Ew sure points out that Isikoff seems to have an agenda. Isikoff sure dug deep on the Clinton Bj’s not so much with insta declassifications. They have to have a date for when they declassified don’t they? That would seem like something that would have to be documented with one of the intelligence muckety mucks. Why was it that Fitz could not get a date verified?
Do you think they insta-declassified or retroactively declassified?

Was Hadley the one who pushed to put the 16 words back in Bush’s speech?

And Durbin voted against the 2002 war resolution. One would think a few others would have followed his lead…since he was in the know. I rememeber being stunned by the timing of that vote. Just stunned that the Dems were allowing themselves to be so fucking manipulated.

I kept thinking our Reps needed to be listening to Diane Rehm, Neil Conan and Amy Goodman who were all having folks like Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, etc etc (people in the know) on seriously questioning the validity of the intelligence. Hell I even heard Robert McNamarra question the validity of the pre war intelligence on one of those shows .

When El Baradei came out in early March and said the “niger documents are forgeries” I kept expecting the war train to halt.

Does this imply Cheney read the op-ed twice? Once in a fit of rage (sham rage, I’d say, since the work up on Wilson and Wilson’s wife had already taken place by June 2003), and once in a cool collected manner with a plan in mind

Page 5:
“Returning to the 7/6/03 New york Times editorial by Wilson, the Vice president recalled that he tore it out of the newspaper. When shown a copy of the Wilson editorial with handwritten notes on it, the Vice president acknowledged that the handwriting was his. Though he has no specific recollection of when he wrote the notes on the upper margin of the editorial, the Vice president believed it was probably contemporaneous with the time he read the editorial. He stated that it was his normal practice to make such notes and underline relevant or important portions of news articles at the same time he read them, so he suspects that was the case with this article.”

[snip]

Page 6

“Regarding the editorial which he cut out of the paper, Vice President Cheney advised that it was his normal practice to carry such documents around with him for a few days and then place them in his “out” box when he was finished with them. He cannot recall if he discussed the underlined portions of the editorial with anyone, but he probably did. After he placed the article in his “out” box, he does not know whatever happened to it, nor did he ask for any specific treatment or follow-up with respect to his handwritten questions on the newspaper.” [my bold]

Do you suppose the NYT has printing presses on the east and west coasts so that it does not have to fly its papers too far each day? If yes, then testing the paper and ink could show the origination of this particular newspaper clipping.

If it is east coast paper and ink (or Cheney fears it possible for the FBI to determine that it is east coast paper and ink), then Cheney would need wave his hands a bit when deciding where and when he possessed that damn Joe Wilson article.

To claim that he read it ‘as if for the first time’ while on AirForce Two or when back in D.C. would be one way to protect himself from perjury.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7234975

“either 7/6/03 , the day it was published, either by personally reading it in Wyoming, or during the return flight to Washington. The Vice President explained that he had traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the holiday weekend and cannot recall if he read the New York Times editorial when he was on the ground in Wyoming, or returning on the flight to Washington on 7/6/03, or when he got back to Washington, in which case he may not have read the editorial until the next day.”

I’ll bet the WH email system would have helped Cheney to remember. Too bad all the emails went missing.

You really ought to read EW’s book, but it’s been a long time for me and I don’t remember all the details – she’s a font of knowledge on the whole thing.

Here’s the deal, though. Wilson’s op piece had basically been to the effect that there is/was no reason to go to war with Iraq, they didn’t have WMDs, and he knew that the President was fibbifying in his State of the Union speech earlier where he had the “16 words” saying that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake from Niger.

There is/was an NIE that had been massaged and massaged to make it as supportive of the Bush/Cheney decision to anhilate civilians in Iraq (something that always happens with war) as possible. Even so, it had some distinct references to the possible unreliability of “intel” about Iraq WMDs. The NIE is highly classified.

So, before the Novak piece that outed Plame, there was a meeting between Bush and Cheney where supposedly Bush “insta-declassified” some or all of the NIE (it hasn’t ALL been released even yet IIRC), but made that “insta-declassification” a secret declassification (his staff and appointments, including Hadley and Rice etc. were supposedly working on trying to come up with some info from the the NIE to make public, given the public push at the time to know what was in the doc that led to the decision to go to war).

The only members of Congress that got to see the NIE before the war AUMF vote were on the Intel committees, and in particular Durbin wanted very much to be able to share info in that NIE with Congress so that they could discuss the parts of the NIE that questioned whether Iraq had a WMD program. But bc of the classified nature of the NIE, he wasn’t able to mention any of that to anyone, including members of Congress getting ready to vote on sending American soldiers to their death.

However, even though the classification was important enough to end Iraqi and American lives over, once Wilson’s op ed piece came out and Bush/Cheney’s ego was tweaked, suddenly the classification became of less importance that getting back at Wilson. So Bush apparently told Cheney they could go through and cherrypick out the “good” bits of the NIE that made their decision look correct, and use those to counter-attack Wilson’s allegations that there was no basis to go to war.

EW has pretty much always claimed and supported that, as bad as Bush becoming leaker in chief is/sounds, that part of the story has always only been a cover story for the decision to also out Plame in the press to get back at Wilson. She has a lot of pieces of evidence that Cheney in particular seems to have used the story that he was letting Libby know to “get out” the classified (oops, insta,secretly, declassified) info as a cover for him telling Libby to burn Plame. To a lesser extent, there may be evidence of Bush being involved in that decision.

So Libby has now “admitted” that, while the rest of the world (other than Bush, Cheney and Libby) believed all of the NIE to be classified, Libby met with Miller to covertly give her cherrypicked NIE info for her to plant in the NYT.

I believe that assessment. [Going OT here - OTOH, I also belief that the NIE handling itself was a violation of the National Security Act and that at one point the Spec Pros may have thought the same. There was a lot of back and forth about NIE prior to the trial and one thing that was decided definitively was that the Spec Pros had a very narrow scope of what he could pursue and the NIE was not part of what his mandate allowed him to pursue. The Nat Sec Act prohibits the Exec branch from planting info without attribution in the domestic press for the purpose of influencing domestic opinion i.e., for domestic propaganda.]

I don’t remember, how EW tied down the Isikoff leak to O’Donnell, but it makes a lot of sense.