White House Press Secretary played cat and mouse today at the press briefing on Newseek's disclosure that Karl Rove was a source of Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame leak. Think Progress has the transcript.

McClellan may be clamming up, but read what former CIA agent Larry Marcinkowski had to say (pdf) about the senior official of the White House who leaked the information:

The BBC reports that a manhunt is on as four Arab prisoners in U.S. custody at the Baghram Air Force Base prison in Afhanistan have escaped.

The US military said the men who escaped were militants from Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Finally, someone addresses the MSM's excessive coverage of stories like the Runaway Bride, Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise at the expense of coverage of important issues, like genocide in Darfur.

Watch this 30 second powerful message to the media. Then go here.

I don't believe President Bush will fire Karl Rove. But, David Corn makes a good argument for why he should.

He leaked national security information as part of a fierce campaign to undermine Wilson, who had criticized the White House on the war on Iraq. Rove's overworked attorney, Robert Luskin, defends his client by arguing that Rove never revealed the name of Valerie Plame/Wilson to Cooper and that he only referred to her as Wilson's wife. This is not much of a defense. If Cooper or any other journalist had written that "Wilson's wife works for the CIA"--without mentioning her name--such a disclosure could have been expected to have the same effect as if her name had been used: Valerie Wilson would have been compromised, her anti-WMD work placed at risk, and national security potentially harmed.

Either Rove knew that he was revealing an undercover officer to a reporter or he was identifying a CIA officer without bothering to check on her status and without considering the consequences of outing her. Take your pick: in both scenarios Rove is acting in a reckless and cavalier fashion, ignoring the national security interests of the nation to score a political point against a policy foe.

I don't think that whether Plame was undercover at the time of the leak is the determinative issue. I think the question is whether the U.S. would have wanted to protect her identity because of her past or present covert status. At this hearing (pdf) of the Democratic Policy Committee in October, 2003, three current and former CIA Agents emphatically and repeatedly answer that question in the affirmative.

As Corn says, at best, Rove was reckless or cavalier. Others have said Rove probably didn't know about the law prohibiting disclosure. If true, that in itself suggests he shouldn't be privy to classified information or occupy such a senior position in the Administration.

by TChris

Update: Kar discusses his confinement:

"I don't hold anything against them for holding us," he said. "What I hold against them is they put us in a cell and forgot us."

*****

Cyrus Kar, the filmmaker who has been detained in a military prison in Bahgdad for seven weeks, was released Sunday. (TalkLeft background here.) Justifying the detention, military officials claim that Kar represented "an imperative security threat to Iraq" which had been resolved "appropriately." In other words, there was no evidence that Kar was a threat at all, and unfavorable publicity forced the military to release him.

While the military claims that Kar was given a meaningful hearing, and that his release shows how well detention review panels work, Kar's lawyers cut through the spin:

"He was never told what if any charges were being made against him," said one of the lawyers, Mark D. Rosenbaum. "He never had access to a lawyer. He was never told that he passed a lie-detector test. He was virtually incommunicado. That's not a model detention policy. And that was for 50 days - for a guy who got into the wrong cab."

Kar's ordeal is not quite over.

The news is reporting that Karl Rove's lawyer's said Sunday that Rove mentioned Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA to Matthew Cooper before the Novak article was published.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

I don't think Rove has admitted a crime. This is nothing different than what Luskin has been saying for the past week. As I wrote here on July 5:

Happy Blogiversary to Skippy and we wish him many, many more.

He brings a smile on every visit.

(Thanks to Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged for making the picture)

by TChris

One of many reasons a felony conviction shouldn't disqualify a citizen from voting:

"Felony disenfranchisement laws are the last vestiges of Jim Crow," said Catherine Weiss, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who is working on the issue. "They disenfranchise African Americans way out of proportion to their numbers in the population."

As of 2000, almost 5 million Americans couldn't vote because of laws that restrict those convicted of a felony from casting ballots -- in some cases even after their sentences and parole are complete, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that favors alternatives to prison. Four in 10 of those disenfranchised were black.

Racial disenfranchisement comes at a high cost to a democratic society.

"This marginalizes people," said Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association. "If they can't participate politically, they tend to care less and less about other things that go along with voting."

Fortunately, voters' rights advocates are making progress.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) reacts to today's Newseek column confirming that Karl Rove was one of Matthew Cooper's sources.

David Corn's thoughts are here. Josh Marshall's here. Here's Hunter at Daily Kos.

The most important statements of the Bush officials may be those they made to investigators before they appeared at the grand jury. Don't forget, many were interviewed with and without lawyers in their offices, even in bars. Making a false statement to a federal official is a five year offense under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001. From the International Herald Tribune, April 3, 2004:

Bump and Update: The Gulf Coast is hunkering down. CNN says the eye wall has made landfall in Fort Walton Beach, Florida in Santa Rosa County. Landfall looks to occur within the next hour devastating the Pensacola area. CNN says It's a category three, 120 miles per hour right now.

CNN's Anderson Cooper is back from London recouping his role from Hurricane Ivan and is down in Pensacola in his rain gear, shouting over the rain and wind.

For personalized late breaking Hurricane Dennis updates, check out the Central Florida Hurricane Center 2005 - it's run by weather hobbyists. For official news, check out the National Hurricane Center or National Weather Service.

Are any talkleft readers in Dennis' path? If so, please keep us updated in the comments.

Digby says go here. For more reasons, go here and here.

This article on Rep. James Sensenbrenner by Maurice Possley in the Chicago Tribune is a must. Sensenbrenner is rapidly becoming Public Enemy Number One.

In an extraordinary move, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee privately demanded last month that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago change its decision in a narcotics case because he didn't believe a drug courier got a harsh enough prison term.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), in a five-page letter dated June 23 to Chief Judge Joel Flaum, asserted that a June 16 decision by a three-judge appeals court panel was wrong. He demanded "a prompt response" as to what steps Flaum would take "to rectify the panel's actions" in a case where a drug courier in a Chicago police corruption case received a 97-month prison sentence instead of the at least 120 months required by a drug-conspiracy statute.

Sensenbrenner is behind the "five years for a joint" and "snitch or go to jail" bill pending in Congress. As TChris wrote, it's time to "just say no" to Sensenbrenner.

Back in September, 2003, Robert Novak wasn't as close-mouthed as he is today. This appeared on Drudge's site and was attributed there to Novak:

'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'...

I found this in the TalkLeft archives, here.