New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified for a second time in the CIA leak case yesterday, providing new details about a previously undisclosed conversation she had with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff about the diplomat at the center of the 22-month investigation. ... The June 23 conversation would be significant if Miller and Libby discussed Plame, the lawyers in the case said. If they did, it could help Fitzgerald establish that Libby was involved in an administration effort to unmask Plame weeks before she was publicly outed by conservative columnist Robert D. Novak in the middle of July.
As early as May of that year, Cheney's office was actively seeking information about Wilson from the CIA, according to former senior administration officials. Libby was aware of the diplomat and his mission by the time he talked with a Washington Post reporter in early June. By then -- one month before Plame was unmasked -- the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger mission that contained information in a section marked "(S)" for secret. Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, brought the memo on a trip to Africa by President Bush in the days before Novak's column was published.
Note: David Kelly was also outed at the same time. The first 2 weeks of July 2003 will be picked over by historians for decades.
The reporter is Jim VandeHei and I bet he does have his sources straight (Powell and who?).
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."