First magic phrase: "key judgment":

The court filing asserts that Mr. Bush authorized the disclosure of the intelligence in part to rebut claims that Mr. Wilson was making, including those in a television appearance and in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003. The filing revealed for the first time testimony by Mr. Libby saying that Mr. Bush, through Mr. Cheney, had authorized Mr. Libby to tell reporters that "a key judgment of the N.I.E. held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

In fact, that was not one of the "key judgments" of the document. Instead, it was the subject of several paragraphs on Page 24 of the document, which also acknowledged that Mr. Hussein had long possessed 500 tons of uranium that was under seal by international inspectors, and that no intelligence agencies had ever confirmed whether he had obtained any more of the material from Africa.

.... In an interview with The Times in 2004, a senior intelligence official involved in drafting the estimate said the uranium allegations were excluded from the key judgments because the drafters knew there were serious doubts about their accuracy....The drafters also noted, in an annex attached to the end of the document, that State Department intelligence officials considered the uranium allegation "highly dubious."

What's a "key judgment?"

Citing intelligence as a "key judgment" in such estimates carries great weight with policy makers, because the reports are meant to highlight the most important and solid judgments of the government's intelligence agencies.

Second magic phrase: "Instant Declassification"

Even as the president was dispatching Mr. Libby to disclose what until then had been classified intelligence to Ms. Miller of The Times, other White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, now Mr. Bush's national security adviser, were debating whether this same information should be formally declassified and made public, prosecutors assert.

But Mr. Libby "consciously decided not to make Mr. Hadley aware of the fact that defendant himself had already been disseminating the N.I.E. by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified,"....a senior official close to Mr. Hadley said that "it appears that the only three people who knew about the instant declassification were Dick Cheney, George Bush and Scooter Libby."

The motive, according to Fitzgerald:

"The evidence will show that the July 6, 2003, Op-Ed by Mr. Wilson was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq," Mr. Fitzgerald argued.

Next up is the Washington Post's extensive article on Fitz' filing that concentrates on Cheney's role and the Administration's "concerted effort" to piddle Joe Wilson.

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

George Tenet also figures prominently in the WaPo article, and to a lesser degree, Ari Fleischer (not by name) via his July 7 press gaggle en route to Africa. [Full background here.] For a really good article on Tenet, Hadley, the NIE, the Niger uranium claims and the alumimun tube claims, go here.

Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press covers the Fitz filing, pointing out how it undermines Libby's "I forgot" defense:

Fitzgerald's aim with the filing was to counter Libby's defense that he innocently forgot about conversations he may have had with reporters about Plame by showing that the White House's concern about the war criticism was so consuming it would be difficult to forget.

But by suggesting that the leak of Plame's name may have been set in motion by the president, however indirectly, the documents reverberated much more broadly. Democrats unleashed a storm of criticism against Bush, saying he appeared to have misused the declassification process for political gain.

She also points out the timing discrepancies in the declassification. There were two: the instant declassification by Bush and Cheney, and then the official one on July 18. Libby leaked to Miller on July 8. He also leaked to Bob Woodward in June.

Bush and Cheney are staying mum as to when the instant declassification took place.

There's other Libby articles today, like I said it's a feast. Tom Maguire. a Libby supporter, takes issue with several of them.

[Graphic created exclusively for TalkLeft by CL.]