Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, has now been indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the grand jury, by the federal grand jury investigating the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.
It has been reported that a last minute deal has given Karl Rove a reprieve for the time being concerning this investigation. The continued investigation into Karl Rove’s involvement hangs over the White House casting a deepening shadow over the rest of this administration's term.
Sources close to the investigation say the probe will continue, and is likely to expand to include other elements, including forged documents that purported to show Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. As this investigation of key White House officials is taking place, little mention is made of the fact that Cheney's National Security Adviser John Hannah and his Middle East advisor David Wurmser are cooperating in Fitzgerald's probe. Both David Wurmser and John Hannah are now working for UN ambassador John Bolton and are said to have played a role in disseminating Plame Wilson's name to the press.
Concerning the origins of the forged Niger documents, Patrick Fitzgerald’s office has recently received information and documents relating to this case from the Italian government. Yet there has been almost no investigation into some of the key players such as Rocco Martino, the Italian “security consultant” who attempted to sell the forged documents to a reporter in Rome in late 2002.
Rocco Martino has yet to be interviewed by the FBI because they claim that the Italian government has not allowed them to interview him, yet Mr. Martino has traveled to the United States twice in 2004 and still the FBI has not attempted to interview him.
One thing that is more baffling than FBI’s failure to investigate what should be a key person in this case is that few people in the media are tying together the Plame investigation with the forged Niger documents or the broader scope of how this all ties together with the Downing Street Memos and a little known place called the OSP or Office of Special Plans.
The Downing Street Memos, as we all know, are the minutes from a meeting that show how the Bush administration used certain pieces of information to back up the reasons for going to war with Iraq. Part of this evidence is the forged Niger documents that our own intelligence agencies deemed unreliable and likely to be false.
Article comments
1 - Preston Parkhurst
The following ran last night
Transcript of a segment of "Countdown" on MSNBC from October 31, 2005
<< Italian investigators have already concluded that the documents were produced in Italy on the diplomatic front. The fake papers were funneled into the American intelligence community through the Office of Special Plans. That�s an alternative intelligence-gathering agency under the jurisdiction of then-Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith >>
<< DANIELS: Let me ask you this, Philip, do you think it is possible, feasible that the administration actually believed on some level that the documents were real?
GIRALDI: No. I don�t think so. Because these documents went through several steps before they wound up at the administration and analysts at both CIA and NASA and the State Department pronounced them to be dubious.
The thing to bear in mind here is that unless accountability is established in this case, this kind of thing could happen again.
DANIELS: You know, we all remember when the former CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for the uranium reference getting into the president�s State of the Union Address. But from your research from your article, it almost appears that the CIA had very little to do with getting that faulty intelligence into the country, let alone into the speech.
GIRALDI: They were in fact completely out of the loop. That�s a correct assessment, yes.
DANIELS: And why do you say that?
GIRALDI: Well, because the documents were not seen by people at CIA until very late in the process, after they were already in the hands of the policymakers at the National Security Council and in the vice president�s office. >>>
Article mentioned in the above transcript is from Philip Giraldi, a contributing editor with The American Conservative magazine, also a former CIA agent
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html