Oct 31 2005
Fitz To Be Tied
Special prosecutor Fitzgerald is demonstrating why those who put stock in his seriousness and professionalism where misled. Fitz is contemplating bring the Bush WH to trial:
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to call Vice President Dick Cheney as a witness in the trial of Lewis Libby, the DRUDGE REPORT has leaned.
But the high stakes move could result in an executive privilege showdown between the White House and Fitzgerald, a top government source said Sunday.
“If Mr. Fitzgerald is going to demand a public recounting of conversations between the vice president, or even the president, and his staff, on matters he, himself, has acknowledged are ‘classified,’ executive privilege will obviously be invoked.”
What a joke. I warned before that the left was so desperate that they would stoop to anything to reclaim power. And Fitzgerald has drunk the Kool Aid. His flimsy indictment on Libby for not outing Plame, when Libby easily could have confirmed her role based on all the internal information he had, was the sign this was going to be a mud wrestling fight and not some great and grand effort to uphold our laws.
Does anyone not see the irony in this? Fitzgerald could have (and really should have) walked away from the case saying there was nothing illegal here except political give and take. Wilson endangered his wife’s career by going public with BS minutiae irrelevant to a war already won. There was nothing to gain, was there? The CIA screw ups are now part of the lore (Crap Intel Again).
And I have to believe there is a large minority segment fed up with Valerie and Joe and the VIPS looney tunes who want their reputations back. They have gone from Rambo to Bozo with these people out making their ‘case’.
Libby supported the prosecutor in good faith and simply pointed out he misled reporters by continuing to point them to other reporters as the source for the Plame rumors. If his memory is not clear – well, Fitz better have proof and not ‘his interpretation’ (which is all he has). Look at what he did with the subpoenas and jail time of journalists! Did the confrontation over the first amendment just boil down to ‘he said, she said’ arguments? That is all Fitzgerald has. No proof of Libby’s intent or the reporters’ veracity.
In fact, if you read Cooper’s latest on this you can tell he too seems surprised at Fitzgerald’s obsessions:
The Wilson part that really interested Fitzgerald was tiny, as I told TIME readers. Basically, I asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife having been involved in sending him to Niger. Libby responded with words to the effect of, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.”
That enough for Fitz – 30 years in jail!
I was surprised last week that the Libby indictment even mentioned me. But apparently his recollection of the conversation differed from mine in a way that led the prosecutor to think he was lying. As for me, I still have no idea if Libby or anyone else has committed a crime. I only know that if there is a Libby trial, I’ll testify truthfully and completely, as I did before the grand jury.
Really? It appears Libby’s recollection is the same as Coopers, only LIbby paraphrases. But Cooper does not seem to see a crime here. Neither do I.
Fitzgerald is now the idiot who outlawed our government telling the truth to a media spreading lies by a partisan hack. Fitzgerald admits there is no law against outing Valerie’s name and job (and supposedly he knows the first source who is not in the White House), yet he grasps for some extension or new case law to make it illegal. The guy is a loose canon. Why should we allow him to pull our government into court to showboat? We the people used to have a say in this country.
We want to win in Iraq and stabilize the region so those living there can help us route out the Islamists in their midst. Wilson and Fitzgerald and the rest of the Liberal cuckoos Nest want to go back and fight political decisions in court. What in the world does the Niger uranium story have to do with affecting anything of import today? Kerry and Clinton and all the left voted for the war. It wis legal and producing the results we wanted. To run around now and claim it was a contrivance is a total waste of time and effort.
You anti-war folks lost. Fitzgerald is a leftwing zealot who wants to take down our government. And we all have better things to do than worry about the way these two are self destructing. I am sure we can shut Fitzgerald down in court. He won’t last a day.
Does anyone know if the PCTEG had anything to do with Able Danger? Just Curious! Would you trust the CIA after 911? I don’t blame the WH and Sec of Def for asking questions!
SSCI – Page 307
Independent of the IC’s reviews of potential Iraqi links to terrorism, the Department of Defense Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP), established a team called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) which was responsible for studying “. . . the policy implications of relationships among terrorist groups and their sources of support.” Following the September 11th attacks, OUSDP brought on two individuals as consultants. According to the two consultants, their work included looking at intelligence information related to all terrorist groups, the links between them, and the roles of state sponsors.
One of these consultants stated that he was told that the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the Secretary of Defense were dissatisfied with the intelligence products they were receiving from the Intelligence Community on terrorism and linkages between terrorist groups worldwide. This individual also stated that he and a colleague had gone to the CTC and to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to review what work they were doing on link analysis and relationships between terrorist groups and state sponsors. They found that the analysis was not being done, and stated that they believed their requests for assistance were being ignored.
When the consultants departed, in December of 2001 and January 2002, two naval reserve intelligence officers were brought in to replace them. These two officers became the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG). The PCTEG reviewed information more specific to al-Qaida and focused partly on al-Qaida’s ties to Iraq, according to one of the PCTEG members who was interviewed by Committee staff. He stated that he believed his work with the Policy Counterterrorrism Evaluation Group was “to look at the network of al-Qaida, and that includes state sponsors, that includes front companies, relations with other terrorist groups. In effect, let’s figure out what al-Qaida is. And that’s what I was doing.” He also stated that he was brought into the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy to “do analysis of terrorist groups, their linkages” by looking at both raw and finished IC products.