Rove-Bush conspiracy noose tightens

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Despite a furious Republican counter-attack to save Karl Rove, new evidence points to George W. Bush's political guru having joined in a White House conspiracy to punish former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticizing Bush's use of intelligence on Iraq.

A key Republican defense of Rove has been that the White House deputy chief of staff only recycled rumors from reporters in 2003 when he told other reporters about Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, and her covert identity as a CIA officer who worked on issues related to weapons of mass destruction.

But two new facts contradict that assertion and show that Rove was coordinating his leaks about Plame with officials in Bush's National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

Full story: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071805.html

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Link to Cheney deepens 'leak-gate' scandal

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/19/link_to_cheney_deepens_145leak_gate146_scandal/

THE NEWS that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was the second possible source in the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent to Time magazine elevates the scandal to a whole new level. It is bad enough for Karl Rove to be accused of being a leaker, since he is President Bush's chief political strategist.

But if Time's story holds, I. Lewis Libby's involvement represents an even more insidious abuse of power. The Bush administration is being accused of leaking the name of Valerie Plame in retribution for a New York Times op-ed article written by her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson. Wilson wrote that he never found any evidence in a 2002 trip to Africa, contrary to claims made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein was procuring uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

Bush would invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. But Libby, Cheney, and the other influential right-wing hard-liners, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, saw their dreams come true. Back in the administration of the senior President Bush, Cheney was defense secretary and Libby and Wolfowitz were two of his aides who, after the first Gulf War left Saddam in power, drafted a document advocating "preemptive" war against possible threats.

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Scooter Libby's Field Trip

Lots of chatter about a classified State Department memo that was distributed and read aboard Air Force One the day after Joseph Wilson outed the White House and its bogus Niger claim. The memo, dated June 10, 2003, included the name of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame, noting she worked for the CIA and that that information should not be shared. The memo stands as a possible source for White House officials such as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, both of whom were dishing to Matt Cooper about Wilson and Plame during the summer of 2003.

As the Wall Street Journal notes today, "The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter."

But there may be an easier explanation for how Libby, chief of staff to Cheney, found out Plame worked at the CIA: he simply visited her workplace.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20050719/cm_huffpost/004403

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