Like his former boss, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage has developed a for telling the truth way after the fact:
"I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me" to have disclosed Plame's identity, Armitage said Sunday on CNN's Late Edition. He was agreeing with comments by Plame that he should have known better.
Armitage said there was no ill-intent on hispart. He said he spoke to Novak after seeing a reference to Wilson'swife in a memo, which did not name her.
Easy to say that after ruining a covert agent's career.
For the first time since the formation of the CIA, is being disclosed to the public:
The Bush administration said it had spent $43.5 billion on spying infiscal 2007, as it bowed on Tuesday to a law ordering disclosure of afigure the government has kept secret for most of the past 60 years.
"Disclosure of the amount of the budget is a good first step towardaccountability," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of AmericanScientists, which has campaigned for publication of the annualintelligence budget.
The figure, which is roughly equal to the entire economy of Croatia orQatar, dwarfs the estimated intelligence budgets of any other countryincluding the closest U.S. ally, Britain, which spends about 10 percentof the amount, he said.
Now that the lid is off on intelligence funding, the debate will begin on whether spending nearly $50 billion per year is worth it.
John helgerson, who headed an aggressive investigation into the CIA's detention tactics, is by his own agency:
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden,has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’sinspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’sdetention and interrogation programs and other matters have createdresentment among agency operatives.
A small team workingfor General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdogoffice, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Currentand former government officials said the review had caused anxiety andanger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hillthat it posed a conflict of interest.
Over the past few months, the American people have seentheir government go into lockdown mode regarding information on their past andpresent activities. Frustrated by incessant stonewalling, one group has taken adifferent approach to breaking through and obtaining the information they need;namely, the Airline Industry.
In response to the 41 lawsuits filed by victims of theSeptember 11th attacks against the Airline Industry, American Airlines Inc.,United Airlines Inc., US Airways Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., ContinentalAirlines Inc. and The Boeing Co. haverepeatedly requested interviews with FBI and CIA investigators of the attack. Afterfailing to obtain information vital to their defense, they have now decided tosue.
In the , the companies asked to interview a"limited number of former and current FBI employees" who hadparticipated in investigations of al-Qaida and al-Qaida operatives before andafter Sept. 11, 2001.
Maybe this is the only approach left? Asking politicians totell the truth doesn’t work. Subpoenaing them to testify doesn’t work. Maybe weneed to start suing government agencies to compel them to come forward and tellthe truth!
Michael Hayden warned President Bush on November 13, 2006 that the could not be magically altered:
Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seemsirreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone orcheckpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to writtenrecords of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
"Thegovernment is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lotof energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and itcannot function."
That just about says it right there. To this day, Hayden remains as Bush's CIA Director.
Ironically, the meeting last year between Hayden and Bush happened just after Bush told the Iraq Study Group, "A constitutional order is emerging."
Maybe Bush should have met with the CIA Director before telling what he told to the Iraq Study Group. Even then, the chances are that Bush would not have shared what Hayden told him.
Sudan has zero incentive to stop the genocide in Darfur because the U.S. will not hold them accountable. According to an , Sudan's government works as a spy for the CIA in Iraq. If the U.S. uses force to stop the killing in Darfur, Sudan will no longer give the CIA the information they need:
Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency inIraq, an example of how the U.S. has continued to cooperate with theSudanese regime even while condemning its suspected role in the killingof tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur.
President Bush hasdenounced the killings in Sudan's western region as genocide and hasimposed sanctions on the government in Khartoum. But some critics saythe administration has soft-pedaled the sanctions to preserve itsextensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan.
"Intelligencecooperation takes place for a whole lot of reasons," said a U.S.intelligence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymitywhen discussing intelligence assessments. "It's not always betweenpeople who love each other deeply."
Sudan's motivation behind this strategy is very basic. The Sudanese government knows that if the U.S. is stretched thin in Iraq, they may not be in a position to intervene in Darfur without pushing the military beyond a breaking point. So Sudan's strategy is simple: keep the U.S. out of Darfur by doing everything possible to keep them in Iraq.
So what is the U.S. thinking, you ask? It just comes down to what is more important to Bush -- stopping the genocidein Darfur, or working with homicidal military regimes to assist in awar that many say cannot be won anyway.
It has long been rumored that in effort to dodge international law, the CIA has used secret to interrogate detainees and transport them to secret prisons throughout the world. Now there is more evidence to support those accusations. According to a new report from the UK's , Britain reportedly did not want the U.S. to land the torture planes in their country in fear that it might damage their reputation:
Britain did not allow CIA “torture flights†to use its airports to take terror suspects out of Europe, an investigation led by senior police officers has concluded.
The 18-month inquiry led by Michael Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, examined claims that “extraordinary rendition†flights chartered by the US Government landed in the UK before spiriting away suspects.
To summarize, this report concluded that the flights did not land on British soil. Human rights groups the planes did land. Either way, it proves that these torture flight are not some fabrication dreamed up by anti-war activists, as certain conservatives would like people to believe.
Also, a separate European inquiry found yesterday that Poland and Romania allowed the Bush Administration to set up on their soil. Obviously, the two countries have the allegations.
Human rights groups allege that detained by the CIA have all of a sudden disappeared:
Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and "disappeared."
The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms "ghost prisoners" in the U.S. "war on terror."
The groups have also called on the Bush Administration to stop using to hold detainees. This comes just more than one year after CIA Director John Negroponte revealed that his agency had the right to hold its prisoners .
So much for setting an example as a world leader. Thanks for screwing this all up for my generation.
Immediately after the judge in the CIA leak trial read Scooter Libby's , speculation began over whether President Bush would pardon Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff. The Bureau of Prisons says Libby must surrender to authorities within . So if Bush is going to step in before Libby sees jail time, he will need to do so in a matter of :
The White House publicly sought to defer the matter again yesterday, saying that Bush is "not going to intervene" for now. But U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Waltonindicated that he is not inclined to let Libby remain free pendingappeals, which means the issue could confront Bush in a matter of weekswhen, barring a judicial change of heart, Cheney's former chief ofstaff will have to trade his business suit for prison garb. Republicansinside and outside the administration said that would be the momentwhen Bush has to decide.
However, if you read the pardon law, it would be illegal for Bush to free Scooter Libby. The pardon rules specifically "require a petitioner to wait a period of at leastfive years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever islater) before filing a pardon application."
The only way around this is if Bush issues an Executive order overturning the law. That would really be pushing it.
At the moment, we find ourselves engulfed in a late-spring presidential campaign preview. The was last night. Today, the Obama, Edwards and Clinton will attend a . It all ends tomorrow with the Republican debate. But there is another important story going on tomorrow that is worthy of some notice (depending on how you feel about government officials that lie to a grand jury).
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was already in March, will be sentenced tomorrow. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wants Libby to serve in prison. Libby's lawyers want him to do instead.
As Time Magazine's reveals, last week Fitzgerald released proof of Valerie Plame's status as a trump card to convince the judge that Libby deserved a harsher sentence:
Thanks to Fitzgerald's brief advocating a stiff sentence for Libby, wefound out last week that the CIA did indeed consider Plame's identityclassified, at least for 18 months. The prosecutor has brought this upnow in apparent support of a remarkable claim: Libby should serve 30 to37 months in prison -- about twice what the federal probation officerecommends and way more than the probation favored by thedefense -- because the underlying (and uncharged) crime was so serious.
The Libby defense team issued one last for forgiveness:
"Mr. Libby is known for his fairness and generosity," the defense lawyers write, and "for his caring and unselfish nature."
One thing is for sure: there will be a lot of angry people at the CIA if the judge lets Libby off the hook. It will have sent a dangerous precedent that it is tolerable for the Executive to bully our agents in the field.
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