The Hollywood Liberal

Trial exposes White House crisis machine

AP
WASHINGTON – David Addington, chief legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, says he was taken aback when the White House started making public pronouncements about the CIA leak investigation.
In the fall of 2003, President Bush’s press secretary was categorically denying that either Karl Rove or I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was involved in exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to a critic of the war in Iraq.
“Why are you making these statements?” Addington asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett.
“Your boss is the one who wanted” them, Bartlett replied, referring to Cheney….
With that, “I shut up,” Addington recalled recently for jurors in Libby’s CIA leak trial, which begins its fourth week on Monday with Libby’s lawyers calling their first witnesses.

At the intersection was Cheney, along with Rove and Libby, who were working in the summer of 2003 to rebut claims by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that Bush had misled the nation about prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The White House denials on behalf of Rove and Libby came just before Rove secretly began acknowledging to the FBI that he had confirmed Plame’s identity for conservative columnist Bob Novak, who first published her name and relationship to Wilson.

H.L.s Take
Libby is on trial for perjury regarding statements he made about Valerie Plame working for the CIA, It is apparent the Libby along with Rove, and Cheney were involved in leaking the information. No one has been charged in the actual leak. If Libby is found guilty that means then he was leaking the info. Where did he get that information from? His boss Cheney? or Rove who has already admitted that he gave the information to Bob Novak who wrote the story that started the whole thing? Were they both involved? Was Bush in on it? This whole thing could unravel just like Watergate did, that is if special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has an interest in justice, and not just convicting one patsy for lying about the crime that no one was ever charged with.

Blogger behind bars 171 days and counting

LA Times
WASHINGTON — Freelance videographer Josh Wolf defied a federal grand jury’s order in July to hand over raw footage of anarchists clashing with police in San Francisco.

He said he was protected by the 1st Amendment. A federal judge said he was in contempt of court.

On Aug. 1, the 24-year-old blogger reported to the federal detention facility in Dublin, Calif. He has been there ever since — except for a period in September when he was freed while a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the legality of his incarceration. (The panel upheld it.) As of Tuesday, he had been incarcerated longer than any journalist in modern U.S. history.

Wolf’s mother, a third-grade teacher from Wrightwood, will be on Capitol Hill today to lobby members of Congress to help free her son. Liz Wolf-Spada also plans to push for a federal shield law that would protect mainstream journalists as well as independent journalists and bloggers like her son.
“I’m asking that they treat an independent journalist the same way they treat the journalists who work for the Hearst Corp.,” she said, referring to the company that owns the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers.

H.L.s Take
Being a blogger myself I have to agree with Ms. Wolf-Spada, Bloggers and independent journalists should be given the same rights as big time newspaper reporters. Bloggers have influenced mainstram media to the point that only 2 years ago they were still fawning all over Bush, however the constant stream of infromation coming out of the blogs about Bush’s administration, & The Iraq War, forced the MSM to take a look at stories that could no longer be ignored. Thanks partially to that The Republican were voted out last November and Bush’s approval ratings are at an all time low. It would have been nice if the MSM would have taken the same stance on Bush before the 2004 election as they are taking now, they might have spared us 4 More years of total failure on every front.
So why shouldn’t bloggers be afforded the same rights as jouralists that work for Fox News or The New York Times, nowadays the bloggers are much more credible, as witnessed by our next story….

‘NYT’ Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims

Editor & Publisher
Excerpt
NEW YORK Saturday’s New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. The author notes, “Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile.”

What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.”

Sound pretty convincing? Well, almost all the sources in the story are unnamed. It also may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Gordon wrote with Miller the paper’s most widely criticized — even by the Times itself — WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, “aluminum tubes” story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows…..

Now, more than four years later, Gordon reveals: “The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad.” Gordon’s unnamed sources throughout the story are variously described as “Administration officials,” “intelligence experts” and “American intelligence.”

Rumors of War

MSNBC

The Iranians have reason to feel paranoid. In recent weeks senior American officers have condemned Tehran for providing training and deadly explosives to insurgents. In a predawn raid on Dec. 21, U.S. troops barged into the compound of the most powerful political party in the country, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and grabbed two men they claimed were officers in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Three weeks later U.S. troops stormed an Iranian diplomatic office in Irbil, arresting five more Iranians. The Americans have hinted that as part of an escalating tit-for-tat, Iranians may have had a hand in a spectacular raid in Karbala on Jan. 20, in which four American soldiers were kidnapped and later found shot, execution style, in the head. U.S. forces promised to defend themselves.

Some view the spiraling attacks as a strand in a worrisome pattern. At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran.

H.L.s Take
Its like we keep saying here at The H.L. Bush, and his neocon administration want constant war without end, so that they and their friends at Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, can continue to make Billions.

US air strike kills Iraqi troops

BBC News
Excerpt
Eight Iraqi soldiers have been killed and six wounded in a US helicopter strike in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, local officials have said.
The officials described Friday’s incident as an act of “friendly fire”, which hit an Iraqi army position in the east of the city.
The US military said five men were killed, and said the intended target had been a suspected al-Qaeda cell.
It expressed its “deepest sympathies” to the families of the dead.

Will the Watada Mistrial Spark an End to the War?

The Nation
Excerpt
On the surface, the ruling by Lieut. Col. John Head appears to result from a procedural technicality, but in fact it is a defeat for the Army’s central goal in prosecuting the 28-year-old officer. The judge had gone to extraordinary lengths to try to keep Watada from achieving his objective of “putting the war on trial,” ruling that Watada’s motivations for refusing to deploy with his unit were “irrelevant” and that no witnesses could testify on the illegality of the war.

But in its zeal to exclude the real meaning of the case, the court tied itself up in procedural knots. Prosecutors wanted the judge to find that Watada had agreed to pretrial stipulations that he had violated his duty when he refused to show up for movement to Iraq. But Watada made clear that he believed his duty, under his oath and military law, was to refuse to participate in an illegal war. As the underlying question of the war’s illegality emerged like a family secret in the courtroom, the judge agreed to the prosecutor’s motion to declare a mistrial. But Time.com reported that Watada’s attorney, Eric Seitz, says he will file an immediate motion to dismiss the case on grounds of double jeopardy if the Army tries to resurrect it.

Thank You Lt. Watada for Refusing to Participate in an Illegal War

West Point Graduates Against the War
Excerpt
Dear Lieutenant Ehren Watada: We are pleased to write to you to express our profound respect and gratitude for your refusal to participate in the illegal war in Iraq. We stand with you regarding the illegality of the orders issued to you and fully support your exercising your conscientious duty to refuse to obey them.

As graduates of the United States Military Academy and former officers in the armed forces of this nation we are enormously encouraged by your example. We too have served our country during war and during peace and we agree with your honorable and courageous decision. Your refusal to fight this illegal war in Iraq has heartened us. It is our hope that your example will encourage others to re-examine their own principles of truth, personal honor and the rule of law that are the founding precepts of our democracy, and act as their consciences dictate as you did.