whether Bush officials blew 'the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in...national security.' Was Mr. Corn subpoenaed? Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Mr. Wilson to attest he had never revealed his wife's employment to anyone? If he had done so, he might have learned Mr. Corn's source."

     On his Web site, Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, writes that he has long been friendly with Toensing, and so, "I am disheartened to see her embracing a rather idiotic conservative talking point and ignoring basic facts to tag me as the true culprit in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. It is an argument that defies logic and the record. But it is an accusation that pro-Bush spinners have used to defend the true leakers and columnist Bob Novak, the conveyor of the leak.

     "This is a canard that has been previously advanced by other conservatives--all to absolve Novak and the actual leakers (mainly Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, not Richard Armitage). And you see the suggestion: that Joe Wilson told me that his wife was an undercover CIA officer and that I then disclosed this information to the public. I've debunked this before. But for Toensing's benefit, I'll go through this again--though I doubt it will do much good."

     The full explanation can be found at www.davidcorn.com. In a nutshell, Corn notes that Novak had already described Plame as a "CIA operative," which essentially means she was covert.

     "At this point," he adds, "her cover--whatever it might have been--was blown to bits. The fact that Novak did not state she was a 'covert' operative is utterly meaningless. (Does the CIA employ non-secret 'operatives'?)"

     E&P Staff

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 07:30am

301. "their unemployment rates are around 10, but that's not very bad at all."

     Posted by DARLADOON 09/16/2006 @ 11:28pm

     DARLA, just read this. Think. and think hard.

     If an American politician (or even President!) came forward and said "I'm going to give the American people a 'just' and 'fair' economic system like France and Germany's....and 'all' it's going to cost is.....10% unemployment on a near-permanent basis"....????

     Posted by Mask at 09/17/2006 @ 07:32am

302. Actually Toensing establishes quite clearly that Plame was not, and had not been a covert agent for over five years when her name came up in the Novak column. She had returned to the states in 1997, six years earlier, and been assigned to Langley. Covert agents are not assigned to Langley.

     And it was actually David Corn who disclosed to the world that she had been at one time covert, not Novak, who only described her as an 'operative', a status that was well known in journalistic circles at the time. Read Toensing's article.

     http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008948

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 07:37am

303. Ponti, you are the living example of an arrogant, loud American. You live in a delusional world. You decry the leftist destruction of our education system, then point to scientific advances as a measure of success. Where do you think that comes from? 2 recent studies have shown that charter schools do worse than public, with Christian charter schools at the very bottom.

     According to Google the happiest people in the world are either the Danes (socialist?), the Puerto ricans, Australians or suprisingly Nigerians. America does not come up.

     Are you really free when your government is full of corrupt congressmen. See: Ney, Cunningham, Jefferson, Delay etc. Add in another corrupt White House and what do you have?

     We have the most Nobel prizes, but we also have a public education system. Which came 1st, the chicken or the egg ? I would argue that the public education system sure helps us. We also have a vastly larger population than many of the other countries, excluding India, China of course.

     Countries with the Most Nobel Prize Winners Rank Country Number of Laureates 1 United States 270 2 United Kingdom 101 3 Germany 76 4 France 49 5 Sweden 30 6 Switzerland 22 7 Netherlands 15 8 USSR 14 8 Italy 14 10 Denmark 13 11 Japan 12 12 Austria 11 13 Canada 10 14 Spain 6 14 Australia 6 16 Ireland 5 16 Israel 5 16 Poland 5 16 South Africa 5 16 Argentina 5 21 India 4

     We have such a high standard of living for most because of lefty ideals. If not for the left there never would have been a middle class.

     there are wackjobs on the left, and flacid ideas that do cause some harm. But I can say the same, and more, about the Right. Your blanket hatred of the left shows me that you have a closed mind. that kind of closed mind has lead us into diisaster in Iraq and allows you to see victory in Plames outing.

     Shameful, at best.

     I suggest you read up on ghandi and get a little humble into your life. You will be suprised at how well it works to make you a better person.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 08:55am

304. Pride kills. Nationalistic pride kills thousands, million. Whether it is German pride, japanese pride, Russian, Turkish pride or American pride.

     Be proud of your country, but humble too. It helps keep one from extremism.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 08:59am

305. Do some research on our Center for Disease Control. A publicly funded research institute that accounts for much of our progress. Paid for with tax money, ala socialism lite.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 09:01am

306. didn't toensing also justify the outing when we thought it was rove and co on the grounds of exposing nepotism or something? anyone who has ever appeared on dennis pragers radio show can't be trusted.

     pontificus:

     "To the extent that our civil liberties are 'under attack', it's because we have a serious war situation on our hands. I think most Americans understand that we are, in fact, at war, notwithstanding the wishful and/or ingenuous thinking you find on leftist websites dedicated to the destruction of Bush. "

     like i said, it's no coincidence that we have a 2.8 trillion dollar budget and our civil liberties are under attack. the reason you give: that we are "at war" proves my point. there ould be no war if we had a budget of zero dollars. we also wouldn't be involved in middle east politics any more than, say, Iceland. and the whole world would be better off for it.

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/17/2006 @ 09:20am

307. Posted by CRABWALK 09/17/2006 @ 08:55am

     Crabby, I dispute the notion that the public education system can take credit for our scientific advances. I'm not going to argue the point with you, however, because I don't think it can be proven either way.

     And even though the US has by far the most Nobel prizes, I don't think that's a good measure either. The non-science Nobels are basically worthless prizes for who has achieved most in the name of political correctness.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 09:40am

308. Shit, didn't Jimmy Carter win a Nobel Peace Prize? What does that tell you?

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 09:41am

309. Posted by LESTER1/2JR 09/17/2006 @ 09:20am

     there ould be no war if we had a budget of zero dollars. we also wouldn't be involved in middle east politics any more than, say, Iceland. and the whole world would be better off for it.

     Lester, Lester where to begin with you? That is a statement of such profound ignorance that I can only guess that you learned it in some college undergraduate course from some grad student.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 09:43am

310. Posted by CRABWALK 09/17/2006 @ 08:55am

     Ponti, you are the living example of an arrogant, loud American. You live in a delusional world. You decry the leftist destruction of our education system, then point to scientific advances as a measure of success. Where do you think that comes from? 2 recent studies have shown that charter schools do worse than public, with Christian charter schools at the very bottom.

     Well that's interesting. Why do you think the Clintons, Gores, and all the other rich liberals responsible for insulating the public school system from any attempt at reform send their own kids to private schools? Are they stupid?

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 09:46am

311. pontificus- so you think small government is good domesticly, but you favor a largely socialistic foreign policy? What kind of conservative would put that kind of faith in the federal government?

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/17/2006 @ 09:53am

312. I guess we didn't get any of our advances in 'nukular' techonlogy or rocket science (actual rockets) from defeated countries in WWII. Only by virtue of our amerikan brains.

     I feel smarterer when I listen to Ponti.

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/17/2006 @ 09:59am

313. Posted by CRABWALK 09/17/2006 @ 08:55am

     And oh, Crabby, if the public schools are so great, why is it that the NEA and other public employee unions are so afraid that parents will pull their kids out if given a choice?

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 10:12am

314. Posted by MALCONTENT 09/17/2006 @ 09:59am

     I guess we didn't get any of our advances in 'nukular' techonlogy or rocket science (actual rockets) from defeated countries in WWII. Only by virtue of our amerikan brains.,

     So you think we only got nuclear technology after WWII was over? Did you go to public school?

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 10:14am

315. Posted by LESTER1/2JR 09/17/2006 @ 09:53am

     pontificus- so you think small government is good domesticly, but you favor a largely socialistic foreign policy?

     Define 'socialistic foreign policy'.

     Posted by pontificus at 09/17/2006 @ 10:17am

316. pontificus- socialistic meaning a big government approach. I mean, we are essentially trying to put the entire muslim world under martial law as a response to 9/11. a small government approach would be getting out of the middle east except for afghanistan, as it was directly connected to an atack on our soil.

     you are advocating unlimited spending and government initiatives run wild and also more wiretapping of american citizens. so essentially you are a some kind of fascist or communist. who EVENTUALLY will perhaps be a conservative when the "war on terror " is over.

     this is exactly what the sell outs of the conservatives movement said about communism. embracing big government is just that.

     welfare and warfare are twins

     Posted by lester1/2jr at 09/17/2006 @ 10:46am

317. "commercializing that knowledge are in the US"

     -and that pretty much sums up my point. americans will commercialize knowledge that comes from ANYWHERE, pontificus, and by virtue of this reality, america cannot lay geographic or cultural claim to the vast majority of scientific advances over the last 100 years. knowledge is permeable, malleable, it comes from everywhere.

     in american universities, there are more foreigners doing scientific research than natives.

     so, ponti, you're entire point is fallacious, erroneous, arrogant, stupid, and retarded.

     and fyi, i smoke herb for medical purposes. it is LEGAL for me to do so.

     Posted by darladoon at 09/17/2006 @ 11:43am

318. Ah, spoken like a true 'modern' constitutional theorist who believes the constitution should mean what ever we want it to mean. No, Will, the Constitution was originally written to protect the life, liberty, and property of the American people, and that's what the general idea has always been. Sure, the left is always trying to curtail all of those things for 'the greater good', but leftist ideas are still generally rejected by the American people.

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/16/2006 @ 10:46pm

     Sorry to disagree, I just know what it says. Our constitution doesn't make the guarantees that you claim it does. Of course, if you would like to point out where it does, I'm more than happy to take you seriously for a few seconds while I read your post.

     The beautiful thing about our country is that when you stand before the bar of justice you are only held to account for the letter of the law. Any imagined spirit of the law doesn't mean jack. The US constitution is our founding charter. It makes us what we are. And, it doesn't say what you claim it does

     Posted by Will C. at 09/17/2006 @ 2:58pm

319. dont listen to pompousness, he's a pro treason republican.

     Posted by pretzel at 09/17/2006 @ 3:03pm

320. the single greatest scientific advancement of the 20th century = relativity

     einstein = german

     Posted by darladoon at 09/17/2006 @ 5:56pm

321. "...so you think we only got nuclear technology after WWII was over? Did you go to public school?"

     Posted by PONTIFICUS 09/17/2006 @ 10:14am

     Yes I did. We may have made the bomb first, but alot of our technology was post WWII and all of our 'Red menace beating' rockets were designed by German scientists.

     Did you go to school?

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/17/2006 @ 6:22pm

322. Posted by DARLADOON 09/17/2006 @ 5:56pm

     Yea. That guy too.

     Eric

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/17/2006 @ 6:23pm

323. " relativity???" That ain't in the bible...must not be relative.

     Posted by Malcontent at 09/17/2006 @ 6:25pm

324. osted by LVLIBERTY1 09/17/2006 @ 6:36pm

     If I am not mistaken, all of the Europe of which you write is democratic. If they want to change, they can. But most do not. They seem to like it.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 10:20pm

325. Ponti, where do you think all of that knowledge comes from? the heritage foundation?

     Private schools for the wealthy are a far different thing that a charter school.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 10:24pm

326. Lets see, Carter negotiated the one remaining peace deal in The middle East, didn't he? Camp David?

     I would pick Arafat as the most disgusting Nobel pick. Interesting that you pick an American prez to mock. You must hate America. Traitor.

     Posted by crabwalk at 09/17/2006 @ 10:30pm