WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

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December 4, 2005 -- Current Deputy Director for National Intelligence helped lay groundwork for 9-11 intelligence failures.

National Security Agency (NSA) insiders speak out about Hayden's and his NSA predecessors' climate of fear, retribution, and lack of priorities.

-- EXCLUSIVE --

Much has been written about why NSA failed to report four important intercepts prior to 911 that would have alerted the United States that a major attack was to take place on September 11, 2001.

The intercepts of Al Qaeda communications were:

Sept. 10, 2001 - "The match is about to begin."

Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour"

In addition, two other intercepts of Al Qaeda cells in the United States were also ignored:

Sept. 10, 2001 - "Watch the news."

Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow will be a great day for us."

WMR can report that because of poor management decisions made by then-NSA Director Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA did not have the expertise or ability to adequately identify key intercepts that, if known and understood in time, could have prevented the 911 attacks. These intercepts sat unread in an area of the NSA basement known as the "Carillon pool" until it was too late.

The reasons why NSA was caught unprepared for 911 essentially go back a decade before Hayden's arrival as director. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, NSA's Russian linguists and Soviet experts were considered the golden employees. Even though the threat changed and the Russian priorities were downgraded, the Russian experts were placed in top management positions in areas in which they had no experience. In what would be a fateful decision, Russian experts were put in charge of Middle East and Asian units, according to NSA sources. It was so bad, according to one source, that when an NSA branch manager, who only knew Russian, was placed in charge of China operations, he embarrassed himself and NSA when, during a Washington, DC briefing for old China hands from the CIA, DIA, and other agencies, he was unable to correctly pronounce Chinese names.

The decision to promote Russian experts to top management, rather than Arabic, Farsi, and other  language experts, would eventually result in almost total ignorance of the warning signs that were developing in the Middle East in the early 1990s. Overworked, under-appreciated, and with no chance of promotion, many Arabic linguists began leaving NSA in the middle 1990s, just as a firebrand Islamic fundamentalist named Osama Bin Laden was making some disturbing comments from Sudan and later, Afghanistan.

By 1998, some 1000 top NSA specialists -- linguists, mathematicians, and computer programmers -- had left the agency. However, the old Russian experts remained and were promoted. One of them was Maureen "Mo" Baginski, a Russian linguist, who was appointed to head the NSA's important Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID). She would later be blamed by Hayden and others for being partly responsible for the 911 failures at NSA. However, old NSA hands say that it was not fair to blame Baginski, since she "was out of her element" when dealing with the Middle East. Baginski is now a senior official of the FBI.

Making matters worse was the initiative to purposely drum out of NSA a number of experienced Middle Eastern and South Asian linguists as part of Hayden's reorganization program that emphasized outsourcing. One NSA linguist, fluent in Pashto (the language of the Taliban), Farsi, and 16 other languages was forced to retire a few years before 911. He was told by NSA managers that "minor languages" like Farsi and Pashto "never will be important to us." In fact, NSA paid little attention to "low density languages" that would later become critical. These included Uzbek, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Farsi, and various Arabic dialects.

Attempts to convince Hayden that he had to beef up Middle Eastern language proficiency by training better instructors, concentrating on Middle Eastern dialects, and evaluating and upgrading language training programs went unheeded. Although Hayden paid plenty of lip service to these ideas, nothing ever happened. Eager to carry out his pet Groundbreaker and Trailblazer outsourcing projects, the NSA Director continued to sell the NSA store to private contractors.

Moreover, the NSA contracting firms, some of which were large Pentagon weapons system providers, convinced Hayden that China, not the Middle East, was the highest priority. As a result, by 2000, Groundbreaker/Trailblazer contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing had successfully seen to it that China, not the Middle East, would be the focus of NSA's re-engineered signals intelligence systems. By hyping the "China threat," intelligence could be used to justify large defense programs in which the contractors had a vested interest. Chief among these was the Ballistic Missile Defense system being pushed by Donald Rumsfeld, who was not yet Defense Secretary but who championed "Star Wars II" as the head of the Rumsfeld Commission on missile defense. Of course, China was high on Rumsfeld's mind when his commission's report rhetorically asked, "What if China gave North Korea advanced missile technology (or even a completed missile)?"

Meanwhile, intelligence from NSA raw intercepts were being leaked to the media, including Parade magazine, in order to justify expensive defense systems to counter the "China threat." NSA analysts were appalled at the lackadaisical way important intelligence was being leaked. Sources for COMINT on China and other countries involved in weapons proliferation -- targeted telephone numbers and fax, computer, and other telecommunications links -- literally dried up overnight and continued to stay dark, according to one source.

Hayden's predecessor as director, Air Force General Kenneth Minihan, did try to stress multi-skills and multi-lingualism for NSA analysts in his National Cryptologic Strategy for the 21st Century (NCS21) reorganization plan.  However, Minihan never did much to launch his NCS21 initiative. Minihan's plan specifically stated that NSA would:

"Invest in our people through education, training and career development to achieve and maintain required skill levels. Our overall occupational structure will be skills-based and constantly tuned to mission requirements and achieve information superiority."

However, Hayden scrapped NCS21, replacing it with Groundbreaker and Trailblazer.

NCS21 would have also helped curb the problem with the "stovepiping" of intelligence, which prevented intelligence like the September 10, 2001 NSA Al Qaeda intercepts from getting to those decision makers who needed it. One of NCS 21's stated goals was to:

"Work with the intelligence community to develop interactive databases to enable the policy maker to initiate a single request, search all available community databases, and receive the requested data."

Rather than integrating databases, Hayden's programs were discontinuing databases, particularly those that concentrated on the Middle East and South Asia.

As a result of the interplay between Hayden, the contractors, and Rumsfeld, NSA's intercept priorities were focused away from the Middle East to Chinese  missile and other weapons systems. Repeated urging to beef up NSA's Middle Eastern and African capabilities were ignored, even after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Many linguists were tossed out based on trumped up "security" problems. NSA Security is noted for running a virtual Gestapo-like operation at the agency. According to dozens of current and ex-NSA employees interviewed by WMR, anyone targeted for any reason by NSA management soon finds themselves the subject of interrogations, forced visits to the NSA psychologist, and finally clearance revocation and termination. The terminations of linguists with critical skills continued right up to September 2001.

Hayden's two reorganizations projects -- Groundbreaker and Trailblazer -- saw a number of NSA's language databases being terminated because of a lack of funding due to the outsourcing of critical operational responsibilities.

A few NSA analysts early on predicted that Islamic radicals encouraged by Saudi radical clerics would soon launch a major suicide terrorist attack on American soil.

The analysts based their prediction on a number of key events and dates. One was the September 12, 1994 suicide crash of a stolen Cessna plane flown into the South Lawn of the White House by Frank Corder. (President Clinton was then staying at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House). The other was the undetected flying of a Cessna aircraft through heavily-fortified Soviet air defense systems by 19 year-old German pilot Mathias Rust in 1987. Rust landed his aircraft in Red Square, within yards of the offices of the top Soviet leadership.

    

September 12, 1994 and May 28, 1987: they were key events for NSA analysts who predicted a suicide aircraft mission in the United States by Islamist radicals.

The other significant date pointed to by NSA analysts was September 11. This was the last day of the siege by the Palestinian terrorist group "Black September" of Israeli athlete hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a day and month that NSA Middle East experts pointed out was significant throughout the Islamic world. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed by their Black September captors. Black September took its name from the September 1970 massacre by King Hussein of Jordan of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan who attempted to stage a coup.

NSA managers who did not understand the nuances of the Middle East claimed that since the "U.S. eliminated Black September," nothing connected to the group or the month of September could be taken seriously.

But two decades later, NSA began to obtain tapes of incendiary speeches by Wahhabi Muslim Saudi clerics in mosques throughout the oil-rich kingdom. When the contents of the transcriptions of these tapes were compared to classified COMINT [Communications Intelligence] and information in articles in various Arabic language newspapers, alarm bells went off in the Middle East branches at Fort Meade, particularly after the February 26, 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center. A report never distributed outside of NSA reported that "Saudi extremists were contemplating 'kamikaze'-type attacks in the United States using aircraft." Ironically and eerily, the date of that report was September 11, 1993.

Also ignored were clear indications that certain Israeli elements were engaged in suspicious activities prior to 9-11. Although NSA has traditionally been skeptical about Israeli intentions -- ever since the 1967 unprovoked Israeli attack on the NSA ship USS Liberty and severe compromises of classified information from the Pollard affair and the DINDI/PIEREX joint NSA-Israeli activities in the 1980s -- by the late 1990s, NSA gingerly handled intercepts of Israeli communications. It is such a touchy subject that the name tags of NSA linguists that carry their language expertise in one case have been altered. Hebrew linguists tags are denoted as "Special Arabic," an obvious attempt to demonstrate to those NSA employees without special access that the agency does not listen in on Hebrew communications.

Israel was suspected by some NSA and CIA analysts of helping to beef up China's missile and other weapons systems with sophisticated technology. Some of this technology was used to make improvements to the Chinese Silkworm anti-ship missile, the C-801 sea-skimming missile, and the EM-52 rocket-propelled anti-ship mine. These weapons systems were then offered by China to Iran.

There were attempts at the analyst level to try to share intelligence prior to 9-11. This was done through the Tech Track program, an analyst-led initiative to identify various subject area experts, particularly in the non-Russian areas, who could be called on for assistance. This program was showing success before NSA management stepped in and took it over. An attempt to eliminate the stovepiping of intelligence was quickly ended due to senior management interference.

Analysts figured out other clever ways to meet with other experts, both within the NSA and at other intelligence agencies. Not necessarily knowing the names of counterparts in other intelligence sections, subject area experts figured out a way to organize dinner meetings at Washington area restaurants by sending out notices on secure networks to particular intelligence branches and sections at the NSA, CIA, DIA, and other agencies. The analysts would identify one another based on the color of the neckties they agreed in advance to wear.

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"Tell the truth and then run." - Proverb

http://lnk.nu/news.yahoo.com/6p0

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Former 9/11 Commissioners: U.S. at Risk

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer

Sun Dec 4, 6:28 PM ET

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The U.S. is at great risk for more terrorist attacks because Congress and the White House have failed to enact several strong security measures, members of the former Sept. 11 commission said Sunday.

"It's not a priority for the government right now," said the former chairman, Thomas Kean, ahead of the group's release of a report Monday assessing how well its recommendations have been followed.

"More than four years after 9/11 ... people are not paying attention," the former Republican governor of New Jersey said. "God help us if we have another attack."

Added Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic vice chairman of the commission: "We believe that another attack will occur. It's not a question of if. We are not as well-prepared as we should be."

The five Republicans and five Democrats on the commission, whose recommendations are now promoted through a privately funded group known as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, conclude that the government deserves "more Fs than As" in responding to their 41 suggested changes.

Since the commission's final report in July 2004, the government has enacted the centerpiece proposal to create a national intelligence director. But the government has stalled on other ideas, including improving communication among emergency responders and shifting federal terrorism-fighting money so it goes to states based on risk level.

"There is a lack of a sense of urgency," Hamilton said. "There are so many competing priorities. We've got three wars going on: one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq and the war against terror. And it's awfully hard to keep people focused on something like this."

National security adviser Stephen Hadley said Sunday that President Bush is committed to putting in place most of the commission's recommendations.

"Obviously, as we've said all along, we are safer, but not yet safe. There is more to do," Hadley said on "Fox News Sunday."

Ex-commissioners contended the government has been remiss by failing to act more quickly.

Kean said the Transportation Security Administration was wrong to announce changes last week that will allow airline passengers to carry small scissors and some sharp tools. He also said the agency, by now, should have consolidated databases of passenger information into a single "terror watch list" to aid screening.

"I don't think we have to go backward here," said Kean, who appeared with Hamilton on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"They're talking about using more money for random checks. Terrorists coming through the airport may still not be spotted," Kean said.

Kean and Hamilton urged Congress to pass spending bills that would allow police and fire to communicate across radio spectrums and to reallocate money so that Washington and New York, which have more people and symbolic landmarks, could receive more for terrorism defense.

Both bills have stalled in Congress, in part over the level of spending and turf fights over which states should get the most dollars.

"This is a no-brainer," said Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman.

"From the standpoint of responding to a disaster, the key responders must be able to talk with one another. They could not do it on 9/11, and as a result of that, lives were lost. They could not do it at (Hurricane) Katrina. They still cannot do it."

As for the dollar dispute, Hamilton said, "We know what terrorists want to do: they want to kill as many Americans as possible. That means you protect the Washington monument and United States Capitol, and not other places."

Congress established the commission in 2002 to investigate government missteps that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its 567-page final report, which became a national best seller, does not blame Bush or former President Clinton for missteps contributing to the attacks but did say they failed to make anti-terrorism a higher priority.

The commission also concluded that the Sept. 11 attack would not be the nation's last, noting that al-Qaida had tried for at least 10 years to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Calling the country "less safe than we were 18 months ago," former Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick said Sunday the government's failure to move forward on the recommendations makes the U.S. more vulnerable.

She cited the failure to ensure that foreign nations are upgrading security measures to stop proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical materials, as well as the FBI's resistance to overhauling its anti-terror programs.

"You remember the sense of urgency that we all felt in the summer of 2004. The interest has faded," the Washington lawyer said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "You could see that in the aftermath of Katrina. We assumed that our government would be able to do what it needed to do and it didn't do it."
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On the Net:

9/11 Public Discourse Project: http://www.9-11pdp.org/

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc.

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"The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other. - Bertrand Russell (Freedom, Harcourt Brace, 1940)

http://lnk.nu/latimes.com/6ox.story

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Torture makes justice impossible

By David Cole

December 3, 2005

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WHEN ATTY. GEN. Alberto Gonzales announced shortly before Thanksgiving that Jose Padilla had been indicted, it came as some surprise that what he was actually charged with had virtually nothing to do with what the United States had been saying about Padilla for the more than three years that he was held in military custody as an "enemy combatant." In news conferences, Gonzales' predecessors had described Padilla as public enemy No. 1: an Al Qaeda operative accused of plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb" and to blow up apartment buildings.

But the indictment makes none of those claims. Instead, it charges Padilla only with playing an extremely marginal role helping a group of people who are alleged to have conspired to provide financial support to unspecified terrorists abroad. No one in the indictment is alleged to have engaged in or plotted any violence, and the allegations specific to Padilla do not even claim that he provided financial support to terrorists. Indeed, the government's case against Padilla is so flimsy that there is a substantial chance that he will be acquitted — that is, if he can get a fair trial after the public image the Justice Department has painted of him.

The disconnect between the allegations aired in news conferences and the charges lodged in court are disturbing. If Padilla was in fact plotting with Al Qaeda to detonate a dirty bomb, shouldn't he be tried for that crime, and punished accordingly? Why proceed instead on a paper-thin set of charges that might lead to his acquittal and release?

The answer is, in a word, torture. Administration sources explained to New York Times reporters Douglas Jehl and Eric Lichtblau that the reason they did not charge Padilla with more serious crimes is that the evidence allegedly supporting those charges was extracted from high-level Al Qaeda detainees — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubeida — through questionable means. They are being held in undisclosed locations and reportedly have been interrogated with such tactics as "waterboarding," in which the suspect is made to think he will drown if he doesn't talk.

Evidence obtained through waterboarding would never be admissible in a court of law. The Supreme Court has long made clear that evidence obtained through any physical coercion is per se inadmissible. And this is no technicality. Such measures are said to produce inherently unreliable evidence and "shock the conscience."

The Padilla case illustrates one of the oft-overlooked costs of torture and other means of coercive interrogation — the very tactics the administration is seeking to preserve in its fight against an amendment offered by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would prohibit all such methods. Because evidence obtained through coercion is universally viewed as inadmissible in court, the tactics effectively immunize suspects and those they implicate from prosecution.

This problem not only infects the Padilla case but virtually everyone held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret CIA "black sites." The U.S. is holding about 500 "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo and reportedly another 30 or more in undisclosed locations. Many of these are alleged to be Al Qaeda fighters, some very high level. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, for example, is said to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attack.

Anyone who fights for Al Qaeda is guilty of war crimes, as Al Qaeda has no right to engage in war and has adopted a policy and practice of targeting civilians. In theory, we should be able to try them, convict them and imprison them.

But more than four years after President Bush created military tribunals, not a single case has gone to trial. Only a handful of the hundreds of detainees have even been charged. One probable reason for the military's reluctance is the real risk that any trial will turn into a trial of the United States' own interrogation practices. Although the military tribunal rules do not exclude the use of testimony extracted by torture, no trial will ever be viewed as legitimate if it allows such testimony, and defense lawyers are certain to make this a central issue in any proceeding.

In short, by electing early on to violate the universal prohibition on torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, the administration has not only inflicted unconscionable harm on detainees from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, and done incalculable damage to the U.S. image abroad, it has painted itself into a corner. It is becoming increasingly unacceptable to hold so-called enemy combatants indefinitely without trial. But we have shielded the vast majority of them from being tried for the wrongs they may well have committed.

President Bush vowed shortly after 9/11 that he would capture the terrorists and bring them to justice. But his own tactics have made that promise impossible to deliver.

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DAVID COLE, a law professor at Georgetown University, is author of "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism" (New Press, 2005).

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

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"So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it."- Jean Paul-Sartre

http://lnk.nu/boston.com/6ow/

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CIA charges roil EU on eve of visit

Rice trip comes amid probes of detentions

By Colin Nickerson and Farah Stockman, Globe Staff

December 4, 2005

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BERLIN -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flies into a hornets' nest of criticism tomorrow as she begins a four-country swing through Europe amid mounting outrage over allegations that the United States has conducted covert counter-terrorism missions on the continent.

Accusations that the United States has snatched terrorism suspects from European streets, operated secret detention facilities, and used airports as layover points for CIA planes transferring captives have caused a furor. The charges have provoked parliamentary inquries, caused close US allies to issue indignant demands for information, and triggered a spate of criminal investigations.

Most of the allegations are speculative, but they have made for blaring headlines from Portugal to Poland in recent days and stoked anti-US anger on the continent to levels not seen since the invasion of Iraq. The European Union's top justice official warned last week that any member state found to have permitted secret US jails on its territory could be stripped of its voting rights in the organization.

''It is very, very important to get at the truth," Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said at a news conference in Berlin. ''Right now there is no US response."

The controversy threatens to overshadow Rice's visit, which is set to begin in Germany, where she will meet with the country's new pro-American chancellor, Angela Merkel. Merkel has been thrust into a difficult situation by a series of European and American media reports that air bases in the country have served as key layover points for CIA flights carrying detainees.

There's little doubt that planes operated by the CIA have made hundreds of flights in and out of Europe since the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. At issue is the nature of their missions, whether European human rights laws were breached, and -- perhaps most ticklish of all -- whether European intelligence agencies were aware of covert ''renditions" of terrorist suspects.

From Germany, Rice is scheduled to travel to Romania and Ukraine before doubling back to Belgium. Her high-profile visit to Europe is likely to intensify demands by politicians, editorialists, and human-rights activists that Washington explain its alleged use of European airports and other facilities on the continent for ''extraordinary renditions." This refers to the capture of terrorist suspects in one country and their covert transfer to another country -- usually one with few human rights protections -- for interrogation.

In Washington, State Department and intelligence officials have been preparing Rice for tough questioning on the secret sites and flights. It is unclear, however, how far European leaders will want to push the issue since it could boomerang back if it turns out their own intelligence agencies were complicit.

Even as Rice prepares, German prosecutors probe charges that the CIA plucked a German citizen of Lebanese descent, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in 2003 and flew him to Afghanistan for five months of interrogation before releasing him with neither explanation nor apology, as he has alleged. Another investigation is underway into claims by Italy that the CIA kidnapped radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan, also in 2003, then flew him to an interrogation facility in Egypt by way of the US air base in Ramstein, Germany. Italy has demanded the arrest of 22 Americans, including CIA operatives, in connection with the incident.

There have long been murmurs that the CIA has secretly transferred detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq to secret detention facilities via airports in Europe. The suspicions exploded into a continent-wide controversy last month after the Washington Post reported that two of eight covert CIA detention facilities were in unidentified ''democracies" in Eastern Europe. The US-based group Human Rights Watch named Romania and Poland as the most likely locations of the so-called ''black sites" in Europe.

Poland and Romania have heatedly denied the allegations. The White House has refused to confirm or deny the reports.

In some ways, the charges are as awkward for European leaders as for the United States. If the CIA has been using airports on the continent as a stop for the transfer of terror suspects, it would seem that either European officials were complicit -- in apparent violation of the EU's human rights charter -- or were ignorant, suggesting an inability to control US activities on their own soil.

The European Union, often more antagonistic to the United States than its individual member states, has vowed to press the issue during Rice's visit. Frattini said the 25-nation alliance has ''an institutional and moral duty to promote and defend fundamental rights of people."

Even America's closest allies are demanding answers. At least eight European nations have launched inquiries into allegations that the US may be operating a ''ghost gulag" with scores of detainees shunted from one detention facility to another, mainly in the Middle East and Central Asia, via transit points in Europe.

An even more explosive allegation is that the CIA may be illegally holding terror suspects at sites in Europe, with Human Rights Watch naming two former military air bases in Romania and Poland.

The Council of Europe -- a intergovernmental human rights agency -- has started an investigation into ''suspicious movements" of aircraft chartered by the CIA. The agency plans to use satellite data to track unusual building activity or suspicious airplane landings at supposedly shuttered air bases in Eastern Europe.

European media have reported that about 300 flights operated by the CIA landed at European airports between November 2001 and the summer of 2005. That does not mean, however, that the flights necessarily carried detainees.

According to The New York Times, 94 CIA-operated flights passed through Germany during that period, 76 through Britain, 33 through Ireland, 16 through Portugal, 15 each through Spain and the Czech Republic, and 13 through Cyprus, with smaller numbers of flights reported in Italy, Poland, Romania, Greece, Macedonia, Switzerland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Intelligence analysts estimate that the United States is holding 100 prisoners without charges outside its territory. Human Rights Watch last week published a list of 26 ''ghost detainees" it believes the CIA has incarcerated for questioning in secret overseas detention facilities. Many of the detainees are suspected of involvement in murderous crimes, including the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan promised Friday that Rice will ''respond in due course" to European demands for more information on alleged secret prisons and transfers of detainees.

''We face . . . an enemy that abides by no laws, that abides by no treaties, an enemy that wears no uniform," McClellan told reporters. ''But we also have a responsibility to respect the laws and the values and the treaty obligations that we have agreed to."

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Nickerson reported from Berlin; Stockman from Washington, D.C.  

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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“No state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual confidence impossible during a future time of peace.” - Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Perpetual Peace

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120405A.shtml

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Rove Running Out of Answers, Time
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

    Sunday 04 December 2005

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    The attorney representing Karl Rove in the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson has made a desperate attempt to ensure President Bush's deputy chief of staff does not become the subject of a criminal indictment.

    In doing so, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has turned the tables on the media, who ultimately fought a losing battle to protect Rove - their source - who revealed to some reporters Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status.

    Now Luskin has fired back, revealing to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Viveca Novak - a reporter working for Time magazine who wrote several stories about the Plame case - inadvertently tipped him off last year that her colleague at the magazine would be forced to testify that Rove was his source who told him about Plame Wilson's CIA status, several people close to the case said this week.

    The latest twist in the two-year-old investigation has all the elements of a Hollywood thriller. New details in the case seem to emerge on a daily basis. Selective leaks to a small handful of newspapers and cable news stations are aimed at portraying some of the key Bush administration officials involved in the case in a sympathetic light, while casting Fitzgerald as a partisan prosecutor.

    But the fact remains, several sources close to the investigation said, that Rove is in serious legal jeopardy. According to sources, Fitzgerald is expected to decide before the end of the year whether to seek an indictment against Rove for obstruction of justice and making false statements to Justice Department, FBI investigators, and the grand jury on three separate occasions, for failing to disclose a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in July 2003 about Plame Wilson.

    According to these sources, unless Novak, who is scheduled to testify before a grand jury this week about her conversation with Luskin in 2004, provides evidence that can convince the grand jury that Rove genuinely forgot he spoke with Cooper in July 2003, and that only when Novak "casually" told Luskin a year later that Cooper obtained his information about Plame Wilson directly from Rove did Rove remember, the man known as the "architect" will most likely find himself facing a criminal indictment.

    Two Time magazine reporters who have shared bylines with Novak on several Plame Wilson articles published in the magazine and are familiar with her meeting with Luskin in 2004 said she will testify that she simply repeated to Luskin what had long been rumored in Washington, DC, circles for over a year at the time: that Rove was Cooper's source.

    Novak - who bears no relation to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the journalist who first published Plame Wilson's name and CIA status in a July 14, 2003, column - met Luskin in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2004, and over drinks, the two discussed Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame Wilson leak. Luskin had assured Novak that Rove learned Plame Wilson's name after it was published in news accounts and that only then did he phone other journalists to draw their attention to it. But Novak, perhaps trying to convince Luskin that she knew more than she really did about her colleague Cooper's source, made an offhanded, casual comment to Luskin to the effect that the internal buzz at Time contradicted Luskin's account, in that everyone in the newsroom knew Rove was Cooper's source and that he would testify to that in an upcoming grand jury appearance, these sources said.

    Novak, who has written for Common Cause magazine, and co-authored the book Inside the Wire, about the atrocities at the Guantánamo prison camp, was in no way trying to tip off Luskin, the sources said; rather, she was trying to gauge his reaction to her comments because "she sensed a story," and thought that maybe Luskin would provide her with a "scoop" by disclosing to her that Rove was in fact Cooper's source.

    Instead, according to Luskin's account, he contacted Rove and told him about his conversation with Novak, and that led the two of them to begin an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails for any evidence that proved that Rove had spoken with Cooper. Luskin said that during this search an email was found that Rove had sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley immediately after Rove's conversation with Cooper, and it was subsequently turned over to Fitzgerald.

    "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the email to Hadley immediately following his conversation with Cooper on July 11, 2003. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

    The email to Hadley, Luskin said, helped Rove recall his conversation with Cooper a year earlier, and Rove returned to the grand jury to clarify his previous testimonies in which he did not disclose that he spoke with journalists, the sources said.

    But Rove's account of his conversation with Cooper went nothing like he had described in his email to Hadley, according to an email Cooper sent to his editor following his conversation with Rove.

    "It was, KR said, [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized [Wilson's] trip," Cooper's July 11, 2003, email to his editor said. "Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The email characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger .. "

    It is unclear whether Rove was misleading Hadley about his conversation with Cooper, perhaps, because White House officials told its staff not to engage reporters in any questions posed about Wilson's Niger claims.

    But Fitzgerald is said to be suspicious about the chain of events that led up to the discovery of the email. Moreover, he is said to be convinced that Rove had changed his story once it became clear that Cooper would be compelled to testify about the source - Rove - who revealed Plame Wilson's CIA status to him.

    Additionally, Viveca Novak's forthcoming testimony before the grand jury appears unlikely to be helpful to Rove, and seems more an attempt at a stall tactic, sources inside Fitzgerald's investigation said.

    For one thing, when Luskin and Novak met for drinks in the summer of 2004, there had already been Beltway gossip, and numerous accounts in major newspapers, fingering Rove as the source of the Plame Wilson leak to Cooper and Robert Novak, none of which forced Rove or Luskin to go back and search for evidence to determine if the rumors had merit.

    Furthermore, sources close to Fitzgerald's investigation said, unless Viveca Novak pointedly told Luskin that she knew for a fact that Cooper would testify that Rove was his source, and that she had evidence to back it up, she was simply repeating to Luskin what had already been rumored when the leak first became public, and there is no reason to believe that her statements single-handedly forced Rove and Luskin to go back and check their facts.

    The Time colleagues familiar with her meeting with Luskin said Novak had simply been fishing for a story and may have led Luskin to believe she was "in the know" about internal information at Time that Rove was Cooper's source. She did not provide Luskin with any new information about Cooper's conversation with Rove that had not already been reported in the media.

    Still, Fitzgerald is said to have more evidence proving Rove tried to cover up his role in the leak as early as October 2003, just three months after Plame Wilson's CIA cover was blown.

    Sources familiar with Luskin's conversations with Fitzgerald said Luskin told Fitzgerald that when Rove was questioned about his role in the leak in October 2003, he did not disclose his communication with Cooper, because Rove was enmeshed with the 2004 Presidential election, traveling around the country, attending fundraisers, meetings, and working more than 15 hours a day on the campaign as well as other pressing White House matters, and just forgot that he spoke with Cooper three months earlier.

    But Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who in October was indicted on five counts of making false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in the Plame Wilson leak, had been the subject of dozens of news stories about the possibility that they played a role in the leak, and had faced dozens of questions as early as August 2003 - one month after Plame Wilson was outed - about whether they played a part.

    Libby and other officials in Cheney's office were the first to learn about Plame's role as a CIA operative. They then shared the classified information with Rove and other senior administration officials in the State Department and the National Security Council, who used it to undermine the credibility of Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. He had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire yellow-cake uranium, the key component used to build a nuclear bomb, from Niger.

    The uranium claim was the silver bullet in getting Congress to support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and the country barely had a functional weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq Survey Group.

    Wilson knew Bush's statement was false, because he had traveled to Niger more than a year earlier to investigate the yellow-cake claims. Rove, Libby, and other administration officials sought to discredit Wilson by claiming that Wilson had said publicly that he was sent to Niger at the request of Cheney's office. Cheney did, in fact, contact the CIA at first to arrange the mission, but Plame ultimately recommended Wilson. Still, in February 2002, Wilson traveled to Niger and reported back to the CIA that intelligence reports saying Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger were false.

    According to a preliminary FBI investigation, White House officials, including Rove and Libby, first learned of Plame's name and CIA status in June 2003 when questions surrounding Wilson's Niger trip were first brought to the attention of Cheney's aides by reporters, according to an Oct 13, 2003, report in the Washington Post.

    "One reason investigators are looking back (to June 2003) is that even before Novak's column appeared, government officials had been trying for more than a month to convince journalists that Wilson's mission wasn't as important as it was being portrayed," the Post reported.

    Fitzgerald is said to be particularly interested in the early days of the leak because they prove that, even before being questioned under oath, Rove had given false statements to prosecutors and that it doesn't appear believable that he could have forgotten about his conversation with Cooper about Plame Wilson so soon after it happened, the sources said.

    It was during the weeks following Plame Wilson's outing that Rove and Libby had personally gone to great lengths to convince White House officials that neither of them had played a part, the sources said.

    On October 7, 2003, President Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said during a press conference that the White House had ruled out three administration officials - Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council - as sources of the leak. This was a day before the FBI questioned the three of them, based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.

    A day later, Rove was interviewed under oath by FBI investigators and told them that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Robert Novak's column was published. In fact, it has since become public knowledge that Rove spoke with Robert Novak before his column was published and that he was one of Novak's two sources.

    That same day in October 2003, in an unusual move, Bush said he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.

    "I mean, this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush told reporters following a meeting with Cabinet members on October 7, 2003. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea."

    Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, responded to the President's statement in an October 10, 2003, interview with the New York Times.

    "If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?'' Lautenberg asked. "Would he say that about a bank-robbery investigation?"

    During this time, the White House was facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs to Justice Department officials probing whether or not the leak came from the White House. Rove's email to Hadley about the conversation he had with Cooper three months earlier didn't turn up during the search, the reasons for which are still murky. Furthermore, a log of Cooper's call to Rove wasn't included in White House phone logs either. Rove's assistant at the time, Susan Ralston, had said Cooper called the White House switchboard and was transferred to Rove's office and transferred calls aren't logged. However, she is said to have "clarified" her testimony earlier this month, saying that Rove told her not to log the call, after Fitzgerald is said to have obtained documentary evidence proving that wasn't the case with other calls transferred to Rove's office, sources close to the investigation who are familiar with Ralston's testimony said.

    At the same time, the White House first started to lay the groundwork for a defense, specifically related to the role Rove played in the leak and whether he or anyone else in the administration knew Plame was a covert CIA operative and intentionally blew her cover in order to undercut Wilson's credibility.

    On October 6, 2003, McClellan, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak's source, tried to explain the difference between unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the record straight" about Wilson's public criticism of the administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq.

    "There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out," McClellan said. "There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that it was not the Vice President's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger. (CIA Director George) Tenet made it very clear in his statement that it was people in the counterproliferation area that made that decision on their own initiative."

    The difference, according to McClellan's explanation, is crucial in that knowingly making an unauthorized leak of classified information is a federal crime. But repeating the leak when it has already been reported may not be considered a serious offense.

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak invesigation, and will be a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

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"If only lies left semen stains." Jon Stewart, Comedy Central´s Daily Show