Rovegate

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2005 11:03 schreef PJORourke het volgende:

Iig heeft Ann als jurist de kennis om dat uit te leggen.

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Rove Death Watch, Part 2
Wherein your correspondent corrects some misconceptions.

Why aren't the major newspapers running editorials calling for Karl Rove's resignation? The Washington Post is silent. So is the Los Angeles Times. Maybe they're waiting for more information. But what more do they have to know? The White House deputy chief of staff revealed the identity of an undercover CIA employee to Time magazine. He did this solely for the purpose of attacking the credibility of an administration critic. He did not check first to find out whether said CIA employee was undercover. Or perhaps he knew and didn't care. Either way, such reckless behavior is a firing offense. Next case.

The New York Times weighs in today with uncharacteristic timidity. (I knew we were in for noncommittal chin-pulling when I saw the headline, "A Few Thoughts on Karl Rove." In editorial-ese, "A Few Thoughts on" is code for "We Can't Decide About.") The editorial states, erroneously, that Rove told Time's Matt Cooper that Wilson was sent to Niger "at the suggestion of his wife." Wilson was sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, but that's not what Rove told Cooper, according to Cooper's e-mail to his bureau chief as quoted by Newsweek, which is all we have to go on. According to Cooper's e-mail, Rove told him Wilson's wife "authorized the trip," which is not true. Rove's absurd insinuation seems to have been that only a girly-man would depend on his wife for work, and that a girly-man wouldn't know squat about weapons of mass destruction. Unless Cooper was garbling what Rove told him, we must conclude that Rove was passing along false information, perhaps with the recommendation that Cooper check it out, or perhaps not.

But I digress.

The Times editorial concludes by calling for Rove to … answer his critics at a press conference! Why not call for Rove's resignation? My guess is that the Times feels the issue of Rove's culpability in this matter is tangled up with the issue of how we came to discover it, i.e., through Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's bullying of the press. To call on Rove to resign, the Times may believe, would be to legitimize a rogue prosecution that's landed Times reporter Judy Miller in jail. If that is the Times's thinking, it's totally wrongheaded. Whether the courts should force reporters to reveal confidential sources is a separate issue from whether sources, after they've been unmasked, should be held accountable by their bosses for improper communications. The First Amendment does not and should not guarantee Karl Rove lifetime employment.

But what if Rove is … a whistle-blower? Yeah, that's it, he's a whistle-blower! This is the trial balloon floated in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the Republican National Committee is circulating madly. The argument is that Rove did a public service by alerting Time that Wilson

had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

The biggest problem with this argument is that Wilson never said that Dick Cheney personally chose him to fly to Niger to check out rumors that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium. To hear the GOP tell it, you'd think Wilson's story had Cheney punching his speed dial and asking, "How's that golf game going, you old so-and-so? What are you doing next Saturday? How'd you like to do me a little favor? Love to Val and the kids." What Wilson claimed in his July 2003 New York Times op-ed piece—the document whose purported falsity Rove was trying to expose—is as follows:

I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

All true. I don't know what verbal shorthand Wilson used when discussing this matter "on the airwaves," but to the extent he emphasized this trip was instigated by Cheney, his point would have been not to indicate Cheney hand-picked him for the trip but rather to emphasize that the trip itself never would have happened had Cheney not ordered the CIA to assign it. Because the CIA had already concluded, correctly, it turns out, that the Iraqis had purchased no yellowcake.

But let's suppose that Wilson did indeed claim, falsely, that Cheney personally selected him to go to Niger ("Go get 'em, tiger!"). To blow the whistle on this lie, Rove still would have no logical need to expose Wilson's wife as a CIA employee. He could merely tell Time's Cooper, "Cheney did not select Wilson for the trip. Cheney has never met or spoken to Wilson in his life. Some faceless bureaucrat at the CIA picked Wilson." For Rove to add (falsely) that Wilson's wife authorized Wilson, or even to add (correctly) that Wilson's wife recommended Wilson to her superiors, would serve merely to castrate Wilson (at least in Rove's overheatedly macho imagination).

I hold no brief for Joe Wilson. This column has criticized him and his wife for cozying up to the glitterati, even at the expense of allowing Valerie Plame to be photographed without any disguise at the TriBeCa film festival. (Wilson had previously claimed that even after she was outed, Plame couldn't be photographed without a disguise because she needed to be protected from "some wacko in the street." The couple's subsequent decision to position Plame's face before the paparazzi suggests that their previous stance was pure theater.) Furthermore, although Wilson found no evidence that Iraq had purchased yellowcake from Niger, I believe that Wilson ought to have been more forthright about finding evidence that Iraq had indeed made some overtures toward purchasing yellowcake, though not in a way that the Senate intelligence committee deemed terribly significant. ("The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that 'Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake' overstated what the Intelligence Community knew…") Bush's famous 16 words about this in his State of the Union address remain hooey, but Wilson was sloppy, and perhaps a little dishonest, in criticizing them.

But this is not what Rove told Cooper. What Rove told Cooper was that Joe Wilson was married to a woman who worked for the CIA. He said this apparently without checking—as any minimally responsible person would do—whether this was information that needed to be kept secret. And that's the generous interpretation; it's possible (though doubtful, I think) that he passed along this information knowing that he was blowing Plame's cover and pretty much destroying her CIA career. (There has been some dispute about whether Plame was technically undercover when she was exposed. I apply a simple test: Did her friends and neighbors know she worked for the CIA? They did not. Ergo, she was undercover.)

Rove behaved in a way that was unacceptably heedless of national security concerns. He revealed a secret not to expose the truth, but to smear a political enemy. And, if Cooper's e-mail is precisely accurate, the smear wasn't even true. Some whistle-blower.

Coda: The White House and Bush are still stonewalling. But Rove may have taken one small step forward on the plank today. As I've noted before, Rove's departure will likely be signaled when the president starts saying things like, "I'm behind Karl 100 percent." (A few readers have asked me to provide a rational explanation for this paradox. I can't. It's just a mysterious Washington ritual, like the consumption of Senate bean soup.) Today's White House briefing included the following exchange:

Q: Scott, from Africa, Mrs. Bush says, Karl Rove is a very good friend of mine; I've known him for years. And she's not going to speculate on any other part of the case. Well, does the President feel the same way about Karl Rove, the relationship with Karl Rove, a very good friend for many years?

A: Yes, he does.

This is a departure from McClellan's previous stance, which was to state that Rove had the president's full confidence only insofar as anyone else who worked at the White House had the president's full confidence. Today McClellan personalized the president's relationship with Rove; he's a "good friend." The optimist in me interprets that as a subtle signal that the bloom is off the Turd Blossom.

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An innocent man?
Democrats are overeager to handcuff Rove

It's something of a stretch to call Karl Rove, the Machiavellian political advisor to President Bush, "innocent."
But in this case, he just might be.

And there's been something positively unseemly about the transparent glee with which many Democrats have been calling for Rove to be frog-marched out of the White House.

That glee is a form of tribute, really. It's an acknowledgement of just how successful (and ruthless) Rove has been, as a political strategist, in building Bush's political empire, and forging a solid Republican majority in Congress.

So why would he be so stupid as to leak Valerie Plame's name?

In the matter of Valerie Plame, it's entirely possible that Rove isn't the culprit, and is guilty of nothing more than talking about her to a reporter when, two years ago, the White House said that he had not. That doesn't mean he did so knowingly, or knew Plame was undercover, two aspects of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- a law that is extremely difficult to prosecute.

It could well be that Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is being entirely truthful when he says that Rove testified voluntarily before the federal grand jury, never invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, and has been assured by prosecutors that Rove is not a focus of the investigation into who leaked Plame's name.

In their zeal to nail Rove, liberals and progressives may be missing the real story here. Rove says he first learned about Plame's status from reporters. If so, somebody had to tell those reporters.

A clue as to who comes from who the reporters are. Matthew Cooper, Time correspondent, says he talked with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after he talked with Rove. Libby has also claimed in the past not to have talked with reporters about Plame.

The leak originally hit print with Robert Novak, a columnist tight with Bush's neocon crowd. But the most intriguing figure is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter previously most notorious as the credulous scribe who reprinted, on page one, mountains of pre-war lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, lies often sourced to Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi was a favored protégé of the neocon war hawks who pushed the Bush White House into war, a cabal led by Cheney himself. Miller was their favored mouthpiece.

It's no stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the neocons were alarmed by the nerve former Ambassador Joseph Wilson struck with his revelations that the Bush team knew that accusations Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger were not only false, but based on crude forgeries. Their preferred response was to go after the messenger -- to discredit Joseph Wilson, just as this administration has attacked Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and various other high-profile critics of administration policy.

Karl Rove is not the only figure in the Bush administration who plays nasty. But these men are not stupid. They would not have leaked such an explosive secret about Plame, one that endangered CIA agents and compromised national security, without some level of deniability. One reason it's hard to imagine Rove as the culprit is that he's simply too smart to blurt out something like this.

Those people wanting Karl Rove's head probably aren't going to get it. There are too many doubts about his guilt, and he is too indispensable to George Bush, for Bush to fire him.

But that doesn't mean heads aren't going to roll somewhere. By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.

In this way, the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity goes much more to the heart of the Bush administration than it would if it were a simple case of a political operative exacting vengeance. This is, once again, all about the lies that the Bush administration used to justify its war. As with the Downing Street Memos, we are learning more and more about just how desperate some members of the Bush administration were to have their war, no matter how flimsy the public rationale.

It's easy, and fun, to imagine Karl Rove in handcuffs. It's far more damning to get to the heart of what actually happened here. In all likelihood, Rove did not do what he is accused of.

But somebody did.

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CIA Agents Letter to US Senate and House

AN OPEN STATEMENT TO THE LEADERS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE SENATE.

The Honorable Dennis Hastert, Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

The Honorable Dr. William Frist, Majority Leader of the Senate

The Honorable Harry Reid, Minority Leader of the Senate


We, the undersigned former U.S. intelligence officers are concerned with the tone and substance of the public debate over the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media, which exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was a shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, may have damaged U.S. national security and poses a threat to the ability of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources.

The Republican National Committee has circulated talking points to supporters to use as part of a coordinated strategy to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. As part of this campaign a common theme is the idea that Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame was not undercover and deserved no protection. The following are four recent examples of this "talking point":

Michael Medved stated on Larry King Live on July 12, 2005, "And let's be honest about this. Mrs. Plame, Mrs. Wilson, had a desk job at Langley. She went back and forth every single day."

Victoria Toensing stated on a Fox News program with John Gibson on July 12, 2005 that, "Well, they weren't taking affirmative measures to protect that identity. They gave her a desk job in Langley. You don't really have somebody deep undercover going back and forth to Langley, where people can see them."

Ed Rodgers, Washington Lobbyist and former Republican official, said on July 13, 2005 on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, "And also I think it is now a matter of established fact that Mrs. Plame was not a protected covert agent, and I don't think there's any meaningful investigation about that."

House majority whip Roy Blunt (R, Mo), on Face the Nation, July 17, 2005, "It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the CIA might have been overzealous in sort of maintaining the kind of top-secret definition on things longer than they needed to. You know, this was a job that the ambassador's wife had that she went to every day. It was a desk job. I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA, and she went to that office every day."

These comments reveal an astonishing ignorance of the intelligence community and the role of cover. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

While we are pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an investigation and that the U.S. Attorney General has recused himself, we believe that the partisan attacks against Valerie Plame are sending a deeply discouraging message to the men and women who have agreed to work undercover for their nation’s security.

We are not lawyers and are not qualified to determine whether the leakers technically violated the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. However, we are confident that Valerie Plame was working in a cover status and that our nation’s leaders, regardless of political party, have a duty to protect all intelligence officers. We believe it is appropriate for the President to move proactively to dismiss from office or administratively punish any official who participated in any way in revealing Valerie Plame's status. Such an act by the President would send an unambiguous message that leaks of this nature will not be tolerated and would be consistent with his duties as the Commander-in-Chief.

We also believe it is important that Congress speak with one non-partisan voice on this issue. Intelligence officers should not be used as political footballs. In the case of Valerie Plame, she still works for the CIA and is not in a position to publicly defend her reputation and honor. We stand in her stead and ask that Republicans and Democrats honor her service to her country and stop the campaign of disparagement and innuendo aimed at discrediting Mrs. Wilson and her husband.

Our friends and colleagues have difficult jobs gathering the intelligence, which helps, for example, to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad. They sometimes face great personal risk and must spend long hours away from family and friends. They serve because they love this country and are committed to protecting it from threats from abroad and to defending the principles of liberty and freedom. They do not expect public acknowledgement for their work, but they do expect and deserve their government’s protection of their covert status.

For the good of our country, we ask you to please stand up for every man and woman who works for the U.S. intelligence community and help protect their ability to live their cover.

Sincerely yours,

Larry C. Johnson, former Analyst, CIA


JOINED BY:

Mr. Brent Cavan, former Analyst, CIA

Mr. Vince Cannistraro, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. Michael Grimaldi, former Analyst, CIA

Mr. Mel Goodman, former senior Analyst, CIA

Col. W. Patrick Lang (US Army retired), former Director, Defense Humint Services, DIA

Mr. David MacMichael, former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA

Mr. James Marcinkowski, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. Ray McGovern, former senior Analyst and PDB Briefer, CIA

Mr. Jim Smith, former Case Officer, CIA

Mr. William C. Wagner, former Case Officer, CIA

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Op woensdag 20 juli 2005 22:34 schreef Lyrebird het volgende:
Ik liep net langs het Shriners Burns hospital, hier in Boston, toen er net een groep kinderen naar binnen ging. De kinderen, die ernstig tot zeer ernstig verbrand waren, worden daar verpleegd. Ze hadden hun ouders bij zich en er waren ook kinderen bij die volgens mij regelrecht uit Irak te kwamen. Moeilijk in te schatten, want ze hadden geen naamkaartjes op. Maar sommige moeders hadden hoofddoekjes om.

Het ziekenhuis wordt 100% filantropisch gefinancierd door de Shriners en wordt alleen gebruikt voor de operatie en verpleging van kinderen met brandwonden. De Shriners zijn een club hele rijke mensen.

Je kunt veel over Amerikanen zeggen, maar zo'n ziekenhuis zul je in Nederland niet zien.

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Rove, Libby Accounts in CIA Case Differ With Those of Reporters

Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame's name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

These discrepancies may be important because Fitzgerald is investigating whether Libby, Rove or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a covert intelligence agent.

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10/5/01: Bush Pulls Security Clearances From 92 Senators

“We can’t have leaks of classified information. It’s not in our nation’s interest.” - President George W. Bush, 10/9/01

President Bush’s defiant statement came in the immediate weeks following 9/11, as the administration clamped down on the information it provided to Congress. President Bush issued an order limiting access to classified intelligence only to 8 members of Congress — the Speaker of the House, House Minority Leader, Senate Majority Leader, Senate Minority Leader, and chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

What precipitated this course of action?

Gannett News Service reported on 10/1/01 that Bush was restricting information because, “The Washington Post reported last week that various lawmakers had been told there would be more terrorist attacks if the United States retaliated.”

Here’s what the Washington Post reported:

Asked whether more terrorist attacks are inevitable if the United States retaliates, [Sen. Richard] Shelby said, “You can bet on that.” … U.S. intelligence officials have told members of Congress there is a high probability that terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden will try to launch another major attack on U.S. targets here or abroad. [Washington Post, 10/6/01]

So at this slightest whiff of evidence that information was being leaked, President Bush pulled classified intelligence access for 92 senators. There was no ongoing criminal investigation nor was there evidence that all the members who had their access limited had leaked information. And now he refuses to hold Karl Rove and Scooter Libby to anywhere near the same standard, despite confirmation of their involvement in the leak of an undercover CIA agent’s identity.

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Op zaterdag 4 februari 2006 13:08 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

_{[ bron ]}

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[q]Fitzgerald Hints White House Records Sought in CIA Leak Case Were Lost[/b]

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House.

The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney\'s former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Lawyers for defendant I. Lewis \"Scooter\" Libby this week accused prosecutors of withholding evidence the Libby camp says it needs to mount a defense.

\"We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed,\" Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to the defense team.

But the prosecutor added: \"In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.\" His letter was an exhibit attached to Libby\'s demand for more information from the prosecution.

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, said the vice president\'s office is cooperating fully with the investigation, and referred questions to Fitzgerald\'s office.

Libby is charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI regarding how he learned of Plame\'s identity and what he did with the information.

The Presidential Records Act, passed by Congress in 1978, made it clear that records generated in the conduct of official duties did not belong to the president or vice president, but were the property of the government.

The National Archives takes custody of the records when the president leaves office.

\"Bottom line: Accidents happen and there could be a benign explanation, but this is highly irregular and invites suspicion,\" said Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project.

\"A particular subset of records sought in a controversial prosecution have gone missing,\" Aftergood said. \"I think what is needed is for the national archivist to ascertain what went wrong and how to ensure it won\'t happen again.\"

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Bush authorized leak of Iraq intelligence estimate, indicted ex-Cheney aide says

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case

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A Fresh Focus on Cheney
Hand-written notes by the Vice President surface in the Fitzgerald probe.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

May 13, 2006 - The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.

Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. In the column, which created a firestorm after its publication, Wilson wrote that he had been dispatched by the CIA without pay to Niger in February, 2002 to investigate an intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country for a nuclear bomb. Wilson said he was told Cheney had asked about the intelligence,but the White House subsequently ignored his findings debunking the Niger claims.

In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson's assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA sponsored trip to Africa: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] 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?"

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for Cheney's own notes to be made public. The notes—apparently obtained as a result of a grand jury subpoena—would appear to make Cheney an even more central witness than had been previously thought in the criminal probe. Fitzgerald's prosecution has created continued problems for the White House. Karl Rove, the President Bush's chief political advisor, recently made his fifth grand jury appearance in the case and remains under scrutiny while Fitzgerald weighs whether to file criminal charges against him. For now, Libby is the only figure charged in the case.

Lea Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for the vice president, declined to comment on the newly disclosed notes. "We continue to cooperate in the investigation as we have since its inception," she said.

Fitzgerald first alleged that Cheney had questioned whether Wilson's trip was a "junket" in a court filing last month. In that filing, Fitzgerald also asserted that the vice president, acting with the approval of President Bush, had authorized Libby to disclose portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to rebut some of Wilson's claims.

But the notes provide significant new context to that assertion. They show the vice president personally raised questions about Wilson's trip right after the publication of the Wilson column-and five days before Libby confirmed to Time reporter Matt Cooper that he had "heard" that Wilson's wife, former CIA agent Valerie Plame, had played a role in sending him to Africa.

Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame after the White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington in AprilLibby, questioned by the FBI and by federal prosecutors in two grand jury appearances, denied providing that confirmation to Cooper and insisted he had heard about Wilson's wife a day or two earlier from NBC TV Meet the Press host Tim Russert—an account that Fitzgerald charged in an indictment last October was a lie. Fitzgerald in his court filing indicated he plans to introduce a copy of Cheney's annotated version of the Wilson column to show the vice president's interest in the circumstances surrounding Wilson's trip was an important matter to Libby that week and explains many of his actions. Those actions, according to the indictment, include discussing Plame's employment at the CIA—a matter Fitzgerald has said was classified at the time—with New York Times reporter Judy Miller on July 8, 2003.

Fitzgerald also said in his court filing that he plans to introduce a copy of Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 newspaper column that first identified Plame as a CIA "operative" who worked issues related to weapons of mass destruction. Fitzgerald said he will do so in order to introduce evidence about a series of conversations that he argued could undercut one of Libby's principal defenses: that he had no reason to believe Plame's employment was a sensitive matter and therefore had no reason to lie to the grand jury about when and with whom he spoke about it.

According to Fitzgerald's filing, on the day that the Novak column was published, a CIA official was asked in Libby's presence by another Cheney aide whether he had read the column. The CIA official had not. But shortly thereafter, the unidentified CIA official discussed in Libby's presence "the dangers posed by disclosure of the CIA affiliation of one of its employees as had occurred in the Novak column," Fitzgerald wrote.

This evidence, Fitzgerald added, "directly contradicts" the assertion by defense lawyers that Libby "had no motive to lie" to the FBI and to the grand jury because he "thought that neither he nor anyone else had done anything wrong." Instead, Fitzgerald asserts, "the evidence about the conversation concerning the Novak column provides a strong motive for the defendant to provide false information and testimony about his disclosures to reporters."

A spokeswoman for Libby declined comment on the filing.

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Cheney could be witness in CIA leak case

WASHINGTON, May 24 Vice President Dick Cheney could be called to testify in the CIA leak case involving his former chief of staff, a U.S. prosecutor said in a pre-trial filing made on Wednesday.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald told a federal court that Cheney's hand-written notes on a newspaper article referring to Valerie Plame shortly before she was exposed as a CIA operative were uniquely relevant to the issues in the case.

Fitzgerald was referring to a July 6, 2003, article written by Plame's husband, Bush administration critic and former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Shortly after the article appeared, Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative was leaked to journalists. Fitzgerald is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by disclosing Plame's identity.

"At the time, the vice president, rather than other potential witnesses, was upset that his personal credibility had been attacked unfairly in his view," Fitzgerald said.

Cheney's former aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby was charged with obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in January.

Fitzgerald said understanding what conversations took place between Cheney and Libby in the week after Wilson's opinion piece was published was critical to determining whether Libby thought it was necessary or appropriate to disclose Wilson's wife's CIA status with reporters.

A spokesperson for Cheney was not immediately available for comment.

Cheney, whose name has surfaced in other court documents as well, told the Fox News Channel in February that he may be called as a witness in the case.

In the court filing, Fitzgerald said Libby has acknowledged that he and the vice president discussed Wilson's article.

"Here as defendant has acknowledged, the vice president communicated to defendant the facts he considered notable, and also directed defendant to get out to the public 'all' the facts in response to the Wilson Op Ed," Fitzgerald wrote in the court filing.

"The state of mind of the vice president as communicated to defendant is directly relevant to the issue of whether defendant knowingly made false statements to federal agents and the grand jury regarding when and how he learned about Ms. Wilson's employment and what he said to reporters regarding this issue," Fitzgerald said in the court filing.

However, Fitzgerald noted that the government has not commented on whether it intends to call Cheney as a witness.