That doesn’t mean, of course, that Rove knew Plame was a NOC — although it also doesn’t mean he didn’t know. But at a minimum, it at least suggests Rove knew the information he had given Cooper was confidential, if not classified. That, after all, was what made it such a valuable nugget to feed to Cooper.
Back to Main
July 17, 2005
WB: Cooper Speaks
Comments
You can read the article by using BugMeNot to get the username and password it takes to login for http://www.Time.com.
That’s how I got to it.
Posted by: Chris Woods | Jul 17 2005 22:02 utc | 1
WB: Cooper Speaks
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, which is trapped behind Time’s subscriber firewall. (Looks like the shitheads are going to sell me a subscription today.)
The Times/Cooper story is on Truthout.org
Rove DID say Plame worked for CIA on WMD. Cooper DID NOT call Rove re welfare reform. Obviously, I would like to know what Billmon thinks of it.
PD
Posted by: PeeDee | Jul 17 2005 22:05 utc | 2
You can try to use bug me not to access Time.
I have cited some part of Coopers piece here.
Some other nuggets from that piece, which make me kind of hopeful:
Grand juries are in the business of handing out indictments, and their docility is infamous. A grand jury, the old maxim goes, will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it of them. But I didn’t get that sense from this group of grand jurors. They somewhat reflected the demographics of the District of Columbia. The majority were African American and were disproportionately women. Most sat in black vinyl chairs with little desks in rows that were slightly elevated, as if it were a shabby classroom at a rundown college. A kindly African-American forewoman swore me in, and when I had to leave the room to consult with my attorneys, I asked her permission to be excused, not the prosecutor’s, as is the custom. These grand jurors did not seem the types to passively indict a ham sandwich. I would say one-third of my 2 1/2 hours of testimony was spent answering their questions, not the prosecutor’s, although he posed them on their behalf. I began to take notes but then was told I had to stop, so I’m reliant on memory.
For my part, I sat at the end of an L-shaped table next to one of the prosecutor’s lawyers, who handed me various documents to review while an overhead projector displayed the documents on a screen near me. Virtually all the questions centered on the week of July 6, 2003. I was new to covering the Bush White House, having been the deputy Washington bureau chief for TIME. As it happens, that week was a big one at the White House. On that Sunday, the New York Times had published former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now infamous Op-Ed describing his mission to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons. Wilson said he had found no evidence of that and was confounded as to why the President would claim otherwise in his 2003 State of the Union address. As a freshly minted White House correspondent, I told the grand jury, I was all over that story by midweek, especially because it emerged as a likely candidate for TIME’s cover the following Monday.
The grand jurors wanted to know what was on my mind, and I told them. The White House had done something it hardly ever does: it admitted a mistake. Shortly after Wilson’s piece appeared, the White House said that the African uranium claim, while probably still true, should not have been in the President’s State of the Union address because it hadn’t been proved well enough. That was big news as the media flocked to find out who had vetted the President’s speech. But at the same time, I was interested in an ancillary question about why government officials, publicly and privately, seemed to be disparaging Wilson. It struck me, as I told the grand jury, as odd and unnecessary, especially after their saying the President’s address should not have included the 16-word claim about Saddam and African uranium.
I told the grand jurors that I was curious about Wilson when I called Karl Rove on Friday, July 11. Rove was an obvious call for any White House correspondent, let alone someone trying to prove himself at a new beat. As I told the grand jury–which seemed very interested in my prior dealings with Rove–I don’t think we had spoken more than a handful of times before that. I recalled that when I got the White House job a couple of weeks earlier, I left a message for him trying to introduce myself and announce my new posting.
But always keep in mind what Frank Rich says and why he right AND wrong:
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
This is NOT about a “gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds”. This is about white people who assumed they were a superpower and went off to kill more than 100,000 non-white people to be able to further support their “way of life” by monopolizing the carbon energy recources left on this planet.
But then, I am not angry with Rich, as he has to sell to a US public and he is doing well in that …
Cooper also says Rove told him that information that was “about to be declassified” would cast doubt on Wilson and his mission. This may refer to the faulty INR memo, which never was actually declassified; but at the least, it strongly suggests that Rove knew he was giving Cooper classified information.
Posted by: Leslie in CA | Jul 17 2005 22:20 utc | 4
“Oh, I’ve said too much” is an old-fashioned rhetorical device I’ve often heard used by Black preachers. It’s invariably followed by “but you know what I mean” to indicate that the entire audience is aware of “the scene” hinted at by the speaker…
Posted by: wilson46201 | Jul 17 2005 22:36 utc | 5
b
go hang with the marines and army if you think they are all white.
Racist.
Posted by: razor | Jul 17 2005 22:38 utc | 6
The grand jurors wanted to know what was on my mind, and I told them. The White House had done something it hardly ever does: it admitted a mistake. Shortly after Wilson’s piece appeared, the White House said that the African uranium claim, while probably still true, should not have been in the President’s State of the Union address because it hadn’t been proved well enough.
“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein…..”
Look at what was going on in Britain. Alastair Campbell (who shared a “quantum entanglement” with Rove) was hunting down Dr David Kelly.
As always, the timing is the key.
Posted by: john | Jul 17 2005 23:03 utc | 7
@razor – the people who do these decisions are white. Those who kill in the name of the US are “white”. Any counter example before your call me a racist?
On Brad DeLongs blog, when he posted a Britsh flag because some 50 Brits died I asked: “Will you put up an Iraqi flag now every day?” Brad deleted that comment.
Razor – I have worked and lived with the US Army quite a few years. It has racism in itself, for sure. But this “campaign” on Iarq is not about racism in the Army, it is a pure racism campaign in it self.
Billmon’c “Cooper Speaks” post reminds of a newsman sitting at the desk stating, “this just in”; update, Rove is getting death by a thousand cuts; update, Rove now has his head up his own ass; update, now GWB has his head up Roves ass. Maybe Rove can have Guckert for a cell mate. Thats for shits and giggles.
I believe Cooper outed Rove. That article does severe damage to Roves case. Especially the part about the welfare conversation. Rove is caught lying again. Mehlman must be in full spasm mode by now.
Over at Kos is a link to the Minnesota Star Tribune where they print Larry Johnsons article about Plame. (He was a class mate and CIA operative with Plame). Also, they reprint the NYT article by Joe Wilson.
On “Think Progress” is “Memo to Rove: Read the Classification Nondisclosure Agreement.” And it post some of the agreement and Rove definately broke the non-disclosure agreement. There is also a post with Podesta and Mehlman with Mehlman looking like death warmed over. This whole thing is getting me excited if only for a moment. I love the painfull looks on the rethuglican face.
Posted by: jdp | Jul 17 2005 23:17 utc | 9
He asked me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the CIA.
It is now clear why Miller is in prison and why she will likely be charged with criminal comtempt.
According to the flood of stories last week, Rove told the grand jury that he didn’t recall where he got the information from and suggested that it could have been from a reporter. Fitzgerald, will all of the WH phone logs in his had, contacted every reporter that Rove spoke with during the period leading up to this. This list included Andrea Mitchell, Tim Russert, Walter Pincus, Cooper and others. I would bet that he asked all of them the content of their conversations with Rove. None told the grand jury that they told Rove about Plame.
The last person on that list was Judy Miller and she is refusing to testify. Rove’s alibi in this case is now completely hinged on what Judy Miller says. If Miller testifies that she was not Rove’s source, then Rove could be in the heap for perjury or lying to Federal law enforcement officials or obstruction of justice in addition to any Intelligence Identities or Espionage Act crimes.
It could be that Rove was hoping to use journalistic privilege to cover his perjury and that Miller, by refusing to testify is a willing collaborator.
Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Jul 17 2005 23:39 utc | 10
@b – your point is well taken. The only other place where I have seen an unequivocal statement is in The Black Commentator. I haven’t found the exact article yet, but I remember their citing an opinion poll which had blacks and hispanics in the US polling against the invasion of Iraq by a margin consistently higher than the national average.
It was also when I read a similar sentiment
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart….
expressed by the young Kerry I said to myself, “this man would make a good president of the US for the US and the world”. But that man never ran for Presidency, or so it seemed to me.
Posted by: bvb09 | Jul 18 2005 0:17 utc | 11
This comment is in response to Billmon’s dilemma of Miller, the First Amendment, and a journalist’s ethics.
First of all, the main reason you appear to be querying yourself into such a confused dither is that you do not appear to be addressing the fundamental purpose of the freedom of the press. For me, doing so greatly simplifies matters.
I am not a journalist, but a psychologist. At the risk of revealing a tidbit of proprietary info here, I’ll share one interesting question from one test from one measure in our bag of tricks in evaluating various aspects of human cognition. The question is:
Why is a free press important in a democracy?
The one-point answers are such as ‘so everyone gets all the facts,’ or ‘so all the information can be published.’ Pedestrian; shallow.
The two-point answer, however, must satisfy this conceptual understanding: ‘The press must be free from influence by those in power so that abuses of power, especially by those in government, can be exposed.’
Note first how this second perspective takes into account the larger focus of the entire Constitution itself, which – to my mind – documents not just our right but our responsibility as citizens to at every moment question those in power and hold them accountable.
Note next how the first perspective is, by comparison, entirely flat-footed, limiting itself to the narrow path of the ‘rights’ of the journalist and the papers who publish them. It seems to me that this has been the arena of this debate, and it exposes just how far the press has fallen and how little they understand their charge as the Fourth Estate.
You almost got it, Billmon; seduced by Kovach’s accuracy criterion, you astutely reasoned that even protecting a source of accurate info can be malicious…. This is almost to the point.
The point is – and please recognize that the judge who put Miller away actually got this point and so does Fitzgerald (see the last line of Blumenthal’s latest account of this scandal where Fitz is quoted) – Miller is clearly protecting someone who is abusing their position of power. This is what the entire debate should be about, not whether or not a source is protected. Protection of a source is merely secondary to whether or not the source is blowing the whistle on abuses of power, such as was the case with Ellsberg. The Plame/Miller/Rove scandal is NOT even close to that caliber; in fact, it is entirely antithetical to it.
Greg Palast actually asked the appropriate question with regard to all this in his latest post, one I’ve been wondering about for two years now. Why did all these reporters who were leaked this info – and who now are being painted in near noble light for refusing to print the leak – fail to print the REAL story, which should have been: TOP WH OFFICIALS LEAK CIA IDENTITY FOR POLITICAL REVENGE! Talk about sleeping on the job.
As a final point, you bring up the interesting notion of Nuremberg principles here. I’ll remind you that there was one defendant from the press tried at those trials. In fact, he was the only non-military, non-government individual to be hanged there. His crime, as the jurists saw it, was his abuse of the press in order to stir the hatred and violence necessary to support the Nazi atrocities. His name was Julius Striecher and his paper was Der Sturmer.
In light of this historical episode, and certainly in light of the current atrocities committed in our names with a pack of lies, your hesitancy to ‘wade into the swamp’ of ethical questions is most disturbing. These episodes are slamming our faces in the muck of these ethical questions, and we cannot shy from them. In fact, these episodes remind us that we cannot at any moment EVER avoid them by ducking into the high and dry comfort zones that would seem to pose the easy answers. Because, as you see, avoiding the real and hard questions ultimately leads to confusion and a failure to see the hard answers in the long run.
And I daresay – again, I’m not a journalist – asking the question of who is served in the situation of a leak or a source with info is a good guideline in the matter. That gets to the core of the First Amendment principle; it MUST serve the citizenry, and NOT those in power. And though not a journalist, I am a citizen, and I’ll be damned if I’ll support anyone, journalist or no, who would claim First Amendment protection of a source whose abuse of power ethically requires exposure in the press in order to protect myself and my fellow citizens from that abuse.
Oh, and just to add a little spring in your step as you venture into the bog, the penalty for criminal contempt appears to have no limit, and theoretically can be life in prison.
I champion your dedication to exposure of truth; please continue to do so with an equal dedication to the deepest ethical and Constitutional considerations.
Posted by: lll | Jul 18 2005 1:02 utc | 13
lll:
Salud to a great comment. You have just earned yourself a round of drinks!
Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Jul 18 2005 1:16 utc | 14
That gets to the core of the First Amendment principle; it MUST serve the citizenry, and NOT those in power.
Just read the Amendment. It proscribes government action against speech. That’s it. And there are exceptions (time and place restrictions, libel, etc.)
Others know more here, but as far as the Rove Affair goes, no 1st Am. issues arise. The Miller situation has nothing to do w speech, so far as I know.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 18 2005 1:19 utc | 15
lll- I had a question about the press in relation to this as well. If say, Fox News reads Republican talking points trying to cover up a crime, does that make them accessories after the fact?
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 18 2005 1:30 utc | 16
It’s awfully hard to pick out the most blatant example of corruption and self-serving from the post 9-11 landscape, but the press, esp. the Washington press, have a good claim.
I’ll never trust the NYT again.
Posted by: ab | Jul 18 2005 1:41 utc | 18
lll unconsciously exposes the paradox in the first amendment of the US constitution. By ascribing an ethical burden ie
‘The press must be free from influence by those in power so that abuses of power, especially by those in government, can be exposed.’
to a commercial enterprise whose primary goal must always be maximising shareholder return he/she limply passes responsibility for ethical government to an entity which not only can’t be held responsible for success/failure is actually proscribed from holding an interest in success/failure.
The aplomb with which US citizens appear to hand over the moral responsibility for their regime to corporations which have the rights of citizenship but none of the responsibilities can only mean that they are willing participants in this farce.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 18 2005 1:54 utc | 19
And how will we know that Rove thinks he’s in trouble? It’s very simple: when all kinds of leaks, documenting Cheney’s micromanagerial control over these things, start to pop up all over the place. I’d expect this to happen, if it ever does, during the interim between the close of the grand jury proceedings in October and the handing down of indictments. I think this interim could last anywere from about three weeks to three months,and I favor January indictments for all kinds of reasons, the foremost being merely malicious: I want to watch the MSM lose its marbles in public, as it certainly shall if another six months go by with nothing more than rumor and guesswork to chew on.
Posted by: alabama | Jul 18 2005 2:00 utc | 20
I’ll never trust the NYT again.
Posted by: ab | July 17, 2005 09:41 PM | #
Not to be intentionally mean or snarky, but I hope right now is not the events that lead you to this conclusion.
If you needed to have a reason not to trust the NYT, there are so many other reasons over the past decade that they are impossible to count. I could start with Jeff Gerth still having a job despite what has been exposed about his publication of lies, smear and innuendo regarding Whitewater and then Wen Ho Lee. That is just for starters.
We could next point to William Safire and his Atta-Prague “smoking gun”.
More recently, Judith “I was proved fucking right” Miller and her years long campaign of publishing WMD lies at the behest of Chalabi, Bolton and the Neocons. Remember the editors note that followed? Jay Rosen has a nice compariso of NYT negligence and malfeasance in both sad episodes here.
More to the point however, the consider the last two sentences of the NYT’s famous mea culpa Editor’s Note: We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.
If anyone could point me to a single story where they have followed through on this pledge, I would happily retract what I am about to say. Which is, anyone, newspaper or not, that lies and makes false promises to deflect bad publicity, should not be trusted period. End of story.
Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Jul 18 2005 2:14 utc | 21
Billmon is doing is a great job of weaving what we know and what we still need to know and all along skewering the media’s role in keeping us posted of the facts in this case. Thanks, Billmon.
Posted by: jg | Jul 18 2005 2:31 utc | 22
@ lll,
It is apparent that journalists claim greater professional confidentiality rights/duties re their sources than even psychologists do re their patients.
@b,
Technically, iraqis are caucasian, aren’t they? I think Rich is completely right; it IS about sending American sons and daughters to their deaths for a lie, causing 100000 civilian deaths in the process. It resembles a class warfare more than a race warfare because the motive is profit. The classists engage racism and nationalism as mere tools to get lower classes to participate.
Posted by: gylangirl | Jul 18 2005 4:04 utc | 23
Debs is dead: Gosh, don’t know as I’d characterize the First Amendment as paradoxical, but certainly the notion that capitalism is democratic seems to me to be paradoxical. Your points with regard to the conflicts raised for corporate journalists (oxymoron, anyone?) are spot on and well-taken.
fauxreal: Would that we could nail the Fox faux (read: foe) for its many crimes. Perhaps this debate will force the world of journalism to start wading into that murky ethical swamp to the extent that Murdoch and his ilk will be exposed for what they are (which is in my humble opinion just short of Streicher).
Slothrop: Not sure what you are meaning here. ‘Congress shall make no law…abridging freedom of speech, or of the press’. If I’m not mistaken, this is the First Amendment issue that everyone in journalism seems to be throwing at Fitzgerald and Judge Hogan, claiming violation. Granted, Rove’s role doesn’t involve First Amendment issues, but the role of the journalists, and their claims of source protection most definitely does.
gylangirl: And yeah, it does appear that many journalists feel they are alone in this boundless confidentiality privilege. Psychologists, physicians, lawyers, and I believe even priests are compelled to report a crime that is happening or threatened to happen, whereas they are not compelled to testify against a client who is accused of a crime. These professionals have certain immunities with regard to their clients, but the exception turns on the higher purpose of those professions (at least the medical ones), which is to do no harm. Yet reporters seem to feel immune even to this distinction, a distinction which – I feel – is clarified by returning to the higher purpose of the free press. Again, it is NOT for the purpose of getting the information out there, for breaking any and all stories, for getting a scoop or a Pulitzer; it is to protect the citizenry from abuses of power.
and bubb rubb: thanks for the nice thoughts!
I just figured out how to post my little tome where it should have been, so will do that. Thanks for your indulgence here.
Posted by: lll | Jul 18 2005 5:32 utc | 24
@gylangirl I’m not trying to be snippy snarky or even sarky but I just don’t see 100,000 deaths as a part of the process. It’s the outcome of greed and 21st century colonialism. Given that all any of us really have is life, the dismissal of 100,000 of those lives as part of the process of deceiving “American sons and daughters” or even killing 2000 “American sons and daughters” appears to this life force as a bit harsh.
Incidentally to you think the raghead lovers over at Little Green Footballs consider themselves the same race as Iraquis? Isn’t it Iranian=Persian=Caucasian and Iraqui=Arab=not white?
I don’t know but I was under the impression that since WW2 whitefellas had agreed not to try and colonise each other since with the advent of TV it is difficult to convince audiences back in the boondocks that the torn body they see which appears to closely resemble cousin Ernie is in fact a bad egg. Although who can’t forget PJ O’Rourke’s wonderful characterisation of civil war in the former Yugoslavia as “The Unspellables versus The Unpronounceables”
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 18 2005 5:48 utc | 25
In the process of stealing the oil and the military contracts, 100000 and <1800 are dead. Not because of their race. Because of the greed. I am not dismissing the 100000 at all.
To follow your and b's 'racist war' reasoning, one could also claim that the war is all about sexism since most of the killers are male and most of the killed are female.
Don't be too sure that "Caucasian/Persian" Iranians won't be treated as badly as the "Caucasian/Arab" Iraquis by the same racist 'raghead lovers' if Iran is invaded next. Likewise, if the oil was in France rather than in Iraq, the Little Green Footballs 'froggie lovers' would be assuming french = not white!
Posted by: gylangirl | Jul 18 2005 6:18 utc | 26
Here’s something kind of interesting….
Pete Yost of the AP buried the Rovian Lead this evening.
Specifically, Yost did not go for the hoped for spin quote from Cooper:
“So did Rove leak Plame’s name to me, or tell me she was covert? No.”
Instead he cut straight to the chase and laid out the fingering, repeatedly, by both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby.
____
And 111–
As to your 2 yr old question…..I would reckon that the sheer addiction to the Evil of Access had a lot to with it.
No wonder Rove released Cooper from his confidentiality promise: Cooper agreed to spin for Rove.
Posted by: gylangirl | Jul 18 2005 6:39 utc | 28
What about Operation Rockingham?
Are you all familiar with the existence of Operation Rockingham? I seemed to have missed this one.
From Wikipedia:
Operation Rockingham is an intelligence unit whose existence was revealed in June 2003 by the Scottish Sunday Herald. Based mainly on an interview with former USmilitary intelligence officer and chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, investigative journalist Neil Mackay describes the function of Operation Rockingham as producing misleading intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which could be used as justification for action against Iraq. Set up in 1991 by John Morrison, the deputy head of the British Ministry of Defence Defence Intelligence Staff, the Rockingham cell was at the center of various British and US intelligence organisations collecting information on Iraq’s WMD.The unit dealt with intelligence obtained from a variety of cources, including Iraqi defectors and the UN arms inspections organisation in Iraq UNSCOM, which Rockingham had penetrated. According to Scott Ritter the unit amassed evidence selectively, with government backing, for political goals…
The article goes on to note that scientist David Kelly mentioned this group when he gave testimony the day before he (was?) suicided. His role with them was only revealed with the Hutton Inquiry.
And, Judith Miller was in email contact with Kelly the day he died and her book, Germs, includes Kelly’s work…so maybe this is the organization Miller was working for.
From the Guardian link:
One of its tactics, which Ritter cites, is its leaking of false information to weapons inspectors, and then, when the search is fruitless, using that as “proof” of the weapons’ existence. He quotes a case in 1993 when “Rockingham was the source of some very controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected ballistic missile site. We … found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed.”
A parallel exercise was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US, named the Office of Special Plans. The purpose of this intelligence agency was the provision of selective intelligence which met the demands of its political masters. Similarly, in the case of the UK, Ritter insists that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders “from the very highest levels”.
Both Ritter and British intelligence sources have said that the selective intelligence gathered by Operation Rockingham would have been passed to the joint intelligence committee (JIC), which was behind the dossiers published by the UK government claiming Iraq had WMDs.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 18 2005 6:52 utc | 29