Rove It Is All Going To Be

Rove: It is all going to be Declassified

From Meet the Press with Tim Russert, 7/17:

‘ MR. RUSSERT: This is the cover of your magazine: “Rove on the Spot,” subtitled “What I Told the Grand Jury,” by Matthew Cooper. And here is an excerpt from your article, which will be available tomorrow in Time magazine.

“So did [Karl] Rove leak Plame’s name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that [Joe] Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him?”–to Niger. “Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the `agency’ on `WMD’?”–weapons of mass destruction. “Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don’t know.”

For the record, the first time you learned that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA was from Karl Rove?

MR. COOPER: That’s correct. ‘

We may conclusde from Mr. Cooper’s statements that Karl Rove not only knew that Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, but also that she was working on the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue.

I conclude that he must have known that telling Time Magazine about her would negatively affect her ability to do her job with regard to WMD.

We may also conclude that Karl Rove knew that he was discussing classified information with Mr. Cooper. Why otherwise promise that the information would be declassified?

I know that Mr. Rove has alleged that he heard about Valerie Plame from a reporter. But you have to be very careful with Mr. Rove’s statements. He lies in substance while telling the truth formally. Before the Cooper revelations, he said that he did not know Joe Wilson’s wife’s name and did not reveal it. We now know that he told Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, without naming her.

So when he says that he heard that she worked for the CIA from a reporter, you have to ask yourself. Did he hear that from a reporter after he had already informed the reporter of it? Or did he hear it from a reporter after Scooter Libby, Rove’s colleague, had already told the reporter about it?

The question the talking heads keep forgetting to ask is, “Why tell Cooper that Wilson’s wife was CIA?” Rove’s memo has already answered that question. He was “warning Cooper off” a story. He was attempting to keep the press from taking Ambassador Wilson seriously. He was hinting around that Wilson’s whole charge, that Bush used forged and false information in alleging Saddam was negotiating to buy Niger uranium just a couple of years before, was to be treated with suspicion because it might be a black psy-ops operation of the CIA’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit.
To tell you the truth, I still cannot understand why Rove thought Cooper would be dissuaded by this line of argument, or why Rove thought it was a decisive one.

Moroever, the reason for which Rove wanted to discredit Wilson was that he was afraid the false Niger story would become an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. Rove intended to paint Bush as a war hero who could be trusted with the nation’s security. If Bush routinely went to war because he had gullibly swallowed a load of bull, then the American public might not put him back in. Wilson’s credibility had to be destroyed.

The rightwing propaganda machine has geared up to insist that Wilson’s findings of no plausible Iraqi purchase of Niger uranium were untrue. Hunh? There was no Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It had been dismantled shortly after 1991. There was no program, ipso facto there is no plausibility to reports of significant uranium purchases, purchases which did not occur. The Rove approach is to insist that there is evidence that some creature ate grass on a farm in Maryland, and that it has not been disproved that it was African elephants that did the eating. That there are no free-ranging African elephants in Maryland does not matter if you keep pointing to the grass and say, well, something ate it and it could have been elephants.

There was no Iraqi nuclear program, and Rove knew this in summer of 2003 when he outed Valerie Plame.

The whole history of forged documents and frauds related to Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapons program from 1995 has not yet been traced. Khidir Hamza was among the main agents of this fraud, planting false information with the London Times as early as 1995 and working closely with Paul Wolfowitz.

The forged documents on Niger, which underlay most of the assertions Rove appears to still have been defending in summer of 2003, have been put up with translations at cryptonome. The International Atomic Energy Commission falsified them immediately on examining them. They are signed by people not then in office, etc.

Vincent Cannistaro, a career intelligence professional, has some interesting ideas about where the Niger forgeries originated. He seems to think they emanated from rightwing thinktanks in the United States. They were forged by a former Italian military intelligence operative, Rocco Martino, and SISMI seems implicated in the fraud, along with, very possibly, the “Rockingham” cell in the British Ministry of Defense. But the question is who put whom up to all this.

See “Everything you Need to know about Michael Ledeen.

And once you consider the Neocon network,that Scooter Libby was the liaison to the CIA for the network that ran the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon becomes highly significant. Libby’s network was in competition with the CIA and many members wanted to permanently weaken the agency in favor of the Pentagon, since they had much more influence there.