GET A TRAITOR OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!
Air America Radio needs your help to get a traitor out of the White House. For two years, we've known that someone in the White House undermined America by maliciously leaking the identity of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame to punish her husband for criticizing the Bush Administration. And now what many suspected has finally been revealed: the leaker is President Bush's closest advisor, the man they call "Bush's Brain" – none other than Karl Rove.
A growing chorus of voices is calling on President Bush to fire Karl Rove – including Air America Radio hosts and listeners. The White House will try to say that Americans don't care about this. They'll try to pass it off as an "inside the Beltway" issue.
That's why today we're asking you to help our hosts by adding your name to our Air America Radio petition calling for Bush to fire Karl Rove. Please help us show that Air America Radio listeners are outraged about treason in the White House by signing right now:
http://www.airamericaradio.com/petition/
George Bush has never been in such a "bad spot," as one reporter put it at Monday's White House press briefing. When this scandal first came up in 2003, the Bush White House said unambiguously: "If anyone in this Administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this Administration.” (Scott McClellan, 9/29/03, White House press briefing)
The President must now make good on his word. By signing our petition, you'll be helping Air America Radio do its job as the country's leading progressive media outlet to bring pressure to bear on the Bush White House that won’t let up until Karl Rove has had his security clearance revoked and is barred from the White House.
Here are the facts about this case:
Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative who worked in the field of WMD counter-proliferation.
After her husband published an editorial in The New York Times critical of the Bush Administration, Valerie Plame's name and her CIA affiliation were leaked to a number of news sources.
Right-wing hack Bob Novak published a column outing Valerie Plame and effectively ending her career.
One of those who received the leak about Valerie Plame’s identity was Matt Cooper – his source: Karl Rove.
By exposing her identity, Rove destroyed a valuable asset in the war on terror. But even worse than that, he potentially exposed and endangered a network of intelligence assets throughout the world that Plame had built painstakingly over an entire career.
We will never know just how much damage Rove did, nor how many lives he ruined.
With 65 stations across the country, Air America is beginning to have the critical mass to make a real impact at crucial moments like these. Show that Air America Radio has become a political force to be reckoned with. Sign our petition and help Air America Radio send a message to the White House.
Thank you, The Air America Radio Team
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Further reading:
Monday's "ridiculous" press briefing:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/07/20050711-3.html
The first of no doubt a flood of newspaper editorials calling for Rove to be fired:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/07/12/EDG8HDLC431.DTL
And Howard Kurtz asks the inevitable: " Frog-Marching Time for Rove?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/07/12/BL2005071200330.html
READ FOR YOURSELF!!
Matt Cooper's Source What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter
By Michael Isikoff -- Newsweek
It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy.
"Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.
For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.
The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney.
Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." 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 e-mail 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 ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.
Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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