Category: Old Dish

I wondered what it might take for Hollywood types to take Islamic terrorism seriously. Maybe slitting a Buddhist monk’s throat and burning a temple will jolt them a little. (Hat tip: Judith.)

“Judy Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and your job is to get her stories into the paper!” – Gerald Boyd, former managing editor of the NYT. That was his response to internal questions about Miller’s pre-war assertion that there were over 1,000 WMD sites in Iraq before the invasion.

Josh Marshall has a point here about apparent discrepancies in the president’s reported answers about Rove and Plamegate. Doesn’t he?

Who leaked them? Why? Wild but informed speculation here. My question: what did Fitzgerald know and when did he know it?

“‘What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret but far more telling to me is, America is paying the consequences.’ Mr Wilkerson, [a retired colonel who was chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January], said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran. It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions. ‘If you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.'” – from the Financial Times today. Cabal? Powell’s top aide – who has distanced himself from Powell, but almost certainly reflectes his own views – also cites the abuse scandal as one of the consequences of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis:

The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”

Condi is blamed for not intervening. But the president himself is the real man responsible. Now, the question is: what else did this cabal get up to? And is that what Fitzgerald is interested in? Did Fitzgerald talk to Wilkerson? Or Powell? The questions multiply. More here.

The new wrinkle that the source for Rove’s Plame information was originally Libby is another piece of information that arguably points toward Cheney. If Rove learned of it through Libby, then Cheney looks pretty isolated to me as the original source of the leak. Wouldn’t Bush or Hadley tell Rove themselves if they were the orginal sources? Today, we find out the following:

The new information about Hannah signals how broadly the prosecutor has probed for answers. As Cheney’s deputy national security adviser, he was intimately involved in Iraq policy.
Hannah is one of at least five people in the Cheney operation who have been interviewed by federal investigators.
Fitzgerald’s interest in the vice president’s office became clearer as the case continued: Cheney was central to building the case that then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought nuclear weapons-grade material in Niger and Libby helped discredit Wilson in part by talking about his wife, according to lawyers in the case.
Fitzgerald talked to Cheney personally near the beginning of the investigation, though according to a person familiar with the case, he has not questioned him since. Fitzgerald and his investigative team interviewed Mary Matalin, a former top Cheney adviser; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokeswoman.

If the prosecutor asks to interview Cheney again in the next few days, we’re into earthquake territory. Then there’s the question of the July 7 Airforce One flight:

According to people involved in the case, prosecutors believe a printout of that memo [citing Plame’s CIA cover] was in the front of Air Force One during the July 7-12 trip Bush took to Africa, but investigators are unsure who saw it. The prosecutor has also examined the role of Stephen J. Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser. In an e-mail that surfaced earlier this year, Rove told Hadley, then deputy national security adviser, about his conversation with Cooper, saying he waved the reporter off Wilson’s allegations. The e-mail was not turned over until long after the probe began… Fitzgerald has questioned Powell about his knowledge of the document, according to people familiar with the case.

My italics. Who has access to the front of Airforce One? Here’s a plausible scenario. Very few people saw the memo. Cheney was one of them. Did Libby inform Miller and Cooper on his own initiative? Or was he part of a coordinated effort?

Or to put it more succinctly: Condi for Veep?

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist,” – Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943, describing what is now legal and constitutional in the United States, under president Bush.

There’s some evidence that cannabis can help stabilize breathing while asleep in animals.

The very reputable reporter, Thomas DeFrank, now reports that Bush knew as long ago as 2003 of Karl Rove’s leaking of Plame’s name and was furious about it. At least, that’s the spin. Why the sudden distancing? We may soon find out.

The rumors are now swirling. Who has really been cooperating with Fitzgerald? The new buzz is that it could be … Colin Powell. Who ends up at the center of the Plame outing? The odds may be narrowing on Cheney. If that pans out, we could be about to hit Plamegate pay-dirt; and the Bush administration could be headed into a political Katrina. But this is still just Capitol Hill buzz; and my sourcing is still light. A blog is not a newspaper and what I’ve just detailed wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) get into a newspaper. But, hey, speculation is part of what a blog is for; and I don’t see why I should withhold what folks in DC are buzzing about from readers. We still don’t know a lot. And these rumors may be shot down. But the issue may well be the now long-reported Airforce One trip where Plame’s covert status was allegedly discussed. With whom did Powell allegedly share the email? Who took the information and used it? We may soon find out.