Washington, D.C. -- U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald will hold a press conference at 2:00 P.M. EDT today, Friday October 28, 2005, regarding the status of the Special Counsel's criminal investigations.
posted on October 28, 2005 08:54:22 AM new
Libby will be indicted and if convicted will receive a Presidential pardon before President Bush leaves office.
posted on October 28, 2005 09:07:29 AM newOnly one in 10 Americans said they believe Bush administration officials did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity, according to a national poll released Tuesday.
Didn't 1 in 10 Americans believe Clinton did nothing wrong as well
I hope these people that leaked the information do get charged and convicted. These people are truly un-American. I just hope they do not get tortured while they are in prison.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on October 28, 2005 09:11:22 AM new
And let's not let this take away from the ongoing investigations into the criminal activities of DelIE and Frist...they're problems are far from over
posted on October 28, 2005 09:37:47 AM new
Actually Dbl - one of the early statement that were made from Cheney, Rove, et al is that they did not know that Plame wasa CIA operative. Therefor if you fuind it hard to believe that this administration would do an investigation and not be informed of that info it stands to reason that they lied in those initial statements.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
An intelligent deaf-mute is better than an ignorant person who can speak.
posted on October 28, 2005 07:17:42 PM new... it stands to reason that they lied in those initial statements.
yah, I follow ya... kinda like if somebody lies about something as innocuous as their age, or a location they say they remember, stands to reasons they lie about everything else.
.
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[ edited by dblfugger9 on Oct 28, 2005 07:50 PM ]
posted on October 29, 2005 06:53:43 AM new
Gee Linda must be verrrry busy lately....not much time to post the glories of the bush debacle
Indictment Adds to White House Woes
Updated 6:13 AM ET October 29, 2005
Listen to Audio Clip
By RON FOURNIER
WASHINGTON (AP) - These are dark days for the White House. And they could get darker. Less than a year after winning re-election by a comfortable margin, President Bush's approval ratings are at the lowest since he took office in 2001 and he is being whipsawed this week by events, some of his own making.
_The U.S. death toll in Iraq hit 2,000 on Tuesday, a fresh reminder of the president's push to war over weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
_A special prosecutor took aim at White House officials in an investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's identity, a disclosure that may have been part of a campaign to discredit an Iraq war critic. The vice president's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts Friday, although top aide Karl Rove escaped charges for now.
_An insurrection of the president's conservative political base forced the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers on Thursday.
_Consumer confidence dropped, home sales were down and the number of people who lost their jobs because of Hurricane Katrina climbed above the half-million mark.
"There are times when no matter what you do it seems to blow up in your face, whether it's self-inflicted or inflicted from the outside," said Democratic consultant Joe Lockhart, who was President Clinton's press secretary during the impeachment flap.
In the face of such grim news, Bush is likely to follow the examples of Clinton and other embattled presidents and make a public display of his work ethic.
"The American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to," Bush said, shrugging off the "background noise" of the CIA leak investigation.
White House officials have said they expect anybody indicted to leave the staff.
On Iraq, the president has given a series of speeches defending his war policies. The approval of a new Iraqi constitution Oct. 15 is one of the few pieces of good news Bush had gotten this month.
The economy has been a baffling issue to Bush and his team. They have not figured out how to convince the public that the economy is doing as well as experts say. It's a hard sell when pension funds are going bankrupt, health care costs and gasoline prices are soaring and jobs are being shipped overseas.
That leaves the rift with conservatives. The White House hopes that Miers fixed that problem by withdrawing.
Bush blamed her demise on a dispute with the Senate over access to White House documents, but that wasn't half the problem. It was a family fight, an ugly one, between a conservative president and like-minded activists who consider themselves entitled to dictate his Supreme Court pick.
They helped him get elected twice. They wanted a tried-and-true conservative on the bench, and Miers didn't cut it.
With independent and Democratic voters abandoning him in droves, Bush couldn't afford to make conservatives angry.
"The base is his last refuge at this point," said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political science professor.
"He's facing some daunting challenges," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. "The way that political leaders move when they are facing challenges is back to their base."
Massachusetts' junior senator, John Kerry, put a more cynical spin on the Miers' withdrawal. "Caught up in a wave of scandal and concerns about the war in Iraq, the president has allowed right-wing interest groups to decide the fate of his Supreme Court nominee rather than stand up to his ultraconservative base," he said.
Kerry would love to see Bush labeled a quick-to-yield politician. Part of the reason Kerry lost to Bush in the 2004 race was that voters said they knew where the president stood even when they disagreed with him _ and that he rarely wavered.
Now the president has given up on a woman he said was the most qualified in the nation.
Where else has Bush gone wrong? His credibility, an asset just a year ago, was undercut when the Iraq war failed to live up to his promises and it was further damaged by his flat-footed response to Hurricane Katrina, according to strategists in both parties.
Even some Republicans believe that Bush made a mistake at the beginning of the year by spending so much postelection political capital on Social Security reform, an issue that few voters cited as a reason for backing him.
Others point to his staff, a talented and loyal group of fellow Texans and their friends who came into the second term bone-tired and short on fresh ideas. Many helped Bush through the Sept. 11 attacks, two wars and a re-election.
Their intense loyalty may have led some advisers to challenge Joseph Wilson's credibility when he questioned Bush's evidence on Iraq and nuclear material. The question Fitzgerald was appointed to explore is whether anybody crossed the line and purposely revealed that Wilson's wife was a spy.
"The bad news tends to breed bad news and oftentimes there is no way to get out of it other than to just wait it out," Lockhart said.
The best thing about bad news is it might get better.
posted on October 29, 2005 02:09:07 PM new
::yah, I follow ya... kinda like if somebody lies about something as innocuous as their age, or a location they say they remember, stands to reasons they lie about everything else::
What are you talking about now?
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
An intelligent deaf-mute is better than an ignorant person who can speak.
posted on October 29, 2005 04:49:48 PM new Our 27 months of hell
By Joseph C. Wilson IV, JOSEPH C. WILSON IV was acting ambassador in Baghdad when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. He is the author of "The Politics of Truth" (Carroll & Graff, 2004). He was a diplomat for 23 years.
AFTER THE two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me, it is tempting to feel vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Between us, Valerie and I have served the United States for nearly 43 years. I was President George H.W. Bush's acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, and I served as ambassador to two African nations for him and President Clinton. Valerie worked undercover for the CIA in several overseas assignments and in areas related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.
Valerie told me later that it was like being hit in the stomach. Twenty years of service had gone down the drain. She immediately started jotting down a checklist of things she needed to do to limit the damage to people she knew and to projects she was working on. She wondered how her friends would feel when they learned that what they thought they knew about her was a lie.
It was payback cheap political payback by the administration for an article I had written contradicting an assertion President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. Payback not just to punish me but to intimidate other critics as well.
Why did I write the article? Because I believe that citizens in a democracy are responsible for what government does and says in their name. I knew that the statement in Bush's speech that Iraq had attempted to purchase significant quantities of uranium in Africa was not true. I knew it was false from my own investigative trip to Africa (at the request of the CIA) and from two other similar intelligence reports. And I knew that the White House knew it.
Going public was what was required to make them come clean. The day after I shared my conclusions in a New York Times opinion piece, the White House finally acknowledged that the now-infamous 16 words "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address."
That should have been the end. But instead, the president's men allegedly including Libby and at least one other (known only as "Official A" ) were determined to defame and discredit Valerie and me.
They used eager allies in Congress and the conservative media, beginning with Novak. Perhaps the most egregious of the attacks was New York GOP Rep. Peter King's odious suggestion that Valerie "got what she deserved."
Valerie was an innocent in this whole affair. Although there were suggestions that she was behind the decision to send me to Niger, the CIA told Newsday just a week after the Novak article appeared that "she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment." The CIA repeated the same statement to every reporter thereafter.
The grand jury has now concluded that at least one of the president's men committed crimes. We are heartened that our system of justice is working and appreciative of the work done by our fellow citizens who devoted two years of their lives to grand jury duty.
The attacks on Valerie and me were upsetting, disruptive and vicious. They amounted to character assassination. Senior administration officials used the power of the White House to make our lives hell for the last 27 months.
But more important, they did it as part of a clear effort to cover up the lies and disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That is the ultimate crime.
The war in Iraq has claimed more than 17,000 dead and wounded American soldiers, many times more Iraqi casualties and close to $200 billion.
It has left our international reputation in tatters and our military broken. It has weakened the United States, increased hatred of us and made terrorist attacks against our interests more likely in the future.
It has been, as Gen. William Odom suggested, the greatest strategic blunder in the history of our country.
We anticipate no mea culpa from the president for what his senior aides have done to us. But he owes the nation both an explanation and an apology.
Plame, the daughter of an Air Force colonel and an elementary school teacher, was recruited by the CIA at 22, shortly after graduation from Pennsylvania State University. She was in the 1985-86 class of CIA officers trained at "The Farm" near Williamsburg, where the curriculum included learning to drive under fire, blowing up cars and handling an AK-47.
Her career postings are classified, but she was one of the elite clandestine spies -- an officer with nonofficial cover who works overseas in business or other jobs and has no diplomatic protection if detected or arrested.
In 2006, she will have 20 years with the agency. As such she qualifies for retirement but would not receive full benefits unless she stays with the agency until age 50.
After she was named in a syndicated column by Robert Novak, Plame had no chance of working again in her chosen field, her friends say, and the strain of remaining at the agency has taken its toll.
"For all intents and purposes out at the CIA, she's like a leper . . . she's radioactive," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and acquaintance of Plame's who was in her officer training class. "There are instances where some people at headquarters have shunned her. In other cases they don't know what to say. It's like someone whose child has died: What do you say to them?
"There are a variety of things she could have done at the agency. She could have become a station chief overseas and run espionage operations. It has destroyed her life on that front. What is she supposed to do now, wear a button saying, " 'Hi, I work for the CIA'?"
Wilson and his lawyer, Christopher Wolf, would not comment on Plame's plans. But Wolf -- who has also been the couple's next-door neighbor for seven years -- said: "She was absolutely devastated by this on lots of levels. . . . Valerie was by definition the ultimate private person. She didn't seek any publicity or any acclaim or any thanks for her work."
After the outing, said Wolf, "her career was over, she knew it was over, and certainly her contacts were put in jeopardy . . . and her family was put at risk."
Last winter, Plame drafted an op-ed article to explain her role in her husband's Niger trip, but the agency would not permit her to submit it for publication. "While I would love to share Valerie's article with readers, so long as her agency refuses to allow her to defend herself, there is nothing she or I can do," Wilson wrote in the recently issued paperback edition of his bestseller "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity."
In the book he quoted a CIA response to Plame telling her "publication of your article has the potential to affect your ability to perform your official duties and the agency's ability to perform its mission." As long as she remains in the CIA -- and even beyond retirement -- national security restrictions would typically apply if she wrote, say, a memoir.
Wilson and Plame, who were married in 1998, live in the District's Palisades neighborhood in a spacious home with a back-deck view of the Washington Monument. Their son and daughter are in kindergarten. (Wilson has another grown set of twins from an earlier marriage.) Before Novak's column, neighbors and friends had no clue she was a spy -- they knew her as a "consultant" in the energy business.
"She's going to be a huge asset no matter what she does," said Plame's friend Honikman, founder of Postpartum Support International, a group the CIA officer contacted for help in overcoming her own severe bout with postpartum depression. "She's too smart a woman . . . and would maximize whatever opportunities lie ahead."
Plame served as executive director of a local postpartum support chapter but had to resign because "it was too much stress" after she was outed, Honikman said. "She had to stay focused on herself and her family." Honikman added, "I admire her for the incredible strength she has shown to endure this."
posted on October 29, 2005 06:25:24 PM new
Talkin about Piss-ants... I about got chewed up yesterday by the little buggers.. and one even got down my shirt and bit me on my titty and omg.. talk about pain and itching, all day long I'm reaching down my shirt to scratch the thing... sore too!
posted on October 29, 2005 06:28:45 PM new
Maggie! Piss-ants are REAL ? Naww, they can't be!
I think Helen may have been referring to a person who now hides because her shining city on a hill is crumbling
posted on October 29, 2005 06:54:28 PM new
I'd like to gloat and do a happy dance too, but why do I have a nagging feeling that nothing is going to stick...could it be that slime is just to hard to hold on to?
I think the Democratic Party should concentrate less on the smear and more on formulating an agenda. The time is ripe for the picking if they come forward with some good ideas..jmho
\\BTW....
Refresh me...who was it that said:
" he would, himself, restore, honesty and integrity to the white House"????
[ edited by maggiemuggins on Oct 29, 2005 07:02 PM ]
posted on October 29, 2005 07:01:04 PM new
I agree Maggie. And since the judge for Scooty's trial was hand picked by bush, for sure justice won't be done.
But gloating is fun when the slimeballs are at least exposed for what they are and with ALL the scandals (Delay's, Frist's, etc.), re-elections for Repugs will be tough....it's a good thing
This investigation cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a "smear". It's a search for truth and hopefully will result in an investiagation of the lies that started a war resulting in the slaughter of thousands.
posted on October 30, 2005 04:55:40 AM new
Gotta leave for the day but if Linda (who has been mysteriously shy lately) appears, be sure to say Hi for me !
Come to think of it...haven't seen too many other neocons here lately....it can't be shame since they have no morals....must be something else.
Well, remember kiddies...an indicment a day keeps the re-elections away !
posted on October 30, 2005 07:31:54 AM new
"Talkin about Piss-ants... I about got chewed up yesterday by the little buggers.. and one even got down my shirt and bit me on my titty and omg.. talk about pain and itching, all day long I'm reaching down my shirt to scratch the thing"
ahhhhhh I dont suppose ya have any pics of that do ya??
posted on October 30, 2005 08:04:43 AM new
Why, thank you for your concern, Classy..
Although the bite is itchy and bothersome, I'm sure I will live..with my boo boo.. wanna kiss it all better? LOL LOL
Well at least she doesn't bite!
) appears, be sure to say Hi for me !
