Month: October 2005

Fitzgerald Announcement: “11am PT / 2pm ET“

Patrick Fitzgerald will hold a news conference today at 2pm ET / 11am PT, according to CNN. I anticipate that many online outlets will air this live, including C-SPAN, Washington Post (no video link up yet), and NPR (can’t confirm) or Air America Radio.

   “The grand jury was expected to meet this morning, with an announcement by Fitzgerald expected about midday,” reports the Los Angeles Times, via Daou Report.

Here’s the address for Fitz’s place.

Will the Froggy Bottom Cafe be open until Fitz shows up for his little speech? Or should we head over to Fitz’s? (His place is a bit plain looking — patriotic, but plain nonetheless — and I don’t see any party treats. Shall we get a hat and whistle for Fitz? ‘course, he’d probably rather have a stiff shot and a nap.)

No, this isn’t like a campaign party. Leave your checkbooks at home. This one’s on the government!

P.S. That’s the NYT photo of Scooter being driven to work this morning. Someone “Photoshopped” in a cardboard box. No idea why they did that.

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It may turn out — in the great war being waged by disaffected members of the intelligence community network against the Neocon cabal inside the Bush administration — that Valerie Plame Wilson is as incidental as Monica Lewinsky was in the unending campaigns against Bill Clinton.

While the White House-spoonfed pundits nitpick over Joseph Wilson’s veracity and Valerie Wilson’s photo in Vanity Fair, the intelligence community is in a full-court press to undo the Bush administration’s gross mishandling of intelligence information, officers, agents, and agencies.

Imagine you’re in that community, and you witness the following:

• Neocon ideologue David Wurmser and the members of the post-9/11 newly created Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans — none of whom are experts in analyzing and assessing raw intelligence — are given carte blanche to cherry-pick and artificially produce “evidence not only linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, which we now know was false and which the CIA all along believed was false,” said Mother Jones reporter Robert Dreyfuss in an interview with his subject former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman on Democracy Now!, Nov. 6, 2003.
  

  
  

• “As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence,” writes Seymour Hersh in an October 2003 New Yorker interview of V.P. Cheney’s spokesperson Cathie Martin who — like Wurmser — is being eyed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
  

  
  

• “[E]ven before [9/11], a number of senior White House officials sought to brand the CIA as soft in its analysis and unwilling to offer more clear-cut views on the threats to America.” WSJ, Oct. 28, 2005
  

• There are endless more examples of which you are also aware.

The retired/active intelligence community will not stand down and allow a Neocon cabal to dismantle its historic structure — allowing ideologues to place sensitive intelligence in the hands of wholly unqualified amateurs such as David Wurmser.

Take another look at this graphic from the Wall Street Journal, posted in Catnip’s WSJ news summary last night. Catnip also quoted BoomanTribune contributors Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson in today’s WSJ piece:

   “Many people will feel vindicated [by Fitzgerald’s investigation],” said Patrick Lang, a former head of human intelligence collection at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, who has regular contact with many active analysts and agents. “There’s a deep sense of satisfaction among those who were pressured [on intelligence issues] but were told not to say they were pressured.” […]

   Any indictments would be a “huge deal … because they will help restore hope that the system works,” said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department.

Beyond the very large, and networked, community of retired intelligence officers, there are all of the active agents and analysts who were pressured or coerced in the run-up to the war. Many of them are joined in gunning for the Neocon cabal that created and marketed its own fictional rationales for the Iraq war.

The intel community also sees grave danger in the erosion of power of the CIA — and the rearranging of the deck chairs on Bush’s Titanic:

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Froggy Bottom Cafe Grab a brunch drink and let’s get started! If we get disappointed, at least we’ll be prepared to drown our sorrows! Please recommend (and unrecommend the Cafe/Lounge from yesterday)

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This must be a milestone for dKos PropaGannon team members and a reward for their effort to establish facts around the CIA leak of Valerie Plame to the U.S. press, and the effort by the WHIG group to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson.

  «« click on pic for bio Fitzgerald

Patrick J. Fitzgerald

A memorable day, let’s hope all facts are turned into solid indictments to the culprits roaming the Colonial Style White House in Washington DC.

Continues »»

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[From the diaries by susanhu.]

Exxon Mobil Corp. Chairman
and CEO Lee Raymond

Really look at this face. This is the face of greed. The face of the wealthy. The face of one who is pulling the strings in the world economy. This is symbolically the face of the devil.

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