Actually, you said Bush admitted that an agent had her identity blown, a declarative statement. Now you change it to say that Bush was discussing the blowing of an agents cover.
Is that what you are getting so worked up over? That I used "admission"? I was simply saying that even Bush has made public commentary which exhibits that he knows classified information had been leaked, and that it was a secret agent's identity (aka a covert agent's identity had been blown).
Bush said IF an administration official broke the law by leaking a covert officer's identity, THEN they would be prosecuted and fired.
You are putting emphasis in the wrong place. He is stating if an administration official "broke the law" by leaking a covert officer's identity, then they would be prosecuted and fired. The question he is leaving open is whether laws were broken, not if info was leaked.
Not even Rove's lawyer is arguing that she wasn't a covert agent who has now had her cover blown. It is about whether he intended to do that, whether he gave enough specifics to do that, and whether he even knew she was a covert agent at the time.
Bush has discussed the seriousness of the investigation
Check it out Monk, the investigation is who blew the agent's cover and if it was done in a way that it was a crime. Everyone understands that a covert agent's cover was blown.
No, it’s still debatable whether Plame was covert. If she wasn’t covert, then she couldn’t have gotten her identity blown.
Hey genius, I gave you a quote from the same article where it was explicitly stated that she was a covert agent. So put the clues together. She WAS a covert agent. Her identity was revealed through a leak of classified info. An investigation begins on that leak, which would only happen if a leak occured (if it wasn't the investigation would not have been going on for two years, more like two seconds), and Bush is discussing possible punishments if a crime were connected to the leaking of the info.
Only extreme linguistic gymnastics and almost delusional apologetics, can get you to a point where you can question IF a covert agent's cover was blown.
Actually, I do because you are in the habit of posting long, posts filled with numerous points without source links that often conflict with previous statements made by you and are in many cases either off topic or just plain wrong
I do not post sources for easily obtainable info. It is a waste of my time to cut and paste links to info, you can just as easily tap a few words into Yahoo or Google to find. My posts do not conflict with previous posts. Only through linguistic twisting and turning are you capable of pretense that I have changed what I was stating in any of my posts. Unlike you I have solid positions I don't need to wriggle out of.
In this latest case you are simply trying to be a stickler for what "admission" must mean, rather than look at the context of what I was discussing.
No. Let’s get the facts straight before we begin. Wilson was biased against Bush and Rove not because he was screwed as you put it. But because Wilson is a long time Democratic partisan who worked in the Clinton administration long before Bush and Rove entered the national scene.
Genius, I was accepting your position to move on with the argument. The only thing I said is that it takes me forgetting that your only "evidence" was stuff coming after he got screwed by Rove and Co. Tenet worked in the Clinton administration... so that kind of thing means nothing. Kerry's campaign and the election campaign came after he got screwed. But let me get very accurate for you...
DID PLAME HAVE HER COVER BLOWN?
You may go to
this CNN page on the Rove story There is a "related" popup link further down the page (whose address I can't seem to cut and paste) which provides a timeline of the case. It is titled "Plame Case". So if you don't trust the wording within the article itself to note that she did, go to that link. There you will find:
A grand jury investigation into who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame has targeted two reporters, threatening to jail them for refusing to name the source of the leak.
At the CIA's request, the Justice Department launches a criminal probe into the leak of Plame's identity. A 1982 law makes knowingly disclosing the identity of a covert agent a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Novak says he won't reveal his sources. He said the CIA asked him not to identify Plame, "but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else" if he did.
So, let's add this up. The grand jury investigation is part of the criminal probe initiated at the request of the CIA, into the leaking of a covert agent's identity. Novak is trying to stand behind the fact that the CIA didn't blow her cover when telling him not to publish her identity, as an excuse for why he didn't do anything wrong. Thus even he is not denying that her cover was blown, only that he couldn't know he was doing it.
Oh by the way
you cited this source earlier to try and blackwash Wilson. In it you will find that your own source said:
Novak hasn't particularly supported the Iraq war, and his column essentially took Wilson's side. But the fact that Novak blew Plame's cover (in the course of relating that Wilson was sent at Plame's suggestion) gave The Nation's David Corn the opportunity to accuse the Bush administration of compromising national security, in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
Your article was very old and at that time was trying to question if Wilson's wife was truly a CIA agent, but understood that if she was then her cover had been blown. It is quite evident from above is it not? At the bottom of the article is an update/correction stating that the CIA has instructed the DOJ to start and investigation... end of story, a covert officer had her cover blown and even your source recognizes that the CIA recognizes that this is true.
What leg are you left to stand on?
WAS WILSON A BITTER PUBLIC PARTISAN HACK ABOUT ROVE BEFORE GETTING SCREWED?
Now I have no clue if in private this guy doesn't like Bush and Co, and maybe he is. But you tried to tie his public activity against them as indication he was obviously biased against them. I have noted that your evidence is all after he got screwed.
In both your source and the CNN timeline you will see that Wilson's mission was in 2002, and that his article in NYTimes was on July 6 2003. This led to Tenet's having to bite the bullet on July 11 2003. Novak writes his article on July 14, 2003, outing Wilson's wife and as we see now Rove had been contacting reporters during this time period with her identity. Intentional or not, Wilson just got a knife in the back for doing good service.
Would that make you a bit bitter? Not only did he have his credit shot for good service (we can agree on that, right?), but his wife's career was destroyed. It is AFTER THAT, on Aug 21 that he publically skewers Rove, and Rove in particular. It is after that that he works for the Kerry campaign. You need me to draw you a diagram or something?
If anything this totally make me respect Wilson. Not only did he get the Niger thing right, but he appears to have correctly identified who tried to backstab him and his wife. Someone give this man a job.
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were proven false in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report dated (July 10, 2004). The Senate panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, actually bolstered the case.
Oh, I'll go look for it. What's funny is that it could be proven false, when the accuracy of the info has been proven since then.
He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."
Senate Committee staffers asked how Wilson could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said.
Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
A bald face lie? Why is it a lie instead of a misstatement? Tell me something... did they turn out to be forgeries, and based on what indicators? Hint: everything Wilson said. He was likely misstating what he had personally found.
The bipartisan Senate intelligience report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson
You are trying to run the other way now with language. What was the nature of rejecting Wilson's statements within the media. It was that no one but his wife had sanctioned the trip. That only his wife was responsible for sending him. The above clearly shows that THEY were lying. He was likely responding to the accusations that she was the only one who made up and signed off on the trip, when he was saying she was not responsible for the trip, or had nothing to do with it.
Clearly they had waited for confirmation from others higher up before going on the mission.
What I really don't get is where this attack is coming from. He was right, he was proven right. They were proven wrong. You are trying to use ad hominem and guilt by association, rather than look directly at who was right.
Did any of this make its way into the numerous articles written by Wilson in the New York Times and other media outlets? Of course not.
Why would it have to, when the object under discussion was whether the sale went through, as the administration was claiming it had?
Wrong again Holmes. A neutral person would conclude that Wilson is a Democratic partisan idealogue who eagerly wanted to get Kerry elected and saw trashing Bush by lying as the easiest way to do it. Then there's the money and fame. Wilson did NOT have more facts on his side and he was NOT backed by all world intel sources.
Oh watson, look at your poor logical ability. How could a neutral person conclude that at all? The question is was his report accurate regarding the subject under discussion which was the sale of material. His info was accurate about that. Whether Iraq was interested is not the same as saying it was going through.
What's ridiculous is that you can't even use hindsight to build the case. We have the facts and they are in. Wilson was right about the Niger claim and they were wrong. His article is what forced the admission by Tenet that the administration was wrong. A few days later someone attempts to discredit Wilson from within the administration.
The idea that Bush and Rove might be the political idealogues seems to have slipped your mind completely.
Why should we believe anything these two say? Why should we believe she was involved in covert operations? Because she says so?
Whether they decided to cash in on their misfortune AFTER the backstabbing is irrelevant to what happened from 2002 to 2003. Certainly one could not have used it to make judgements about his claims in 2003.
If you think Rove and Bush have not been cashing in on all of this, then you are simply denying reality. They were up for a loss and obviously attempted to punish someone raining on their bad intel. They went on to decorate the guy who had the bad intel... ever going to back up your assertion he got punished?
I never said Wilson was a perfect individual, and neither did I say Plame was. The questions are:
1) Was he right on Niger? He was, confirmed before his own article by UN officials on proliferation, and the White House iced him for it. If he wasn't then Tenet would never have had to come clean. That is motive for revenge. The timing couldn't be sweeter for any investigation.
2) Was he right on Rove? Apparently he was. And this makes things even more strained for you. If you are saying the White House should have dismissed Wilson because they knew about Wilson and his wife and what type of people they were, then how did they not know she was a covert agent when they leaked it?
3) Was she a covert agent? As I have shown above, your own sources admit it, and so does the CIA... which is why an investigation was started.
You are spinning spinning spinning, on this one, and getting nowhere.
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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