Posting Towards Gomorrah

[SlaveNoMore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
#1 doesn't depend on anything Armitage said.

As for #2, can it really be true that whether disclosing (a sort of) classified information is legal or not depends on whether someone else has disclosed it? Possibly, but I'll wait for Slave to quote the statute.

The elements of IIPA are: (1) authorized access to classified information, (2) learning the identity of a covert agent (3) intentional disclosure of information identifying the agent to (4) an individual not authorized to receive classified information (5) knowledge that the information identifies a covert agent and (6) knowledge that the United States is taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the agent’s role.

(2)has been repeatedly shot down - that being said, the [easy] fact that she wasn't posted overseas in 5 years has been recently put into question. Byron York wrote recently that "special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done 'covert work overseas' on counterproliferation matters in the past five years.". This would seem to make it a tougher call. However, despite several attempts by Libby's lawyers to obtain any proof of this finding, Fitz refused to deliver.

(6) is easy. If no one thought she was covert, including most CIA spooks interviewed over the years, its next to impossible to suggest anyone was taking affirmative measures to conceal her identity. Plus, you need to prove scienter. Have fun with that.

As to your second point, no, the law doesn't necessarily say "once out, permanently out", but it logically follows that within a certain period of time, the agent ceases to be covert.

Again, no crime for Armitage. No crime for Rove. Crime for Libby, but perjury related to [probably] unnecessary repeat testimony. Crime that all this pen and ink was wasted on a buffoon like Joe Wilson. And Rove deserves an apology.

[Penske_Account]

is is bad taste to pull it out and read on a cross country flight?

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
And Rove deserves an apology.

Why does he deserve an apology? All along many people readily acknowledged that it was unlikely a crime was committed for the reasons you point out--some of the elements weren't satisfied.

But Novak's first article said "two administration sources confirmed Wilson's wife . . . " One was Armitage. The other was Rove. Both have admitted to this. Are you saying that because Armitage came first, by a few days (yet still before the first article was published), Rove's role is somehow lessened?

I don't get it. Novak needed confirmation for his column. Like most reporters, he wants a second source for an explosive allegation like he was making. Rove was that second source. Putting aside the requirements (or limits of the law), Rove was as involved as Armitage in "outing" Plame.

If you think there's nothing wrong with what was done because it was withing the bounds of the law, fine. But to say that Rove's culpability, if any, is diminished because it's now clear that Armitage leaked first (yet closely in time) reduces whatever moral (if not legal) trangression Rove committed makes little sense.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
is is bad taste to pull it out and read on a cross country flight?

I thought you were against carry-on luggage.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)


If you think there's nothing wrong with what was done because it was withing the bounds of the law, fine. But to say that Rove's culpability, if any, is diminished because it's now clear that Armitage leaked first (yet closely in time) reduces whatever moral (if not legal) trangression Rove committed makes little sense.

You and your silly logic, Burger. With the revelation that Armitage spilled a couple of days before Rove did, and both before Novak wrote his article, Rove is free! He's free!

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Gattigap
You and your silly logic, Burger. With the revelation that Armitage spilled a couple of days before Rove did, and both before Novak wrote his article, Rove is free! He's free!

Although it does undermine the "unitary executive" theory.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I think SS will agree with me when I say there is no point trying to converse with you on this topic until you read the book.

How Ty of you.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
The elements of IIPA are: (1) authorized access to classified information, (2) learning the identity of a covert agent (3) intentional disclosure of information identifying the agent to (4) an individual not authorized to receive classified information (5) knowledge that the information identifies a covert agent and (6) knowledge that the United States is taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the agent’s role.

(2)has been repeatedly shot down - that being said, the [easy] fact that she wasn't posted overseas in 5 years has been recently put into question. Byron York wrote recently that "special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done 'covert work overseas' on counterproliferation matters in the past five years.". This would seem to make it a tougher call. However, despite several attempts by Libby's lawyers to obtain any proof of this finding, Fitz refused to deliver.

(6) is easy. If no one thought she was covert, including most CIA spooks interviewed over the years, its next to impossible to suggest anyone was taking affirmative measures to conceal her identity. Plus, you need to prove scienter. Have fun with that.

As to your second point, no, the law doesn't necessarily say "once out, permanently out", but it logically follows that within a certain period of time, the agent ceases to be covert.

Again, no crime for Armitage. No crime for Rove. Crime for Libby, but perjury related to [probably] unnecessary repeat testimony. Crime that all this pen and ink was wasted on a buffoon like Joe Wilson. And Rove deserves an apology.

If I learned anything from working on cases that have had some media exposure, it is that you cannot believe press accounts to establish even basic propositions. This has nothing to do with the political angle here -- it's just that when you get into the details, they seldom match the coverage.

Fitz might or might not have trouble proving (2) or (6), but neither is easy. I don't know all the facts, but neither do Libby's defenders, even if you ignore their obvious bias.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
is is bad taste to pull it out and read on a cross country flight?

Your fellow passengers will appreciate the steps you are taking to better understand the enemy.

[SlaveNoMore]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Why does he deserve an apology? All along many people readily acknowledged that it was unlikely a crime was committed for the reasons you point out--some of the elements weren't satisfied.

But Novak's first article said "two administration sources confirmed Wilson's wife . . . " One was Armitage. The other was Rove. Both have admitted to this. Are you saying that because Armitage came first, by a few days (yet still before the first article was published), Rove's role is somehow lessened?

I don't get it. Novak needed confirmation for his column. Like most reporters, he wants a second source for an explosive allegation like he was making. Rove was that second source. Putting aside the requirements (or limits of the law), Rove was as involved as Armitage in "outing" Plame.

If you think there's nothing wrong with what was done because it was withing the bounds of the law, fine. But to say that Rove's culpability, if any, is diminished because it's now clear that Armitage leaked first (yet closely in time) reduces whatever moral (if not legal) trangression Rove committed makes little sense.

Armitage voluteered the information to give Novak a story.

Whereas:

"When Novak inquired about Wilson's wife working for the CIA, Rove indicated he had heard something like that, the source said."

You see no difference here?

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore


You see no difference here?

Who's the source describing what Rove said?

And why did Rove also tell Matt Cooper the same thing, in an effort to get him off the Wilson allegations?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

• And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous--the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that the evil Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
  
  But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an Al Qaeda bigwig, stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music, broke him so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.
  
  The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps, ladies with Mr. Colt in their purses, kids with peashooters. Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"? Where is the right wing when you really need them?
  
  This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first-class petting the white cat.
  
  It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland."
  
  "Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland--ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A.
  
  But they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because there was one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to make us take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage and dump the coffee. The jihadists we're afraid of are, so far as we know, young Muslim men from the Middle East, not old grandmas named Evelyn and Gladys married to soybean farmers, and not even old white guys like me, but nonetheless they pat us down for plastic explosives under our Sansabelts and have us raise our stockinged feet to be wanded for possible toe bombs. It's all to make us feel we're in a movie and it will have a happy ending.
  
  God forbid somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.
  
  They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cell phones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

• And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous--the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that the evil Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
  
  But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an Al Qaeda bigwig, stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music, broke him so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.
  
  The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps, ladies with Mr. Colt in their purses, kids with peashooters. Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"? Where is the right wing when you really need them?
  
  This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first-class petting the white cat.
  
  It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland."
  
  "Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland--ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A.
  
  But they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because there was one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to make us take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage and dump the coffee. The jihadists we're afraid of are, so far as we know, young Muslim men from the Middle East, not old grandmas named Evelyn and Gladys married to soybean farmers, and not even old white guys like me, but nonetheless they pat us down for plastic explosives under our Sansabelts and have us raise our stockinged feet to be wanded for possible toe bombs. It's all to make us feel we're in a movie and it will have a happy ending.
  
  God forbid somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.
  
  They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cell phones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing?

I invented this. Remember?

[Replaced_Texan]

Meet Alejandro Cuitlahuac Gomez, a green, liberal, athiest, permanent resident alien from Mexico.

He's about to decide whether or not to go through the naturalization process and become a US citizen.

He's opened a poll to determine whether or not he should stay or go. The first to reach a million votes will determine his fate. It costs $10 to vote in the poll. The poll closes on election day 2008.

If STAY wins, all votes from GO, minus taxes, expenses and legal fees will be divided between:

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY
THE GREEN PARTY
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS


If GO wins, all votes from STAY, minus bank processing fees, taxes, and legal fees will be divided between:


THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
REPUBLICAN PARTY
CHRISTIAN COALITION
700 CLUB


If a 'GO' vote should win, departure of Alejandro C. Gomez from the United States must be completed by July 31st or 90 days thereafter - whichever is longer - immediately following the 1 million votes.

He'll keep the ten million bucks that decided the contest.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
I thought you were against carry-on luggage.

I am, in theory, but the rules still allow carry-ons, so why not maximize my benefit, yes?