1 Boring Old Man

Waxman Taps Mukasey in CIA Leak Probe

A House committee chairman looking into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity asked for Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s help in getting transcripts of investigators’ interviews with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and five White House aides. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the White House is blocking Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from providing the transcripts, which are among the material the congressman wants from the criminal investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity.

In a letter to Mukasey, Waxman said that during the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno made an independent judgment and provided FBI interview reports to Capitol Hill, including interview summaries with President Clinton, Vice President Gore and three White House chiefs of staff. ”Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the committee,” Waxman stated. ”I hope you will not accede to the White House objections.” The White House and Fitzgerald’s office declined to comment.

The congressman’s request comes less than a month after Mukasey, a retired federal judge, was sworn in as the nation’s 81st attorney general, replacing Alberto Gonzales, a personal friend of the president who served as White House counsel before taking the top job at the Justice Department. Waxman said his request has taken on new urgency following recently published excerpts from a book being written by Scott McClellan, a former White House press secretary. McClellan wrote that five of the highest-ranking officials in the government were involved in passing along false information to the public that presidential political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis ”Scooter” Libby were not involved in the Plame leak…

I wonder how many times I’ve written about the Valerie Plame incident. I wonder how many times other bloggers or journalists have written about it. Plamegate, Treasongate, Nigergate – names embedded in our minds so as to immediately recall countless images and stories dating back now four and a half years – an onion peeled layer by layer by the determination of a dogged bloggers, a dedicated Special Prosecutor, and a few Congressmen who know where this story leads. It’s not like the truth isn’t known. The testimony in the Scooter Libby Trial made it clear what happened, but failed to prove any crime other than the chronic lies of a single staffer. The books [Anatomy of Deceit, The Politics of Truth, Fair Game, Hubris, etc.], the endless blog posts, and MSM articles have added incremental details that filled in the gaps Libby’s Trial left for the imagination. The story has gone on so long that regular people have lost interest in even hearing about it. Only the faithful continue to hang onto every word, every report – hoping for Justice for a myriad of reasons.

• Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity as a WMD Analyst was revealed by top Administration Officials to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson.
• Joseph Wilson reported on his own experience that lead him to conclude that the Bush Administration had distorted Intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
• Joseph Wilson was right. Each piece of that Intelligence [Niger Uranium purchase, Aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges, ties between al Qaeda and Hussein] has now been shown to be wrong. And each piece of that Intelligence could have been proved wrong at the time it was used to justify the War.
• The only reason the Administration was able to lead us into a War with such flimsy evidence was the state of mind in America after the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City. We were hurt, scared, and outraged.

There have been other windows – N.S.A. Spying. Torture, Secret Prisons, things we would never have dreamed of in the past. But then came a really big window, the firing of the U.S. Attorneys last year. By that time, we were onto them. Justice may not yet be complete in that episode, but it was swift and effective. Everyone involved directly is gone from government, has been gone for months – including a number of people at the White House. This time, the Administration was being watched so closely that their attempted U.S.A. Plan failed immediately.

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons

President Bush said today that a new intelligence finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003 had not altered his sense that Iran remained a danger. The world needed to view the report as “a warning signal,” not grounds for reassurance, he said, and the United States would not renounce the option of a military response. “I have said Iran is dangerous,” Bush said a day after the release of the National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus of all 16 American spy agencies, “and the N.I.E. doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world — quite the contrary.”