(Richard) Armitage Says He Was Foolish in CIA Leak

[sabra]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Sunday he was foolish to have revealed Valerie Plame's CIA identity.

Armitage's acknowledgment came in response to comments by Plame, who said the former Bush administration official had no right to talk to a reporter about where she worked.

...

"I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me" to have disclosed Plame's identity, Armitage said Sunday. He was agreeing with comments by Plame that he should have known better.

Armitage said there was no ill-intent on his part. He said he spoke to Novak after seeing a reference to Wilson's wife in a memo, which did not name her.


Read more: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hOVmnMwLkjokxPMSuDKwFkmUNGMgD8SRM6880

[papau]

1. Yeah I believe -amazing how our media now sells Armitage as "good guy" despite prior bad guy history

[MADem]

4. Well, the media isn't "selling" anything--they're QUOTING the guy.

It's not a small thing when a former senior SECSTATE official self-identifies himself as "foolish."

[papau]

31. True - but it is well past the time that papers should report the "news" without giving

historical context - that is the way the Bush folks have gotten away with having their lie after lie being fed the public by our media.

[MADem]

39. You absolutely need the context to understand his regret.

If the headline said 'Armitage says he was FOOLISH about Plame' and doesn't tell us why or what for, it just hangs there, unsupported by anything save the knowledge of the few that pay attention.

I actually think the article is quite good. It gives facts in a timeline, and leads with this near the top:

Armitage's acknowledgment came in response to comments by Plame, who said the former Bush administration official had no right to talk to a reporter about where she worked.

A year ago, Armitage publicly apologized to Plame and her husband. The former No. 2 State Department official remains the only principal in the leak to have done so.

[MADem]

2. He got gossipy and hubris-laden. He would have been better off if he'd gone to a dentist instead

of meeting up with Novak, and getting that goofyass tooth of his fixed.

[Eurobabe]

10. Do you find that damn tooth distracting too?

GAWD, get a fucking dentist or something dude!

[MADem]

12. He looks like he should be trying to steal Olive Oyl from Popeye, or something!! nt

[Ilsa]

51. Uncle Fester from Addams Family Values is more attractive. nt

[hlthe2b]

3. The rarest of rare...

One Repug who takes at least a modicum of responsibility for his own actions....

His statement makes news because it is so very rare...

[still_one]

20. He takes no responsibility for anything. He knows he won't be touched

Everyone who was throwing those compliments at fitzgerald show that he wasn't particularly independent after all

They protect each other at the cost of our Republic and the Constitution

and that the Democrats are not pursuing this makes them complicit

People refusing to testify before Congress, let you and I try that and we will be thrown in the clink before you can blink your eye

[chelsea0011]

35. You got that right. Here is a guy confessing and it's hands off to him?

I don't get this at all. It seems the immunity deals were far and wide or something is rotten.

[sofa king]

42. I still think he's covering for Hadley, Cheney and Rove.

I think the ruse is to put the onus for the leak on the Powell State Department, rather than on Rice, Cheney, and Rove. He's said it in public. But has he testified it under oath?

I think what Armitage gets for taking the fall is a cut of the $2.3 trillion that walked out of the Department of Defense, plus or minus the half a trillion or so that's disappeared in Iraq.

[louis-t]

5. Yes, foolish, and treasonous.

You forgot that part Richie. Asshole.

[Supersedeas]

36. He would do better to distinguish his off-the-cuff remark, from the calculated effort managed by the

VP's office

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. Why isn't that big fat bastard in jail??

How is it that he gets a pass on this?

[MADem]

13. He didn't fuck around. He copped to what he did, immediately.

The key to the whole 'outing' biz has to be INTENT.

Fitz was the one who gave him that pass.

[The_Casual_Observer]

14. It makes nonsense of the fitz thing about the case being confused by lies

Here is a guy that admitted to the crime & they let it go, instead they focused on that pointy nosed little bastard & ended up with nothing. So it goes.

[MADem]

15. No it doesn't.

An element of the crime is INTENT. Without the intent, you have no 'crime.' Someone just gasbagging, who immediately admits it, doesn't meet the standard of committing a crime. Armitage didn't screw around--he admitted in a hurry. "Oh shit, Ah fucked UP!!!" And he was a CONFIRMER, not an instigator, of the information, as well.

What happened with Scooter is that he fucking lied, through his TEETH, to the point that he couldn't back out of his lies...and his buddies (Miller, et. al) ratted him out to save their OWN skins.

[still_one]

22. and what about rove, he lied also, but fitzey baby kept giving him an opportunity to get it right

If it was us we would be thrown into gitmo

[MADem]

23. He got his story straight, and then came clean. He had better legal help, and it was "decided"

that Scooter would take the fall. That's how it works.

We wouldn't stand a chance if they went after us.

[still_one]

24. He lied, and whether you are talking to an FBI agent or under oath, both are prosecutable

[MADem]

40. Only if you can PROVE it, as Fitzgerald noted.

That's why ethics-challenged lawyers, and clever track-covering by loyal acolytes, are the hallmarks of this administration.

[MadMaddie]

27. If this guy had said the same thing to a....let's say Russian

reporter or a Chinese reporter....and let's say it was an accidental slip of the tounge would intent still be used in this case. I am guessing that it would be considered "Treason" any way it's looked at.

[MADem]

41. I heard Plame make that argument on Real Time.

And I do agree with her, at a gut level, but...and here's the but...there's still that "intent" business in there.

And if the individual who let the details slip was a buddy of BushCo, he's STILL get off--even if he gave away the combination to open up the big doors at NORAD. A pardon would be issued, if need be--look at Scooter, after all.

When it comes to Bush and the law, and Bush and the state, he thinks that both concepts are embodied in him as an individual. He really does believe he is above the law, and he is the state.

He's wrong, but that's his attitude. And that would be his attitude even if Laura gave away the launch codes to the Chinese. She'd get the pardon, and he'd ignore any protests.

He wouldn't care what we think, either.

[DemoTex]

7. I tend to think that Armitage was a Judas Goat ...

Leading the little lambs away from Cheney.

[calimary]

28. Well, he sure as hell was a Judas Something.

Schmuck.

Arrogant, short-sighted, thoughtlyess, gossipy schmuck.

[struggle4progress]

30. Bingo!

[Benhurst]

8. In BushAmerica, treason is soooooo silly.

[Baby Snooks]

25. "Just a technicality"

If Bush were ever charged with treason, Kay Bailey Hutchison would call it "just a technicality" as she called Libby's perjury "just a technicality." No doubt if Bush were ever charged with treason, Nancy Pelosi would insist that even that didn't matter and impeachment was still off table. Bush's Women. Rivaling Hitler's Women at this point.

[Eurobabe]

9. So why isn't Uncle Fester behind bars?

Chimpy said he'd persecute the leaker!

[Rosa Luxemburg]

11. Foolish eh? What a lying toad

He did it on purpose

[bjobotts]

16. It was foolish of me to get so many people killed from a slip of the tongue

Just foolish to have helped bring down a whole CIA operation on the proliferation of Nuclear weapons through the CIA group 'Brewster-Jennings'.
Traitorous is the word you're looking for

[Spazito]

17. Hmmm, no one seems to question this....

"He said he spoke to Novak after seeing a reference to Wilson's wife in a memo, which did not name her."

A memo from whom to whom and what was the subject of the memo? If the memo DID NOT name Wilson's wife, who gave the name Valerie Plame and not Valerie Wilson?

There are still more unanswered questions, imo, as to who FIRST raised Valerie Plame and why?

[MADem]

45. It was that memo they were handing around AF1--Ari and others saw it, too. NT

[Spazito]

46. Not according to Fitzgerald...

It seems this was a memo sent to Armitage and other State officials and NOT the AF1 memo.


"The Armitage leak was not directly a part of the White House's fierce anti-Wilson crusade. But as Hubris notes, it was, in a way, linked to the White House effort, for Amitage had been sent a key memo about Wilson's trip that referred to his wife and her CIA connection, and this memo had been written, according to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, at the request of I. Lewis Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. Libby had asked for the memo because he was looking to protect his boss from the mounting criticism that Bush and Cheney had misrepresented the WMD intelligence to garner public support for the invasion of Iraq.

The memo included information on Valerie Wilson's role in a meeting at the CIA that led to her husband's trip. This critical memo was--as Hubris discloses--based on notes that were not accurate. (You're going to have to read the book for more on this.) But because of Libby's request, a memo did circulate among State Department officials, including Armitage, that briefly mentioned Wilson's wife."

http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/08/hubris_the_armi.php

Edited to add another link on this:

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/11/armitage-a-revi.html




This certainly explains why the memo came about but, again, leaves many key questions unanswered.

[MADem]

47. The AF1 memo WAS a State Department memo

I think it's the same one--slightly 'reworked' as indicated in the second cite below.

There are usually a half dozen or more of any one memo of this sort floating around to ensure that senior leadership are all on the same page on an issue:

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.


Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post....Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later....The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517.html

http://archive.salon.com/politics/war_room/2005/07/20/plame/

The AP says that the State Department memo -- the one Ari Fleischer was seen perusing on Air Force One in July 2003 -- was originally prepared in June 2003 at the direction of Carl W. Ford Jr., who was then the head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A retired State Department official told the AP that Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state who was in charge of the department while Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were traveling, had asked for the memo because he was not familiar with the claims about an Iraq-Niger link or the State Department's disagreement with the White House over the merits of those claims.

However, after Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times, Armitage called Ford and asked him to provide Powell, who was by then en route to Africa, with an account of Wilson's Niger trip, the former official told the AP. The memo was reworked a bit and faxed to Powell on Air Force One on July 7, 2003. The AP, relying on the account of the retired official, said that the memo said that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had suggested that he be sent to Niger. It did not, the official said, say whether Plame worked undercover at the CIA, nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame.

[Spazito]

49. Ahhh, got it, thanks, it wasn't clear from what I had read that

this was the memo. The references were to the original one as opposed to the copy circulated on AF1. Thanks for clarifying it.

[MADem]

52. To be quite precise, it probably wasn't word-for-word the same, but the

provenance (State) and the 'controlling document' (commissioned by a senior state official) certainly were! They may well have faxed Colin the Cliff Notes of the original doc!

[Spazito]

53. Yes, that's very true, it does answer my question as to the

subject of the memo and why "the wife of Mr. Wilson" was mentioned as it was a constant in all variations of the original memo.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

18. Oh, fiddle-dee-dee.

We all make mistakes.

[lovuian]

19. To out a CIA agent intentionally is TREAson

Not intentionally so says HE but we know better

[mod mom]

21. treasonous is the term I would choose.

[MadMaddie]

26. Ummm.....did he just admit that he committed "Treason"?

Hello....is it just me? Kinda like OJ's book "If I did it"? Prosecutors should be hauling his ass to jail.

I don't care if it was an accidental slip of the tounge or not...he knew better. This man has been in government for over 30 years.

[humbled_opinion]

29. DOH.. Yep but notice everyone is silent including the Democrat Leadership. n/t

[MadMaddie]

32. Yea and the Democratic leadership seems to fail again.

One can only hope they are working on something....but I doubt it?

[0007]

33. When did Armitage ever show any common sense?

I believe he's one of the three stooges in disguise.

[leftist_not_liberal]

34. EVERY CIA agent should be outed

and the Nazi-infested institutionally corrupt organization should be shut down and not replaced. It is and always has been nothing more than the SS of imperial global capitalism.

Killing off the CIA would go a long, long way towards solving our drug problems (since dope is what funds the CIA's off-budget holocaust activities) and contracting the vicious empire that support everyone's ecocidal American Dream life-styles.

We now return to our regularly scheduled picking of pepper from fly shit...

[Doctor_J]

37. One man's fool is another one's traitor

GOP="fool". If a Dem had done this he'd already be in prison

[liberal N proud]

38. Will this stop any congressional investigation?

One that would have already happened in another time?

Here is an update on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/12/cia.armitage/

[EFerrari]

43. Naughty boy.

:sarcasm:

[yardwork]

44. ya think?

[sutz12]

48. Working for the Bush administration is foolish..

Outing a CIA operative is treason.

[Ilsa]

50. Yep, working for them is foolish. Eventually you are expected

lie in a bathtub and open a vein for the Chimperor.