If Rove told the FBI agents the same story that he and McClellan were
telling the
press, then he might have set himself up for a felony charge of lying
to a federal law enforcement official. And if he lied, then he need not
have been under oath to have committed a crime.
Another
intriguing possibility in the leaks case brings back the baroque
personality of right-wing pressroom denizen Jeff Gannon, born James
Guckert.
The New York Times reported
Friday that in addition to possible charges directly involving the
revelation of Valerie Wilson's identity and related perjury or
conspiracy charges,
Fitzgerald is exploring other possible crimes. Specifically, according
to the Times, the special counsel is seeking to determine whether
anyone transmitted classified material or information to persons who
were not cleared to receive it -- which could be a felony under the
1917 Espionage Act.
One
such classified item might be
the still-classified State Department document, written by an official
of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, concerning the CIA's
decision to send former ambassador Joseph Wilson to look into
allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
Someone leaked that INR document -- which inaccurately indicated that
Wilson's assignment was the result of lobbying within CIA by his wife,
Valerie -- to right-wing media outlets, notably including Gannon's
former employers at Talon News. On Oct. 28, 2003, Gannon posted an
interview with Joseph Wilson on the Talon Web site, in which he posed
the following question: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your
wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi
weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports.
Do you dispute that?"
Gannon
later hinted, rather
coyly, that he had learned about the INR memo from an article in the
Wall Street Journal. He also told reporters last February that FBI
agents working for Fitzgerald had questioned him about where he got the
memo. At the very least, that can be interpreted as confirming today's
Times report about the direction of the case.
You
know,
James Guckert's return to the scene is an interesting twist. The
man-whore-in-the-White-House story never really got any play in
the mainstream press. It's going to be hard NOT to talk about it if he turns out to be a major witness.
e Pluribus Media published an
analysis of Gannon's contradictory statements on the memo
issue: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/6/95341/90908
Missouri Spies on Drivers Through Cell Phones The state of Missouri has begun a program to track individual movements on highways through cell phones.
The Missouri
Department of Transportation will spend $3 million annually on a
program to monitor the movements of individuals on highways via their
cell phones -- without their knowledge or consent.
Delcan NET,
a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the
location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell
phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone
is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway
map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given
time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up
another potential ticketing technology.
Missouri rejected the
simpler solution used by other states of embedding sensors in the
pavement that record how many vehicles pass over a stretch of pavement
without uniquely identifying them. Missouri wanted a program that
required less equipment.
"The traffic community has been really
excited for quite some time about the possibility of being able to use
cell phones to track vehicles," Valerie Briggs, program manager for
transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway
and Transportation Officials told the Associated Press. "Almost
everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points,
and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system."
A
pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000
miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on
motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.
Oh my. 
