DC press corps is so Soviet Propagandesque, that it is comical....

The Whore Post / Lyin' NY Times led DC press corps is so Soviet Propagandesque, that it is comical....

In this case, the DC press corpse lapping up the Bush regime's DISINFORMATION campaign, Bush and Karl Rove sending RICHARD ARMITAGE out to MUDDY THE WATERS of the Rove-Libby-Cheney efforts to PUBLICIZE the undercover identity of CIA "NOC" spy Valerie Plame, in an effort to SMEAR and intimidate Plame, her husband, and any other potential whistleblowers in the government who dared to oppose the Bush White House's LIES_to_WAR agenda in early 2003.

[note: "NOC" is CIA terminology for "NON OFFICIAL COVER," i.e. a spy with NO FORMAL TIES to the US Government, and therefore completely at the mercy of a foreign government should that NOC undercover CIA spy be arrested for spying by that foreign government. In "OUTING" Valerie Plame, the Bush White House (Rove, Cheney, Libby) also effectively "OUTED" the ENTIRE COVER COMPANY "Brewster-Jennings Energy Consultants" - and every CIA agent who ever worked for it, possibly subjecting dozens of CIA informants and "assets" in foreign countries to arrest, torture, and murder by foreign regimes.]

<< Richard Armitage's STORY SOUNDS AS PHONY AS a ten-dollar Rolex, SO NATURALLY the [whore] WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS ATE IT UP. The former No. 2 State Department diplomat claims his disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA status was "inadvertent", which is shorthand for saying he forgot the "classified" labels on the memo prepared for the damage control effort against Joseph Wilson. >>

We'll let David Fiderer pick up the gory details of the DC press corpse slavishly applauding their Stalinist masters:

======================================

How Is Richard Armitage's Story Dishonest? Let's Count the Many Ways
David Fiderer
09.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/how-is-richard-armitages_b_30409.html


Richard Armitage's story sounds as phony as a ten-dollar Rolex, so naturally the Washington press corps ate it up. The former No. 2 State Department diplomat claims his disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA status was "inadvertent", which is shorthand for saying he forgot the "classified" labels on the memo prepared for the damage control effort against Joseph Wilson.

But the memo identifying Wilson's wife also alerted Armitage and others in the Administration that Plame herself could endanger their campaign to squelch criticism of the case for Iraq's WMDs. By labeling her a "WMD managerial type" the memo directed Armitage, and others who could easily find out, to Plame's actual job - operations chief for the clandestine Joint Task Force on Iraq overseeing espionage operations for gathering intelligence on Saddam's supposed WMDs. Surely she knew where bodies were buried in the trumped up case for war. The Administration, still trying to keep a lid on the WMD scam, had reason to worry if Plame ever stooped to divulge government secrets with the same reckless indifference shown by Armitage, Libby and Rove.

Armitage "forgot" about the classified warnings twice, each time right after the Washington Post and the New York Times published Joseph Wilson's allegation- that the so-called intelligence about Niger's uranium sale was never credible. Each time, Armitage passed on the information as digressive chitchat to a prominent Washington reporter.

The suspicious timing, by itself, proves little. But there's plenty more. First, Armitage explained his lapses with words that were carefully parsed and highly deceitful. For instance, he told David Martin of CBS News that, though the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified."

That's a red herring with an overpowering smell. Read the memo yourself. If you're smart enough to read it, you can't be dumb enough to overlook the obvious warnings that everything in the memo is secret and classified. Before every paragraph, at the top and bottom of every page and every attachment, are reminders as obvious as neon lights saying everything in the memo is secret and classified. Taken together, all those warnings - I counted 17 - are hard to forget.

Under the law, Armitage has no leeway to presume something is not classified "if he reason to believe" otherwise. His leaks are textbook violations of the Espionage Act . Under 18 United States Code Sec. 793(d):

Whoever, lawfully having possession of... any document... or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, ... to any person not entitled to receive it, ...Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
To spell it out,

1. Armitage had lawful possession of the document or information related to the national defense. (Fitzgerald's indictment of Libby removes all doubt that Plame's employment status was classified and not common knowledge outside the intelligence community.)
2. Armitage had reason to believe the information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, (those "classified" and "secret" labels are the memo are hard to miss), and
3. Woodward was not entitled to receive it.

Note what the statue does not require. It does not require specific knowledge that the information was harmful to the United States; nor must the specific act cause actual harm to the United States (though the harm to national security was significant since Plame also did covert work in Iran).

Then there's the Foreign Intelligence and Identities Act. The burden of proof is higher under this statute, though there's sufficient evidence for a plausible case, (see Whom Should I Believe? Victoria Toensing or My Own Lying Eyes?)

Patrick Fitzgerald pursued no criminal action against Armitage, probably because the Deputy Secretary volunteered his full cooperation right from the start. Armitage's apparent good faith must have lent plausibility to his claim that, over the one-month interval between publication of the memo (June 10, 2003) and the leak to Bob Novak (July 8, 2003), Armitage "forgot" the 17 warnings that the information was classified.

But Armitage also "forgot" about his first leak to Bob Woodward, until his memory was jogged by Woodward years later. Following the Scooter Libby indictment, Woodward reminded Armitage that he leaked Plame's identity to Woodward on June 13, 2003. The timing of the first leak, 72 hours after the publication of the memo with 17 warnings, is far more incriminating.

Imagine you were Richard Armitage. Having worked in the military and high government posts for 40 years, your job is to regularly review and retain the contents of classified memos. You read the subject memo, which was published on June 10, 2003. On June 12, 2003, the Washington Post publishes the story "CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid". (Wilson, then an unnamed source of reporter Walter Pincus, affirms the contents of the State Department memo, which says the Niger intelligence was too far-fetched for serious consideration.) On June 13, 2003 you meet with Bob Woodward and, like some gossiping schoolgirl, casually mention the employment of Joe Wilson's wife because you forgot that the information was classified. Please. Let's return to planet earth. Any clerk in a corporate personnel department knows he'll be immediately fired if caught blurting out confidential employee information. Armitage could not do his job if his 72-hour memory were that much of a sieve.

Robert Parry, reporting in Consortium News, also raises doubts about Armitage's feigned obliviousness. Parry writes, "When I asked my well-placed conservative source about [Armitage's] scenario, he laughed and said, 'Armitage isn't a gossip, but he is a leaker. There's a difference.'"

Armitage made other deceptive remarks to insinuate that the Plame leak was an honest mistake. "I had never seen a covert agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government," he said to David Martin and to the Associated Press, which, legally, is à propos to nothing and almost certainly false, because many State Department employees work as covert agents for the CIA. (For example, in 1989 Valerie Plame "worked" as a State Department officer at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, though her covert mission was to recruit agents for the CIA.)

The memo's contents also put Armitage on notice that any details in the memo may not be 100% accurate. The very first paragraph (like all others, marked "S [ecret[//N[ot for] F[oreign Governments]") makes clear that the contents are based on the notes of State Department staffers who were "involved at the margin" of Joe Wilson's Niger trip, but were not available to help prepare the memo. Consequently, any reader with a security clearance knows better than to presume the sensitivity of Mrs. Wilson's role within the CIA.

But the staffer's reference to Mrs. Wilson as a "WMD management type" signaled her potential proximity to the broad WMD effort in Iraq. At the time, the Chief of Staff for State Department Undersecretary John Bolton was Frederick Fleitz,, who concurrently worked in the CIA's section for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control as a senior CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control. Fleitz could have easily alerted Bolton and others regarding Plame's role in gathering WMD intelligence for Iraq.

Armitage had another line that, to put it charitably, strains credulity. Though he says he remembers leaking to Novak, Armitage didn't realize that he was the leaker. Hmm. The supposed time sequence is as follows: Armitage leaks to Novak on July 8, 2003. Novak publishes his column on July 14, 2003. On July 21, 2003, Joe Wilson argues that his family is subject to a smear campaign. The Democrats insist on an investigation (a request stymied by the Republicans). But Richard Armitage, the gossip who forgets what's classified and what isn't, never realizes that he might be Novak's source. Only later, on October 1, 2003, when Novak writes a follow-up column stating that his primary source was "no partisan gunslinger", does it occur to Armitage that he might be Novak's source.

If Murray Waas' reporting for the National Journal proves to be true, the timing of Novak's column, and Armitage's sudden awareness, are extremely suspicious. Waas reports that Novak telephoned Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, "according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men." (Al Hunt, of the Capital Gang, described Rove and Novak as "intimately close.") The date of the call was September 29, 2003, three days after the public knew of the CIA request to the Justice Department to investigate the Plame leak, Two days after that alleged phone call, Novak published his column describing the leaker as "no partisan gunslinger" ( i.e. not Rove), and suddenly Armitage figures out that the leaker is he himself. On October 2, 2003, Armitage was interviewed by the FBI.

So if you add up:
1. The suspicious timing of the leaks that coincided with Wilson's published allegations,
2. The implausibility that Armitage would forget that the info was classified three days after reading the memo with 17 warnings,
3. The dishonest claims that "not every sentence is classified ' or that
4. "he'd never seen a covert agent's name in a memo",
5. The implausibility of Armitage not realizing that he was Novak's source in a column published six days after the leak,
6. The signal to Armitage that Wilson's wife may know far more information undermining the case for war,
7. The implausibility that Armitage would relay information from a classified memo to Bob Woodward without an agenda beyond gossipy chit-chat, and
8. The standard negotiating ploy of doing a mea culpa on one leak but forgetting the first, far more incriminating, leak,

then it looks like:

a. Armitage was engaged in precisely the same activity as Libby, in terms of conducting a stealth smear campaign on both Joseph and Valerie Wilson; and/or
b. Armitage conscientiously devised an "I'm-innocent-but-I-remembered-this-and-forgot-that" scenario as a means of providing cover for anyone else, like Libby.

Murray Waas' reporting, above, reinforces the second hypothesis.

Robert Parry writes that his "well-placed conservative source", who knows both Rove and Armitage, said that "the two men are much closer than many Washington insiders understand, that they developed a friendship and a working relationship when Bush was recruiting Colin Powell to be Secretary of State."

I think Mr. Parry is on to something.