Free Frank Warner

Why no army of reporters in Richard Armitage’s driveway?

Kate O’Beirne has a point:

“For almost three years, at every minor twist or turn of Plamegate, there were media stakeouts at the offices and homes of of the suspected leakers that invariably made the evening news and played in constant loops on cable. So who’s on Armitage driveway duty? Richard Armitage isn’t being hounded to answer questions about his role in Plamegate because the media wishes he had no role.”

When Joseph Wilson’s dishonesty about his CIA-paid Niger trip was exposed in July 2003, he tried to change the subject by accusing President Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove of “outing” -- illegally revealing the name of -- Wilson’s CIA wife, Valerie Plame.

Ghosts of ‘Fitzmas.’ Late last year, Democrats even dreamed of “Fitzmas,” hoping special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would indict Rove for this “crime” before Christmas. News reporters swarmed Rove’s house for months in anticipation of an arrest and “perp walk.” Rove was not indicted. No one was indicted for telling the press about Plame, because it wasn’t a crime.

This week, we found out that Richard Armitage, then a deputy secretary of state, was the real “leaker” of Plame’s name. Because Armitage opposed Bush on Iraq once the liberation began, it’s suddenly clear to even the Democratic news media that revealing Plame’s name was a purely innocent way to explain Wilson’s trip to Niger. (Plame is the one who suggested Wilson go.)

So no one is bothering Armitage today. The big media don’t care anymore. They won’t ask Armitage why he said nothing while Fitzgerald hounded Rove for three years over a crime that hadn’t been committed.

Corn’s apology? The real irony is that one of the two reporters today revealing Armitage’s role as “leaker” is The Nation magazine’s David Corn, who for these three years has been accusing Rove of illegally exposing “top secret agent” Valerie Plame.

If Rove was a felon in Corn’s eyes, what is Armitage? When can we expect Corn’s apology for inventing crimes and naming likely perpetrators?

Frank Warner

Now even official economists are talking $2 a gallon gasoline

I still might win my $10 bet.

Last Sept. 15, as the price of gasoline soared close to $3 a gallon in the post-Hurricane Katrina hysteria, I bet a friend that the price would be down to $2 a gallon again within three years.

“No, it will never been below $2 again,” this friend said. “They know they can charge $3. Why should they ever drop prices?”

Falling fast? Well, here in eastern Pennsylvania, gasoline prices remain at the level they were right after Katrina. But the price was 15 to 20 cents higher just a few weeks ago, so now the economists are saying it could fall a lot more.

“We’ll be closer to $2 than $3 come Thanksgiving,” says Fred Rozell, gasoline analyst at the Oil Price Information Service.

Gas at $2 a gallon, a turkey dinner and a free $10 bill. It can’t happen soon enough.

Frank Warner

Unknown soldiers: With 38,000 Bronze Stars awarded in the Iraq war, where are the stories of heroism?

Did you know that, during the Iraq war, the Bronze Star has been awarded 38,000 times for American GIs’ actions well above the expected performance of duty?

Not all of these medals were earned for unusual bravery, but let’s assume at least 1,000 of our troops demonstrated rare and unselfish courage to earn the Bronze Star. About 1,000 of the Bronze Stars were awarded specifically for valor. That would be 1,000 stories of American heroics. That would be 1,000 stories hardly told.

I’ve been following the war fairly closely for three and a half years, and I admit I can’t think of 10 American servicemembers who have made headlines for their heroism.

* One of them is U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who was killed April 4, 2003, just as Baghdad was liberated. Sgt. Smith jumped atop an Armored Personnel Carrier and machine-gunned at least 20 of the 100 Iraqi Republican Guard troops who were closing in on about three dozen of his fellow soldiers near Baghdad’s airport. So far, Smith is the only soldier whose Iraq service has been recognized with a Medal of Honor.

* Another hero is Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, who died April 22, 2004, eight days after he jumped on a terrorist’s grenade to save three fellow Marines at a checkpoint in Husaybah.

* Another hero is Army Staff Sgt. William Thomas Payne. On Sept. 12, 2004, in Baghdad, when a car bomb disabled and set fire to a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Payne ran through insurgents’ gunfire and climbed atop the vehicle to pull the crew and other soldiers to safety.

* Another hero is Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who was shot in the face Nov. 16, 2004, as he entered an enemy hideout in Fallujah, and then was killed when an insurgent rolled a grenade toward him and his fellow Marines. To protect his buddies, Peralta snatched the grenade and held it to his body.

* Yet another hero is pioneer pilot Chuck Yeager’s grandson, Marine Cpl. Joel Yeager, who in November 2004 exchanged grenades with the enemy and tossed one back, too, saving a buddy under fire in Fallujah.

* Another hero is Army medic Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, who on June 2, 2005, in Baghdad was shot in the chest, got back up, chased and captured the sniper who shot him. When Tschiderer discovered the sniper was wounded, he gave him first aid.

* Three other heroes are Army military police, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mike, who defended their convoy from an ambush by 40 insurgents March 20, 2005, southeast of Baghdad.

Who are they? You might have heard about these American heroes of the Iraq war. You probably didn’t. If you did, it’s unlikely you heard or read news accounts of their gallantry for more than a day or two.

Why have we heard so little? The 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico should know about the noble sacrifices their native sons and daughters are making every day in Iraq. We’re paying for this battle. We should know more about those who fight for us and for freedom.

We hear regularly about Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Those incidents and allegations certainly don’t represent the common behavior of GIs in Iraq. Yet I’ll bet my house that more Americans know the names Lynndie England and Charles Graner than know Paul Smith and Jason Dunham.

Quiet at the Pentagon. This is not simply the fault of the anti-Iraq-liberation news media. Someone at the Pentagon should be getting the full story out, and that someone has dropped the ball. Two months ago, the Blackfive military blog pointed out how hard it is even to find how many troops have earned Silver Stars. Everyone should demand a full accounting. Give us the stories.

American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen are doing hard, heroic work in Iraq. In addition to all those Bronze Stars and Smith’s Medal of Honor, another 11,700 Purple Hearts and 195 Silver Stars have been awarded.

Our troops are demonstrating exceptional valor, virtue and sacrifice in their risky operations. It’s time we heard about them.

Frank Warner

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Update: Click here to read about more heroes. And more heroes here.

Update of Oct. 27, 2006: ‘Heroes’: Pentagon unveils a series of stories on courageous GIs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Update: And now, click here to take a look at the Pentagon’s “50 Heroes for 50 States.”

Why didn’t they talk sooner? The case against Armitage, Fitzgerald, Isikoff and Corn

Jack Kelly today succinctly dresses down all those, including Richard Armitage, who turned Armitage’s accidental mention of Valerie Plame’s name into a witch hunt under special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

There is no reason that the nation had to wait since October 2003 for the new book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn to tell us Plame’s name wasn’t given to the press as part of a White House vendetta, but as an innocent and duty-bound telling of the truth, Kelly writes for Real Clear Politics.

Reflecting neither innocence nor a sense of duty is the way that even the original “leaker” Armitage, now a former deputy secretary of state, kept silent as others like Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby were publicly accused and hunted down for his act.

Sham prosecution. Kelly writes:

For more than three years, Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have been accused, falsely, of being the source of the leak. Mr. Armitage, Mr. [Colin] Powell, and Justice department officials knew the truth, but said nothing. Clarice Feldman, a Washington, D.C. lawyer, described Mr. Armitage's silence as “inexplicable and perfidious.”

“Had he spoken out publicly immediately, could there have been a reason for the press to have demanded the appointment of the feckless special prosecutor?” she asked.

Mr. Fitzgerald knew in his first few days on the job that Mr. Armitage was the leaker; that the leak was inadvertent, and that the Intelligence Identities Act hadn't been violated. Yet he has persisted in a sham prosecution.

Mr. Isikoff and Mr. Corn write that: “the Plame leak in Novak's column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about prewar intelligence.”

They add, lamely, that: “The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.”

They don’t mention that Mr. Isikoff and (especially) Mr. Corn have been among the journalists flogging this meme, and the time that it takes to research and write a book indicates they've known for quite some time that it isn’t true. They're only willing to tell the truth, now, for money.

Political intrigue. We now know that Amitage in July 2003 inadvertently told columnist Bob Novak the truth: that Valerie Plame, a CIA worker, was the one who in 2002 recommended her husband, Joseph Wilson, for a CIA-paid trip to Niger.

Wilson, a Democratic Party hack, has misrepresented what he discovered on that trip. He found tentative evidence that President Bush was correct to say (later) that Saddam Hussein had “sought” uranium in Africa. Nevertheless, Wilson in 2003 called Bush a liar for saying it.

Wilson also implied strongly, repeatedly and publicly that Vice President Dick Cheney had asked him to take that 2002 Niger tour. Wilson nurtured that falsehood to suggest that even the Bush administration trusted his judgment. Well, the truth is, no. Only his wife trusted him enough to suggest him for the Niger mission.

Vanity Fair cover. When Novak’s story on Plame’s role in the Niger trip was published July 14, 2003, Wilson quickly changed the subject, accusing the Bush White House of “outing” his CIA wife to get back at him. He claimed his wife was a top secret undercover agent, and now, he said, her job and life might be in jeopardy.

Washington went into hysterics. Democrats (and David Corn) stirred the pot: Was it a crime to mention Plame’s name? Armitage in October 2003 explained to Department of Justice officials that it was he who first told Novak about Plame. Then came the witch hunt and, from Armitage, a mysterious silence.

But Plame had not done CIA undercover work in at least six years. And with Plame’s name and identity public, her life was now in so much peril that she and Wilson posed for the cover of the January 2004 Vanity Fair magazine.

Payback time. In fact, it was no crime to identify Plame. It was right to blow the whistle on her and her husband. How else could we understand the CIA’s sending Wilson on that junket?

It was a nice try, Plame and Wilson. You’ve made a lot of money with your dishonesty. Now pay us back for that wasted trip.

Frank Warner

SEE ALSO: Richard Armitage blew the whistle on Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

Harvard’s Ron Kessler: Suicidal thoughts dropped after Katrina

National Public Radio, which last year reported that suicide attempts increased in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, now reports that suicidal thoughts actually decreased after the disaster.

The extensive study of the region’s mental health was authored by Professor Ron Kessler of the Harvard Medical School.

NPR says:

Psychiatrists usually expect suicide rates to increase in step with depression and other mental illness, but the study finds that thoughts of suicide among people with mental health problems actually decreased. Similar patterns were reported after the Kobe earthquake in Japan and during the civil war in Lebanon, when rates of depression were high, but suicide was uncommon.

Similar to 1963. I recall a similar phenomenon being reported after the assassination of President Kennedy. The U.S. suicide rate plummeted for weeks, or at least that was the story. (Apparently, the opposite happened in Britain after Princess Diana’s death in 1997.)

Of course, some people don’t want to believe the post-Katrina study of about 1,000 affected residents of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. The New Orleans Times-Picayune last month quoted Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, deputy psychiatric coroner of Orleans Parish, as saying suicide rates tripled in the months after the hurricane.

I guess we’ll have to wait for Dr. Rouse’s complete report.

Frank Warner

Saddam Hussein watches ‘South Park’ in prison

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the irreverent “South Park” adult cartoon show, say that Saddam Hussein in prison has been forced to watch their movie on the deposed Iraqi dictator.

In the movie, “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” Saddam is depicted as Satan’s lover. Marines guarding Saddam apparently have told the producers that Saddam has had to watch the film “repeatedly.”

If only Kim Jong-Il could be made to watch “Team America.” That would be breakthrough.

Frank Warner

So it wasn’t John Karr

The DNA analysis says it’s not John Karr. So I guess that’s that.

I got a kick out of his lawyer accusing prosecutors of dragging Karr back from Bangkok with “no independent factors leading to a presumption he did anything wrong.” Hello? Karr said he killed a girl. What should authorities have done? Ignore him?

I don’t think even the DNA testing was enough to clear Karr, but he simply was nowhere near Boulder, Colorado, on Dec. 26, 1996.

DNA everywhere? Am I wrong, or did I hear during all of the Karr coverage that when DNA first was discovered on JonBenet Ramsey’s garments, investigators went to the manufacturer to examine a new pair and discovered that, even new, these garments have human DNA on them?

What the heck is that?

Frank Warner

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Update: Here's what I heard about DNA in clean garments. It’s from a Rita Cosby MSNBC interview on Aug. 22:

Wendy Murphy, former prosecutor:  OK.  So let’s just get back to the basics for a moment, shall we?  First of all, there‘s no significant DNA.  Henry Lee has said that the thing we’re talking about in the underpants not only is such a minuscule piece of DNA, it was probably from the manufacturer, MSNBC reported earlier today that they actually could match that DNA to another pair of underpants manufactured by the same company.  Remember, the pair we’re talking about was taken from a brand-new package, so they were likely able to do that...

Stanley Kurtz: ‘We’ll be back to duck and cover if we don’t stop Iran first’

Stanley Kurtz today cites an article by Stephen Peter Rosen, “After Proliferation: What to Do if More States Go Nuclear.”

Kurtz summarizes Rosen’s report by pointing out that, if Iran gets atom bombs, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt will want atom bombs, too, and they’ll probably get them.

If that happens, Rosen says, forget about “deterrence,” the comforting Cold War idea that no government would start a nuclear war against another nuclear power when it knows its nation would be blown to atoms in response.

Who killed us? Kurtz writes:

With three, four, or more nuclear states in the Muslim Middle East, what becomes of deterrence?

A key to deterrence during the Cold War was our ability to know who had hit whom. With a small number of geographically separated nuclear states, and with the big opponents training satellites and specialized advance-guard radar emplacements on each other, it was relatively easy to know where a missile had come from. But what if a nuclear missile is launched at the United States from somewhere in a fully nuclearized Middle East, in the middle of a war in which, say, Saudi Arabia and Iran are already lobbing conventional missiles at one another?

Would we know who had attacked us? Could we actually drop a retaliatory nuclear bomb on someone without being absolutely certain? And as Rosen asks, What if the nuclear blow was delivered against us by an airplane or a cruise missile? It might be almost impossible to trace the attack back to its source with certainty, especially in the midst of an ongoing conventional conflict.

Fallout shelters. Rosen notes that, with so many Islamic nations having nuclear weapons, the chance rises dramatically that one of them will launch an atomic attack against the United States, either directly or by slipping a bomb to a terrorist organization for hand delivery to an American city.

This leads us to what may be Rosen’s most striking recommendation. “Duck and cover” is back! In a post-proliferation world, we are going to be raising another generation of children (probably several generations of children) marked by nerve-wracking “retention drills.” And get ready...the fallout shelter is coming back, too.

Given the Soviets’ overwhelmingly large nuclear arsenal — capable of turning the entire United States to dust in the event of a major nuclear exchange — fallout shelters came to seem like a joke. But when dealing with a possible strike from a single weapon, or at most a mere handful of weapons, the logic of the fallout shelter is compelling. We’re going to need to be able to evacuate our cities in the event of a direct attack, or to avoid radiation plumes from cities that have already been struck. Tens or hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by such measures.

End of the dove. Kurtz and Rosen say that a “nuclearized Middle East” – and we’re not even mentioning North Korea here – would put the United States on war footing for generations.

Kurtz adds a more political note:

Funny how the very thing the doves don’t want — a preemptive strike on Iran, is the only thing that can save them. A nuclear Iran, followed by cascading proliferation throughout the Middle East and beyond, means the death of the dove. Even a negotiated and verifiable agreement to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program is inconceivable without the sort of credible threat of force the doves have made impossible to sustain.

Forgotten experience. So many people have forgotten the four decades of nuclear tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The mutual terror evaporated just 15 years ago when the Evil Empire was replaced with a little openness and freedom. That could reverse itself, true, but we know the difference between nuclear weapons in the hands of secretive, unaccountable regimes and nuclear weapons in the hands of open, accountable democracies. It’s huge.

The rational goal is total nuclear disarmament, and that won’t happen until every dictatorship has given up its nuclear weapons first. Because if dictatorships have atom bombs, democracies have to hold them in the hope of deterrence.

It would be bad to let more nations acquire nuclear arsenals. It would be many times worse if the new nuclear states were dictatorships. And the worst thing of all would be to allow atom bombs in the hands of a suicidal dictatorship.

Ugly choices. If we do nothing now, prepare for big trouble. Learn to duck and cover.

Frank Warner

Richard Armitage blew the whistle on Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson

It turns out that Richard L. Armitage, then a deputy secretary of state, probably was the first one to tell columnist Bob Novak that Valerie Plame, wife of Democratic Party political hack Joseph Wilson, was the CIA worker who in 2002 recommended Wilson for a CIA-paid trip to Africa.

On that African trip, Wilson was supposed to investigate whether Saddam Hussein recently had bought uranium from Niger. In his whole week (yeah, one week) there, Wilson found no evidence of a uranium deal. However, Ibrahim Mayaki, the former Nigerien prime minister, told Wilson that he had interpreted an Iraqi trade delegation’s 1999 proposal for “expanding commercial relations” as an offer to buy Niger’s uranium.

When he returned to the U.S., Wilson abused and misrepresented his findings. Appealing to opponents of Iraq’s liberation, he claimed his inability to uncover evidence that Saddam “bought” uranium also was evidence President Bush “lied” -- that is, made a “false” statement -- when Bush said in early 2003 that Saddam had “sought” uranium from Africa.

Publicity hound. By mid-2003, Wilson’s relentless dishonesty and reckless headline-seeking had many in Washington wondering who the hell at the CIA suggested Wilson for that Niger trip in the first place. Wilson had implied strongly and falsely that Vice President Dick Cheney personally sent him.

Well, Armitage seems to have blown the whistle on Plame and Wilson, and Novak published the truth: Wilson’s own CIA wife offered Wilson’s name for the CIA junket. (At the very least, her presence at that CIA office made it more likely a co-worker would suggest her husband for the trip.) She had abused her office by taking part in enlisting a relative who turned out to be more self-serving than straight-talking.

It’s a good thing that Armitage got the facts out, even if his revelation was accidental. It’s also good that others confirmed the facts of that mystery mission to Niger. Now we know why the CIA wasted our money on Wilson.

Frank Warner

* * *

Oh, and let me renew my Five-Dollar Yellowcake Challenge.

I have $5 for the first person who can name one thing, anything, Joseph Wilson found on his 2002 trip to Niger that proved “false” President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union statement, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

It’s the safest five-dollar bill in my bank.

* * *

SEE ALSO: Exit interview: 14 questions no one asked President Bush.

SEE ALSO: Why didn't they talk sooner? The case against Armitage, Fitzpatrick, Isikoff and Corn.

SEE ALSO: Libby leak case is about the war and how Wilson covered up for Saddam.

SEE ALSO: Senate Intelligence Committee report: What Joseph Wilson didn’t tell the public.

SEE ALSO: Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson made sure we were 100% wrong on WMDs.

A picture of my brother’s family on vacation

For reasons of national security, I won’t name names, but one of my brothers is down in St. Martin vacationing with his wife and two kids.

As luck would have it, I just found a picture of them. If you look closely, you can see the sunshiny relief on their faces.

Ernesto, barreling over Haiti but safely west of St. Martin, has just been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm.

Wind and water. I was there with them 10 years ago, and two hurricanes passed by in a week. Funny how the big storms don’t seem so dangerous on the horizon. Just a lot of blustery wind and churning sea water.

It’s the direct hits that cause the damage. Otherwise, it’s another day at Coralita Beach.

So HELLO, ST. MARTIN! Hope all is well.

Frank (Uncle Frank)