{"id":502,"date":"2006-09-11T17:59:47","date_gmt":"2006-09-11T22:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/09\/11\/back-to-business\/"},"modified":"2006-09-12T01:49:38","modified_gmt":"2006-09-12T06:49:38","slug":"back-to-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/09\/11\/back-to-business\/","title":{"rendered":"back to business&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div align=\"justify\"><strong>emptywheel<\/strong> at <font color=\"#000066\"><strong>The Next Hurrah<\/strong><\/font> has been the keeper of the grail about the C.I.A. leak case at a level of detail that&#8217;s been staggering to behold. In her most recent post, she reveals once again, however, that she&#8217;s more than just a fact-monger &#8211; she&#8217;s onto a much bigger picture:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/thenexthurrah.typepad.com\/the_next_hurrah\/2006\/09\/hubris_misses_t.html\"><strong>Why the NIE Claims Are Important<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As a review, here&#8217;s what Libby&#8217;s NIE lies are all about. This is all documented in <a href=\"http:\/\/thenexthurrah.typepad.com\/the_next_hurrah\/2006\/05\/leaking_the_nie.html\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Link to another page in this blog\">this post<\/a>, and here is the <a href=\"http:\/\/thenexthurrah.typepad.com\/the_next_hurrah\/files\/LibbyCourtHearingTranscriptMay5.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Link to another page in this blog\">court transcript<\/a> in which most of this is revealed. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Scooter Libby has instructions in his notes to leak something to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003<\/li>\n<li>When questioned about the notation, Libby claimed the instructions related to the NIE<\/li>\n<li>Libby went further to make certain claims about the NIE leak&#8211;that the leak was authorized by Dick Cheney and George Bush, that such an authorization was totally unique in his career, and that Libby was so worried about leaking the NIE to Judy that he double checked to make sure he was authorized to do so<\/li>\n<li>Libby later made claims that directly contradicted these assertions&#8211;most importantly, even though Libby claims the Judy leak was totally unique in his career, he also leaked the NIE to three other people: Bob Woodward, a journalist on July 2, and the WSJ<\/li>\n<li>Also, in spite of the fact that Libby says he was really worried about getting authorization to leak the NIE to Judy, he&#8217;s not really sure whether he was authorized to leak the NIE to Woodward; his concern about the leak to Judy <strong>only<\/strong> extended to whatever he leaked to Judy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, Libby is almost certainly lying about what he was authorized to leak to Judy on July 8, 2003, in a meeting where Judy Miller admits he talked about Valerie Plame, and where Libby tried to get her to falsely attribute the story. Or let me put it even more plainly:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Evidence suggests that the Vice President of the United States authorized the outing of the CIA spy who could prove Cheney ignored evidence that Iraq didn&#8217;t have WMDs.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Scooter Libby&#8217;s behavior, his testimony, his story doesn&#8217;t make any sense. In some ways, it seems like awkward lies to cover his own ass because he was up to no good. Patrick Fitzgerald said it well when he said that Libby&#8217;s lies made it impossible to complete his investigation &#8211; so he was indicting him for obfuscating any possibility of discovering the truth about how the C.I.A. Leak was orchestrated.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Right now, the party line is that it wasn&#8217;t orchestrated at all. Bumbling Richard Armitage blabbed and gossiped. Then Key Administration Officials, not knowing Plame was couvert, confirmed when they were asked &#8211; sure they wanted to protect the President, but that was just &quot;politics.&quot; Judy Miller was just the reporter Libby knew best. He was &quot;just&quot; leaking like he had been doing. It was all just a funny set of events that happened. You know, that Washington stuff that&#8217;s just part of the game.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">That&#8217;s not what <strong>emptywheel<\/strong> thinks. She thinks that it wasn&#8217;t just a &quot;get Joe Wilson for questioning our integrity&quot; deal. It was a much more devious plot. It was a premeditated attempt to neutralize Valerie Plame, the operations officer at the C.I.A. who knew that there was never any real evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and who knew when Cheney knew that evidence was lacking and decided to ignore it. When Joseph Wilson went public, Cheney was afraid of much more than just Joseph Wilson. He was afraid of what Valerie knew, and what publicizing his actively ignoring the C.I.A. would do to him. So he sent Scooter Libby on a search and destroy mission. That&#8217;s what explains Scooter&#8217;s peculiar inconsistent story. It&#8217;s not just a bunch of understandable serendipity, it&#8217;s a special_ops-esque dirty trick to cover a crime.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">At least that&#8217;s what I think <strong>emptywheel<\/strong> thinks. It&#8217;s what I think. I&#8217;m looking forward to Marcy&#8217;s <font color=\"#4400ff\"><strong>Firedoglake<\/strong><\/font> book to see if she can nail it. Have you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.firedoglake.com\/cia-leak-investigation-book-by-marcy-wheeler\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>contributed<\/strong><\/a>? I have&#8230;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>emptywheel at The Next Hurrah has been the keeper of the grail about the C.I.A. leak case at a level of detail that&#8217;s been staggering to behold. In her most recent post, she reveals once again, however, that she&#8217;s more than just a fact-monger &#8211; she&#8217;s onto a much bigger picture: Why the NIE Claims [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}