Ah. That feels better. But just a little, because it would seem that Dick and Karl got off without a scratch. Damn!

Sure didn't take too long for the Jury to find Libby guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Libby Found Guilty in CIA Leak Trial
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN and MATT APUZZO
Associated Press Writers

via t r u t h o u t

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted Tuesday of lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s. The conviction focused renewed attention on the Bush administration's much-criticized handling of weapons of mass destruction intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The verdict culminated a nearly four-year investigation into how CIA official Valerie Plame's name was leaked to reporters in 2003. The trial revealed how top members of the Bush administration were eager to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of doctoring prewar intelligence on Iraq...

He faces up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced June 5 but under federal sentencing guidelines is likely to face far less. Defense attorneys immediately promised to ask for a new trial or appeal the conviction...

Reaction to the conviction on Capitol Hill was swift. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid welcomed the jury's verdict and called on Bush to pledge not to pardon Libby. Before the trial began, the Justice Department said it had no pardon file active for Libby.

"It's about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," Reid said...

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered a pre-sentencing report be completed by May 15. Judges use such reports to help determine sentences. Libby will be allowed to remain free while awaiting sentencing.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CIA_LEAK_TRIAL?SITE=NYSTA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-03-06-13-11-06

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

Libby Found Guilty in CIA Leak Trial

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN and MATT APUZZO
Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted Tuesday of lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s. The conviction focused renewed attention on the Bush administration's much-criticized handling of weapons of mass destruction intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The verdict culminated a nearly four-year investigation into how CIA official Valerie Plame's name was leaked to reporters in 2003. The trial revealed how top members of the Bush administration were eager to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of doctoring prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Libby, who was once Cheney's most trusted adviser and an assistant to Bush, was expressionless as the jury verdict was announced on the 10th day of deliberations. His wife choked out a sob and sank her head.

He faces up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced June 5 but under federal sentencing guidelines is likely to face far less. Defense attorneys immediately promised to ask for a new trial or appeal the conviction.

"We have every confidence Mr. Libby ultimately will be vindicated," defense attorney Theodore Wells told a throng of reporters. "We believe Mr. Libby is totally innocent and that he didn't do anything wrong."

Libby did not speak to reporters.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has led the leak investigation, said no additional charges would be filed. That means nobody will be charged with the leak and Libby, who was not the source for the original column outing Plame, will be the only one to face trial.

"The results are actually sad," Fitzgerald said. "It's sad that we had a situation where a high-level official person who worked in the office of the vice president obstructed justice and lied under oath. We wish that it had not happened, but it did."

White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Bush watched news of the verdict on TV in the Oval Office. Perino said the president respected the jury's verdict but "was saddened for Scooter Libby and his family."

Perino said "I would not agree" with any characterization of the verdict as embarrassing for the White House.

"I think that any administration that has to go through a prolonged news story that is unpleasant and one that is difficult - when you're under the constraints and the policy of not commenting on an ongoing criminal matter - that can be very frustrating," she said.

Libby was convicted of one count of obstruction, two counts of perjury and one count of lying to the FBI about how he learned Plame's identity and whom he told. Prosecutors said he learned about Plame from Cheney and others, discussed her name with reporters and, fearing prosecution, made up a story to make those discussions seem innocuous.

Libby said he told investigators his honest recollections and blamed any misstatements on a faulty memory. He was acquitted of one count of lying to the FBI about his conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

One juror who spoke to reporters outside court said the jury had 34 poster-size pages filled with information they distilled from the trial testimony. They discerned that Libby was told about Plame at least nine times and they didn't buy the argument that he forgot all about it.

"Even if he forgot that someone told him about Mrs. Wilson, who had told him, it seemed very unlikely he would not have remembered about Mrs. Wilson," the juror, Denis Collins, said.

Collins, a former Washington Post reporter, said jurors wanted to hear from others involved in the case, including Bush political adviser Karl Rove, who was one of two sources for the original leak. Defense attorneys originally said both Libby and Cheney would be witnesses and Rove was on the potential witness list.

"I will say there was a tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby on the jury. It was said a number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove? Where are these other guys?' " Collins said. "I'm not saying we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of. It seemed like he was, as Mr. Wells put it, he was the fall guy."

Reaction to the conviction on Capitol Hill was swift. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid welcomed the jury's verdict and called on Bush to pledge not to pardon Libby. Before the trial began, the Justice Department said it had no pardon file active for Libby.

"It's about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," Reid said.

Perino would not discuss Reid's pardon concerns.

Wilson and Plame have sued Libby, Cheney and several other administration officials in federal court. Attorneys at the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which brought the lawsuit, praised the conviction and Fitzgerald's team.

"Their prosecution of a senior White House official illustrates that we are a nation of laws and that no man is above the law," attorneys said in a prepared statement.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered a pre-sentencing report be completed by May 15. Judges use such reports to help determine sentences. Libby will be allowed to remain free while awaiting sentencing.

This is from the April 13, 2006 program.

Libby's latest court filings name Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer as people who were also involved in leaking the information about Valerie Plame to the press. In Ari Fleischer's grand jury testimony, he describes a day when Scooter Libby took him to lunch, which had never happened before, and Scooter told him that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA agent, and that it was not widely known. (wink wink) Ari said that he took that to mean that he should leak it to the press. But the important part here is, of course, that Scooter has named Karl Rove as being involved in the conspiracy.

Video - Rove Implicated by Libby (Quicktime 17 MB) Audio - Rove Implicated by Libby (MP3 9 MB)

This is from the April 10, 2006 program of
Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

As always, Keith Olbermann is the only guy in the news media thoroughly covering this story.

Joseph Wilson clarifies the details and emphasizes seriousness of the situation.

In a nutshell, President Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove are traitors. Together, they conspired to out Valerie Plame as a CIA agent in retaliation for her husband's going to the media about how Saddam hadn't really purchased uranium from Niger, and therefore, how Iraq's WMDs didn't exist.

Video - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - All (37 MB)

Video - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Intro (9 MB)

Video - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Wilson Interview (13 MB)

Video - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Shuster Analysis (10 MB)

Audio - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - All (18 MB)

Audio - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Intro (5 MB)

Audio - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Wilson Interview (9 MB)

Audio - Joe Wilson on Olbermann - Shuster Analysis (6 MB)

This is from the October 30, 2005 program of 60 minutes

I've been clearing off my TIVO since I've been home so much lately, and what do I run across but a 60 Minutes piece from October 30, 2005 about Valerie Plame. Not about the scandal per se, but about Valerie: who she was, what she did, and the lives potentially at risk and irrepairable damage that has been done to our National Security as a result of her identity being revealed.

Valerie was an undercover Agent gathering intelligence about numerous countries' Nuclear Weapons programs. She dedicated her life to protecting the National Security of the United States. She recommended her husband, Joseph Wilson, to go on another patriotic mission to Nigeria to verify whether or not Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from there. Wilson went on this mission, almost as a favor, for the Vice President himself. When Wilson came back with the truth - that the documents saying Saddam had purchased uranium were forged, the Vice President wanted Wilson to keep quiet about it.

When he did not, and instead offered up to the press what he had uncovered, our Bush, Cheney and Rove conspired to reveal his wife's identity in retaliation.

Wow. You've really got to see this for yourself.

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - All

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part One

Video - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part Two

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - All

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part One

Audio - 60 Minutes On The CIA Leak - Part Two

I'm late for lunch and swamped finishing my masters (three more days!)....

But I just finished uploading Keith Olbermann's report on this situation from last Thursday, April 6, 2006, so I wanted to at least make it available to you raw style until I can blog it properly later.

The file is available as "all three parts together" and in three parts here w/pics.

1- Olbermann's overview

2-Shuster's take on it

3- John Dean's take on it.

This is from Sunday, April 9, 2006:

A "Concerted Effort" to Discredit Bush Critic
Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer for The Washington Post

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.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year - in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there - as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney's knowledge. But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision – un-remarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it - is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next known meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12...

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House" - not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified - discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800916.html

A "Concerted Effort" to Discredit Bush Critic
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post

Sunday 09 April 2006

Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.

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.

Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year - in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there - as "a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," CIA case officer Valerie Plame.

Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame's CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney's knowledge. But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision – un-remarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it - is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous."

Libby's next known meeting with a reporter, according to Fitzgerald's legal filing, was with Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, on July 8, 2003. He spoke again to Miller, and to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, on July 12.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.

Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons." But it also said US intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations.

Iraq's alleged uranium shopping had been strongly disputed in the intelligence community from the start. In a closed Senate hearing in late September 2002, shortly before the October NIE was completed, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and his top weapons analyst, Robert Walpole, expressed strong doubts about the uranium story, which had recently been unveiled publicly by the British government. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise, called the claim "highly dubious." For those reasons, the uranium story was relegated to a brief inside passage in the October estimate.

But the White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002 to foster "public education" about Iraq's "grave and gathering danger" to the United States, repeatedly pitched the uranium story. The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most US analysts - the hard part for Iraq would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller - but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters. Most nuclear arguments were highly technical, but the public could easily grasp the link between uranium and a bomb.

Tenet interceded to keep the claim out of a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, but by Dec. 19 it reappeared in a State Department "fact sheet." After that, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the US intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four US officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Less than two months later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the principal US evidence as bogus. A Bush-appointed commission later concluded that the evidence, a set of contracts and correspondence sold by an Italian informant, was "transparently forged."

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was producing no results, and as the bad news converged on the White House - weeks after a banner behind Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln - Wilson emerged as a key critic. He focused his ire on Cheney, who had made the administration's earliest and strongest claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear program.

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that "multiple officials in the White House" - not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified - discussed Plame's CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

At the same time, top officials such as then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley were pressing the CIA to declassify more documents in hopes of defending the president's use of the uranium claim in his State of the Union speech. It was a losing battle. A "senior Bush administration official," speaking on the condition of anonymity as the president departed for Africa on July 7, 2003, told The Post that "the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." The comment appeared on the front page of the July 8 paper, the same morning that Libby met Miller at the St. Regis hotel.

Libby was still defending the uranium claim as the administration's internal battle burst into the open. White House officials tried to blame Tenet for the debacle, but Tenet made public his intervention to keep uranium out of Bush's speech four months earlier. Hadley then acknowledged that he had known of Tenet's objections but forgot them as the State of the Union approached.

Hoping to lay the controversy to rest, Hadley claimed responsibility for the Niger remarks.

In a speech two days later, at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney defended the war by saying that no responsible leader could ignore the evidence in the NIE. Before a roomful of conservative policymakers, Cheney listed four of the "key judgments" on Iraq's alleged weapons capabilities but made no mention of Niger or uranium.

On July 30, 2003, two senior intelligence officials said in an interview that Niger was never an important part of the CIA's analysis, and that the language of Iraq's vigorous pursuit of uranium came verbatim from a Defense Intelligence Agency report that had caught the vice president's attention. The same day, the CIA referred the Plame leak to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, the fateful step that would eventually lead to Libby's indictment.

From the "Hey is anybody listening? The information we've been waiting for years to break has broken" department, Jason Leopold and like five other reporters are covering what has got to be the most exciting development in this dismal administration: not only did Cheney tell Libby to leak the information to the press about Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, being a CIA agent, but , according to Libby himself, Bush told Cheney to tell him to do it.

I have some nice clips from Keith Olbermann going up next, but this story published this morning in the Times sums it up nicely too.

Bush and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak
by Jason Leopold for t r u t h o u t.

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

This information was provided to this reporter by attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status.

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband.

Details of President Bush's involvement in the Plame Wilson affair came in a 39-page court document filed by Fitzgerald late Wednesday evening in US District Court in Washington.

Fitzgerald's court filing was made in response to attorneys representing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators for not telling grand jury he spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson.

Libby's attorneys have in the past months have argued that the government has evidence that would prove Libby's innocence and that the special prosecutor refuses to turn it over to the defense. Fitzgerald said in court documents he has already turned over thousands of pages of evidence to Libby's attorneys and that further discovery requests have been overly broad.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041006Z.shtml

Bush and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 10 April 2006

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

This information was provided to this reporter by attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status.

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband.

Details of President Bush's involvement in the Plame Wilson affair came in a 39-page court document filed by Fitzgerald late Wednesday evening in US District Court in Washington.

Fitzgerald's court filing was made in response to attorneys representing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators for not telling grand jury he spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson.

Libby's attorneys have in the past months have argued that the government has evidence that would prove Libby's innocence and that the special prosecutor refuses to turn it over to the defense. Fitzgerald said in court documents he has already turned over thousands of pages of evidence to Libby's attorneys and that further discovery requests have been overly broad.

The attorneys and officials close to the case said over the weekend that the hastily arranged meeting was called by Cheney to "brief the president" on Wilson's increasing public criticism about the White House's use of the Niger intelligence and the negative impact it would eventually have on the administration's credibility if the public and Congress found out it was true, the sources said.

Bush said publicly in October 2003 that he had no idea who was responsible for unmasking Plame Wilson to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters. The president said that he welcomed a Justice Department investigation to find out who was responsible for it.

But neither Bush nor anyone in his inner circle let on that just four months earlier, they had agreed to launch a full-scale campaign to undercut Wilson's credibility by planting negative stories about his personal life with the media.

A more aggressive effort would come a week or so later when Cheney - who, sources said, was "consumed" with retaliating against Wilson because of his attacks on the administration's rationale for war - met with President Bush a second time and told the president that there was talk of "Wilson going public" and exposing the flawed Niger intelligence.

It was then that Cheney told Bush that a section of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purported to show Iraq did seek uranium from Niger should be leaked to reporters as a way to counter anything report Wilson might seek to publish, these sources said.

Throughout the second half of June, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, and senior officials from Cheney's office kept Bush updated about the progress of the campaign to discredit Wilson via numerous emails and internal White House memos, these sources said, adding that some of these documents were only recently turned over to the special counsel.

One attorney close to the case said that Bush gave Cheney permission to declassify the NIE and that Cheney told Libby to leak it to Bob Woodward, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor, which Libby did on June 27, 2003.

But Woodward told Libby shortly after he received the information about the NIE that he would not be writing a story about it for the Post but that he would use the still classified information for the book he was writing at the time, Plan of Attack.

Woodward would not return calls for comment nor would Libby's attorneys Ted Wells and William Jeffress.

Libby told Cheney that he had a good relationship with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and that he intended to share the NIE with her. Libby met with Miller on July 8, 2003 and disclosed the portion of the NIE that dealt with Iraq and Niger to her.

According to four attorneys who last week read a transcript of President Bush's interview with investigators, Bush did not disclose to the special counsel that he was aware of any campaign to discredit Wilson. Bush also said he did not know who, if anyone, in the White House had retaliated against the former ambassador by leaking his wife's undercover identity to reporters.

Attorneys close to the case said that Fitzgerald does not appear to be overly concerned or interested in any alleged discrepancy in Bush's statements about the leak case to investigators.

But "if Mr. Libby continues to misrepresent the government's case against him ... President Bush and most certainly Vice President Cheney may be caught in an embarrassing position," one attorney close to the case said. "Mr. Fitzgerald will not hesitate to remind Mr. Libby of his testimony when he appeared before the grand jury."

Speaking to college students and faculty at California State University Northridge last week, Wilson said that after President Bush cited the uranium claims in his State of the Union address he tried unsuccessfully for five months to get the White House to correct the record.

"I had direct discussions with the State Department, Senate committees," Wilson said during a speech last Thursday. "I had numerous conversations to change what they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."

Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and finally decided to write an op-ed in the New York Times and expose the administration for knowingly "twisting" the intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear threat to make a case for war. The op-ed appeared in the newspaper July 8, 2003. Wilson wrote that had he personally traveled to Niger to check out the Niger intelligence and had determined it was bogus.

"Nothing more, nothing less than challenging the government to come clean on this matter," Wilson said. "That's all I did."

In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information about him is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

Scooter Libby's trial has been conveniently calendered for AFTER the upcoming election.

Libby Trial Date Set for January 2007
By Edwin Chen for the The Los Angeles Times

A US District Court judge today set a January, 2007 trial date for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former top White House official who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI in a federal investigation on how a CIA operative's identity was exposed.

Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and his top national security adviser, has proclaimed his innocence.

"We are very happy with the trial date," Theodore Wells, Libby's lawyer, said after today's court hearing. "The Jan. 8 date will permit us the time we need to prepare our defense," he said, adding his client was "totally innocent."

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald launched the investigation after the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was identified in the news media in 2003. At the time, her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, had emerged as a prominent critic of the manner in which the Bush Administration had used intelligence to build a case to launch the Iraq war.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-020306libby_lat,0,1476603.story

Also available at truthout:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020306R.shtml

Libby Trial Date Set for January 2007
By Edwin Chen
The Los Angeles Times

Friday 03 February 2006

Washington - A US District Court judge today set a January, 2007 trial date for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former top White House official who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI in a federal investigation on how a CIA operative's identity was exposed.

Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and his top national security adviser, has proclaimed his innocence.

"We are very happy with the trial date," Theodore Wells, Libby's lawyer, said after today's court hearing. "The Jan. 8 date will permit us the time we need to prepare our defense," he said, adding his client was "totally innocent."

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald launched the investigation after the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was identified in the news media in 2003. At the time, her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, had emerged as a prominent critic of the manner in which the Bush Administration had used intelligence to build a case to launch the Iraq war.

Libby, who resigned after being indicted in late October, attended today's hearing, which lasted about 45 minutes, but said little.

The judge, Reggie Walton, said he expected jury selection to take a few days. And lawyers for both sides said they expected the trial to last about a month.

Still at issue is whether Fitzgerald has turned over all the relevant documents being sought by the defense. The prosecutor said the process was "99% complete," including the delivery of 1,250 pages to the defense team this week. But Wells said he believed that Fitzgerald still had "thousands and thousands and thousands of pages" in documents that should be turned over.

And you can bet he wasn't treated well by either one. While he's looking through what's left of his house, a couple goons with M-16s handcuff him for a while to let him know who's boss. Meanwhile, E-bay removes his photos of the wreckage from his website.
Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons

By Jackson Thoreau for OpEdNews.

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.

Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.

When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history...

"I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble's house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.

"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so," Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go."

Here is the full text of the story in case the link goes bad:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jackson__050909_physician_who_told_o.htm

Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina,
Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons

by Jackson Thoreau

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8,
that's the least we can do.

Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I've heard is very
much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.

When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history.

As Marble explains, he was driving to his destroyed house Sept. 8 in
Gulfport, Ms., when military police refused to allow him to cross a
barricade that was about 200 feet from his home. They forced him to
drive an extra 20 minutes and spend even more on gasoline.

"Thanks to Dubya Gump and Mr. Cheney, gas is really expensive and
extremely hard to get anywhere Katrina has destroyed," Marble wrote.
"So needless to say, I was extremely aggravated that they wouldn't let
me pass."

Suddenly a long line of dark cars pulled up, and they honked at Marble
to back up to let them through the barricade that supposedly no one
could drive through. That only made Marble madder so he did what most
of us would do ? or at least consider doing.

"I waved a middle finger at the caravan," Marble wrote.

After driving the extra 20 minutes and filming video of destruction
along the way, he made it to his home. Marble overheard a neighbor say
that Cheney was down the street talking to people. That's when he got
the idea to go meet Dr. Evil himself.

"I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons," Marble wrote.
"For those who don't know, Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator
[Pat] Leahy 'go fu** yourself' on the Senate floor. Also, I am not
happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of
FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong
time, i.e. Iraq."

So Marble, who was wearing an old Mr. T "I Pity Da Fool" t-shirt since
he was sifting through the wreckage, asked a couple of police officers
if he and a friend could walk down to Cheney. They told him Cheney was
"looking forwardî to talking to ìthe locals.î

"So we grabbed my Canon digital rebel and my Sony videocamera and
started walking down the street," Marble wrote. "And then right in
front of the destroyed tennis court I used to play on, Dick Cheney was
giving a pep rally, talking to the press. The Secret Service guys
patted us down and waved the wands over us, and then let us pass."

As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some
camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble
suddenly yelled, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you
asshole!"

Hey, at least Marble was polite. After all, he referred to Cheney as
ìMr. Cheney.î

"I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I
noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house."

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marbleís
house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two
military police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for
someone who fit Marble's description who had cursed at Cheney.

"I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so,"
Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so
tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after
getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I
was free to go."

So letís get this straight: A physician with a newborn baby loses most
everything he owns in the hurricane, does what most of us WANT to do and
ìechoesî Cheneyís words he spoke on the Senate floor last year, walks
away harmlessly, mission accomplished, and then once the media cameras
leave, he is treated like a foreign terrorist as Cheneyís goons waving
M-16s handcuff him in front of his destroyed home? Had it not been for
the media cameras filming the initial scene, I doubt Cheneyís goons
would have just let Marble go after 20 minutes.

America, land of the free?

Marble and his family have been in the media spotlight before, including
his wife, Lisa, and baby, Sofia Grace, who was born shortly after the
storm, on CNN. Marble has also been interviewed in art magazines and the
Biloxi Sun Herald about his concert fund-raisers and musical success ó
one of his bands, dR. O, has had at least 20 No. 1 songs on the MP3.com
charts.

"The truth is even with all our losses, we are still luckier than many
people down here because at least we didn't die," Marble wrote. "But I
thought I could try to raise some awareness to the bad policies of the
Dubya Gump administration and also possibly raise some money to replace
the many things we lost, and so I decided I would auction the videotape
my friend shot of the event. I will also grant an interview to the
winner if so desired."

So go to eBay here and place a bid for this important video to help
Marble raise some needed funds. I have done so and was at least at one
time the high bidder.

Marble also has an Internet site with photographs of some damage in his
town at www.HurricaneKatrinaSucked.com. A photo of him is here, and you
can also email Marble at clone9@yahoo.com.

Dr. Ben Marble, you rock. May we all return the favor.

UPDATE: Late Friday, Sept. 9, and again on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, eBay,
which is owned by strong Bush-Cheney supporters, took down Marble's
site.

Marble said it was because he didnít bleep out the first ìfuî of ìfuck,î
which he said in an email to me was ìpretty silly.î I think itís a
bunch of BS - I did some searches on eBay of profanity they allow that
is not even partially bleeped out and found more than 1,250 items on
there with the word "bitch,î more than 400 items on there with the word
"bastard,î more than 60 ìgo to hellî phrases and even two ìgoddamned son
of a bitchî items. Yet, they say they won't even allow "f***.î Thatís
fu****. If you want to complain to an eBay bigwig, email meg@ebay.com.

The bidding on Marbleís second auction was over $1,900 at one time. He
is also considering auctioning off some of his paintings.

More at http://www.opednews.com

I saw this in the November 9, 2004 NY Times on page C4 of the Business Section. But I couldn't find it online, so I decided to just retype it here.

From the NY Times (From Reuters):

The Halliburton Company, the oil services company, has disclosed in a regulatory filing that one of its joint ventures may have improperly paid Nigerian officials to win a multibillion-dollar contract. The company also said the United States officials had issued subpoenas to current and former employees of Kellogg Brown & Root, its engineering and construction unit. Halliburton said in September that an internal investigation has found that members of the TSKJ consortium, which it helps lead, may have considered bribing Nigerian officials a decade ago. Nigeria is also investigating allegations that the consortium paid as much as $180 million to secure a contract for the TSKJ liquefied natural gas project. (Reuters)

This is from the June 21, 2004 program.

Stewart: "Mr. Vice President, I have to inform you: You're pants are on fire."

Cheney said he never stated that it was "pretty well confirmed" that meetings had taken place between Saddam's Officials and Al Queda members. The Daily Show dug up the Meet the Press coverage from December 9, 2001 that proves otherwise.

As a blogger and "traditional" journalist, I always hesitate to throw the word "lie" around unless I can validate my statement. How wonderful that we live in an age where I can present my case and back it up with evidence all on one interactive medium (for those that have quicktime, anyway...)

I also had the luxury of having the Daily Show With Jon Stewart to do my homework for me.

Here's the Complete Video Clip of the contradicting statements as presented within this larger daily show clip. (The larger clip also contains footage of the Shrub and Rummy making excuses for their past inaccurate statements.)

Here'sa tiny clip of Cheney denying he ever said the meeting was "pretty well confirmed.
(Source: CNBC)

CNBC: "You have said in the past that it was quote "pretty well confirmed."

Cheney: "No, I never said that. Never said that. Absolutely not."

Here's a little clip of the Meet the Press footage
where he clearly did say just that such a meeting was "pretty well confirmed."
(Source: Meet The Press, December 9, 2001)

Cheney: "It's been pretty well confirmed, that he didn't go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior Official of the Iraqi Intelligence service."

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

This just in from Eric Idle:

The FCC Song.

Here's
My mirror of the song, in case you have trouble with the first link.

Lyrics:

Here's a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge.

Fuck you very much the FCC
Fuck you very much for fining me
Five thousand bucks a fuck
So I'm really out of luck
That's more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me

So fuck you very much the FCC
for proving that free speech just isn't free
Clear Channel's a dear channel
So Howard Stern must go
Attorney General Ashcroft doesn't like strong words and so
He's charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbaugh
So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much, Dear Mr. Bush
For heroically sitting on your tush
For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail
Let's send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail
She's an uppity rich bitch
and at least she isn't male
So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too
Fuck you and fuck everything you do
Your pacemaker must be a fake
You haven't got a heart
As far as I'm concerned you're just a pasty-faced old fart
And as for Condoleeza she's an intellectual tart
So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much, the EPA
For giving all Alaska's oil away
It really is a bummer
When I can't fill my hummer
The ozone's a nogozone now that Arnold's here to say:
"The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA"
So fuck you all so very much

So what the planet fails
Let's save the great white males
And fuck you all so very much

This is from the May 2, 2004 program of
Meet the Press.

This directory contains the entire interview in one big file and three smaller files:

Joseph Wilson On Meet The Press.

Check out Joseph Wilson's new book:
The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir.

One thing Joseph said that sticks out in my mind is that daddy Shrub said whoever leaked the information about Wilson's wife was an "insidious traitor."
Does anyone know where he said this or when? Update: Oh okay. He said it in 1999. But it still applies -- to Karl Rove and the Cheney gang in this case:
"I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our [intelligence] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."

This just in from a friend of mine:

As the September 11th Commission grills President Bush and Vice President Cheney about their contradictory statements today, we wanted to alert you to a powerful new tool to help journalists, activists and the public compare the Bush administration's claims against well-documented facts.

The Center for American Progress today launched a comprehensive

Claim vs. Fact database that documents statements from conservatives like President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress and Fox News personalities, and compares those statements to the facts.

Each fact is sourced, and in many cases includes a web link directly to that source.

This is from the January 25, 2003 program of
60 Minutes.

This piece is riveting from beginning to end. Don't miss a second of it.

I've made the files available as a single download or in three smaller parts.

Doing Business With The Enemy
(60 Minutes - January 25, 2004)

Leslie Stahl is my new hero. She's been taking her responsibility of reporting for one of the best rated news programs in the United States very seriously by going out of her way to fill us in on things we need to know about what the Shrub Administration and its good friend, Corporate America, have been up to lately. Specifically, doing things behind our backs with our own money.

And it's not pretty. In this piece, we learn that virtually anyone in the U.S. with a pension plan could unknowingly have their money invested in one of several "terrorist" countries.

Turns out that the reason companies like Halliburton, GE, and Conoco are allowed to do business with these "terrorist" driven countries to begin with, is that they have operations located in the Cayman Islands.

So Leslie goes to the Cayman Islands to check out Halliburton's offices there, but it turns out that Halliburton's Cayman island office doesn't really exist. Not a single employee of Halliburton actually works there and all of the mail is re-routed to Texas. (Leslie sneaked in a hidden camera to interview the manager of the bank in the Caymans where Haliburton rents space to find all this out.)

The hidden camera gets some priceless footage of the bank president explaining that a lot of American companies do this, and some of them actually do hire people to sit in the office and push paper, and others (such as Halliburton) don't.

This story was produced by Richard Bonin and Adam Ciralsky.

Here's Leslie Stahl's opening statement:

When President Bush said "Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations," did it ever occur to you that the money he's talking about is, in large part, yours, mine, and every other American's?

Turns out, just about every one of us with a 401K, pension plan, or mutual fund, has money invested in companies that are doing business with so called "rogue states."

In other words, there are U.S. companies that are helping drive the economies of countries like Iran, Syria, and Libya, that have sponsored terrorists.

Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed
By Tom Brune for Newsday.

The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.

The three subpoenas were issued to the White House on Jan. 22, three weeks after Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel in the probe and during the first wave of appearances by White House staffers before the grand jury.

The investigation seeks to determine if anyone violated federal law that prohibits officials with security clearances from intentionally or knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover agent...

White House implicated

The subpoenas underscore indications that the initial stages of the investigation have focused largely on the White House staff members most involved in shaping the administration's message on Iraq, and appear to be based in part on specific information already gathered by investigators, attorneys said Thursday.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usleak0305,0,3272655,print.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlines

Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed
By Tom Brune
Newsday

Friday 05 March 2004

Grand jury to review call logs from Bush’s jet in probe of how a CIA agent’s cover was blown.

WASHINGTON -- The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.

The three subpoenas were issued to the White House on Jan. 22, three weeks after Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel in the probe and during the first wave of appearances by White House staffers before the grand jury.

The investigation seeks to determine if anyone violated federal law that prohibits officials with security clearances from intentionally or knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover agent.

White House implicated

The subpoenas underscore indications that the initial stages of the investigation have focused largely on the White House staff members most involved in shaping the administration's message on Iraq, and appear to be based in part on specific information already gathered by investigators, attorneys said Thursday.

Fitzgerald's spokesman declined to comment.

The investigation arose in part out of concerns that Bush administration officials had called reporters to circulate the name of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in an attempt to discredit the criticism of the administration's Iraq policy by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

In 2002, Wilson went to Niger at the behest of the CIA to check out reports that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium "yellow cake" to develop nuclear weapons. He reported that Iraq sought commercial ties but that businessmen said the Iraqis didn't try to buy uranium.

All three subpoenas were sent to employees of the Executive Office of the President under a Jan. 26 memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez saying production of the documents, which include phone messages, e-mails and handwritten notes, was "mandatory" and setting a Jan. 29 deadline.

"The president has always said we would fully comply with the investigation, and the White House counsel's office has directed the staff to fully comply," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Thursday.

The Novak column

Two of the subpoenas focus mainly on White House records, events and contacts in July, both before and after the July 14 column by Robert Novak that said "two senior administration officials" told him Plame was a CIA officer.

The third subpoena repeats an informal Justice Department document request to the White House last fall seeking records about staff contacts with Novak and two Newsday reporters, Knut Royce and Timothy Phelps, who reported on July 22 that Plame was a covert agent and Novak had blown her cover.

The subpoena added journalists such as Mike Allen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Michael Duffy of Time magazine, Andrea Mitchell of NBC's "Meet the Press," Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball," and reporters from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. There have been no reports of journalists being subpoeaned.

The subpoenas required the White House to produce the documents in three stages -- the first on Jan. 30, a second on Feb. 4 and the third on Feb. 6 -- even as White House aides began appearing before the grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C.

The subpoena with the first production deadline sought three sets of documents.

It requested records of telephone calls to and from Air Force One from July 7 to 12, while Bush was visting several nations in Africa. The White House declined Thursday to release a list of those on the trip.

That subpoena also sought a complete transcript of a July 12 press "gaggle," or informal briefing, by then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer while at the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria.

That transcript is missing from the White House Web site containing transcripts of other press briefings. In a transcript the White House released at the time to Federal News Service, Fleischer discusses Wilson and his CIA report.

Finally, the subpoena requested a list of those in attendance at the White House reception on July 16 for former President Gerald Ford's 90th birthday.

The White House at the time announced the reception would honor Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, but said the event was closed to the press.

The White House Thursday declined to release the list and the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, which paid for the event, did not return phone calls.

The subpoena with the second production deadline sought all documents from July 6 to July 30 of the White House Iraq Group. In August, the Washington Post published the only account of the group's existence.

What about Karl Rove?

It met weekly in the Situation Room, the Post said, and its regular participants included senior political adviser Karl Rove; communication strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; policy advisers led by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley; and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Wilson alleged in September that Rove was involved in the leak but a day later pulled back from that, asserting that Rove had "condoned" it.

Hughes left the White House in the summer of 2002. Matalin, who left at the end of 2002, did not return a call for comment. Matalin appeared before the grand jury Jan. 23, the day after the subpoenas were issued.

The subpoena with the last production date repeated the Justice Department's informal request to the White House last fall for documents from Feb. 1, 2002, through 2003 related to Wilson's February 2002 trip to Niger, to Plame and to contacts with journalists.

Current White House press secretary Scott McClellan, press aide Claire Buchan and former press aide Adam Levine have told reporters they appeared before the grand jury Feb. 6. At least five others have reportedly been questioned.

This is from the December 12, 2003 program of NOW With Bill Moyers.

Bill Moyers:

Everywhere you look today, or try to look, our right to know is under assault. In the name of fighting terrorists, the government is pulling a veil of secrecy around itself. Information that used to be readily accessible is now kept out of sight.

To cover this story, NOW is collaborating with U.S. News and World Report. Their five month investigation finds that, although the government regularly cites 911 as the basis for secrecy, the true reasons, in many cases, have nothing to do with the War On Terror.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: The untold story of the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy
How the public's business gets done out of the public eye

Here's the t r u t h o u t archive of the complete U.S. News and World Report article: Keeping Secrets, written by Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound.

This segment was produced by David Brancaccio and Peter Meryash.

Veil of Secrecy - Complete (Small - 40 MB)

Veil of Secrecy - Part 1 of 3 (Small - 11 MB)
Veil of Secrecy - Part 2 of 3 (Small - 16 MB)
Veil of Secrecy - Part 3 of 3 (Small - 13 MB)

Here's some technical information about getting quicktime going to watch these movies.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
(link and text of other article is directly below it)

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/usinfo/press/secrecy.htm

Breaking News 12/12/03
INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: The untold story of the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy
How the public's business gets done out of the public eye

Friday, Dec. 12, the PBS television program NOW with Bill Moyers will air a report on Bush administration secrecy produced in collaboration with U.S. News. Please visit pbs.org for stations and airtimes in your area. The U.S. News article, "Keeping Secrets," will be publshed in Monday's edition. Full text will be available on USNews.com Saturday, Dec. 13, at 6 p.m.

The Bush administration has removed from the public domain millions of pages of information on health, safety, and environmental matters, lowering a shroud of secrecy over many critical operations of the federal government.

The administration's efforts to shield the actions of, and the information held by, the executive branch are far more extensive than has been previously documented. And they reach well beyond security issues.

A five-month investigation by U.S. News details a series of initiatives by administration officials to effectively place large amounts of information out of the reach of ordinary citizens, including data on such issues as drinking-water quality and automotive tire safety. The magazine's inquiry is based on a detailed review of government reports and regulations, of federal agency Web sites, and of legislation pressed by the White House.

U.S. News also analyzed information from public interest groups and others that monitor the administration's activities, and interviewed more than 100 people, including many familiar with the new secrecy initiatives. That information was supplemented by a review of materials provided in response to more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the magazine seeking details of federal agencies' practices in providing public access to government information.

Among the findings of the investigation:

Important business and consumer information is increasingly being withheld from the public. The Bush administration is denying access to auto and tire safety information, for instance, that manufacturers are required to provide under a new "early-warning system" created following the Ford-Firestone tire scandal four years ago. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, is more frequently withholding information that would allow the public to scrutinize its product safety findings and product recall actions.

New administrative initiatives have effectively placed off limits critical health and safety information potentially affecting millions of Americans. The information includes data on quality and vulnerability of drinking-water supplies, potential chemical hazards in communities, and safety of airline travel and others forms of transportation.

Beyond the well-publicized cases involving terrorism suspects, the administration is aggressively pursuing secrecy claims in the federal courts in ways little understood--even by some in the legal system. The administration is increasingly invoking a "state secrets" privilege that allows government lawyers to request that civil and criminal cases be effectively closed by asserting that national security would be compromised if they proceed.

New administration policies have thwarted the ability of Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to monitor the executive branch and, in some cases, even to obtain basic information about its actions.

There are no precise statistics on how much government information is rendered secret. One measure, though, can be seen in a tally of how many times officials classify records. In the first two years of Bush's term, his administration classified records some 44.5 million times, or about the same number as in President Clinton's last four years, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration.

MEDIA CONTACT: Rchard Folkers, Director of Media Relations(rfolkers@usnews.com or 202-955-2219)

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/121403A.shtml

Keeping Secrets
By Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound
U.S. News & World Report

Friday 12 December 2003

The Bush administration is doing the public's business out of the public eye. Here's how--and why

"Democracies die behind closed doors."
--U.S. Appeals Court Judge Damon J. Keith

At 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2001, as a bone-chilling rain fell on Washington, George W. Bush took the oath of office as the nation's 43rd president. Later that afternoon, the business of governance officially began. Like other chief executives before him, Bush moved to unravel the efforts of his predecessor. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, directed federal agencies to freeze more than 300 pending regulations issued by the administration of President Bill Clinton. The regulations affected areas ranging from health and safety to the environment and industry. The delay, Card said, would "ensure that the president's appointees have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations." The process, as it turned out, expressly precluded input from average citizens. Inviting such comments, agency officials concluded, would be "contrary to the public interest."

Ten months later, a former U.S. Army Ranger named Joseph McCormick found out just how hard it was to get information from the new administration. A resident of Floyd County, Va., in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, McCormick discovered that two big energy companies planned to run a high-volume natural gas pipeline through the center of his community. He wanted to help organize citizens by identifying residents through whose property the 30-inch pipeline would run. McCormick turned to Washington, seeking a project map from federal regulators. The answer? A pointed "no." Although such information was "previously public," officials of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told McCormick, disclosing the route of the new pipeline could provide a road map for terrorists. McCormick was nonplused. Once construction began, he says, the pipeline's location would be obvious to anyone. "I understand about security," the rangy, soft-spoken former business executive says. "But there certainly is a balance--it's about people's right to use the information of an open society to protect their rights."

For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters. The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government while making increasing amounts of information unavailable to the taxpayers who pay for its collection and analysis. Bush administration officials often cite the September 11 attacks as the reason for the enhanced secrecy. But as the Inauguration Day directive from Card indicates, the initiative to wall off records and information previously in the public domain began from Day 1. Steven Garfinkel, a retired government lawyer and expert on classified information, puts it this way: "I think they have an overreliance on the utility of secrecy. They don't seem to realize secrecy is a two-edge sword that cuts you as well as protects you." Even supporters of the administration, many of whom agree that security needed to be bolstered after the attacks, say Bush and his inner circle have been unusually assertive in their commitment to increased government secrecy. "Tightly controlling information, from the White House on down, has been the hallmark of this administration," says Roger Pilon, vice president of legal affairs for the Cato Institute.

Air and water
Some of the Bush administration's initiatives have been well chronicled. Its secret deportation of immigrants suspected as terrorists, its refusal to name detainees at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the new surveillance powers granted under the post-9/11 U.S.A. Patriot Act have all been debated at length by the administration and its critics. The clandestine workings of an energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney have also been the subject of litigation, now before the Supreme Court.

But the administration's efforts to shield the actions of, and the information obtained by, the executive branch are far more extensive than has been previously documented. A five-month investigation by U.S. News detailed a series of initiatives by administration officials to effectively place large amounts of information out of the reach of ordinary citizens. The magazine's inquiry is based on a detailed review of government reports and regulations, federal agency Web sites, and legislation pressed by the White House. U.S. News also analyzed information from public interest groups and others that monitor the administration's activities, and interviewed more than 100 people, including many familiar with the new secrecy initiatives. That information was supplemented by a review of materials provided in response to more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the magazine seeking details of federal agencies' practices in providing public access to government information.

The principal findings:
Important business and consumer information is increasingly being withheld from the public. The Bush administration is denying access to auto and tire safety information, for instance, that manufacturers are required to provide under a new "early-warning" system created following the Ford-Firestone tire scandal four years ago. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, is more frequently withholding information that would allow the public to scrutinize its product safety findings and product recall actions.

New administration initiatives have effectively placed off limits critical health and safety information potentially affecting millions of Americans. The information includes data on quality and vulnerability of drinking-water supplies, potential chemical hazards in communities, and safety of airline travel and other forms of transportation. In Aberdeen, Md., families who live near an Army weapons base are suing the Army for details of toxic pollution fouling the town's drinking-water supplies. Citing security, the Army has refused to provide information that could help residents locate and track the pollution.

Beyond the well-publicized cases involving terrorism suspects, the administration is aggressively pursuing secrecy claims in the federal courts in ways little understood--even by some in the legal system. The administration is increasingly invoking a "state secrets" privilege (box, Page 24) that allows government lawyers to request that civil and criminal cases be effectively closed by asserting that national security would be compromised if they proceed. It is impossible to say how often government lawyers have invoked the privilege. But William Weaver, a professor at the University of Texas-El Paso, who recently completed a study of the historical use of the privilege, says the Bush administration is asserting it "with offhanded abandon." In one case, Weaver says, the government invoked the privilege 245 times. In another, involving allegations of racial discrimination, the Central Intelligence Agency demanded, and won, return of information it had provided to a former employee's attorneys--only to later disclose the very information that it claimed would jeopardize national security.

New administration policies have thwarted the ability of Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to monitor the executive branch and, in some cases, even to obtain basic information about its actions. One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, became so frustrated with the White House's refusal to cooperate in an investigation that he exclaimed, during a hearing: "This is not a monarchy!" Some see a fundamental transformation in the past three years. "What has stunned us so much," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a public interest group in Washington that monitors government activities, "is how rapidly we've moved from a principle of `right to know' to one edging up to `need to know.' "

The White House declined repeated requests by U.S. News to discuss the new secrecy initiatives with the administration's top policy and legal officials. Two Bush officials who did comment defended the administration and rejected criticism of what many call its "penchant for secrecy." Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, says that besides the extraordinary steps the president has taken to protect the nation, Bush and other senior officials must keep private advice given in areas such as intelligence and policymaking, if that advice is to remain candid. Overall, Bartlett says, "the administration is open, and the process in which this administration conducts its business is as transparent as possible." There is, he says, "great respect for the law, and great respect for the American people knowing how their government is operating."

Bartlett says that some administration critics "such as environmentalists . . . want to use [secrecy] as a bogeyman." He adds: "For every series of examples you could find where you could make the claim of a `penchant for secrecy,' I could probably come up with several that demonstrate the transparency of our process." Asked for examples, the communications director offered none.

There are no precise statistics on how much government information is rendered secret. One measure, though, can be seen in a tally of how many times officials classify records. In the first two years of Bush's term, his administration classified records some 44.5 million times, or about the same number as in President Clinton's last four years, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration. But the picture is more complicated than that. In an executive order issued last March, Bush made it easier to reclassify information that had previously been declassified--allowing executive-branch agencies to drop a cloak of secrecy over reams of information, some of which had been made available to the public.

Bait and switch
In addition, under three other little-noticed executive orders, Bush increased the number of officials who can classify records to include the secretary of agriculture, the secretary of health and human services, and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, all three can label information at the "secret" level, rendering it unavailable for public review. Traditionally, classification authority has resided in federal agencies engaged in national security work. "We don't know yet how frequently the authority is being exercised," says Steven Aftergood, who publishes an authoritative newsletter in Washington on government secrecy. "But it is a sign of the times that these purely domestic agencies have been given national security classification authority. It is another indication of how our government is being transformed under pressure of the perceived terrorist threat." J. William Leonard, director of the information oversight office, estimates that up to half of what the government now classifies needn't be. "You can't have an effective secrecy process," he cautions, "unless you're discerning in how you use it."

From the start, the Bush White House has resisted efforts to disclose information about executive-branch activities and decision making. The energy task force headed by Cheney is just one example. In May 2001, the task force produced a report calling for increased oil and gas drilling, including on public land. The Sierra Club and another activist group, Judicial Watch, sued to get access to task-force records, saying that energy lobbyists unduly influenced the group. Citing the Constitution's separation of powers clause, the administration is arguing that the courts can't compel Cheney to disclose information about his advice to the president. A federal judge ordered the administration to produce the records, prompting an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Energy interests aren't alone in winning a friendly hearing from the Bush administration. Auto and tire manufacturers prevailed in persuading the administration to limit disclosure requirements stemming from one of the highest-profile corporate scandals of recent years. Four years ago, after news broke that failing Firestone tires on Ford SUVs had caused hundreds of deaths and many more accidents, Congress enacted a new auto and tire safety law. A cornerstone was a requirement that manufacturers submit safety data to a government early-warning system, which would provide clues to help prevent another scandal. Lawmakers backing the system wanted the data made available to the public. After the legislation passed, officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they didn't expect to create any new categories of secrecy for the information; they indicated that key data would automatically be made public. That sparked protests from automakers, tire manufacturers, and others. After months of pressure, transportation officials decided to make vital information such as warranty claims, field reports from dealers, and consumer complaints--all potentially valuable sources of safety information--secret. "It was more or less a bait and switch," says Laura MacCleery, auto-safety counsel for Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer group. "You're talking about information that will empower consumers. The manufacturers are not going to give that up easily."

Get out of jail free
Government officials, unsurprisingly, don't see it that way. Lloyd Guerci, a Transportation Department attorney involved in writing the new regulations, declined to comment. But Ray Tyson, a spokesman for the traffic safety administration, denies the agency caved to industry pressure: "We've listened to all who have opinions and reached a compromise that probably isn't satisfactory to anybody."

Some of the strongest opposition to making the warning-system data public came from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The organization, whose membership comprises U.S. and international carmakers, argued that releasing the information would harm them competitively. The Bush administration has close ties to the carmakers. Bush Chief of Staff Card has been General Motors' top lobbyist and head of a trade group of major domestic automakers. Jacqueline Glassman, NHTSA's chief counsel, is a former top lawyer for DaimlerChrysler Corp. In the months before the new regulations were released, industry officials met several times with officials from the White House's Office of Management and Budget.

The administration's commitment to increased secrecy measures extends to the area of "critical infrastructure information," or CII. In layman's terms, this refers to transportation, communications, energy, and other systems that make modern society run. The Homeland Security Act allows companies to make voluntary submissions of information about critical infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security. The idea is to encourage firms to share information crucial to running and protecting those facilities. But under the terms of the law, when a company does this, the information is exempted from public disclosure and cannot be used without the submitting party's permission in any civil proceeding, even a government enforcement action. Some critics see this as a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing companies worried about potential litigation or regulatory actions to place troublesome information in a convenient "homeland security" vault. "The sweep of it is amazing," says Beryl Howell, former general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Savvy businesses will be able to mark every document handed over [to] government officials as `CII' to ensure their confidentiality." Companies "wanted liability exemption long before 9/11," adds Patrice McDermott, a lobbyist for the American Library Association, which has a tradition of advocacy on right-to-know issues. "Now, they've got it."

Under the administration's plan to implement the Homeland Security Act, some businesses may get even more protection. When Congress passed the law, it said the antidisclosure provision would apply only to information submitted to the Department of Homeland Security. The department recently proposed extending the provision to cover information submitted to any federal agency. A department spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Business objections were also pivotal when the Environmental Protection Agency recently backed off a plan that would have required some companies to disclose more about chemical stockpiles in communities.

If the administration's secrecy policies have helped business, they have done little for individuals worried about health and safety issues. The residents of the small town of Aberdeen, Md., can attest to that. On a chilly fall evening, some 100 people gathered at the Aberdeen firehouse to hear the latest about a toxic substance called perchlorate. An ingredient in rocket fuel, perchlorate has entered the aquifer that feeds the town's drinking-water wells. The culprit is the nearby U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, where since World War I, all manner of weapons have been tested.

Trigger finger
After word of the perchlorate contamination broke, a coalition of citizens began working with the Army to try to attack the unseen plume of pollution moving through the ground. But earlier this year, the Army delivered Aberdeen residents a sharp blow. It began censoring maps to eliminate features like street names and building locations--information critical to understanding and tracking where contamination might have occurred or where environmental testing was being done.

The reason? The information, the Army says, could provide clues helpful to terrorists. Arlen Crabb, the head of a citizens' group, doesn't buy it. "It's an abuse of power," says Crabb, a 20-year Army veteran, whose well lies just a mile and a half from the base. His coalition is suing the Army, citing health and safety concerns. "We're not a bunch of radicals. We've got to have the proof. The government has to be transparent."

Aberdeen is but one example of the way enhanced security measures increasingly conflict with the health and safety concerns of ordinary Americans. Two basics--drinking water and airline travel--help illustrate the trend. A public health and bioterrorism law enacted last year requires, among other things, that operators of local water systems study vulnerabilities to attack or other disruptions and draw up plans to address any weaknesses. Republicans and Democrats praised the measure, pushed by the Bush administration, as a prudent response to potential terrorist attacks. But there's a catch. Residents are precluded from obtaining most information about any vulnerabilities.

This wasn't always the case. In 1996, Congress passed several amendments to the Clean Water Act calling for "source water assessments" to be made of water supply systems. The idea was that the assessments, covering such things as sources of contamination, would arm the public with information necessary to push for improvements. Today, the water assessments are still being done, but some citizens' groups say that because of Bush administration policy, the release of information has been so restricted that there is too little specific information to act upon. They blame the Environmental Protection Agency for urging states to limit information provided to the public from the assessments. As a result, the program has been fundamentally reshaped from one that has made information widely available to one that now forces citizens to essentially operate on a need-to-know basis, says Stephen Gasteyer, a Washington specialist on water-quality issues. "People [are] being overly zealous in their enforcement of safety and security, and perhaps a little paranoid," he says. "So you're getting releases of information so ambiguous that it's not terribly useful." Cynthia Dougherty, director of EPA's groundwater and drinking-water office, described her agency's policy as laying out "minimal standards," so that states that had been intending to more fully disclose information "had the opportunity to decide to make a change."

The Federal Aviation Administration has its own security concerns, and supporters say it has addressed them vigorously. In doing so, however, the agency has also made it harder for Americans to obtain the kind of safety information once considered routine. The FAA has eliminated online access to records on enforcement actions taken against airlines, pilots, mechanics, and others. That came shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when it was discovered that information was available on things like breaches of airport security, says Rebecca Trexler, an FAA spokeswoman. Balancing such concerns isn't easy. But rather than cut off access to just that information, the agency pulled back all enforcement records. The FAA has also backed away from providing access to safety information voluntarily submitted by airlines.

As worrisome as the specter of terrorism is for many Americans, many still grumble about being kept in the dark unnecessarily. Under rules the Transportation Security Administration adopted last year--with no public notice or comment--the traveling public no longer has access to key government information on the safety and security of all modes of transportation. The sweeping restrictions go beyond protecting details about security or screening systems to include information on enforcement actions or effectiveness of security measures. The new TSA rules also establish a new, looser standard for denying access to information: Material can be withheld from the public, the rules say, simply if it's "impractical" to release it. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.

This same pattern can be seen in one federal agency after another. As Joseph McCormick, the former Army Ranger trying to learn more about the pipeline planned for Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, learned, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission now restricts even the most basic information about such projects. The agency says its approach is "balanced," adding that security concerns amply justify the changes.

The Bush administration is pressing the courts to impose more secrecy, too. Jeffrey Sterling, 36, a former CIA operations officer, can testify to that. Sterling, who is black, is suing the CIA for discrimination. In September, with his attorneys in the midst of preparing important filings, a CIA security officer paid them a visit, demanding return of documents the agency had previously provided. A mistake had been made, the officer explained, and the records contained information that if disclosed would gravely damage national security. The officer warned that failure to comply could lead to prison or loss of a security clearance, according to the lawyers. Although vital to Sterling's case, the lawyers reluctantly gave up the records.

What was so important? In a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va., a Justice Department attorney recently explained that the records included a pseudonym given to Sterling for an internal CIA proceeding on his discrimination complaint. In fact, the pseudonym, which Sterling never used in an operation, had already been disclosed through a clerical error. Mark Zaid, one of Sterling's attorneys, says the pseudonym is just a misdirection play by the CIA. The real reason the agency demanded the files back, he says, is that they included information supporting Sterling's discrimination complaint. Zaid says he has never encountered such heavy-handed treatment from the CIA. "When they have an administration that is willing to cater [to secrecy], they go for it," he says, "because they know they can get away with it." A CIA spokesman declined comment.

In this case, which is still pending, the administration is invoking the "state secrets" privilege, in which it asserts that a case can't proceed normally without disclosing information harmful to national security. The Justice Department says it can't provide statistics on how often it invokes the privilege. But Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor active in national security matters, says: "In the past, it was an unusual thing. The Bush administration is faster on the trigger."

Surveillance
At the same time, the government is opening up a related front. Last spring, the TSA effectively shut down the case of Mohammed Ali Ahmed, an Indian Muslim and naturalized citizen. In September 2001, Ahmed and three of his children were removed from an American Airlines flight. Last year, Ahmed filed a civil rights suit against the airline. But TSA head James Loy intervened, saying that giving Ahmed information about his family's removal would compromise airline security. The government, in other words, was asserting a claim to withhold the very information Ahmed needed to pursue his case, says his attorney, Wayne Krause, of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "You're looking at an almost unprecedented vehicle to suppress information that is vital to the public and the people who want to vindicate their rights," Krause says.

Secret evidence of a different kind comes into play through a little-noticed effect of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. A key provision allows information from surveillance approved for intelligence gathering to be used to convict a defendant in criminal court. But the government's application--which states the case for the snooping--isn't available for defendants to see, as in traditional law enforcement surveillance cases. With government agencies now hoarding all manner of secret information, the growing stockpile represents an opportunity for abusive leaks, critics say. The new law takes note of that, by allowing suits against the federal government. But there's an important catch--in order to seek redress, one must forfeit the right to a jury trial. Instead, the action must be held before a judge; judges, typically, are much more conservative in awarding damages than are juries.

Most Americans appreciate the need for increased security. But with conflicts between safety and civil rights increasing, the need for an arbiter is acute--which is perhaps the key reason why the vast new security powers of many executive-branch agencies are so alarming to citizens' groups and others. A diminished role of congressional oversight is just one area of fallout, but there are others. Some examples:

It took the threat of a subpoena from the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks to force the White House to turn over intelligence reports. Even at that, family members of victims complain, there were too many restrictions on release of the information. In Congress, the administration has rebuffed members on a range of issues often unrelated to security concerns.

In a huge military spending bill last year, Congress directed President Bush to give it 30 days' notice before initiating certain sensitive defense programs. Bush signed the bill into law but rejected the restraint and said he would ignore the provision if he deemed it necessary.

Initial contracts to rebuild Iraq, worth billions of dollars, were awarded in secret. Bids were limited to companies invited to participate, and many had close ties to the White House. Members of Congress later pressed for an open bidding process.

Many public interest groups report that government agencies are more readily denying Freedom of Information Act requests--while also increasing fees, something small-budget groups say they can ill afford. The Sierra Club, for example, has been thwarted in getting information on problems at huge "factory farms" that pollute rivers and groundwater. Says David Bookbinder, senior attorney for the group: "What's different about this administration is their willingness to say, `We're going to keep everything secret until we're forced to disclose it--no matter what it is.' "

The administration is undeterred by such complaints. "I think what you've seen is a White House that has valued openness," says Daniel Bryant, assistant attorney general for legal policy, and "that knows that openness with the public facilitates confidence in government."

That's not the way Jim Kerrigan sees it. He operates a small market-research firm in Sterling, Va., outside Washington. For more than a decade, he has forecast federal spending on information technology. Three months after Bush took office, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo telling government officials to no longer make available such information so as to "preserve the confidentiality of the deliberations that led to the president's budget decisions."

As a result, Kerrigan says, information began to dry up. Requests were ignored. And the data he did get came with so much information censored out that they were barely usable. The fees Kerrigan paid for a request, which once topped out at $300, jumped to as much as $6,500. "I can't afford that," he says. "This administration's policy is to withhold information as much as possible."

Key Dates: Secrecy and the Bush Administration:

Inauguration Day (1/20/01) Administration freezes Clinton-era regulations, without allowing for public comment.
10/12/01 Attorney General John Ashcroft, reversing Clinton policy, encourages agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act requests if a "sound legal basis" exists.
10/26/01 President Bush signs U.S.A. Patriot Act, expanding law enforcement powers and government surveillance.
2/22/02 Congress's General Accounting Office sues Vice President Dick Cheney for refusing to disclose records of his energy task force; the GAO eventually loses its case. A separate private case is pending.
3/19/02 White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card directs federal agencies to protect sensitive security information.
11/25/02 Bush signs Homeland Security Act. Its provisions restrict public access to information filed by companies about "critical infrastructure," among other matters.
01/3/03 Administration asks, in papers filed before the Supreme Court, for significant narrowing of the Freedom of Information Act.
3/25/03 Bush issues standards on classified material, favoring secrecy and reversing provisions on openness.

Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe
By Richard Sale for Insight.

The Feds have announced that they've got hard evidence against Cheney staff employees John Hannah and Lewis "Scooter" Libby that they were involved in the leak that outed Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA operative wife.

About time! Hip hip hooray and all that kinda thing!

But wait a minute! They were undoubtedly just following Cheney's orders. How come he's not being held responsible for the actions of his personal staff?

Bogus.

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml

Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe
Posted Feb. 5, 2004
By Richard Sale
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."

On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a negative report" on the claim and then, on July 6, as the Bush administration was widely accused of manipulating intelligence to get American public opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Post in which he accused the Bush administration of "misrepresenting the facts." His piece also asked, "What else are they lying about?"

According to one administration official, "The White House was really pissed, and began to contact six journalists in order to plant stories to discredit Wilson," according to the New York Times and other accounts.

As Pincus said in a Sept. 29 radio broadcast, "The reason for putting out the story about Wilson's wife working for the CIA was to undermine the credibility of [Wilson's] mission for the agency in Niger. Wilson, as the last top diplomat in Iraq at the time of the Gulf War, had credibility beyond his knowledge of Africa, which was his specialty. So his going to Niger to check the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium there and returning to say he had no confirmation was considered very credible."

Eight days later, columnist Robert Novak wrote a column in which he named Wilson's wife and revealed she was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Since Plame was working undercover, it exposed her and, in the opinion of some, ruined her usefulness and her career. It also violated a 1982 law that prohibits revealing the identity of U.S. intelligence agents.

On Oct. 7, Bush said that unauthorized disclosure of an undercover CIA officer's identity was "a criminal matter" and the Justice Department had begun its investigation into the source of the leak.

Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister wire service of Insight magazine.

An interesting Newsweek feature explaining how Dick Cheney bought into the Shrub War and then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.

Of particular interest is the quote below where Cheney says that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons" and then Newsweek clarifies that "Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons."

However, in Donald Rumsfeld's Meet The Press Interview, Rumsfeld claims that "they [Iraq] had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that.

So it looks like somebody did say that Saddam had nuclear weapons, and it was Dick Cheney.

Cheney's Long Path to War
By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas (With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman) for Newsweek.

Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/991209.asp?0cv=KA01&cp1=1

page 1 of 3

Cheney's Long Path to War

By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed agenda, but it's a safe assumption that they often talk about intelligence--about what the United States knows, or doesn't know, about the terrorist threat.

THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney's judgment, say White House aides, and values the veep's long experience in the intelligence community (as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about terrorists and their global connections. "This is a very important area. It's the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard questions," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert last September. "That's my job."

Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian's long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon's mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying water for the neocons or anyone else's self-serving agendas. "That's an urban myth," said this aide, who declined to be identified. Cheney has cited as his "gold standard" the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report put out by the entire intelligence community. And, indeed, an examination of the declassified version of the NIE reveals some pretty alarming warnings. "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the October 2002 NIE states.

Nonetheless, it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while discarding others that don't. He is widely regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for the worst-case --scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.

Cheney, say those who know him, is in no way cynically manipulative. By all accounts, he is genuinely convinced that the threat is imminent and menacing. Professional intelligence analysts can offer measured, nuanced opinions, but policymakers, Cheney likes to say, have to decide. As he put it last July in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, "How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?" And yet Cheney seems to have rung the warning bell a little too loudly and urgently. If nothing else, his apparently exaggerated alarms over Iraq, WMD and the terror connection may make Americans slow to respond the next time he sees a wolf at the door.

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What is it about Cheney’s character and background that makes him such a Cassandra? And did his powerful dirge drown out more-modulated voices in the councils of power in Washington and in effect launch America on the path to war? Cheney declined an interview request from NEWSWEEK, but interviews with his aides and a wide variety of sources in the intelligence and national-security community paint the portrait of a vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.

Cheney, say those who know him, has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk. The national-security state must be strong, vigilant and wary. Cheney believes that America’s military and intelligence establishments were weakened by defeat in Vietnam and the wave of scandals that followed in Watergate in the ’70s and Iran-contra in the ’80s. He did not regard as progress the rise of congressional investigating committees, special prosecutors and an increasingly adversarial, aggressive press. Cheney is a strong believer in the necessity of government secrecy as well as more broadly the need to preserve and protect the power of the executive branch.

He never delivers these views in a rant. Rather, Cheney talks in a low, arid voice, if at all. He usually waits until the end of a meeting to speak up, and then speaks so softly and cryptically, out of one side of his mouth, so that people have to lean forward to hear. (In a babble of attention-seekers, this can be a powerful way of getting heard.) Cheney rarely shows anger or alarm, but on occasion his exasperation emerges.

One such moment came at the end of the first gulf war in 1991. Cheney was secretary of Defense, and arms inspectors visiting defeated Iraq had discovered that Saddam Hussein was much closer to building a nuclear weapon than anyone had realized. Why, Cheney wondered aloud to his aides, had a steady stream of U.S. intelligence experts beaten a path to his door before the war to say that the Iraqis were at least five to 10 years away from building a bomb? Years later, in meetings of the second President Bush’s war cabinet, Cheney would return again and again to the question of how Saddam could create an entire hidden nuclear program without the CIA’s knowing much, if anything, about it.

Cheney’s suspicions—about both the strength of Iraq and the weakness of U.S. intelligence agencies—were fed after he left government. Cheney spent a considerable amount of time with the scholars and backers of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has served as a conservative government-in-waiting. Cheney was on the board of directors and his wife, Lynne, a conservative activist on social issues, still keeps an office there as a resident “fellow.” At various lunches and dinners around Washington, sponsored by AEI and other conservative organizations, Cheney came in contact with other foreign-policy hard-liners or “neoconservatives” like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. It was an article of faith in the AEI crowd that the United States had missed a chance to knock off Saddam in 1991; that Saddam was rebuilding his stockpile of WMD, and that sooner or later the Iraqi strongman would have to go. When some dissidents in northern Iraq tried to mount an insurrection with CIA backing in the mid-’90s and failed, the conservatives blamed the Clinton administration for showing weakness. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Tony Lake, had, it was alleged, “pulled the plug.”

In the late ’90s, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of one of the resistance groups, the Iraqi National Congress, began cultivating and lobbying intellectuals, journalists and political leaders in Washington. Chalabi —had a shadowy past; his family, exiled from Iraq in the late ’50s, had set up a banking empire through the Middle East that collapsed in charges of fraud in 1989. (Chalabi, who has always denied wrongdoing, has been convicted and sentenced, in absentia, by a Jordanian military court to 22 years of hard labor.) But operating out of London, the smoothly persuasive Chalabi presented himself as a democratic answer to Saddam Hussein. With a little American backing, he promised, he could rally the Iraqi people to overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.

Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq.” But the professionals at the State Department and at the CIA took a more skeptical view. In 1999, after Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, providing funds to support Iraqi exile groups, the U.S. government convened a conference with the INC and other opposition groups in London to discuss “regime change.” The American officials proposed bringing INC activists to America for training. Chalabi’s aides objected. Most of the likely candidates were Iraqi refugees living in various European countries. By coming to the United States, they could lose their refugee status. Some Pentagon officials shook their heads in disbelief. “You had to wonder,” said one who attended the conference, “how serious were these people. They kept telling us they wanted to risk their lives for their country. But they were afraid to risk their refugee status in Sweden?”

After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”

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Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam. In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.” It is important to note that at this early stage, the neocons did not have the enthusiastic backing of Vice President Cheney. Just because Cheney had spent a lot of time around the Get Saddam neocons does not mean that he had become one, says an administration aide. “It’s a mistake to add up two and two and get 18,” he says. Cheney’s cautious side kept him from leaping into any potential Bay of Pigs covert actions.

What changed Cheney was not Chalabi or his friends from AEI, but the 9/11 attacks. For years Cheney had feared—and warned against—a terrorist attack on an American city. The hijacked planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon confirmed his suspicions of American vulnerability—though by no means his worst fears—that the terrorists would use a biological or nuclear weapon. “9/11 changed everything,” Cheney began saying to anyone who would listen. It was no longer enough to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, Cheney believed. The United States had to find ways to act against the terrorists before they struck.

Cheney began collecting intelligence on the threat anywhere he could find it. Along with Libby, his chief of staff, the vice president began showing up at the CIA and DIA for briefings. Cheney would ask probing questions from different analysts in various agencies and then, later with his staff, connect the dots. Such an aggressive national-security role by a vice president was unusual. So was the sheer size of Cheney’s staff—about 60 people, much larger than the size of Al Gore’s. The threat from germ warfare was a particular concern of Cheney’s. After 9/11, Libby kept calling over to the Defense Department, asking what the military was doing to guard against a bio attack from crop-dusters. In July 2002, Cheney made a surprise, unpublicized visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He wanted to question directly the public-health experts about their efforts to combat bioterrorism. If not for the traffic snarls caused by his motorcade, his visit might have remained a secret.

Nov. 17, 2003 Cover Package: Dick Cheney and the War in Iraq

There was, within the administration, another office parsing through intelligence on the Iraqi and terror threat. The Office of Special Plans was so secretive at first that the director, William Luti, did not even want to mention its existence. “Don’t ever talk about this,” Luti told his staff, according to a source who attended early meetings. “If anybody asks, just say no comment.” (Luti does not recall this, but he does regret choosing such a spooky name for the office.) The Office of Special Plans has sometimes been described as an intelligence cell, along the lines of “Team B,” set up by the Ford administration in the 1970s to second-guess the CIA when conservatives believed that the intelligence community was underestimating the Soviet threat. But OSP is more properly described as a planning group—planning for war in Iraq. Some of the OSP staffers were true believers. Abe Shulsky, a defense intellectual who ran the office under Luti, was a Straussian, a student of a philosopher named Leo Strauss, who believed that ancient texts had hidden meanings that only an elite could divine. Strauss taught that philosophers needed to tell —”noble lies” to the politicians and the people.

The OSP gathered up bits and pieces of intelligence that pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs and his ties to terror groups. The OSP would prepare briefing papers for administration officials to use. The OSP also drew on reports of defectors who alleged that Saddam was hiding bio and chem weapons under hospitals and schools. Some of these defectors were provided to the intelligence community by Chalabi, who also fed them to large news organizations, like The New York Times. Vanity Fair published a few of the more lurid reports, deemed to be bogus by U.S. intelligence agencies (like one alleging that Saddam was running a terrorist-training camp, complete with a plane fuselage in which to practice hijackings). The CIA was skeptical about the motivation and credibility of these defectors, but their stories gained wide circulation.

Cheney’s staffers were in more than occasional contact with the OSP. Luti, an intense and brilliant former naval aviator who flew combat missions in the gulf war, worked in Cheney’s office before he took over OSP, and was well liked by Cheney’s staff. Luti’s office had absorbed a small, secretive intelligence-analysis shop in the Pentagon known as Team B (after the original Team B) whose research linked 9/11 to both Al Qaeda and the Iranian terror group Hizbullah. The team was particularly fascinated by the allegation that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. One of Team B’s creators—David Wurmser—now works on Cheney’s staff. Libby went to at least one briefing with Team B staffers at which they discussed Saddam’s terror connections. It would be a mistake, however, to overstate the influence of OSP on Cheney or his staff. Cheney collected information from many sources, but principally from the main intelligence agencies, the CIA and DIA. Likewise, Cheney’s aides say that they talked to Chalabi and his people about “opposition politics”—not about WMD or terrorism. (“The whole idea that we were mainlining dubious INC reports into the intelligence community is simply nonsense,” Paul Wolfowitz told NEWSWEEK.)

There has been much speculation in the press and in the intelligence community about the impact of the conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie on the Bush administration. A somewhat eccentric Harvard-trained political scientist, Mylroie argued (from guesswork and sketchy evidence) that the 1993 World Trade Center attack was an Iraqi intelligence operation. When AEI published an updated version of her book “Study of Revenge” two years ago, her acknowledgments cited the help of, among others, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton and Libby. But Cheney aides say that the vice president has never even discussed Mylroie’s book. (“I take satisfaction in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein,” said Mylroie. “The rest is details.”)

Cheney is hardly the only intelligence adviser to the president. CIA Director George Tenet briefs the president every morning. But Tenet was often caught up defending his agency. Cheney feels free to criticize, and he does. “Cheney was very distrustful and remains very distrustful of the traditional intelligence establishment,” says a former White House official. “He thinks they are too cautious or too invested in their own policy concerns.” Cheney is not as “passionate” in his dissents as Wolfowitz, the leading intellectual neocon in the administration. But he carries more clout.

Cheney often teams up with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to roll over national-security adviser Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. “OVP [Cheney’s office] and OSD [Rumsfeld’s office] turned into their own axis of evil,” grouses a former White House official, who added that Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same strategic vision: pessimistic and dark. Some observers see a basic breakdown in the government. Rice has chosen to play more of an advisory role to the president and failed to coordinate the often warring agencies like State and Defense. “Cheney was acting as national-security adviser because of Rice’s failure to do so,” says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

State Department staffers say that Cheney’s office pushed hard to include dubious evidence of Iraq’s terror ties in Powell’s speech to the United Nations last February. Libby fought for an inclusion of the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell resisted, but Powell’s aides were impressed with Libby’s persistence. In the end, the reference to Atta was dropped, but Powell did include other examples linking Baghdad to Al Qaeda. When the State Department wanted to cut off funds to Chalabi for alleged accounting failures, Cheney backed shifting the money from the State Department to the Defense Department. It is significant, however, that Cheney ultimately did not support setting up Chalabi as a government in exile, a ploy that the State Department and CIA strongly opposed. They feared that Chalabi would proclaim himself ruler-by-fiat after an American invasion. Though Chalabi’s people often talked to Cheney’s staff, the vice president has no particular brief for the INC chief over any other democratically elected leader, says an administration official.

Accused of overstating the Iraqi threat by politicians and pundits, Cheney is publicly and privately unrepentant. He believes that Al Qaeda is determined to obtain weapons of mass destruction and use them against American civilians in their cities and homes. To ignore those warnings would be “irresponsible in the extreme,” he says in his speeches. His staffers are not unmindful of the risk of crying wolf, however, and acknowledge that if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq, the public will be much less likely to back pre-emptive wars in the future. Cheney still believes the WMD will turn up somewhere in Iraq—if they aren’t first used against us by terrorists.

With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman

Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged
By Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender for the Boston Globe.

Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Evidence of a connection, if any exists, has never been made public. Details that Cheney cited to make the case that the Iraqi dictator had ties to Al Qaeda have been dismissed by the CIA as having no basis, according to analysts and officials. Even before the war in Iraq, most Bush officials did not explicitly state that Iraq had a part in the attack on the United States two years ago.

But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning "more and more" about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq...

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney's "willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It's astounding."

In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.

But Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying: "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know."...

But there is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said.

Former senator Max Cleland, who is a member of the national commission investigating the attacks, said yesterday that classified documents he has reviewed on the subject weaken, rather than strengthen, administration assertions that Hussein's regime may have been allied with Al Qaeda.

"The vice president trying to justify some connection is ludicrous," he said.

Nonetheless, Cheney, in the "Meet the Press" interview Sunday, insisted that the United States is learning more about the links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.

"We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s," Cheney said, "that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems."...

But intelligence specialists told the Globe last August that they have never confirmed that the training took place, or identified where it could have taken place. "The general public just doesn't have any independent way of weighing what is said," Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said. "If you repeat it enough times . . . then people become convinced it's the truth."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/16/cheney_link_of_iraq_911_challenged/

Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged

By Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, 9/16/2003

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Evidence of a connection, if any exists, has never been made public. Details that Cheney cited to make the case that the Iraqi dictator had ties to Al Qaeda have been dismissed by the CIA as having no basis, according to analysts and officials. Even before the war in Iraq, most Bush officials did not explicitly state that Iraq had a part in the attack on the United States two years ago.

But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning "more and more" about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq.

Democrats sharply attacked him for exaggerating the threat Iraq posed before the war.

"There is no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11," Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat running for president, said in an interview last night. "There was no such relationship."

A senior foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner, said it is "totally inappropriate for the vice president to continue making these allegations without bringing forward" any proof.

Cheney and his representatives declined to comment on the vice president's statements. But the comments also surprised some in the intelligence community who are already simmering over the way the administration utilized intelligence reports to strengthen the case for the war last winter.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney's "willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It's astounding."

In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.

But Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying: "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know."

Multiple intelligence officials said that the Prague meeting, purported to be between Atta and senior Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, was dismissed almost immediately after it was reported by Czech officials in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and has since been discredited further.

The CIA reported to Congress last year that it could not substantiate the claim, while American records indicate Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time, the officials said yesterday. Indeed, two intelligence officials said yesterday that Ani himself, now in US custody, has also refuted the report. The Czech government has also distanced itself from its original claim.

A senior defense official with access to high-level intelligence reports expressed confusion yesterday over the vice president's decision to reair charges that have been dropped by almost everyone else. "There isn't any new intelligence that would precipitate anything like this," the official said, speaking on condition he not be named.

Nonetheless, 69 percent of Americans believe that Hussein probably had a part in attacking the United States, according to a recent Washington Post poll. And Democratic senators have charged that the White House is fanning the misperception by mentioning Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks in ways that suggest a link.

Bush administration officials insisted yesterday that they are learning more about various Iraqi connections with Al Qaeda. They said there is evidence suggesting a meeting took place between the head of Iraqi intelligence and Osama bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s; another purported meeting was said to take place in Afghanistan, and during it Iraqi officials offered to provide chemical and biological weapons training, according to officials who have read transcripts of interrogations with Al Qaeda detainees.

But there is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said.

Former senator Max Cleland, who is a member of the national commission investigating the attacks, said yesterday that classified documents he has reviewed on the subject weaken, rather than strengthen, administration assertions that Hussein's regime may have been allied with Al Qaeda.

"The vice president trying to justify some connection is ludicrous," he said.

Nonetheless, Cheney, in the "Meet the Press" interview Sunday, insisted that the United States is learning more about the links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.

"We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s," Cheney said, "that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems."

The claims are based on a prewar allegation by a "senior terrorist operative," who said he overheard an Al Qaeda agent speak of a mission to seek biological or chemical weapons training in Iraq, according to Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement to the United Nations in February.

But intelligence specialists told the Globe last August that they have never confirmed that the training took place, or identified where it could have taken place. "The general public just doesn't have any independent way of weighing what is said," Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said. "If you repeat it enough times . . . then people become convinced it's the truth."

Monday night, I posted a clip from Meet the Press where Dick Cheney stated that he no longer has any financial ties to Halliburton. Guess I wasn't the only one who noticed that wasn't exactly true.

Now Senators Daschle and Lautenberg are demanding hearings investigating the no-bid contracts. They also did me the favor of producing the exact numbers I asked for.

Oil services firm paid Cheney as VP
In Reuters.

"The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind' with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton," Daschle said in a statement.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney, who was Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000, said he had severed all ties with the Houston-based company.

"I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years," he said.

Cathie Martin, a Cheney spokeswoman, confirmed that the vice president has been receiving the deferred compensation payments from Halliburton, but she disputed that his statements on "Meet the Press" had been misleading.

Cheney had already earned the salary that was now being paid, Martin said, adding that once he became a nominee for vice president, he purchased an insurance policy to guarantee that the deferred salary would be paid to him whether or not Halliburton survived as a company.

"So he has no financial interest in the company," she said.

But Lautenberg said Cheney's financial disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001, and another $162,393 in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments this year and in 2004 and 2005.

"In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president," Lautenberg said.

The vice president's salary is $198,600 annually.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.azstarnet.com/star/wed/30917Ncheney.html

Oil services firm paid Cheney as VP
REUTERS

Dick Cheney

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick
Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton Co., has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company since taking office while asserting he has no financial interest in the company, Senate Democrats said Tuesday.

The Democrats demanded to know why Cheney claimed to have cut ties with the oil services company, involved in a large no-bid contract for oil reconstruction work in Iraq, when he was still receiving large deferred salary payments.

Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said the revelations reinforced the need for hearings about the no-bid contracts Halliburton received from the Bush administration.

"The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind' with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton," Daschle said in a statement.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, Cheney, who was Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000, said he had severed all ties with the Houston-based company.

"I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years," he said.

Cathie Martin, a Cheney spokeswoman, confirmed that the vice president has been receiving the deferred compensation payments from Halliburton, but she disputed that his statements on "Meet the Press" had been misleading.

Cheney had already earned the salary that was now being paid, Martin said, adding that once he became a nominee for vice president, he purchased an insurance policy to guarantee that the deferred salary would be paid to him whether or not Halliburton survived as a company.

"So he has no financial interest in the company," she said.

But Lautenberg said Cheney's financial disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001, and another $162,393 in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments this year and in 2004 and 2005.

"In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president," Lautenberg said.

The vice president's salary is $198,600 annually.

This clip is a Dick Cheney classic.

According to Cheney, he doesn't know anything about anything. He doesn't know who Ambassador Joseph Wilson is. He doesn't know who the CIA is. He must not know what a newspaper is either.

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Russert: "Were you briefed on his (Joseph Wilson's) findings of February-March of 2002?"

Cheney: "No. I don't know Joe Wilson. I've never met Joe Wilson...Joe Wilson? I don't know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back...I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him...I have no idea who hired him."

Tim Russert: "The CIA did."

Cheney: "Yeah but who are 'the CIA?' I don't know."

Cheney On The Forged Nigerian WMD Evidence (Small - 8 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The Missing WMD (Small - 10 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney: "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stay away from any of that information."

Cheney also said that he has "no idea" why there was no bidding process, and to "go ask the Core of Engineers." He also said that he "has no financial interest of any kind" with the company and hasn't "for over three years."

(Can someone please find me a link to the fact that he still receives deferred income from Halliburton every year? I know I've seen that several times in different publications. It's bound to be somewhere else besides in a Daily Show clip. -- Thanks! UPDATE! 9/16/03 -- Well, that didn't take long (see snippet below from Chris Floyd in Counterpunch.)

Update: 9/17/03 - New story in Reuters with all the details.

Cheney On The Halliburton Contracts (Small - 6 MB)

From Counterpunch, March 2003:

Old news, you say? Irrelevant to the current crisis? Surely, now that Cheney has been translated to glory as the nation's second-highest public servant, he is beyond any taint of grubby material concerns? Au contraire, as those ever-dastardly French like to say. At this very moment, while the smoke is still rising from the rubble of Baghdad, while the bodies of the unburied dead are still rotting in the desert wastes, Dick Cheney is receiving one million dollars a year in so-called "deferred compensation" from Halliburton. That's a million smackers from a private company that profits directly from the mass slaughter in Iraq, going into the pockets of the "public servant" who is, as the sycophantic media never tires of telling us, the power behind George W.'s throne - and a prime architect of the war.

Here is the full text of the Counterpunch article that seems to complement this video clip so nicely. (In case the link goes bad.):

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd03292003.html

March 29, 2003
Bushist Party Feeds on Fear and War
Blood on the Tracks

By CHRIS FLOYD

Before the first cruise missile crushed the first skull of the first child killed in the first installment of George W. Bush's crusade for world dominion, the unelected plutocrats occupying the White House were already plying their corporate cronies with fat contracts to "repair" the murderous devastation they were about to unleash on Iraq. There was, of course, no open bidding allowed in the process; just a few "selected" companies--selected for their preponderance of campaign bribes to the Bushist Party, that is - "invited" to submit their wish lists to the War Profiteer-in-Chief.

It should come as no surprise that one of the leading beneficiaries of this hugger-mugger largess is our old friend, Halliburton Corporation, the military-energy servicing conglomerate. Halliburton, headed by Vice Profiteer Dick Cheney until the Bushist coup d'etat in 2000, is already reaping billions from the Bush wars--which Cheney himself tells us "might not end in our lifetime."

Cheney is an old hand at this kind of death merchanting, of course. In the first Bush-Iraq War, Cheney, playing the role now filled by Don Rumsfeld--a squinting, smirking, lying Secretary of Defense - directed the massacre of some 100,00 Iraqis, many of whom were buried alive, or machine-gunned while retreating along the "Highway of Death," or annihilated in sneak attacks launched after a ceasefire had been called. When George I and his triumphant conquerors were unceremoniously booted out of office less than two years later by that radical fringe group so hated by the Bushists--the American people--Cheney made a soft landing at Halliburton.

There he grew rich on government contracts and taxpayer-supported credits doled out by his old pals in the military-industrial complex. He also hooked up with attractive foreign partners - like Saddam Hussein, the "worse-than-Hitler" dictator who paid Cheney $73 million to rebuild the oil fields that had been destroyed by, er, Dick Cheney. And while the Halliburton honcho became a multimillionaire many times over, some of his employees were not so lucky - Cheney ashcanned more than 10,000 workers during his boardroom reign. (At least he didn't bury them alive.)

Old news, you say? Irrelevant to the current crisis? Surely, now that Cheney has been translated to glory as the nation's second-highest public servant, he is beyond any taint of grubby material concerns? Au contraire, as those ever-dastardly French like to say. At this very moment, while the smoke is still rising from the rubble of Baghdad, while the bodies of the unburied dead are still rotting in the desert wastes, Dick Cheney is receiving one million dollars a year in so-called "deferred compensation" from Halliburton. That's a million smackers from a private company that profits directly from the mass slaughter in Iraq, going into the pockets of the "public servant" who is, as the sycophantic media never tires of telling us, the power behind George W.'s throne - and a prime architect of the war.

This is money that Cheney wouldn't get if Halliburton went down the tubes--a prospect it faced in the early days of the Regime, due to a boneheaded merger engineered by its former CEO, a guy named, er, Dick Cheney. In a deal apparently sealed during a golf game with an old crony, Cheney acquired a subsidiary, Dresser Industries--a firm associated with the Bush family for more than 70 years--which was facing billions of dollars in liability claims for its unsafe use of asbestos. Dresser's bigwigs doubtless made out like bandits from the deal, and Cheney left the mess behind when the grateful Bushes put him on the presidential ticket, but there was serious concern that Halliburton itself would be forced into bankruptcy - unless it found massive new sources of secure funding to offset the financial "shock and awe" of the asbestos lawsuits.

Then lo and behold, after September 11, Halliburton received a multibillion-dollar, open-ended, no-bid contract to build and service U.S. military bases and operations all over the world. It also won several shorter-term contracts, such as expanding the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, where the Regime is holding unnamed, uncharged suspected terrorists in violation of the Geneva Convention. With this fountain of federal money pouring into its coffers - and Bushist operatives in Congress pushing legislation to restrict asbestos lawsuits--Halliburton was able to hammer out a surprisingly favorable settlement deal with the asbestos victims. The company--and Cheney's million-dollar paychecks--were saved. Praise Allah!

Halliburton is just the tip of the slagheap, of course. Daddy Bush's popsicle stand, the Carlyle Group - which controls a vast network of defense firms and "security" operations around the world - is also panning gold from the streams of blood pouring down the ancient tracks of Babylon. Junior Bush - who like a kept woman made his own influence-peddling fortune through services rendered to a series of sugar daddies--has conveniently gutted the national inheritance tax, swelling his own eventual bottom line when his father joins the legions of Panamanian, Iranian, Afghan, Iraqi--and American--dead he and his son have sent down to Sheol.

Never in American history has a group of government leaders profited so directly from war--never. Like their brothers-in-arms, Saddam's Baathists, the Bushists treat their own country like a sacked town, looting the treasury for their family retainers and turning public policy to private gain. Like Saddam, they feed on fear and glorify aggression. Like Saddam, they have dishonored their nation and betrayed its people.

But the money sure is good, eh, Dick?

Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and is a regular contributor to CounterPunch.

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The Misleading, Inaccurate Estimates For How Much The War Will Cost (Small - 8 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The Congressional Budget Office's Claims That Our Forces Are Already Overextended (Small - 7 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On Misjudgements By The Shrub Administration and Its Primary Concern Over In Iraq (Oil) (Small - 5 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The Plan For Iraq (Or Lack Of One) (Small - 7 MB)

Tim Russert: "What is our plan for Iraq? How long with the 140,000 American Soldiers be there? How many international troops will join them? And how much is this gonna cost?"

Cheney: "Well, some of those questions are unknowable at present. They will depend on developments -- depend on how fast it takes us to achieve our objectives."

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The War That Was Supposedly Over May 1, 2003 -- And The Soldiers Who Are Still Dying (Small - 5 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The 140+ Saudis Who Were Flown Out Of The Country Right After 911 (Small - 3 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Subject: The Confused American Public That Thinks Iraq Was Responsible For 9-11, Saudi Involvement In 9-11, And the "Classified" Pages of the 9-11 Commission Report

Note: There is no mention whatsoever of this segment in the transcript. (Except for the part in the end about Cheney thinking another attack is imminent.)

Cheney On Iraq and 9-11 (Small - 7 MB)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

I also have this footage edited into smaller clips, organized by subject, that I'm in the process of uploading right now.

Cheney On Meet The Press - 1 of 2 (Small - 55 MB)

Cheney On Meet The Press - 2 of 2 (Small - 49 MB)

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/966470.asp

Transcript for Sept. 14
Sunday, September 14, 2003
GUEST: Dick Cheney, vice president
Tim Russert, moderator
This is a rush transcript provided for the information and convenience of the press. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
(Note from Lisa -- boy, that's the understatement of the year! This transcript is very abridged.)

MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: America remembers September 11, 2001. In Iraq, six months ago, the war began with shock and awe. Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on MEET THE PRESS:
(Videotape, March 16):
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Did the Bush administration misjudge the level of organized resistance, the number of American troops needed, the cost of securing Iraq, and the existence of weapons of mass destruction? Those questions and more for the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. Our exclusive guest for the full hour.
Mr. Vice President, welcome back to MEET THE PRESS.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Good morning, Tim. It’s good to be back.
MR. RUSSERT: Two years ago, September 11, 2001, you went to New York City, just the other day, attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Has this nation recovered from September 11, 2001?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think in many respects, recovered, yes. On the other hand, there are some things that’ll never be the same. I look back on that, and I think about what we’ve been engaged in since.
And in a sense, sort of the theme that comes through repeatedly for me is that 9/11 changed everything. It changed the way we think about threats to the United States. It changed about our recognition of our vulnerabilities. It changed in terms of the kind of national security strategy we need to pursue, in terms of guaranteeing the safety and security of the American people.
And I’m not sure everybody has made that transition yet. I think there are a number of people out there who hope we can go back to pre-9/11 days and that somehow 9/11 was an aberration. It happened one time; it’ll never happen again. But the president and I don’t have that luxury. You know, we begin every day reading the intelligence reports from the CIA and the FBI on the nature of the threat that’s out there, on the plotting by al-Qaeda members and related groups to launch attacks against the United States and contemplating the possibility of an attack against the U.S. with far deadlier weapons than anything we’ve seen to date. So on the one hand, I’m sure everybody wants to get back to normal, and we have in many respects. But on the other hand, we all have to recognize as a nation that 9/11 changed a great deal in our lives.
MR. RUSSERT: You fully expect that there will be another attack on the United States.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I have to assume that. The president has to assume that. It would be nice to be able to say that that can’t happen. But if we’ve learned anything, if we look back now, it seems to me that we’ve learned that there was a campaign of terror mounted against us. Before 9/11, we tended to think in terms of a terrorist act as a criminal enterprise. And the appropriate response was a law enforcement response.
You go find the bad guy, put him in jail, case closed. What we’ve learned since is that that’s not the case at all; but, in fact, a lot of the terrorist attacks we’ve suffered in the 1990s were al-Qaeda directed. That’s certainly true in the World Trade Center in ’93, in the East Africa Embassy bombings in ’98, and the USS Cole in 2000 and obviously on 9/11.
It’s very important we make that transition in understanding that we’re at war, that the war continues, that this is a global enemy that struck in not only New York and Washington but in Bali and in Djakarta, in Mombasa, in Casablanca, Riyadh since 9/11, that this is an enterprise that is global in scope and one we’ve had major success against it. And the fact of the matter is there were thousands of people that went through those training camps in Afghanistan. We know they are seeking deadlier weapons—chemical, biological and nuclear weapons if they can get it. And if anything, those basic notions that developed in the early days after 9/11 have been reinforced by what we’ve learned since.
MR. RUSSERT: There’s grave concern about surface-to-air missiles shooting down American commercial aircraft. Should we not outfit all U.S. commercial airliners with equipment to detect and avoid that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, there are technologies available. They are extremely expensive if you’re going to put them on every airliner. You’ve got to make choices here about, you know, when you’re dealing with a risk, there may be certain aircraft flying into certain locales that are especially vulnerable that you may want to deal with. But I wouldn’t automatically go to the assumption that we need to put the most sophisticated system on every single airplane.
MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection.
MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn’t have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we’ve learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.
We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of ’93. And we’ve learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven.
Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact. With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.
MR. RUSSERT: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.
MR. RUSSERT: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. At some point, we may be able to declassify it, but there are ongoing investigations that might be affected by that release, and for that reason, we kept it classified. The committee knows what’s in there. They helped to prepare it. So it hasn’t been kept secret from the Congress, but from the standpoint of our ongoing investigations, we needed to do that.
One of the things this points out that’s important for us to understand—so there’s this great temptation to look at these events as discreet events. We got hit on 9/11. So we can go and investigate it. It’s over with now.
It’s done. It’s history and put it behind us.
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there. We learn more and more as we capture people, detain people, get access to records and so forth that this is a continuing enterprise and, therefore, we do need to be careful when we look at things like 9/11, the commission report from 9/11, not to jeopardize our capacity to deal with this threat going forward in the interest of putting that information that’s interesting that relates to the period of time before that. These are continuing requirements on our part, and we have to be sensitive to that.
MR. RUSSERT: Vanity Fair magazine reports that about 140 Saudis were allowed to leave the United States the day after the 11th, allowed to leave our airspace and were never investigated by the FBI and that departure was approved by high-level administration figures. Do you know anything about that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t, but a lot of folks from that part of the world left in the aftermath of 9/11 because they were worried about public reaction here in the United States or that somehow they might be discriminated against. So we have had, especially since the attacks of Riyadh in May of this year from the Saudi government, great support and cooperation in going after terrorists, especially al-Qaeda. I think the Saudis came to realize as a result of the attacks of last May that they were as much of a target as we are, that al-Qaeda did have a foothold inside Saudi Arabia—a number of the members of the organization are from there—that there have been private individuals in Saudi Arabia who provided significant financial support and assistant, that there are facilitators and operators working inside Saudi Arabia to support the al-Qaeda network. And the Saudis have been, as I say in the last several months, very good partners in helping us go after the people in the al-Qaeda organization.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the situation in Iraq. We all remember this picture from May 1. The president on the USS Lincoln on May 1; mission accomplished. Since that time, these are the rather haunting figures coming out of Iraq. We had lost 138 soldiers before May 1, and 685 wounded, injured. Since that time, since the president came on the carrier and said major combat was over, we’ve lost 158, and 856 wounded and injured. Those numbers are pretty troubling.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, it’s significant, Tim. Any loss of life or injuries suffered by American military personnel is significant. Everyone wishes that that weren’t necessary. But from the standpoint of the activity we’re engaged in over there and what we’ve been able to accomplish over the last two years, I think it’s important to keep all of this in perspective. I looked at some numbers yesterday. I had them run the numbers, for example, in terms of our casualties since we launched into Afghanistan, began the war on terror a little over two years ago now. And the number killed in combat, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, as of yesterday, was about 213. When you add in those from non-hostile causes—the plane crashes, helicopter goes down without hostile fire—we’ve got a total of 372 fatalities since we started the war.
Remember, we lost 3,000 people here on 9/11. And what we’ve been able to accomplish—although I must say we regret any casualties. You’d like to be able do everything casualty-free. When you think about what we’ve accomplished in terms of taking Afghanistan—we had a total of 30 killed in action in Afghanistan—taking down the Taliban and destroying the capacity of al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base to attack the United States, launching an attack into Iraq, destroying the Iraqi armed forces, taking down the government of Iraq, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, capturing 42 out of the 55 top leaders, and beginning what I think has been
fairly significant success in terms of putting Iraq back together again, the price that we’ve had to pay is not out of line, and certainly wouldn’t lead me to suggest or think that the strategy is flawed or needs to be changed.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that Saddam Hussein had a deliberate strategy, a deliberate calculated plan, not to have the big battle of Baghdad but rather to dissolve away into the mainstream population and then mount this guerrilla war?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t. I think that, in effect, he lost control at the outset. If you look at what transpired during the course of the campaign, the campaign that Tommy Franks mounted, the speed with which they moved, the element of surprise that was involved here, the fact that we were basically able to sever communications between the head, Saddam Hussein, and his forces, now, I don’t think he had any choice ultimately but to flee Baghdad as he did. The level of resistance continues out there, obviously, but I think we’re making major progress against it, and I think it’s important not to let anecdotal reporting on individual resistance conflicts somehow color or lead us to make misjudgments about the total scope of the effort.
The fact is that most of Iraq today is relatively stable and quiet. There are still ongoing incidents, attacks on coalition forces or on others, on the Jordanian Embassy, on the U.N. delegation, on the Shia clerics in Najaf, from ones of—two sources, I believe: either from the remnants of the old regime, the Ba’athists, the Fedayeen Saddam, or terrorists, al-Qaeda types, many of whom were in Iraq before the war, some of whom have arrived since the war. Those are the main two sources that we’ve got to deal with. We are dealing with them. The actual number of incidents, according to General Abizaid, this month is significantly below what it was last month on a daily basis. So we just have to keep working the problem, and we’re doing that.
MR. RUSSERT: Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, running for president, had this to say: “...what President Bush gave the American people on Sunday night was a price tag”—$87 billion—”not a plan. And we in Congress must demand a plan.”
What is our plan for Iraq? How long will the 140,000 American soldiers be there? How many international troops will join them? And how much is this going to cost?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, some of those questions are unknowable at present, Tim. It’ll depend on developments. It’ll depend on how fast it takes us to achieve our objectives. Remember when we went there, that we went there specifically to take down the Saddam Hussein regime, to wrap up all WMD capability he had possessed or developed, to deal with the threat that his regime represented to the region, and the United States. Very significant challenge. But we have, in fact, I think, been very successful at achieving that.
In terms of where we’re going now, we’re moving aggressively to deal with the security situation. We’re continuing those efforts. We’ve got some first-rate troops undertaking those efforts, and, needless to say, we’ve had major success, major progress when you think about the number of Iraqi bad guys that we’ve eliminated or captured. We’ve—working very aggressively, Bremer is, to stand up a new government. We’ve now got a 25-man governing council in place made up of Iraqis, a broad representative group of Iraqi officials.
We’ve got Iraqis now in charge of each ministry in the government. We’ve got 90 percent—over 90 percent of the cities and towns and villages of Iraq are now governed by democratically elected or appointed local councils. We’ve got all the schools open; we’ve got all the hospitals up and functioning. We’re making major progress in restoring the electricity to pre-war levels. We’re rebuilding the oil system and infrastructure in the country. So all of that’s happening. And it’s a very important part of our total strategy. We’re also working to stand up an Iraqi security force. And in four months we’ve put together a force now of some 55,000 Iraqis serving in the police force, serving in the border security force and so forth at the local level. But that will continue to grow. The second largest security contingent in Iraq today behind the U.S. is Iraqi. We’ve been successful to some extent in getting international support. We’ve got a Polish division. We stood up a Polish-led division a few weeks ago that has troops in it from 17 countries.
With respect to the financing, the $87 billion we’ve asked for is—about 3/4 of that is to support our military and security operations. About 1/4 of it will go specifically to helping make the investments Bremer believes we need to make in order to get the Iraqis back and functioning on their own capability.
So how long will it take? I don’t know. I can’t say. I don’t think anybody can say with absolute certainty at this point. We’ve achieved already, when you consider that we’ve only been there about four months, a great deal, and we are well on our way, I think, to achieving our objective. But the key here for us is to stay committed to get the job done, to get the guys on the ground the resources they need, both from a military as well as a civilian standpoint, and that’s exactly what the president is doing.
MR. RUSSERT: Let’s go through some of those things because there have been suggestions of misjudgments by the administration. When you were on the program in March, I asked you about troop levels. Let’s watch:
(Videotape, March 16, 2003):
MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the
conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: We, in fact, have about 140,000 troops, 20,000 international troops, as well. Did you misjudge the number of troops necessary to secure Iraq after major combat operations?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, you’re going to get into a debate here about—talking about several years, several hundred thousand troops for several years. I think that’s a non-starter. I don’t think we have any plan to do that, Tim. I don’t think it’s necessary to do that. There’s no question but what we’ve encountered resistance. But I don’t think anybody expected the time we were there to be absolutely trouble-free. We knew there were holdover elements from the regime that would fight us and struggle. And we also knew al-Qaeda was there, and Ansar al-Islam, up in northeastern Iraq, which we’ll come back to, talk about in a minute.
So I don’t think there was a serious misjudgment here. We couldn’t know precisely what would happen. There were a lot of contingencies we got ready for that never did happen. You know, for example, one of the things we spent time worried about was that Saddam would destroy his own oil industry, that he’d do in Iraq what he did in Kuwait 12 years ago. The consequence of that, if he’d gone in and blown up those wells, as they contemplated doing, in fact wired some of them for destruction, would have been that the oil industry would have been shut down to zero production, probably for several years, while we tried to restore it. We were able to defeat that. That didn’t occur. We had plans for it that we didn’t have to execute or implement. So it’s like any other process. A plan is only as good until you start to execute, then you have got to make adjustments and so forth. But I don’t think there has been a major shift in terms of U.S. troop levels. And I still remain convinced that the judgment that we’ll need “several hundred thousand for several years” is not valid.
MR. RUSSERT: The Congressional Budget Office said that: “That the Army lacks sufficient active-duty forces to maintain its current level of nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq beyond next spring. In a report that underscores the stress being place on the military by the occupation of Iraq, the CBO said the Army’s goals of keeping the same number of troops in Iraq and limiting tours of duty there to a year while maintaining its current presence elsewhere in the world were impossible to sustain without activating more National Guard or Reserve units.”
Can we keep 150,000 troops beyond next spring without, in effect, breaking the Army?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, we can do what we have to do to prevail in this conflict. Failure’s not an option. And go back again and think about what’s involved here. This is not just about Iraq or just about the difficulties we might encounter in any one part of the country in terms of restoring security and stability. This is about a continuing operation on the war on terror. And it’s very, very important we get it right. If we’re successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it’s not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it’s not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11. They understand what’s at stake here. That’s one of the reasons they’re putting up as much of a struggle as they have, is because they know if we succeed here, that that’s going to strike a major blow at their capabilities.
MR. RUSSERT: So the resistance in Iraq is coming from those who were responsible for 9/11?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I was careful not to say that. With respect to 9/11, 9/11, as I said at the beginning of the show, changed everything. And one of the things it changed is we recognized that time was not on our side, that in this part of the world, in particular, given the problems we’ve encountered in Afghanistan, which forced us to go in and take action there, as well as in Iraq, that we, in fact, had to move on it. The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it’s a global operation. It doesn’t know national boundaries or national borders. And the commitment of the United States going into Afghanistan and take down the Taliban and stand up a new government, to go into Iraq and take down the Saddam Hussein regime and stand up a new government is a vital part of our long-term strategy to win the war on terror. America’s going to be safer and more secure in the years ahead when we complete the task in Iraq successfully, and we will complete it successfully. And whatever the cost is, in terms of casualties or financial resources, it’s a whale of a lot less than trying to recover from the next attack in the United States. So what we do on the ground in Iraq, our capabilities here are being tested in no small measure, but this is the place where we want to take on the terrorists. This is the place where we want to take on those elements that have come against the United States, and it’s far more appropriate for us to do it there and far better for us to do it there than it is here at home.
We talk about $87 billion. Yeah, that’s a significant expense. No question about it. But it’s going to be much more expensive down the road if we wait. And it’ll be uch more expensive—it’s less money, frankly, than the events of 9/11 imposed on us here in the United States.
MR. RUSSERT: In terms of costs, Mr. Vice President, there are suggestions again—it was a misjudgment by the administration or even misleading. “Lawrence Lindsey, head of the White House’s National Economic Council, projected the ‘upper bound’ of war costs at $100 billion to $200 billion.”
We’ve already spent $160 billion after this $87 billion is spent. The Pentagon predicted $50 billion: “The administration’s top budget official [Mitch Daniels] estimated that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion...he said...that earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high.”
And Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, went before Congress and said this: “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own econstruction, and relatively soon. The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years.” It looked like the administrations truly misjudged the cost of this operation.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, I didn’t see a one-point estimate there that you could say that this is the administration’s estimate. We didn’t know. And if you ask Secretary Rumsfeld, for example—I can remember from his briefings, he said repeatedly he didn’t know. And when you and I talked about it, I couldn’t put a dollar figure on it.
MR. RUSSERT: But Daniels did say $50 billion.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, that might have been, but I don’t know what is basis was for making that judgment. We do know that we are prepared and need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to make it work. But this is not a situation where, you know, it’s only a matter of us writing a check to solve the problem. Iraq sits on top of 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, very significant reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia.
The fact is there are significant resources here to work with, and the notion that we’re going to bear the burden all by ourselves from a financial standpoint I don’t think is valid. We’ve got a donor’s conference scheduled coming up next month, where the international community will come together and pledge funds to cooperate and supported with the Iraqi operation. The U.N. resolution now that Colin Powell’s been working on this weekend involves, as well, authorization for the international financial institutions to come support that. There’s money at the U.N. left over in the oil-for-food program that’s going to be available.
There are funds frozen, Iraqi assets in various places in...
MR. RUSSERT: How much is all that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t have a final dollar figure. We don’t know who will...
MR. RUSSERT: Is the ei...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...pony up for that. The $87 billion, again, remember, about 3/4 of that is to support the U.S. military operations or about 1/4 of it actually goes to Iraq operations, and a portion clearly will be used in Afghanistan and for the war on terror.
MR. RUSSERT: Is the $87 billion the end of it? Will the American people be asked for any more money?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can’t say that. It’s all that we think we’ll need for the foreseeable future for this year. I guess people shouldn’t be surprised that the request is coming now either. What we’ve done consistently since we started this enterprise, working with the Congress, is we did not want to incorporate the Iraq cost within the baseline DOD budget. So we’ve always dealt with it on the side as a separate appropriation. That’s what we’re doing here. The reason we’re going now is because we’ve had the work done in Iraq. Bremer’s been there long enough to put together a good budget looking over the next year. He’s got a pretty good idea of what it’s going to cost him. We’ve got more information now than we’ve had before about what our continuing needs and requirements are going to be. So now we’re making the request.
We have not tried to hide it under a bush. The president has been very direct. We’re working closely with the Congress in putting a request together, but I come back again to the proposition of what’s the cost if we don’t act, what’s the cost if we do nothing, what’s the cost if we don’t succeed with respect to our current interest operation in Iraq? And I think that’s far higher than getting the job done right here.
MR. RUSSERT: Democrats have written you letters and are suggesting profiteering by your former company Halliburton and this is how it was reported: “Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contrast worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents. The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military’s increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations.” Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Of course not, Tim. Tim, when I was secretary of Defense, I was not involved in awarding contracts. That’s done at a far lower level. Secondly, when I ran Halliburton for five years and they were doing work for the Defense Department, which frankly they’ve been doing for 60 or 70 years, I never went near the Defense Department. I never lobbied the Defense Department on behalf of Halliburton. The only time I went back to the department during those eight years was to have my portrait hung which is a traditional service rendered for former secretaries of Defense. And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years. And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government, so...
MR. RUSSERT: Why is there no bidding?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I have no idea. Go ask the Corps of Engineers. One of the things to keep in mind is that Halliburton is a unique kind of company. There are very few companies out there that have the combination of the very large engineering construction capability and significant oil field services, the first- or second-largest oil field service company in the world, and they’ve traditionally done a lot of work for the U.S. government and the U.S. military. That expertise has stood the military in good stead over the years, but it’s a great company. There are fine people working for it.
I also have a lot of confidence in the people in the Department of Defense. Nobody has produced one single shred of evidence that there’s anything wrong or inappropriate here, nothing but innuendo, and—basically they’re political cheap shots is the way I would describe it. I don’t know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that, but Halliburton is a fine company. And as I say—and I have no reason to believe that anybody’s done anything wrong or inappropriate here.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to one of the most quoted passages from MEET THE PRESS when you were on in March, and that was trying to anticipate the reaction we would receive from the Iraqi people. Let’s watch:
(Videotape, March 16, 2003):
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct and we’re not treated as liberators but as conquerors and the Iraqis begin to resist particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s unlikely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with various groups and individuals, people who’ve devoted their lives from the outside to try and change things inside of Iraq.
The read we get on the people of Iraq is there’s no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: We have not been greeted as liberated.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think we have by most Iraqis. I think the majority of Iraqis are thankful for the fact that the United States is there, that we came and we took down the Saddam Hussein government. And I think if you go in vast areas of the country, the Shia in the south, which are about 60 percent of the population, 20-plus percent in the north, in the Kurdish areas, and in some of the Sunni areas, you’ll find that, for the most part, a majority of Iraqis support what we did.
MR. RUSSERT: People like Ahmed Chalabi, former Iraqis who came in and briefed—you talked about—did they sell us a bill of goods? Did they tell us this would be easier, that we’d be welcomed with flowers, and not the kind of armed resistance we’re being met with?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think they felt—certainly, they were advocates of the U.S. action because they wanted to liberate Iraq from, you know, what has been one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century, the Saddam Hussein regime. And I see and receive evidence on a fairly regular basis. I mean, if you go out and
look at what’s happening on the ground, you’ll find that there is widespread support.
There was a poll done, just random in the last week, first one I’ve seen carefully done; admittedly, it’s a difficult area to poll in. Zogby International did it with American Enterprise magazine. But that’s got very positive news in it in terms of the numbers it shows with respect to the attitudes to what Americans have done.
One of the questions it asked is: “If you could have any model for the kind of government you’d like to have”—and they were given five choices—”which would it be?” The U.S. wins hands down. If you want to ask them do they want an Islamic government established, by 2:1 margins they say no, including the Shia population. If you ask how long they want Americans to stay, over 60 percent of the people polled said they want the U.S. to stay for at least another year. So admittedly there are problems, especially in that area where Saddam Hussein was from, where people have benefited most from his regime and who’ve got the most to lose if we’re successful in our enterprise, and continuing attacks from terror. But to suggest somehow that that’s representative of the country at large or the Iraqi people are opposed to what we’ve done in Iraq or are actively and aggressively trying to undermine it, I just think that’s not true.
MR. RUSSERT: You also told me, Mr. Vice President, in March that you thought Saddam would be captured or killed, turned in by his own people. Why hasn’t that happened if they view us as liberators?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, we’re working on it, and we’ll continue to work on it. His sons were turned in by the Iraqi people. A great many of the folks that we’ve captured of those top 55, the 42 we’ve got, a great many of them were turned in as a result of tips from the Iraqis. And as we’re there longer and get an Iraqi government stood up, get more and more Iraqis involved in the security service and the security force, the intelligence, I think, will improve and people will be willing to come forward and offer even more information than they have in the past that’ll help us wrap up these bad guys, and that includes get Saddam Hussein.
MR. RUSSERT: You have no doubt you’ll find him.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No doubt.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to weapons of mass destruction. I asked you back in March what you thought was the most important rationale for going to war with Iraq. There’s the question, and here is your answer:
“...the combination of [Saddam’s] development and use of chemical weapons, his development of biological weapons, his pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
VICE PRES. CHENEY: And the tie to terror.
MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think that the jury is still out in terms of trying to get everything pulled together with respect to what we know. But we’ve got a very good man now in charge of the operation, David Kay. He used to run UNSCOM, a highly qualified, technically qualified and able individual. He’s in charge of the operation now. And I also think, Tim, that if you go back and look at what we found to date, that we—there’s no doubt in my mind but what Saddam Hussein had these capabilities. This wasn’t an idea cooked up overnight by a handful of people, either in the administration or out of the CIA. The reporting that led to the National Intelligence Estimate, upon which I based my statements to you, that was produced a year ago now, the essence of which has since been declassified, that was the product of hundreds of people working over probably 20 years, back at least to the Osirak reactor in 1981. The conclusions in that NIE, I think, are very valid. And I think we will find that in fact they are valid. What we’re dealing with here is a regime that had to learn after we hit them in ’91 that anything above ground was likely to be destroyed in an air campaign. They’d gone through many years of inspections. They knew they had to hide and bury their capabilities in this region inside their civilian structure. And I think that’s what they did. And if you look—we’ll talk about the nuclear program. The judgment in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material, weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a few months to a year. That was the judgment of the intelligence community of the United States, and they had a high degree of confidence in it.
What do we know ahead? Well, we know he had worked on the program for 20 years. We know he had technicians who knew how do this stuff because they had been working on it over that period of time. We believed, the community believed, that he had a workable design for a bomb. And we know he had 500 tons of uranium. It is there today at Tuwaitha, under seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency. All those are facts that are basically not in dispute. And since we got in there, we found—we had a gentleman come forward, for example, with full designs for a process centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you’d need to build such a system. And we know Saddam had worked on that kind of system before. That’s physical evidence that we’ve got in hand today.
So to suggest that there is no evidence there that he had aspirations to acquire nuclear weapon, I don’t think is valid, and I think David Kay will find more evidence as he goes forward, interviews people, as we get to folks willing to come forward now as they become more and more convinced that it’s safe to do so, that, in fact, he had a robust plan, had previously worked on it and would work on it again.
Same on biological weapons—we believe he’d developed the capacity to go mobile with his BW production capability because, again, in reaction to what we had done to him in ’91. We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack.
So on CW and chemical weapons, my guess is it’s buried inside his civilian infrastructure. That’s not an unusual place to put it. And, again, David Kay’s task is to look for the people that were involved in the program, to find documentary evidence to back it up, to find physical evidence when he can find that. It’s a hard task, but I have got great confidence that he can do this. And again, the whole notion that somehow there’s nothing to the notion that Saddam Hussein had WMD or had developed WMD, it just strikes me as fallacious. It’s not valid now. Nobody drove into Baghdad and had somebody say, “Hey, there’s the building over there where all of our WMDs stored.” But that’s not the way the system worked.
MR. RUSSERT: There’s real debate about those labs. But I want to talk about something very specific. And that was the president’s State of the Union message when he said that the British had learned that Saddam was acquiring uranium from Africa. That was in January. In March the head of the International Energy Atomic Agency, ElBaradei, issued this statement: “A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector said in a report...Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed ‘not authentic’ after carefully scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors. ‘There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities,’ ElBaradei said.”
Eight days after that, you were on MEET THE PRESS, and we...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Right.
MR. RUSSERT: ...talked about that specifically. Let’s watch:
(Videotape, March 16, 2003):
MR. RUSSERT: And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree, yes. And you’ll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community, disagree.
And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Reconstituted nuclear weapons. You misspoke.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. I did misspeak. I said repeatedly during the show weapons capability. We never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.
MR. RUSSERT: Now, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a year before that, was sent over by the CIA because you raised the question about uranium from Africa. He says he came back from Niger and said that, in fact, he could not find any documentation that, in fact, Niger had sent uranium to Iraq or engaged in that activity and reported it back to the proper channels. Were you briefed on his findings in February, March of 2002?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.
I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa. What was in the State of the Union speech and what was in the original British White papers. So there may be difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground with respect to that, but I guess—like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came...
MR. RUSSERT: The CIA did.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who in the CIA, I don’t know.
MR. RUSSERT: This is what concerns people, that the administration hyped the intelligence, misled the American people. This article from The Washington Post about pressuring from Cheney visits: “Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq’s weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analyst felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit wth the Bush administration’s policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials. With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff ‘sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here,’ one senior agency official said.”
VICE PRES. CHENEY: In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job. I’ve had an interest in the intelligence area since I worked for Gerry Ford 30 years ago, served on the Intel Committee in the House for years in the ’80s, ran a big part of the intelligence community when I was secretary of Defense in the early ’90s. This is a very important area. It’s one the president’s asked me to work on, and I ask questions all the time. I think if you’re going to provide the intelligence and advice to the president of the United States to make life and death decisions, you need to be able to defend your conclusions, go into an arena where you can make the arguments about why you believe what you do based on the intelligence we’re got.
MR. RUSSERT: No pressure?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Shouldn’t be any pressure. I can’t think of a single instance. Maybe somebody can produce one. I’m unaware of any where the community changed a judgment that they made because I asked questions.
MR. RUSSERT: If they were wrong, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t we have a wholesale investigation into the intelligence failure that they predicted...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: What failure?
MR. RUSSERT: That Saddam had biological, chemical and is developing a nuclear program.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: My guess is in the end, they’ll be proven right, Tim. On the intelligence business, first of all, it’s intelligence. There are judgments involved in all of this. But we’ve got, I think, some very able people in the intelligence business that review the material here. This was a crucial subject. It was extensively covered for years. We’re very good at it. As I say, the British just revalidated their claim. So I’m not sure what the argument is about here. I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program.
How do you explain why Saddam Hussein, if he had no program, wouldn’t come clean and say, “I haven’t got a program. Come look”? Then he would have sanctions lifted. He’d earned $100 billion more in oil revenue over the last several years. He’d still be in power. The reason he didn’t was because obviously he couldn’t comply and wouldn’t comply with the U.N. resolutions demanding that he give up his WMD. The Security Council by a 15-to-nothing vote a year ago found him still in violation of those U.N. Security Council resolutions. A lot of the reporting isn’t U.S. reporting. It’s U.N. reporting on the supplies and stocks of VX and nerve agent and anthrax and so forth that he’s never accounted for.
So I say I’m not willing at all at this point to buy the proposition that somehow Saddam Hussein was innocent and he had no WMD and some guy out at the CIA, because I called him, cooked up a report saying he did.
That’s crazy. That makes no sense. It bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever. And in terms of asking questions, you bet I do. I’ve seen in times past when there’s been faulty intelligence, because they don’t always get it right; I think, for example, of having missed the downfall of the Soviet Union. And so I ask a lot of questions based on my years of experience in this business, but that’s what I get paid to do.
MR. RUSSERT: We have to take a quick break, be right back with more of our conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney and talk about the economy right after this.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: More with the vice president after this quick station break.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: And we are back.
Mr. Vice President, the economy and the Bush-Cheney record. The day you took office, Inauguration Day, as compared to now. Dow Jones is down 11 percent. Unemployment rate is up 49 percent. A $281 billion surplus is now a $500 billion plus deficit. Jobs, net loss of 2.6 million. The debt is up 20 percent and still growing. How can you run for re-election on that record?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, right there we were starting into a recession and we certainly didn’t bear responsibility for creating the circumstances that led to the recession. The combination of the recession, the economic slowdown, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war on terror have obviously created economic problems for the country, but we’re making significant progress. The president’s policies in terms of—especially the tax-cut package that we’ve passed now three times does offer very bright prospects for the future. The forecast by nearly everybody I’ve talked with for the last half of this year is we’re looking at 4 percent to 5 percent real growth, a significant boost over where we’ve been. Going into next year, we anticipate most forecasters’ growth on the order of 4 percent or better in GDP. So I think we’ve turned the corner and we’re making significant progress. And that’s part of the normal business cycle as well as the added unusual factors of a national emergency.
MR. RUSSERT: If you froze the tax cut for the top 1 percent of Americans, it would generate enough money to pay for the $87 billion for the war, if you did it for just one year. Would you consider that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think it’d be a mistake, because you can’t look at that without considering what its impact would be on the economy. An awful lot of the returns in that top bracket are small businesses, and they provide an awful lot of the job growth in this economy. If you’re going to go increase taxes on small businesses, you’re going to slow down the extent to which we’re able to reduce unemployment. So I think it’s a serious mistake; the wrong time to raise taxes.
MR. RUSSERT: The president said in 2002 the tax cut would generate 800,000 jobs; in 2003, he said—be another million jobs. None of that has happened. What has happened is the deficit is skyrocketing, over $500 billion. You used to be a real deficit hawk. We went back when you were a leader in Congress. This is what you said about Ronald Reagan’s deficit. You said that “‘The continued failure of the administration to deal with the deficit puts at risk everything Ronald Reagan believes in,’ said Rep. Richard Cheney of Wyoming. ‘...The deficit “potentially” is Mr. Reagan’s Vietnam,’ he told reporters.”
And then this: “‘Some of us frustrated by the failure of the administration to do anything about deficits,’ said House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Dick Cheney. Asked how the president looked after his cancer surgery, Cheney said, ‘He looks good; he’s just a little soft on deficits.’”
That’s when the deficit was below $200 billion. What happened to Dick Cheney, deficit hawk.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I was just looking at the picture you got there, Tim. I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I am a deficit hawk. So is the president. The fact of the matter is, we’ve always made exceptions for recession, national emergency, time of war. The deficit that we’re running today, after we get the approval of the $87 billion, will still be less as a percentage of our total capacity to pay for it, our total economic activity in this country, than it was back in the ’80s or the deficits we ran in the ’90s. We’re still about 4.7 percent of our total GDP. So the notion that the United States can’t afford this or that we shouldn’t do it is, I think, seriously flawed. One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.
MR. RUSSERT: And tax cuts.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tax cuts accounted for only about 25 percent of the deficit.
MR. RUSSERT: But we see deficits for the next 10 years, big ones. How do you deal with that, when you have Social Security, Medicare, coming up?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We anticipate even with the added spending that we’ve asked for now we’ll cut the deficit roughly in half from where it’ll be next year over the next five years. So we’ll be moving in the right direction. We’ve got to have—without question, we’ve got to make choices, we’ve got to have fiscal discipline on the rest of the budget. But the idea that we can’t defend America or that we can’t go do what needs to be done in the Middle East with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, support the troops, rebuild those countries so they never again become safe havens for terrorists to threaten our safety and our security, is silly. The cost of one attack on 9/11 was far greater than what we’re spending in Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: What do you think of the Democratic field?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Haven’t really, frankly, paid a hell of a lot of attention to it, Tim. I’m awful busy with my normal day job. And I just haven’t—really haven’t looked at it. I know some of them; Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt are people I’ve known for some time. Others, like Howard Dean, I frankly don’t have any relationship with. And I’ll watch with interest. Whoever they nominate, we’re ready to take them on.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you think the president is betting his presidency on the war in Iraq?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: This president is betting his presidency on the importance of fighting the war on terror, of recognizing that 9/11 changed everything, of adopting a strategy that’s going to make this nation safer and more secure for our kids and grandkids. And it takes a president willing to take a risk, willing to use the power of the United States, to make that happen. And this president’s done it.
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Vice President, we thank you for joining us and sharing your views.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Thank you, sir.
MR. RUSSERT: And we’ll be right back.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe
The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants.
By the Associated Press.

Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said...

Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan.

The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO...

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/politics/main570137.shtml

GAO: Cheney Hindered Probe

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2003

Dick Cheney (Photo: AP)

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants.

(AP) Congressional investigators say they were unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Vice President Dick Cheney about his energy task force.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, a General Accounting Office report released Monday said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said.

The GAO unsuccessfully sued the vice president last year to release information.

The Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the GAO's report before it was released and chose not to comment. The vice president's office declined to look at it, the GAO said.

The National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed by President Bush in January 2001 to develop a national energy policy.

The task force submitted its final report in May 2001. Congress is now considering the energy-related legislative proposals.

The GAO said the task force's report was the "product of a centralized, topdown, short-term, and labor-intensive process that involved the efforts of several hundred federal employees government wide."

In the few months between the start of the energy task force and its presentation of the final report, the vice president, some Cabinet-level and other senior administration officials and support staff controlled most of the report's development, according to the GAO.

They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said.

Two Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Bob Graham of Florida, on Tuesday criticized the administration for failing to release the energy task force documents and called on Cheney to produce the records.

"As gas prices reach historic levels and the nation's energy infrastructure is pushed beyond its limits, the Bush administration has decided their energy policy will be of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests," Kerry said in a statement.

Said Graham: "If the Bush-Cheney team has nothing to hide, then why are they hiding documents? There can be only one answer — they don't want the American people to know just how much influence the big oil companies have over U.S. energy policy."

Last December, a federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to gather information about meetings that Cheney's energy task force held with industry executives and lobbyists while formulating the administration's energy plan.

The judge said the lawsuit filed by Comptroller General David Walker against the vice president was an unprecedented act that raised serious separation-of-powers issues between the executive and legislative branches of government. The comptroller general runs the GAO.

Some Democratic congressmen requested information in the spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with in creating the Bush administration's energy plan.

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

Arnie and Kenneth Lay and Dick Cheney had meetings together during the California Energy Crisis/Scandal. How interesting.

Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis
By Jason Leopold for Commondreams.org.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0817-07.htm

Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis
By Jason Leopold
CommonDreams.org

Sunday 17 August 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.

More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.

At the meeting, Davis asked Bush for federal assistance, such as imposing federally mandated price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. But Bush refused saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that’s what caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket. It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said. However, Bush’s response appears to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis. It worked. According to recent polls, a majority of voters grew increasingly frustrated with the way Davis handled the power crisis. Schwarzenegger has used the energy crisis and missteps by Davis to bolster his standing with potential voters. While Davis took a beating in the press (some energy companies ran attack ads against the governor), Lay used his political clout to gather support for deregulation.

A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.

“No,” Cheney said during the Frontline interview. “The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things--an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process.”

A month before the Frontline interview and Bush’s meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chairs Bush’s energy task force, met with Lay to discuss Bush’s National Energy Policy. Lay, whose company was the largest contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign, made some recommendations that would financially benefit his company. Lay gave Cheney a memo that included eight recommendations for the energy policy. Of the eight, seven were included in the final draft. The energy policy was released in late May 2001, after Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken met with Lay and after the meeting between Bush and Davis and Cheney’s Frontline interview.

The policy made only scant references to California's energy crisis, which Enron was accused of igniting, and did not indicate what should be done to provide the state some relief. Cheney said the policy focused on long-term solutions to the country's energy needs, such as opening up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and freeing up transmission lines. That's why California was ignored in the report, Cheney said.

What’s unknown to many of the voters who will decide Davis’s fate on Oct. 7, the day of the recall election, is that while Cheney dismissed Davis’s accusations that power companies were withholding electricity supplies from the state, one company engaged in exactly the type of behavior that Davis described. But Davis would never be told about the manipulative tactics the energy company engaged.

In a confidential settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose chairman was appointed by Bush a year earlier, Tulsa, Okla., based-Williams Companies agreed to refund California $8 million in profits it reaped by deliberately shutting down one of its power plants in the state in the spring of 2000 to drive up the wholesale price of electricity in California.

The evidence, a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between an employee at Williams and an employee at a Southern California power plant operated by Williams, shows how the two conspired to jack up power prices and create an artificial electricity shortage by keeping the power plant out of service for two weeks.

Details of the settlement had been under seal by FERC for more than a year and were released in November after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain the full copy of its report. Similarly, FERC also found that Reliant Energy engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Williams and in February the commission ordered Reliant to pay California a $13.8 million settlement.

Had the evidence been released in 2001 when Davis accused energy companies of fraud it would have helped California’s case and voters may have viewed the governor more positively. But if FERC were to publicly release the details of the Williams settlement it wouldn't have jibed with Bush's energy policy, which was made public instead in May 2001. It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.

But Davis was still causing problems for Lay. California’s power woes had a ripple effect, forcing other states to cancel plans to open up their electricity markets to competition fearing deregulation would lead to widespread blackouts and price gouging. For Enron, a company that generated most of its revenue from buying and selling power and natural gas on the open market, such a move would paralyze the company.

Fearing that Davis would take steps to re-regulate California’s power market that Lay spent years lobbying California lawmakers to open up to competition, Lay recruited Schwarzenegger, Riordan, Milken, and other powerful business leaders like Bruce Karatz, chief executive of home builder Kaufman & Broad; Ray Irani, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum; and Kevin Sharer, chief executive of biotech giant Amgen.

The 90-minute secret meeting Lay convened took place inside a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel. Lay, and other Enron representatives at the meeting, handed out a four-page document to Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken titled “Comprehensive Solution for California,” which called for an end to federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in the California energy crisis and said consumers should pay for the state’s disastrous experiment with deregulation through multibillion rate increases. Another bullet point in the four-page document said “Get deregulation right this time -- California needs a real electricity market, not government takeovers.”

The irony of that statement is that California’s flawed power market design helped Enron earn more than $500 million in one year, a tenfold increase in profits from a previous year and it’s coordinated effort in manipulating the price of electricity in California, which other power companies mimicked, cost the state close to $70 billion and led to the beginning of what is now the state’s $38 billion budget deficit. The power crisis forced dozens of businesses to close down or move to other states, where cheaper electricity was in abundant supply, and greatly reduced the revenue California relied heavily upon.

Lay asked the participants to support his plan and lobby the state Legislature to make it a law. It’s unclear whether Schwarzenegger held a stake in Enron at the time or if he followed through on Lay’s request. His spokesman, Rob Stutzman, hasn’t returned numerous calls for comment about the meeting. For Schwarzenegger and the others who attended the meeting, associating with Enron, particularly Ken Lay, the disgraced chairman of the high-flying energy company, during the peak of California’s power crisis in May 2001 could be compared to meeting with Osama bin Laden after 9-11 to understand why terrorism isn’t necessarily such a heinous act.

A person who attended the meeting at the Peninsula, which this reporter wrote about two years ago, said Lay invited Schwarzenegger and Riordan because the two were being courted in 2001 as GOP gubernatorial candidates. A week before the meeting, Davis signed legislation to create a state power authority that would buy, operate and build power plants in lieu of out-of-state energy companies, such as Enron, that the governor alleged was ripping off the state.

For Enron’s Lay, the timing of the meeting was crucial. His company was just five months away from disintegrating and he was doing everything in his power to keep his company afloat and the profits rolling in.

It wasn’t until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company’s manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company’s role in California’s electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like “Fat Boy” and “Death Star,” that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.

Enron’s top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators who are still trying to get to the bottom of the crisis.

California is still demanding that FERC order the energy companies to refund the state $8.9 billion for overcharging the state for electricity during its yearlong energy crisis. But FERC says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds because the state still owes the energy companies $1.8 billion in unpaid power bills.

Davis, who refused to cave in to the demands of companies like Enron even while Democrats, Republicans and the public criticized him, was right all along. Maybe Californians ought to cut Davis some slack.

-------

Jason Leopold (jasonleopold@hotmail.com) spent two years covering California's energy crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is currently working on a book about the crisis.

This is from the July 31, 2003 program.

Cheney Reaction (Small - 9 MB)

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Group: Cheney Task Force Eyed on Iraq Oil
By H. Josef Hebert for the Associated Press.

Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.

The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration's energy needs and future energy agenda.

Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush's energy plan.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-iraq-cheney-energy,0,7562329.story

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.

The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration's energy needs and future energy agenda.

Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush's energy plan.

Tom Fitton, the group's president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information, but "it shows why it is important that we learn what was going on in the task force."

"Opponents of the war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq," said Fitton. "Supporters will say they were only evaluating oil reserves in the Mideast, and the likelihood of future oil production."

The task force report was released in May 2001. In it, a chapter titled "Strengthening Global Alliances" calls the Middle East "central to world oil security" and urges support for initiatives by the region's oil producers to open their energy sectors to foreign investment. The chapter does not mention Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Commerce Department spokesman Trevor Francis said: "It is the responsibility of the Commerce Department to serve as a commercial liaison for U.S. companies doing business around the world, including those that develop and utilize energy resources. The Energy Task Force evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply. The final report, released in May of 2001, contains maps of key energy-producing regions in the world, including Russia, North America, the Middle East and the Caspian region."

A spokeswoman for the vice president did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Friday.

A two-page document obtained with the map and released by Judicial Watch lists, as of March 2001, companies in 30 countries that had an interest in contracts to help then-President Saddam Hussein develop Iraq's oil wealth.

The involvement of Russia and France has been documented. Also on the list were companies from Canada, Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, India and Mexico. Even Vietnam had interest in a service contract and, according to the paper, was close to signing an agreement in October 1999.

So far nearly 40,000 pages of internal documents from various departments and agencies have been made public related to the Cheney task force's work under the Judicial Watch-Sierra Club lawsuit. The task force itself has refused to turn over any of its own papers.

So either Cheney knew and he and the Shrub communicate so poorly that this information was never conveyed from dick to shrub -- or -- the Shrub did know that the Nigerian Uranium information was incorrect. Either way, it stinks.

The Uranium Fiction
A NY Times Editorial.

We're glad that someone in Washington has finally taken responsibility for letting President Bush make a false accusation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the State of the Union address last January, but the matter will not end there. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, stepped up to the issue yesterday when he said the C.I.A. had approved Mr. Bush's speech and failed to advise him to drop the mistaken charge that Iraq had recently tried to import significant quantities of uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to do...

We're glad that someone in Washington has finally taken responsibility for letting President Bush make a false accusation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the State of the Union address last January, but the matter will not end there. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, stepped up to the issue yesterday when he said the C.I.A. had approved Mr. Bush's speech and failed to advise him to drop the mistaken charge that Iraq had recently tried to import significant quantities of uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to do.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/12SAT1.html

The Uranium Fiction

We're glad that someone in Washington has finally taken responsibility for letting President Bush make a false accusation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the State of the Union address last January, but the matter will not end there. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, stepped up to the issue yesterday when he said the C.I.A. had approved Mr. Bush's speech and failed to advise him to drop the mistaken charge that Iraq had recently tried to import significant quantities of uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to do.

So far, the administration's handling of this important — and politically explosive — issue has mostly involved a great deal of finger-pointing instead of an exacting reconstruction of events and an acceptance of blame by all those responsible. Mr. Bush himself engaged in the free-for-all yesterday while traveling in Africa when he said his speech had been "cleared by the intelligence services." That led within a few hours to Mr. Tenet's mea culpa.

It is clear, however, that much more went into this affair than the failure of the C.I.A. to pounce on the offending 16 words in Mr. Bush's speech. A good deal of information already points to a willful effort by the war camp in the administration to pump up an accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the well of the House of Representatives last January. Doubts about the accusation were raised in March 2002 by Joseph Wilson 4th, a former American diplomat, after he was dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to look into the issue.

Mr. Wilson has said he is confident that his concerns were circulated not only within the agency but also at the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Tenet, in his statement yesterday, confirmed that the Wilson findings had been given wide distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other high officials had not been directly informed about them by the C.I.A. The uranium charge should never have found its way into Mr. Bush's speech. Determining how it got there is essential to understanding whether the administration engaged in a deliberate effort to mislead the nation about the Iraqi threat.

Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By Massimo Calabresi and Timothy J. Burger for Time.

What Was Cheney's Role?
Lawmakers who once saluted every Bush claim and command are beginning to express doubts. Two congressional panels are opening new rounds of investigations into the Administration's prewar claims about WMD. One of their immediate inquiries, sources tell Time, involves Vice President Dick Cheney's role in reviewing the intelligence before the bombing started. Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA in the prelude to the war, going over intelligence assessments with the analysts who produced them. Some Democrats say Cheney's visits may have amounted to pressure on the normally cautious agency. Cheney's defenders insist that his visits merely showed the importance of the issue and that an honest analyst wouldn't feel pressure to twist intelligence. The House intelligence committee (and possibly its Senate counterpart, sources say) plans to question the CIA analysts who briefed Cheney, and that could lead to calling Cheney's hard-line aides and perhaps the Veep himself to testify.

Is Powell Trying To Have It Both Ways?
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who staked his reputation on his February declaration at the U.N. about Saddam Hussein's arms program, is also feeling the heat. Powell's aides fanned out after that performance to say the Secretary had gone to the CIA and scrubbed every piece of intelligence to make certain it was solid. But since then, little of Powell's presentation has been proved by evidence on the ground, and last week his aides were on the defensive over a memo from the State Department's intelligence bureau that questioned whether two Iraqi trailers discovered in April were mobile bioweapons labs, as Powell has asserted. Questionable intelligence that made it into Powell's February speech leaves him particularly vulnerable. Expect a push by Democrats, and perhaps some Republicans, to seek Powell's testimony too.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030707-461781,00.html

Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By MASSIMO CALABRESI AND TIMOTHY J. BURGER

ERIC DRAPER/THE WHITE HOUSE/AP
QUESTION TIME: Bush huddles with Bremer and Franks in Doha, Qatar

Sunday, Jun. 29, 2003
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.

It seems as if just about everyone has questions these days about the missing WMD. Did U.S. intelligence officials—or their civilian bosses—overstate the evidence of weapons before the war? And if some intelligence officials expressed skepticism about WMD, who ignored them? For the past several weeks, the usually lockstep Bush Administration has done its best to maintain a unified front in the face of these queries. Whenever asked, Administration officials have replied that the weapons will turn up eventually. But as the search drags on through its third largely futile month, the blame game in Washington has gone into high gear. And as Bush's allies and enemies alike on Capitol Hill begin to pick apart some 19 volumes of prewar intelligence and examine them one document at a time, the cohesive Bush team is starting to come apart. "This is a cloud hanging over their credibility, their word," Republican Senate Intelligence Committee member Chuck Hagel told abc News. Here are key questions Congress wants answered:

What Was Cheney's Role?
Lawmakers who once saluted every Bush claim and command are beginning to express doubts. Two congressional panels are opening new rounds of investigations into the Administration's prewar claims about WMD. One of their immediate inquiries, sources tell Time, involves Vice President Dick Cheney's role in reviewing the intelligence before the bombing started. Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA in the prelude to the war, going over intelligence assessments with the analysts who produced them. Some Democrats say Cheney's visits may have amounted to pressure on the normally cautious agency. Cheney's defenders insist that his visits merely showed the importance of the issue and that an honest analyst wouldn't feel pressure to twist intelligence. The House intelligence committee (and possibly its Senate counterpart, sources say) plans to question the CIA analysts who briefed Cheney, and that could lead to calling Cheney's hard-line aides and perhaps the Veep himself to testify.

Is Powell Trying To Have It Both Ways?
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who staked his reputation on his February declaration at the U.N. about Saddam Hussein's arms program, is also feeling the heat. Powell's aides fanned out after that performance to say the Secretary had gone to the CIA and scrubbed every piece of intelligence to make certain it was solid. But since then, little of Powell's presentation has been proved by evidence on the ground, and last week his aides were on the defensive over a memo from the State Department's intelligence bureau that questioned whether two Iraqi trailers discovered in April were mobile bioweapons labs, as Powell has asserted. Questionable intelligence that made it into Powell's February speech leaves him particularly vulnerable. Expect a push by Democrats, and perhaps some Republicans, to seek Powell's testimony too.

Will Tenet Be Left Holding the Bag?
CIA Director George Tenet is faring a bit better. The House committee's top Democrat, Jane Harman, noted last week that "caveats and qualifiers" Tenet raised in prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons were "rarely included" in Administration arguments for war. After the awkward Q&A in Doha, Bush put Tenet in charge of the WMD hunt. Tenet in turn hired a former U.N. weapons inspector, David Kay, to run the search, but Tenet and Kay have a lot of ground to make up fast. Tenet, sources say, recently conceded to the House panel that the CIA should have done more to warn that finding WMD could be a drawn-out process. Tenet got a reprieve last week when an Iraqi scientist who had hidden parts and documents for nuclear-weapons production in his backyard for 12 years came forward. Tenet's usually behind-the-scenes CIA suddenly became very public in trumpeting the importance of the discovery, if only to remind people how hard illicit weapons would be to find. But Tenet's hot zone isn't Baghdad; it's Capitol Hill. He canceled testimony before the Senate committee last week, citing a schedule conflict. If he doesn't find any weapons, he needs to find a way not to be blamed.

Bush officials believe that time and history are on their side. They argue that now that Saddam is gone, Americans don't care very much about finding WMD. They also say it is only a matter of time before more evidence of weapons materials and programs emerges. And when that occurs, they contend, all their opponents will look as silly as they did when they argued that the war was going badly in its second week. "The Dems are looking for an issue, but I think they're making a mistake," says a senior Administration official.

Democrats do sense a possibly potent campaign theme, but they run the risk of appearing to politicize a sensitive national-security issue as they try to prove the Administration has a credibility gap. But Democrats are not alone in feeling as though they may have been sandbagged on the evidence before the war began. Sources say g.o.p. Senate Intelligence Committee members Olympia Snowe and Hagel have privately questioned the Administration's handling of prewar intelligence. The Republican-held House voted last week to order the CIA to report back on "lessons learned" from the buildup to war in Iraq. The House and Senate intelligence-committee leaders have agreed to coordinate their probes loosely to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. In a rare move, the House panel quietly voted on June 12 to grant all 435 Representatives access to the Iraq intelligence, although a Capitol Hill source said fewer than 10 members outside the committee had reviewed the material.

Administration officials have a further concern about where all these questions are leading. They fear that any problem with the prewar intelligence could undermine Bush's ability to continue his muscular campaign against terrorism overseas. The Administration has argued that to counter new kinds of threats posed by terrorists, rogue states and WMD, it has to be able to act pre-emptively. But pre-emption requires excellent intelligence, and the whole doctrine is undermined if the intelligence is wrong—or confected. "Intelligence takes on an even more important role than in the past because you can't wait until you see an enemy army massing anymore," says former Clinton Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg. But if WMD don't turn up and the Administration wants to act elsewhere, it may find that the enemy massing against it is public opinion at home.

From the Jul. 07, 2003 issue of TIME magazine

Update On Cheney's Health (Small - 4 MB)
Update On Health Of Cheney's Relationship With Halliburton (Small - 3 MB)
One Big Cheney Update (Small - 7 MB)

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Judge questions Bush request to halt Cheney suit
By the Associated Press (in the Houston Chronicle).

A federal appeals court today questioned the Bush administration's request to stop a lawsuit delving into Vice President Dick Cheney's contacts with energy industry executives and lobbyists.

Appeals Judges Harry Edwards and David Tatel suggested the White House had no legal basis for asking them to block a lower court judge from letting the case proceed.

The Bush administration took the unusual step of coming to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the midst of the case.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has ruled that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch may be entitled to a limited amount of information about the meetings Cheney and his aides had with the energy industry in formulating the White House's energy plan.

The plan, adopted four months after President Bush took office, favored opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling and a wide range of other steps backed by industry.

Among the industry executives that the Cheney energy task force has acknowledged meeting with were former Enron Corp. chief executive Ken Lay.

Tatel, an appointee of President Clinton, said the administration has failed to show that it is suffering legal harm at the hands of the lower court. Edwards, a Carter-era appointee, told a government attorney flatly that "you have no authority" to ask the appeals court to intervene in the middle of the lawsuit.

The government is seeking "a modest extension" of a previous court ruling, responded Gregory Katsas, a deputy assistant attorney general.

The third member of the panel, Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, expressed doubt that the Cheney task force is required to disclose information about its inner workings. However, Randolph, an appointee of Bush's father, also questioned whether the administration should be seeking appeals court intervention.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/1872197

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April 17, 2003, 11:01AM
Judge questions Bush request to halt Cheney suit
Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court today questioned the Bush administration's request to stop a lawsuit delving into Vice President Dick Cheney's contacts with energy industry executives and lobbyists.

Appeals Judges Harry Edwards and David Tatel suggested the White House had no legal basis for asking them to block a lower court judge from letting the case proceed.

The Bush administration took the unusual step of coming to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the midst of the case.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has ruled that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch may be entitled to a limited amount of information about the meetings Cheney and his aides had with the energy industry in formulating the White House's energy plan.

The plan, adopted four months after President Bush took office, favored opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling and a wide range of other steps backed by industry.

Among the industry executives that the Cheney energy task force has acknowledged meeting with were former Enron Corp. chief executive Ken Lay.

Tatel, an appointee of President Clinton, said the administration has failed to show that it is suffering legal harm at the hands of the lower court. Edwards, a Carter-era appointee, told a government attorney flatly that "you have no authority" to ask the appeals court to intervene in the middle of the lawsuit.

The government is seeking "a modest extension" of a previous court ruling, responded Gregory Katsas, a deputy assistant attorney general.

The third member of the panel, Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, expressed doubt that the Cheney task force is required to disclose information about its inner workings. However, Randolph, an appointee of Bush's father, also questioned whether the administration should be seeking appeals court intervention.

The Bush administration says it has demonstrated that the two private groups are not entitled to any information about the meetings between industry representatives and presidential aides, including the vice president.

The environmental group and the conservative group allege that participants from industry effectively became members of Cheney's task force in assembling the White House's energy policy.

But Halliburton can still be a subcontractor, according to the Newsweek story below.

Note that a letter from Rep. Henry Waxman appears to have been instrumental in heating up the situation. (Along with this telling Daily Show Clip, perhaps?)

Halliburton Out of the Running
The construction firm once run by Dick Cheney won’t get a big Iraq contract
By Michael Hirsh for Newsweek.

Halliburton was one of five large U.S. companies that the Bush administration asked in mid-February to bid on the 21-month contract, which involves the reconstruction of Iraq’s critical infrastructure, including roads, bridges and hospitals, after the war. But the administration has come under increasingly strident criticism abroad and at the United Nations for offering postwar contracts only to U.S. companies. Many of the questions have been raised about Halliburton, which Cheney headed from 1995 until 2000. On Monday, the U.S. Army announced it had awarded a contract to extinguish oil fires and restore oil infrastructure in Iraq to Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root engineering and construction division. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, later sent a letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, questioning why other oil-service companies had not been allowed to bid.

...Allegations of a too-close-for-comfort relationship with corporate America have long dogged Cheney and other Bush administration officials, as well as insiders. On Thursday, leading hawk Richard Perle stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon panel of unpaid outside advisers, after congressional Democrats raised questions about his relationship with Global Crossing, a telecom firm that had sought his assistance in winning government approval for a deal with an Asian conglomerate. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, said Friday she “hadn’t even heard” that Halliburton would not be awarded the reconstruction contract and added, “The vice president has nothing to do with these contracts.”

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/892259.asp?0cv=KB10&cp1=1

Vice President Dick Cheney arrives at the White House earlier this month
Halliburton Out of the Running
The construction firm once run by Dick Cheney won’t get a big Iraq contract
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

March 28 — After taking some political heat, Halliburton is stepping out of the kitchen. The giant energy and construction firm once managed by Vice President Dick Cheney is no longer in the running for a $600 million rebuilding contract in postwar Iraq, NEWSWEEK has learned.

TIMOTHY BEANS, THE chief acquisition officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in an interview that Halliburton is not one of the two finalists to be prime contractor for the reconstruction of Iraq, though the Houston-based firm could take part as a subcontractor. The contract is to be awarded next week.

Halliburton was one of five large U.S. companies that the Bush administration asked in mid-February to bid on the 21-month contract, which involves the reconstruction of Iraq’s critical infrastructure, including roads, bridges and hospitals, after the war. But the administration has come under increasingly strident criticism abroad and at the United Nations for offering postwar contracts only to U.S. companies. Many of the questions have been raised about Halliburton, which Cheney headed from 1995 until 2000. On Monday, the U.S. Army announced it had awarded a contract to extinguish oil fires and restore oil infrastructure in Iraq to Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root engineering and construction division. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, later sent a letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, questioning why other oil-service companies had not been allowed to bid.

Controversial Bush Aide Perle Resigns

Allegations of a too-close-for-comfort relationship with corporate America have long dogged Cheney and other Bush administration officials, as well as insiders. On Thursday, leading hawk Richard Perle stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon panel of unpaid outside advisers, after congressional Democrats raised questions about his relationship with Global Crossing, a telecom firm that had sought his assistance in winning government approval for a deal with an Asian conglomerate. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, said Friday she “hadn’t even heard” that Halliburton would not be awarded the reconstruction contract and added, “The vice president has nothing to do with these contracts.”

What remains unclear is whether Halliburton took itself out of the running for the contract, was asked by the Bush administration to do so or whether its bid was simply not deemed competitive. USAID’s Beans would not elaborate on why Halliburton did not make it onto the finalists’ list, but he suggested that Halliburton chose to play a subcontracting role. And Beans said that Andrew Natsios, director of the aid agency—which is handing out most of the postwar contracts—is keen to counter any allegations of favoritism or political influence. “If I got a phone call from anybody putting any political pressure on me, I would report it immediately to Natsios, as I’ve been instructed to do,” said Beans. “He said if anybody calls you, if there’s any pressure whatsoever, you tell me immediately … No one has called me on this. This is going to be done completely openly, transparently and honestly.” USAID officials also emphasize that bidding is reviewed by two “independent” panels composed of engineers and career civil servants.

Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, referred all questions about the contract to USAID. But a U.N. official who follows the issue told NEWSWEEK that the Iraq reconstruction contract probably wasn’t worth the bad publicity for Halliburton, which depends on maintaining a favorable image both in Washington and the Arab world (where it gets much of its oil-related business, and where the war is increasingly unpopular). “This kind of political controversy was not in their corporate interests,” he said. Halliburton may prefer to quietly work as a subcontractor rather than be in the spotlight as prime contractor, the official suggested.

Beans said USAID had originally hoped to announce the reconstruction contract on Wednesday and has delayed the announcement until “realistically, early next week.” He said the contract, part of $2.4 billion allocated for relief and reconstruction in Bush’s supplemental budget request, has been delayed mainly because of last-minute complications raised by lawyers for the two final bidders, whom he would not identify. (Among the other U.S. companies asked to bid were Fluor Corp., Washington Group, Bechtel Group, Louis Berger Group and Parsons Corp.) The snag involves settling questions about liability issues if a contractor accidentally uncovers and releases—by digging or other means—poison gas or other weapons of mass destruction during reconstruction, he said.

IMG: E-mail from the Homefront
The controversy over the awarding of the first postwar contracts only to U.S. companies is part of a larger ongoing issue of whether Iraq’s transformation will be more U.S.-led or multilateral. On Thursday, Bush and his No. 1 ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, dickered at Camp David over how central a role the United Nations would play in postwar Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has taken the lead on postwar as well as wartime issues, is pushing a plan that relies on speed, efficiency and U.S. “unity of command” in contrast to United Nations-led nation-building efforts in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. Blair, in part because he is under terrific political pressure at home to take a multilateral approach, has effectively become the spokesman for U.N. interests in Washington.
IMG: Psy-Ops Gallery

USAID officials say the practical demands of rebuilding Iraq quickly, and the legal obligation they are under to favor U.S. firms—Congress wrote such “aid-tying” preferences into the law—have drastically limited their choices. They point especially to the need for speed, which in turn requires security clearances; generally only U.S. companies have such clearances. Also, invoking a legal exception called “impairment of foreign assistance” allowed the administration to circumvent normal bidding procedures, which can take many months. “It’s where people cannot wait,” said Beans. “Remember, these were part of the front-end rush job to get support in. We couldn’t piddle around ... When we were still before the United Nations, we didn’t know how this was going to go. We were in contingency planning. A $600 million procurement is huge. Normally it would take us five to six months to get it done. They said you’ve got two months.” The stakes are bigger than that, actually: the prime contractor is likely to get a lot more than $600 million funneled its way in future extensions of the contract.

Even big British construction firms like Costain and Balfour Beatty have not been asked to bid as prime contractors, even though British troops are fighting alongside American soldiers and have secured the major port of Umm Qasr, which is to be part of the rebuilding project. Earlier this week, USAID awarded a nearly $5 million contract to a Seattle-based company, Stevedoring Services, to run Umm Qasr. British firms had expressed interest in the contract.

Natsios says that in an effort to broaden the participants he has invoked a special provision of the law opening up subcontracts to friendly countries. He and other aid officials note that up to about 50 percent of the work is going to be subcontracted, as is happening in Afghanistan. As of yet, however, no foreign firms have been awarded even a subcontracting role in Iraq, USAID officials said. Last week, British cabinet minister Clare Short traveled to Washington and complained to Natsios and other administration officials about the contracting process.

Beans said the war’s slower-than-expected progress has at least one silver lining for him. “I’ve been under incredible pressure to get these things done,” he said. “The fact that they’ve been slowed down a little bit has given me a little extra time.”

"Cost plus" basis huh?
Iraq rebuilding contracts awarded
Halliburton, Stevedoring Services of America get government contracts for early relief work.
By Mark Gongloff for CNN/Money.

The Army Corps of Engineers told CNN Tuesday that Halliburton would be paid on a "cost plus" basis, meaning it would be reimbursed for the costs of its work and would get a certain percentage of those costs as a fee.

Since it's still unknown how much damage has been or will be done to Iraqi oil fields in the war, it's difficult to estimate the contract's eventual dollar value.

But its biggest value could be that it puts Halliburton in a prime position to handle the complete refurbishment of Iraq's long-neglected oil infrastructure, which will be a plum job.

Getting Iraq's oil fields to pre-1991 production levels will take at least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with $3 billion more in annual operating expenses, according to a recent study by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, named for the first President Bush's secretary of state during the first Gulf War.

"Certainly Halliburton would have the lead [in the competition for that job], even absent this contract, given the size and scope of their current operations," said Pierre Conner, an analyst with Hibernia Southcoast Capital. "But there's no question they'll start with some footprint there. It clearly puts them in the position where they will know more about the situation and have a bit of an operation there."

Though none of the potential administrators of such a contract -- including the Defense Department, the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations -- have claimed responsibility for handing out the job, Monday's award and Bush's request for funding seem to indicate the U.S. government will be in charge.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://money.cnn.com/2003/03/25/news/companies/war_contracts/index.htm

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Iraq rebuilding contracts awarded
Halliburton, Stevedoring Services of America get government contracts for early relief work.
March 25, 2003: 4:33 PM EST
By Mark Gongloff, CNN/Money Staff Writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The first contracts for rebuilding post-war Iraq have been awarded, and Vice President Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton Co., is one of the early winners.

The Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) unit of Halliburton (HAL: up $0.54 to $20.66, Research, Estimates), of which Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000, said late Monday that it was awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure.

President Bush Tuesday asked Congress for $489.3 million to cover the cost of repairing damage to Iraq's oil facilities, much or all of which could go to Halliburton or its subcontractors under the terms of its contract with the Army.

Cheney divested himself of all interest in Halliburton, the largest U.S. oilfield services company, after the 2000 election.

Halliburton wouldn't speculate about the total monetary value or duration of its contract, under which it will put into action some of the firefighting and repair plans it outlined for the Army in a study it conducted in November.

"KBR's ... contract is limited to task orders under the contract for only those services which are necessary to support the mission in the near term," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said.

The Army Corps of Engineers told CNN Tuesday that Halliburton would be paid on a "cost plus" basis, meaning it would be reimbursed for the costs of its work and would get a certain percentage of those costs as a fee.

Since it's still unknown how much damage has been or will be done to Iraqi oil fields in the war, it's difficult to estimate the contract's eventual dollar value.

But its biggest value could be that it puts Halliburton in a prime position to handle the complete refurbishment of Iraq's long-neglected oil infrastructure, which will be a plum job.

Getting Iraq's oil fields to pre-1991 production levels will take at least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with $3 billion more in annual operating expenses, according to a recent study by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, named for the first President Bush's secretary of state during the first Gulf War.

"Certainly Halliburton would have the lead [in the competition for that job], even absent this contract, given the size and scope of their current operations," said Pierre Conner, an analyst with Hibernia Southcoast Capital. "But there's no question they'll start with some footprint there. It clearly puts them in the position where they will know more about the situation and have a bit of an operation there."

Though none of the potential administrators of such a contract -- including the Defense Department, the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations -- have claimed responsibility for handing out the job, Monday's award and Bush's request for funding seem to indicate the U.S. government will be in charge.

Halliburton said it has subcontracted the firefighting portion of the Army contract to Houston-based companies Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc. (WEL: up $0.06 to $1.16, Research, Estimates) and Wild Well Control Inc., a private company.

Hall of Halliburton said all oil fires should be put out within 240 days. Very few oil wells have been set ablaze by Iraqis so far, in contrast to the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait set fire to more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells. Halliburton's KBR unit was involved in putting out the 1991 fires.

Separately, USAID late Monday awarded a $4.8 million contract to Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), a private company based in Seattle, to manage the Umm Qasr ports in southern Iraq.

Umm Qasr's ports, where U.S. and British troops have struggled for full control, are seen as critical to efforts to bring humanitarian relief to Iraqis. SSA will handle several tasks, including assessing the need for dredging and repairs to the ports, and unloading and warehousing cargo.

USAID plans to issue seven other contracts, including one for $600 million for general construction work in post-war Iraq. Halliburton is among several companies reported to have put in bids for that contract.

The Daily Show is turning out to be a vital source of news and information during this war.

Jon and the gang are gracious as always as they connect the frightening, depressing dots. (Note: here's an update on some developments in this situation since this clip was originally posted.)
Daily Show On Halliburton Contract (Small 9 MB)

Little Halliburton Movie (Hi-res 8 MB)

The popular belief is that Iraq started those fires. However, there have now been reports from Gulf War Veterans that American soldiers, not Iraq soldiers, started those Gulf War fires in 1991.

That means our government is hiring Halliburton to fight fires it's planning on starting itself...

Halliburton wins contract on Iraq oil firefighting
By Reuters as published in Forbes.

A Halliburton Co. (nyse: HAL - news - people) subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) has won the contract to oversee any firefighting operations at Iraqi oilfields after any U.S.-led invasion, a Defense Department source said on Thursday.

KBR was widely viewed by many in the oilfield services industry as the likely candidate to oversee firefighting in Iraq's oilfields. Halliburton does extensive logistic support work for the U.S. military.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2003/03/06/rtr900049.html

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HAL 20.41 + 0.41
3/6/03 4:00:00 PM ET

REUTERS
Halliburton wins contract on Iraq oil firefighting
Reuters, 03.06.03, 8:31 PM ET

HOUSTON, March 6 (Reuters) - A Halliburton Co. (nyse: HAL - news - people) subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) has won the contract to oversee any firefighting operations at Iraqi oilfields after any U.S.-led invasion, a Defense Department source said on Thursday.

KBR was widely viewed by many in the oilfield services industry as the likely candidate to oversee firefighting in Iraq's oilfields. Halliburton does extensive logistic support work for the U.S. military.

Vice President Dick Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive officer from 1995 to 2000,

A possible beneficiary of Thursday's deal is oilwell firefighting company Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc., with which Halliburton has had an alliance since 1995.

A Halliburton spokeswoman declined comment and referred all questions to the Defense Department.

Dick and his wife don't like a cartoon of the misses.

Trouble is, parody is supposed to be legal in our "free" country that supposedly comes complete with "free speech" (courtesty of the First Amendment).

White House insists satirist remove image lampooning Lynne Cheney from Web site
By Larry Neumeister for the AP.

An Internet lampoon of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife is no laughing matter at the White House, which has asked a satirist to remove pictures of her -- complete with red clown noses -- from his Web site.

But the New York Civil Liberties Union struck back Wednesday on behalf of John A. Wooden, 31, threatening a lawsuit to protect his First Amendment rights to parody the White House and Bush officials on his site, whitehouse.org.

The official White House site is whitehouse.gov.

Cheney counsel David S. Addington warned Wooden's Chickenhead Productions Inc. that Lynne V. Cheney's name and pictures -- altered to show her with a red clown's nose and a missing tooth -- could not be used to make money without her consent, and asked Wooden to delete the photos and "fictitious biographical statement about her."

Instead, Wooden cautioned Web site visitors that the vice president "wishes you to be aware ... that some/all of the biographic information contained on this PARODY page about Mrs. Cheney may not actually be true."

And, it added, the editors of the Web site were "confident that any rumors about Mrs. Cheney formerly being a crystal meth pusher are 100 percent likely to be absolutely untrue. Similarly, any stories about her penchant for licking brandy Alexanders off the hirsute belly of her spouse are all lies, lies, lies!"

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/03/06/national0711EST0502.DTL

White House insists satirist remove image lampooning Lynne Cheney from Web site

LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer Thursday, March 6, 2003

(03-06) 04:11 PST NEW YORK (AP) --

An Internet lampoon of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife is no laughing matter at the White House, which has asked a satirist to remove pictures of her -- complete with red clown noses -- from his Web site.

But the New York Civil Liberties Union struck back Wednesday on behalf of John A. Wooden, 31, threatening a lawsuit to protect his First Amendment rights to parody the White House and Bush officials on his site, whitehouse.org.

The official White House site is whitehouse.gov.

Cheney counsel David S. Addington warned Wooden's Chickenhead Productions Inc. that Lynne V. Cheney's name and pictures -- altered to show her with a red clown's nose and a missing tooth -- could not be used to make money without her consent, and asked Wooden to delete the photos and "fictitious biographical statement about her."

Instead, Wooden cautioned Web site visitors that the vice president "wishes you to be aware ... that some/all of the biographic information contained on this PARODY page about Mrs. Cheney may not actually be true."

And, it added, the editors of the Web site were "confident that any rumors about Mrs. Cheney formerly being a crystal meth pusher are 100 percent likely to be absolutely untrue. Similarly, any stories about her penchant for licking brandy Alexanders off the hirsute belly of her spouse are all lies, lies, lies!"

NYCLU lawyer Chris Dunn wrote the office of the vice president that the material was "fully protected by the First Amendment."

"With everything happening in the world, you'd think the office of the vice president would have something more important to do than sending letters to political satirists," Wooden said.

A spokeswoman for Cheney's office, Jennifer Millerwise, confirmed the letter from Addington was authentic but said she otherwise had no comment.

International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign thinks we ought to pre-emptively kick the Shrub's butt out of office for making pre-emptive strikes a part of our foreign policy. He thinks we should rid ourselves of Ashcroft while we're at it. (I think he's forgetting somebody...But two out of three ain't bad.)

Preemptive impeachment
Law professor stands ready to draft articles for any member of the House
By Kéllia Ramares, Online Journal Contributing Editor

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country . . .

—The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

...Article II Sec. 4 of the Constitution states that: "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Boyle says that waging a war of aggression is a crime under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles. "It's very clear," he adds, "if you read all the press reports, they are going to devastate Baghdad, a metropolitan area of 5 million people. The Nuremberg Charter clearly says the wanton devastation of a city is a Nuremberg war crime."

The United States is a party to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles, and thus is constitutionally bound to obey them. "The Constitution, in Article 6, says that international treaties are the supreme law of the land here in the United States of America. So all we would be doing here, in this impeachment campaign," Boyle says, "is impeaching them for violating international treaties, as incorporated into the United States Constitution, as well as the Constitution itself."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Ramares010403/ramares010403.html

Preemptive impeachment
Law professor stands ready to draft articles for any member of the House

By Kéllia Ramares
Online Journal Contributing Editor

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country . . .

—The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

January 4, 2002—"We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression," says International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By contrast, Prof. Boyle wants merely to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft for their plans to invade Iraq and create a police state in America.

Boyle is offering his services as counsel, free of charge, to any member of the House of Representatives willing to sponsor articles of impeachment. He is experienced in this work, having undertaken it in 1991 for the late Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-TX), in an effort to stop the first Persian Gulf War. It takes only one member to introduce articles of impeachment. Of course, it will take many more than that to vote for impeachment, which will culminate in a trial in the Senate. Boyle is confident that, once the articles are introduced, others, including Republicans, will co-sponsor them. But we have to convince our Representatives that impeachment is necessary for the country and politically safe for them. This non-violent, constitutional process may be our best way of stopping World War III and saving our civil rights.

Grounds for Impeachment

Article II Sec. 4 of the Constitution states that: "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Boyle says that waging a war of aggression is a crime under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles. "It's very clear," he adds, "if you read all the press reports, they are going to devastate Baghdad, a metropolitan area of 5 million people. The Nuremberg Charter clearly says the wanton devastation of a city is a Nuremberg war crime."

The United States is a party to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles, and thus is constitutionally bound to obey them. "The Constitution, in Article 6, says that international treaties are the supreme law of the land here in the United States of America. So all we would be doing here, in this impeachment campaign," Boyle says, "is impeaching them for violating international treaties, as incorporated into the United States Constitution, as well as the Constitution itself."

Bush Cabal Repudiates Nuremberg Principles

We don't have to wait for the devastation of Baghdad to impeach the Bush cabal because they have already repudiated the Nuremberg Charter via the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war and pre-emptive attack. "This doctrine of pre-emptive warfare or pre-emptive attack was rejected soundly in the Nuremberg Judgment, " Boyle says. "The Nuremberg Judgment . . . rejected this Nazi doctrine of international law of alleged self-defense." The Bush Doctrine, embodied in the National Security Strategy document, published on the White House web site, is appalling, Boyle says. "It reads like a Nazi planning document prior to the Second World War."

The Fruit Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

As Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez explained on the floor of the House in 1991, his articles charged the elder Bush with:

1) Violating the Equal Protection Clause by having minorities and poor whites, who were the majority of the soldiers in the Middle East, "fight a war for oil to preserve the lifestyles of the wealthy."

2) Violating "the Constitution, Federal law, and the UN Charter by bribing, intimidating, and threatening others, including the members of the UN Security Council, to support belligerent acts against Iraq."

3) Violating the Nuremberg principles by conspiring to engage in a massive war against Iraq that would cause tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

4) Committing "the United States to acts of war without congressional consent and contrary to the UN Charter and international law." (This refers to the lack of a formal declaration of war, as required by the Constitution).

5) Committing crimes against the peace by leading the United States into aggressive war against Iraq, in violation of Article 24 of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Charter, other international instruments and treaties, and the Constitution of the United States.

Boyle believes that the articles he drafted for Gonzalez' effort to impeach George H. W. Bush, the father, could still serve as a basis for impeaching George W. Bush, the son.

Are the People Ready for Another Impeachment?

Impeachment has the advantage of bypassing the U.S. Supreme Court, which illegally installed Bush in the Oval Office. The same "Justices" would have the final word on legal challenges to constitutional abominations, such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act, both of which the White House rammed through a Congress frightened by the September 11th attacks and the as yet unsolved anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill.

But no matter how blatant the violations of constitutional, statutory and international law are, impeachment is still a political process. Republicans control the Congress and many Democrats, fearful of being labeled "soft on terrorism" might be unwilling to challenge the Bush cabal. It would take tremendous public pressure to get a reluctant Congress to impeach. Still, Boyle thinks he can garner public support by adding an article of impeachment against John Ashcroft.

"We know for a fact that there are Republicans and Democrats and Independents and Greens, even very conservative Republicans, such as Dick Armey and [Bob] Barr, who are very worried about a police state." Boyle says that an article against Ashcroft would make clear "that we don't want a police state in the name of an oil empire."

It's Up to Us

Unfortunately for the impeachment campaign, Armey has retired and Barr, who spoke out against some of the most draconian proposals for what eventually became the USA PATRIOT Act, was defeated in the Republican primary. Boyle is still waiting for the one member of Congress willing to introduce articles of impeachment when the 108th Congress convenes on January 7.

Since Bush has indicated that he is not likely to go to war before the end of January or early February, Boyle thinks we have a month to stop the war by impeaching the chain of command: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with police state enforcer Ashcroft. Time and the Internet are advantages Rep. Gonzalez did not have in 1991, when the Persian Gulf War was launched the day after he introduced his articles.

Boyle is asking the public to push for impeachment in two ways. First, contact your own member of Congress to urge him or her to introduce articles of impeachment, and tell the member that he or she may contact Prof. Boyle for assistance in drafting the articles. Second, demand impeachment by engaging in non-violent direct action, in exercise of your First Amendment rights to free speech, peaceable assembly and petition for redress of grievances. Boyle was pleased that 100,000 people marched around the White House last October 26 to protest the impending war on Iraq. But he says one million people need to peaceably take to the streets with signs, banners and voices shouting, "Impeach Bush!"

"The bottom line: it's really up to you and to me to enforce the law and the Constitution against our own government," he says. "We are citizens of the United States of America. We have to act to preserve the republic that we have, to preserve our Constitution, to preserve a rule of law. This is our responsibility as citizens. We simply can't pass the buck and say 'Oh, some judge is going to do it somewhere.' It's up to us to keep this republic."

Copyright © 2003 Kéllia Ramares. For fair use only.

Listen to Kéllia Ramares' full interview of Prof. Francis Boyle at R.I.S.E. - Radio Internet Story Exchange. Also, shop the R.I.S.E. online store for impeachment paraphernalia.

Download a printable version.
For a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here.

National march against war and racism

Saturday, Jan. 18

National march on Washington, DC, to say no to war on Iraq. The event will begin with a rally at 11a.m. Eastern time on the west side of the Capitol Building, followed by a march to the Washington, DC, Navy Yard, a huge military complex located in the heart of one of Washington's working class communities.

In a joint action in San Francisco, marchers will assemble at 11a.m. Pacific time at Market and Embarcadero Streets in the Financial District for a march to Civic Center.

Sunday, Jan. 19

There will be a Youth and Student Rally and March against War and Racism In Washington, DC. Marchers should gather at 11 a.m. at the Departmentt of In-Justice on Pennsylvania Ave., between 9th and 10th Streets NW. There will be a march to the Presidential Palace (a.k.a. the White House) for a Youth & Student Weapons Inspection.

The Youth and Student Rally and March is to protest the attacks against the Arab and Muslim communities—including the recent mass arrests in California. People are encouraged to bring banners and puppets, to dress as weapons inspectors, to find as many creative methods to dramatize your demands in opposition to a war of aggression and in support of a reorganization of society's priorities that would put people's needs ahead of the Pentagon and the war profiteers in Corporate America. For more information on these protests, please visit the website of International ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.

The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Online Journal.
Email editor@onlinejournal.com

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1-hour documentary on the Terrorist flight school in Venice Fl. The must see video on the "terrorist" flight school in Venice, Fla.

War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11th 2001
War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11th 2001

Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters
Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters

Bacardi: The Hidden War
Bacardi: The Hidden War

The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder
The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder

The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider
The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider

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Preemptive impeachment
Law professor stands ready to draft articles for any member of the House

By Kéllia Ramares
Online Journal Contributing Editor

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country . . .

—The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

January 4, 2002—"We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression," says International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By contrast, Prof. Boyle wants merely to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft for their plans to invade Iraq and create a police state in America.

Boyle is offering his services as counsel, free of charge, to any member of the House of Representatives willing to sponsor articles of impeachment. He is experienced in this work, having undertaken it in 1991 for the late Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-TX), in an effort to stop the first Persian Gulf War. It takes only one member to introduce articles of impeachment. Of course, it will take many more than that to vote for impeachment, which will culminate in a trial in the Senate. Boyle is confident that, once the articles are introduced, others, including Republicans, will co-sponsor them. But we have to convince our Representatives that impeachment is necessary for the country and politically safe for them. This non-violent, constitutional process may be our best way of stopping World War III and saving our civil rights.

Grounds for Impeachment

Article II Sec. 4 of the Constitution states that: "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Boyle says that waging a war of aggression is a crime under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles. "It's very clear," he adds, "if you read all the press reports, they are going to devastate Baghdad, a metropolitan area of 5 million people. The Nuremberg Charter clearly says the wanton devastation of a city is a Nuremberg war crime."

The United States is a party to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles, and thus is constitutionally bound to obey them. "The Constitution, in Article 6, says that international treaties are the supreme law of the land here in the United States of America. So all we would be doing here, in this impeachment campaign," Boyle says, "is impeaching them for violating international treaties, as incorporated into the United States Constitution, as well as the Constitution itself."

Bush Cabal Repudiates Nuremberg Principles

We don't have to wait for the devastation of Baghdad to impeach the Bush cabal because they have already repudiated the Nuremberg Charter via the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war and pre-emptive attack. "This doctrine of pre-emptive warfare or pre-emptive attack was rejected soundly in the Nuremberg Judgment, " Boyle says. "The Nuremberg Judgment . . . rejected this Nazi doctrine of international law of alleged self-defense." The Bush Doctrine, embodied in the National Security Strategy document, published on the White House web site, is appalling, Boyle says. "It reads like a Nazi planning document prior to the Second World War."

The Fruit Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

As Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez explained on the floor of the House in 1991, his articles charged the elder Bush with:

1) Violating the Equal Protection Clause by having minorities and poor whites, who were the majority of the soldiers in the Middle East, "fight a war for oil to preserve the lifestyles of the wealthy."

2) Violating "the Constitution, Federal law, and the UN Charter by bribing, intimidating, and threatening others, including the members of the UN Security Council, to support belligerent acts against Iraq."

3) Violating the Nuremberg principles by conspiring to engage in a massive war against Iraq that would cause tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

4) Committing "the United States to acts of war without congressional consent and contrary to the UN Charter and international law." (This refers to the lack of a formal declaration of war, as required by the Constitution).

5) Committing crimes against the peace by leading the United States into aggressive war against Iraq, in violation of Article 24 of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Charter, other international instruments and treaties, and the Constitution of the United States.

Boyle believes that the articles he drafted for Gonzalez' effort to impeach George H. W. Bush, the father, could still serve as a basis for impeaching George W. Bush, the son.

Are the People Ready for Another Impeachment?

Impeachment has the advantage of bypassing the U.S. Supreme Court, which illegally installed Bush in the Oval Office. The same "Justices" would have the final word on legal challenges to constitutional abominations, such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act, both of which the White House rammed through a Congress frightened by the September 11th attacks and the as yet unsolved anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill.

But no matter how blatant the violations of constitutional, statutory and international law are, impeachment is still a political process. Republicans control the Congress and many Democrats, fearful of being labeled "soft on terrorism" might be unwilling to challenge the Bush cabal. It would take tremendous public pressure to get a reluctant Congress to impeach. Still, Boyle thinks he can garner public support by adding an article of impeachment against John Ashcroft.

"We know for a fact that there are Republicans and Democrats and Independents and Greens, even very conservative Republicans, such as Dick Armey and [Bob] Barr, who are very worried about a police state." Boyle says that an article against Ashcroft would make clear "that we don't want a police state in the name of an oil empire."

It's Up to Us

Unfortunately for the impeachment campaign, Armey has retired and Barr, who spoke out against some of the most draconian proposals for what eventually became the USA PATRIOT Act, was defeated in the Republican primary. Boyle is still waiting for the one member of Congress willing to introduce articles of impeachment when the 108th Congress convenes on January 7.

Since Bush has indicated that he is not likely to go to war before the end of January or early February, Boyle thinks we have a month to stop the war by impeaching the chain of command: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with police state enforcer Ashcroft. Time and the Internet are advantages Rep. Gonzalez did not have in 1991, when the Persian Gulf War was launched the day after he introduced his articles.

Boyle is asking the public to push for impeachment in two ways. First, contact your own member of Congress to urge him or her to introduce articles of impeachment, and tell the member that he or she may contact Prof. Boyle for assistance in drafting the articles. Second, demand impeachment by engaging in non-violent direct action, in exercise of your First Amendment rights to free speech, peaceable assembly and petition for redress of grievances. Boyle was pleased that 100,000 people marched around the White House last October 26 to protest the impending war on Iraq. But he says one million people need to peaceably take to the streets with signs, banners and voices shouting, "Impeach Bush!"

"The bottom line: it's really up to you and to me to enforce the law and the Constitution against our own government," he says. "We are citizens of the United States of America. We have to act to preserve the republic that we have, to preserve our Constitution, to preserve a rule of law. This is our responsibility as citizens. We simply can't pass the buck and say 'Oh, some judge is going to do it somewhere.' It's up to us to keep this republic."

Copyright © 2003 Kéllia Ramares. For fair use only.

Listen to Kéllia Ramares' full interview of Prof. Francis Boyle at R.I.S.E. - Radio Internet Story Exchange. Also, shop the R.I.S.E. online store for impeachment paraphernalia.

It's like a triple-layer conflict of interest layer cake. I don't know what's more exciting -- finding out how much Cheney knew about Enron and/or the California Energy scam or seeing just how far he and the Republican party will go so that he can remain above the law in order to cover it up.

If there's nothing to cover up: cough up the documents. No terrorist connection here buddy -- this is domestic policy at its core. (Remember that? Domestic policy?)

Too bad the GAO couldn't stick it out with its case. I knew it was too good to be true that it had kept the pressure on this long.

GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit
By Peter Brand and Alexander Bolton for The Hill

Threats by Republicans to cut the General Accounting Office (GAO) budget influenced its decision to abandon a lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, The Hill has learned.

Sources familiar with high-level discussions at the GAO said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, met with GAO Comptroller General David Walker earlier this year and “unambiguously” pressured him to drop the suit or face cuts in his $440 million budget.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.thehill.com/news/021903/cheney.aspx

IN THIS ISSUE Thursday February 20, 2003

FEBRUARY 19, 2003

GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit
By Peter Brand and Alexander Bolton

Threats by Republicans to cut the General Accounting Office (GAO) budget influenced its decision to abandon a lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, The Hill has learned.

Sources familiar with high-level discussions at the GAO said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, met with GAO Comptroller General David Walker earlier this year and “unambiguously” pressured him to drop the suit or face cuts in his $440 million budget.

Walker yesterday acknowledged meeting Stevens, but denied the senator threatened to cut funding for the investigative agency. However, he confirmed that such threats were made, although he said they came from a lawmaker not “in a position to deliver” on them and did not occur recently.
PATRICK RYAN
Vice President Dick Cheney

The decision to drop the lawsuit has raised concerns that Congress’s all-purpose auditor has sacrificed its traditional role as an independent arm of Congress.

“ I met with Stevens in his capacity of president pro tempore,” the comptroller said: “In the conversation with Sen. Stevens there was no assertion or inference [of funding cuts]. He didn’t even raise the issue of appropriations.”

Walker did say, however, that several lawmakers have threatened in the past year to cut agency funding if it persisted with the controversial lawsuit. He also said the budget threat was among a number of factors that tipped his Feb. 7 decision to halt litigation.

A GAO staff member and several Stevens’s aides attended the meeting.

Stevens’s offices were closed at press time and neither the senator nor his spokeswoman could be reached for comment.

The controversy with Cheney came to a head in December after U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, citing separation of powers, ruled that Walker lacked sufficient grounds to compel Cheney to disclose the records of a White House energy task force that he had headed.

Walker had filed the suit against Cheney in February 2002 at the request of House Democrats. This was the first time in its 81-year history that the GAO, acting in its capacity as the investigative arm of Congress, sued the executive branch to obtain withheld information.

Walker said he initiated all the meetings on Capitol Hill and “I did what I thought was right.”

Before deciding not to appeal Bates’s decision, Walker said he met senior Republicans and Democrats in both chambers, and most lawmakers of them urged him not to pursue the matter. He said, “I considered all the facts and circumstances and am very comfortable with my decision.”

But several House Democratic leaders and key members of the Democratic Caucus have stringently criticized Walker’s decision.

“ I thought it was a bad decision,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, who along with Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, pressed Walker to file the suit last year.

“ If you have a GOP Congress not interested in exercising the role of oversight, and GAO doesn’t act independently of the Congress, there is nobody providing the job of checks and balances called for in our Constitution,” said Waxman. “This jeopardizes GAO’s ability to act independently in the future.”

Bates, who was nominated to the bench by the current president, ruled against the GAO because “neither a house of Congress nor any congressional committee has issued a subpoena for the disputed information.”

By not appealing this ruling, House Democrats argue, GAO will not be able to pursue sensitive information in the future without permission from the majority party.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Walker’s decision was a “very unfortunate undermining of GAO’s independence and effectiveness.”

Rep. Bob Matsui (D-Calif.), chair of the House Democrats’ campaign committee, said, “This not only undermines the independence of the GAO, but it also makes it difficult to get information.”

“ With the congressional committees controlled by the Republicans, I think it’s unlikely you’ll see GAO pursue something adversarial, and that’s a problem,” Matsui added. Matsui said he believed that Walker probably faced political pressure to drop the lawsuit.

On the floor of the House last Wednesday, Waxman condemned Walker’s decision.

“GAO will be able to continue [its] routine work. And if a Republican controlled committee ever urges GAO to pursue a controversial investigation of the Bush administration, GAO may be able to do this. But don’t hold your breath.”

Walker said that while Republican control of Congress and the White House makes GAO investigations more complicated, it wouldn’t affect his judgment. If the GAO is unable to obtain information from the executive branch, Walker said he would ask the appropriate committee of jurisdiction for a subpoena.

n response to allegations that the agency’s effectiveness would be diminished, Walker pointed to GAO’s annual report, which shows that the agency saved taxpayers $37.7 billion in return for its approximately $440 million budget.

Walker, a former aide to President Reagan who took office in November 1998, is serving a 15-year term.

Shock troops for Bush
Partisans of the extreme right gathered outside of Washington this weekend to cheer on Cheney and Coulter -- and vent their rage at the liberals who rule America.
By Michelle Goldberg for Salon.

It was another year at CPAC, ground zero of the vast right-wing conspiracy, the place where in 1994 Paula Jones was first introduced to the world. This year marks CPAC's 30th anniversary, but not since the Reagan presidency has its agenda meshed so easily with that of the White House, which honored the event by sending both Cheney and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to speak. Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, Senate Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and a bevy of other Republican congressmen were also there, cheered by hordes of college boys in blue blazers, soignée blondes in short skirts, and portly Southerners in T-shirts with slogans like "Fry Mumia" and, above a photo of the burning towers of the World Trade Center, "Clinton's Legacy."

Held at Gateway Marriott in Crystal City, Va. from January 30 to February 1, CPAC drew a crowd of 4,000, 1,700 of them college students. Most of the action took place in a ballroom on the second floor, where speakers lambasted liberals from a stage draped in red, white and blue and backed by 18 American flags and two enormous video screens. It was like a right-wing version of a Workers World rally, with one crucial difference. Workers World is a fringe group with no political power. CPAC is explicitly endorsed by people running the country. Its attendees are Bush's shock troops, the ones who staged the white-collar riot during the Florida vote count and harassed Al Gore in the vice presidential mansion. Bush may not want to embrace them in public, but they are crucial to his political success and he has let them know, in hundreds of ways, that their mission is his.

Heralded by the power chords of Survivor's 1982 hit "Eye of the Tiger," Cheney got things off to a roaring start at about noon on Thursday. "CPAC has consistently championed those ideas that make America great," he said, before essentially repeating President Bush's State of the Union address. In the days that followed, one had to wonder exactly which ideas Cheney was talking about...

To attend CPAC is to crash through the looking glass into a world where passionate worship of the president is part of a brave rebellion against government, where Sweden is a hellish dystopia and Tom Daschle a die-hard Marxist. It's to realize that, despite the conservative hold on the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court and the utter dejection among Democrats, right-wingers still fancy themselves an embattled minority facing an army of wily, ruthless leftists, who they hate with the righteous fury of the downtrodden.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/02/04/cpac/

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News
Vice President Dick Cheney addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Arlington, Va., Jan. 30. Below, a bumper sticker for sale at the conference.

Shock troops for Bush
Partisans of the extreme right gathered outside of Washington this weekend to cheer on Cheney and Coulter -- and vent their rage at the liberals who rule America.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg

printe-mail

Feb. 4, 2003 | Before Vice President Dick Cheney gave the opening address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a three-day gathering of the right-wing faithful outside of Washington, D.C., organizers asked vendor Gene McDonald to put away his "No Muslims = No Terrorists" bumper stickers.

McDonald complied, and for the rest of the conference the jolly white-haired Floridian peddled his popular anti-Islam wares from under a table. As the leading lights of conservatism, including some of the most powerful figures in the Republican Party, gave speeches to a packed house, McDonald did a brisk trade, despite official condemnation by CPAC staff. He offered T-shirts with the words "Islam: Religion of Peace" surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word "Allah" on its timer. A towering linebacker of a man attending the conference with his elderly parents bought a mug saying "Islam" in red Nazi-style block lettering, with the "S" replaced by a black swastika. "They're going to love me at work," he chortled.

It was another year at CPAC, ground zero of the vast right-wing conspiracy, the place where in 1994 Paula Jones was first introduced to the world. This year marks CPAC's 30th anniversary, but not since the Reagan presidency has its agenda meshed so easily with that of the White House, which honored the event by sending both Cheney and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to speak. Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, Senate Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and a bevy of other Republican congressmen were also there, cheered by hordes of college boys in blue blazers, soignée blondes in short skirts, and portly Southerners in T-shirts with slogans like "Fry Mumia" and, above a photo of the burning towers of the World Trade Center, "Clinton's Legacy."

Held at Gateway Marriott in Crystal City, Va. from January 30 to February 1, CPAC drew a crowd of 4,000, 1,700 of them college students. Most of the action took place in a ballroom on the second floor, where speakers lambasted liberals from a stage draped in red, white and blue and backed by 18 American flags and two enormous video screens. It was like a right-wing version of a Workers World rally, with one crucial difference. Workers World is a fringe group with no political power. CPAC is explicitly endorsed by people running the country. Its attendees are Bush's shock troops, the ones who staged the white-collar riot during the Florida vote count and harassed Al Gore in the vice presidential mansion. Bush may not want to embrace them in public, but they are crucial to his political success and he has let them know, in hundreds of ways, that their mission is his.

Heralded by the power chords of Survivor's 1982 hit "Eye of the Tiger," Cheney got things off to a roaring start at about noon on Thursday. "CPAC has consistently championed those ideas that make America great," he said, before essentially repeating President Bush's State of the Union address. In the days that followed, one had to wonder exactly which ideas Cheney was talking about.

Yes, CPAC explored some crucial questions. One panel asked, "Islam, Religion of Peace?" (Short answer: no.) There was a 40-minute talk on tort reform and 35 minutes on "Safeguarding Civil Liberties in a Time of War," which included a speech by veteran lefty civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, who was treated respectfully by an audience that largely fears big government and holds its privacy sacrosanct.

Yet Hentoff aside, one theme overwhelmed all others: a quaking, obsessive hatred of the liberals who are still believed to rule the world. CPACers exemplify what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" in the 1964 essay of the same name. "Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated -- if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention," Hofstadter wrote. "Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes." And George W. Bush has harnessed their obsession and rage for his own political gain.

The conference was packed with events devoted to denouncing the perfidious left. There were panels titled "Modern Feminism: The Bilking of the Taxpayer," "Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College Campuses," "NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other Professional Victims" and "Myths, Lies & Terror: The Growing Threat Of Radical Environmentalism." Dan Flynn, author of "Why the Left Hates America," was on hand to sign his book. Ann Coulter, there to push her own book, was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, after which she ripped into the "treason lobby" -- the Democratic Party -- whose platform "consists in breaking every one of the 10 commandments."

. Next page | They have no doubt that Bush will do their bidding
1, 2, 3

page two

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Shock troops for Bush | 1, 2, 3

To attend CPAC is to crash through the looking glass into a world where passionate worship of the president is part of a brave rebellion against government, where Sweden is a hellish dystopia and Tom Daschle a die-hard Marxist. It's to realize that, despite the conservative hold on the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court and the utter dejection among Democrats, right-wingers still fancy themselves an embattled minority facing an army of wily, ruthless leftists, who they hate with the righteous fury of the downtrodden.

At the "What Are We Fighting For?" talk, Elaine Donnelly, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, cautioned that the "destructive legacy of Bill Clinton" remains in the Pentagon and "could still make a comeback. We have to be vigilant." She made the horrifying consequences of such a resurgence clear. Hillary Clinton, she said, is now a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where "she will have more power than we may think." For example, she may tell the military, "If you want those Apache helicopters, you have to put women in combat ... think about 'Black Hawk Down,' the soldier being dragged through the streets. Do we want to see that on a gender-neutral basis?"

Of course, for decades the conservative movement has been defining itself in opposition to the specter of an amok liberalism that, among other depredations, leaves American women vulnerable to ravishment by savage black men. The right needs liberal power, no matter how illusory, as a foil.

That may be why there were so many college students in attendance, since university campuses are perhaps the only places left in America where conservatives might legitimately feel marginalized. Many students spoke of being radicalized by the hostility they face as Republicans at liberal schools, much as David Brock did in his book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." Given the p.c. hysteria that has choked the intellectual life of so many institutions, it's likely they really have been mistreated. Still, some of the examples they proffered suggested something rather less than an epidemic of college Stalinism. At the panel on campus liberal bias, for example, Roger Custer of Ithaca College's Young America's Foundation spoke of the oppression he suffered when his group advertised a speech by Pat Buchanan's sister Bay with signs saying, "Feminazis beware: Your Nuremberg has come."

"We received a barrage of criticism," Custer said indignantly. "Leftists said they felt physically threatened."

The issue of environmentalism shows much about CPAC-style politics. For CPACers, standing up to environmentalists isn't merely a matter of opposing regulations seen as onerous. Rather, they've framed it as a creationism-style holy war. Speakers at CPAC were livid even at businesses that adopted green models out of self-interest. Nick Nichols, CEO of the crisis management group Nichols-Dezenhall, railed against British Petroleum's attempts to cast itself as environmentally friendly, calling it a "new and improved Neville Chamberlain." David Riggs, who runs the anti-environmentalist GreenWatch project at the Capitol Research Center, took the stage to the sound of jungle roars and declared that environmentalism "has nothing to do with bunnies and bambies. It's about destroying free enterprise and eliminating private property." Floyd Brown of the Young America's Foundation announced, "A lot of people who used to claim their color was red now claim their color is green."

Of course, CPACers are ebullient about the Bush presidency, and they have no doubt that Bush will do their bidding. Their understanding of Bush is very similar to the conventional wisdom on the left: He's seen as a man whose language and image pander to moderates while his actions serve the far right. Tim Weigel, who was manning the Free Republic booth, described compassionate conservative initiatives like Bush's plan to address AIDS in Africa as, "throwaways, put out there to keep the left quiet while he takes care of Iraq." Behind him hung a picture of Hillary Clinton's head Photoshopped onto the body of a pig.

The lobby behind Bush's social agenda was on full display. Austin Ruse of the Catholic Families and Human Rights Institute told the audience about his success working with Population Research Institute, which opposes family planning in all forms, to pressure the White House to withdraw the United States' $34 million contribution to the United Nations Family Planning Fund. Population Research Institute did this largely by fabricating evidence that the Population Fund supports coerced abortion in China, a charge that the administration's own investigators found to be baseless. Ruse offered advice to the crowd about how the U.S. could fully extricate itself from all its international treaties. His was the moderate position; another man on his panel wanted to pull out of the U.N. altogether.

In the exhibitors' hall, Freedom Village USA, an upstate New York-based Christian drug-treatment center hoping to get federal money under Bush's faith-based initiative showed just what faith-based drug treatment really means. "Other programs teach you relief," said Robert A. Neu, assistant to Freedom Village president Fletcher A. Brothers. "Freedom Village offers a cure. It's a one-step program of getting on your knees and accepting Jesus Christ." Neu claims a 75 to 80 percent success rate, which he says measures the number of Freedom Villagers who have become born-again Christians. In addition to literature about drug abuse, the booth was selling videos titled "Harry Potter, Witchcraft Repackaged: Making Evil Look Innocent."

. Next page | Why does the right hate so many Americans?
1, 2, 3

Shock troops for Bush | 1, 2, 3

Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote "moral clarity" in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he's disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the "brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French") at the "What Are We Fighting For?" panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous "us" who failed to rise to Bush's challenge. "Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity," he told the crowd. "We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!"

Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, "George Bush is our agenda!"

But Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn't out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged "open warfare" against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called "Tip a Troll," in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, "The Homosexual Agenda," "Roe V. Wade" and "The Liberal Media."

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn't letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it's time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled "2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?" Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn't be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. "One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball," he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more "bare-knuckle" tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the "well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House."

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. "It's amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left's hegemonic domination of the media," Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments ("Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil") and antiwar protesters. "Scott Ritter, that's a liberal for you," began one bit. "Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it's to get underage girls." Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the "mean-spiritedness" of the left, much of which he'd learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). "David Horowitz knows how the left thinks," Beato proclaimed. "He's trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That's the message we're getting from here."

Throughout the three days of CPAC, Beato, a gangly, smooth-cheeked blond studying public administration, sat rapt in the audience, sprawling on the floor when all the seats were taken and murmuring, "yes, yes" as people like Coulter hurled imprecations against liberal treachery. An evangelical Christian who proudly announced his virginity to me moments after we met, he was polite and earnest and seemed genuinely worried by what the Democrats have in store. "The liberal ideal is a collectivist utopia," he said gravely. "In essence, it's the same as communism. Tom Daschle won't get up there and say he's a communist, but ultimately that's what the left envisions." He invoked, as many at CPAC did, the Scandinavian hellhole of Sweden. "Sure, some people there might be happy," he allowed, "but how do you define happiness?"

Beato really believes that Coulter isn't cruel, only brave and battle-worn. "Ann's passion is a reaction to a lot of what she receives from liberals," he said. "She's had tomatoes thrown at her. She's trying to communicate with a sense of humor about the mean-spiritedness of the left."

It's a telling twist, this idea of Coulter as a victim lashing back at her tormentors. Writing of the paranoid, Hofstadter said: "He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish." It's a will that Coulter has, and that the right has. Over three days, they struggled with various degrees of sincerity to puzzle out why the left, as they imagine it, hates America. A better question, and one they'll never ask, is why the right hates so very many Americans.

FERC Gives Another Energy Company A Slap On the Wrist For Ripping Off California
Latest Smoking Gun Evidence Shows Reliant Energy Withheld Power From Consumers During Height of Energy Crisis
By Jason Leopold for Scoop.

A few weeks before the meeting between Bush and Davis, Vice President Dick Cheney, who chairs Bush's energy task force, was interviewed by PBS' Frontline for a special series on California's energy crisis. During the interview, Cheney flat-out denied that energy companies ripped off California.

"The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things - an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate," Cheney said in the May 17 Frontline interview. "Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process."

When asked whether it was possible whether energy companies were behaving like a "cartel" and if some of the high power prices in California could be the result of manipulation, Cheney responded with a resounding "no."

It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00007.htm

A Slap On the Wrist For Ripping Off California
Monday, 3 February 2003, 10:20 am
Article: Jason Leopold

FERC Gives Another Energy Company A Slap On the Wrist For Ripping Off California

Latest Smoking Gun Evidence Shows Reliant Energy Withheld Power From Consumers During Height of Energy Crisis
By Jason Leopold

One of the most damning pieces of evidence in the federal government’s investigation into California’s energy crisis emerged Friday, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that energy firms took part in a year-long scheme to boost the price of electricity in the state by withholding much needed power from consumers.

This latest smoking gun puts to rest, once and for all, the debate about what caused California’s energy crisis. But, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has punished the wrongdoing with a mere slap on the wrist and consumers are still left paying record prices for electricity.

The nation’s energy markets are in dire need of a massive overhaul to ensure other states are not victimized like California. Already, Texas and Arizona have filed complaints with FERC that they too are beginning to see evidence of manipulation by energy companies. But the Republican dominated FERC, whose chairman was appointed by President Bush, is dragging its feet on the issue. Meanwhile, the price of natural gas and electricity has reached record highs, which adds further stress to the nation’s already troubled economy.

This latest smoking gun in the ongoing investigation into California’s energy crisis was released by the FERC Friday. It consists of transcript of a conversation between a trader and a power plant operator at Houston-based Reliant Energy in which the two discuss shutting down some of the company’s power plants in California between June 20 and 22, 2000 to create an artificial shortage so the price of power would skyrocket. The tactic worked. It caused power prices to reach “unjust and unreasonable” levels in California, which under the Federal Power Act is illegal.

“[We] started out Monday losing $3 million… So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million,” the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.

Reliant cut a deal with FERC, agreeing to refund California $13.8 million to settle the issue and will not be penalized under federal laws.

State Senator Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, said the settlement does not go far enough. Energy corporations such as Reliant, Duke, Williams and Enron have said publicly over the past two years that they have acted “properly” and have laid all of the blame on California’s crisis on the shoulders of state lawmakers. We now know these corporations have been lying.

There are likely dozens of other smoking guns to be found that show the same type of behavior during the peak of the energy crisis, said Robert McCullough, an energy consultant based in Portland who has been assisting California in its investigation.

“The one thing that isn't conceivably believable is that (Reliant) only withheld two days,” McCullough said.

Shutting down power plants in California to boost wholesale prices is not a new issue. Last year, CBS News reported that Williams Companies engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Reliant. The evidence, also a transcript of a recorded conversation between a Williams trader and a power plant operator in California, showed the two conspiring to shut down a power plant for two weeks to boost electricity prices and Williams’ profits. FERC kept the evidence under wraps for a year and cut a secret deal with Williams to refund California $8 million it obtained through the scam without admitting any guilt.

FERC released the transcripts last November after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain the full copy of its report.

How could FERC keep this smoking gun concealed for a year?

Had this evidence been released 21 months ago, pre-Enron, it would have helped California’s case. But it wouldn't have jibed with Bush's energy policy, which was made public instead in May 2001. Around the same time, President Bush was in California and met with Gov. Gray Davis about the state's energy crisis. Bush told Davis he would do nothing to help the state.

A few weeks before the meeting between Bush and Davis, Vice President Dick Cheney, who chairs Bush's energy task force, was interviewed by PBS' Frontline for a special series on California's energy crisis. During the interview, Cheney flat-out denied that energy companies ripped off California.

"The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things - an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate," Cheney said in the May 17 Frontline interview. "Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process."

When asked whether it was possible whether energy companies were behaving like a "cartel" and if some of the high power prices in California could be the result of manipulation, Cheney responded with a resounding "no."

It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.

According to evidence obtained by Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, earlier this year, the energy task force, "considered and abandoned plans to address California's energy problems in its report."

California’s electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in the state between 2000 and 2001, resulted in four days of rolling blackouts and forced the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity and the opportunity to choose their own power provider. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $30 billion.

For nearly three years, California officials have pleaded with FERC commissioners, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to provide the state with some relief from soaring wholesale power prices and investigate energy companies, including Enron, Williams Companies and Reliant, for allegedly manipulating the market.

Bush and Cheney responded personally to California Gov. Gray Davis’ cries for help in May of 2001 by saying the crisis was the result of California’s poorly designed power market, which left some regulatory restrictions in place. Although that is partially true, it’s now become apparent that energy companies bear most of the blame.

It wasn’t until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company’s manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company’s role in California’s electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like “Fat Boy” and “Death Star,” that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.

Enron’s top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators who are still trying to get to the bottom of the crisis.

California is demanding that FERC order the energy company’s to refund the state $8.9 billion for overcharging the state for electricity during its yearlong energy crisis. FERC is expected to wrap up its investigation in March and decide whether the state is entitled to the refunds. But an administrative law judge for the agency released a preliminary decision in December that says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds because the state still owes the energy companies $1.8 billion in unpaid power bills.

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- Jason Leopold is a freelance journalist based in California, he is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com.

If there's nothing to hide, why not cough up the documents? Like every other administration.

It's called being accountable.
Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
By Adam Clymer for the New York Times.

I'm beginning to wonder if the Shrub is covering up a lot more than Cheney's involvement in the Enron mess.

I wish that Enron videotape would resurface...whatever happened to that thing anyway?

The administration's most publicized fight over secrecy, and its biggest victory to date, has come over its efforts to keep the investigative arm of Congress from gaining access to records of the energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.

This fight is only the showiest of many battles between the Bush administration and members of Congress over information. Such skirmishes happen in every administration. But not only are they especially frequent now, but also many of the loudest Congressional complaints come from the president's own party, from Republicans like Senator Grassley and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.

The vice president framed the fight as being less about what the papers sought by the General Accounting Office might show than over power — what Congress could demand and how it could get it or what essential prerogatives the executive branch could maintain, especially its ability to get confidential advice. And he welcomed the battle. In an interview the day before the suit was filed, he said. "It ought to be resolved in a court, unless you're willing to compromise on a basic fundamental principle, which we're not." And on Dec. 9, Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court ruled for the vice president.

Judge Bates ruled that David M. Walker, who as comptroller general heads the General Accounting Office, had not suffered any personal injury, nor had he been injured as an agent of Congress, and therefore the suit could not be considered. An appeal is all but certain to be filed, but for the time being, the administration clearly has a victory.

"Vice President Cheney's cover-up will apparently continue for the foreseeable future," said Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who pressed Mr. Walker to act, hoping to find evidence of special interest favoritism for Republican donors in the Cheney documents.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/politics/03SECR.html?ex=1042174800&en=a0e06b3e3c5acc46&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

The New York Times The New York Times Washington January 3, 2003

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
By ADAM CLYMER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.

Some of the Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings, were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration's drive for greater domestic security. Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney's battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority of the executive branch, senior administration officials say.
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Some of the changes have sparked a passionate public debate and excited political controversy. But other measures taken by the Bush administration to enforce greater government secrecy have received relatively little attention, masking the proportions of what dozens of experts described in recent interviews as a sea change in government openness.

A telling example came in late 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the new policy on the Freedom of Information Act, a move that attracted relatively little public attention.

Although the new policy for dealing with the 1966 statute that has opened millions of pages of government records to scholars, reporters and the public was announced after Sept. 11, it had been planned well before the attacks.

The Ashcroft directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no "foreseeable harm" from the release.

Generally speaking, said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, while secrecy has been increasingly attractive to recent administrations, "this administration has taken it to a new level."

Its "instinct is to release nothing," Professor Brinkley said, adding that this was not necessarily because there were particular embarrassing secrets to hide, but "they are just worried about what's in there that they don't know about."

The Bush administration contends that it is not trying to make government less open. Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said, "The bottom line remains the president is dedicated to an open government, a responsive government, while he fully exercises the authority of the executive branch."

Secrecy is almost impossible to quantify, but there are some revealing measures. In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as "Secret" — the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.

In Congress, where objections to secrecy usually come from the party opposed to the president, the complaints are bipartisan. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat first elected in 1974, said, "Since I've been here, I have never known an administration that is more difficult to get information from." Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said things were getting worse, and "it seems like in the last month or two I've been running into more and more stonewalls."

Mr. Cheney says the Bush policies have sought to restore the proper powers of the executive branch. Explaining the fight to control the task force records to ABC News last January, he said that over more than three decades: "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. We saw it in the War Powers Act, we saw it in the Anti-Impoundment Act. We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that the presidents cough up and compromise on important principles. One of the things that I feel an obligation on, and I know the president does, too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."

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Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records

(Page 2 of 5)

Mr. Bush has made similar comments. But the more relevant history may have been in Texas, where Mr. Bush, as governor, was also reluctant to make government records public. Confronted with a deadline to curb air pollution, he convened a private task force to propose solutions and resisted efforts to make its deliberations public. When he left office, he sent his papers not to the Texas State Library in Austin, but to his father's presidential library at College Station. That library was unable to cope with demands for access, and the papers have since been sent to the state library.
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Framing an Argument

One argument underlies many of the administration's steps: that presidents need confidential and frank advice and that they cannot get it if the advice becomes public, cited by Mr. Cheney in reference to the task force and by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in explaining the administration's decision to delay the release of President Ronald Reagan's papers.

Mr. Gonzales said "the pursuit of history" should not "deprive a president of candid advice while making crucial decisions."

Some administration arguments are more closely focused on security. Mr. Ashcroft has said that releasing the names of people held for immigration offenses could give Al Qaeda "a road map" showing which agents had been arrested.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has threatened action against Pentagon officials who discuss military operations with reporters, said before troops at the Army's Special Operation Command on Nov. 21, 2001, "I don't think the American people do want to know anything that's going to cause the death of any one of these enormously talented and dedicated and courageous people that are here today."

The critics argue more generally. Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, argues that secrecy does more harm than good. The Central Intelligence Agency's exaggerated estimates of Soviet economic strength, for example, would have stopped influencing United States policy, Mr. Moynihan said, if they had been published and any correspondent in Moscow could have laughed at them.

"Secrecy is a formula for inefficient decision-making," Mr. Moynihan said, and plays to the instincts of self-importance of the bureaucracy.

Mary Graham, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, saw two major risks in this administration's level of secrecy.

"What are often being couched as temporary emergency orders are in fact what we are going to live with for 20 years, just as we lived with the cold war restrictions for years after it was over," Ms. Graham said. "We make policy by crisis, and we particularly make secrecy policy by crisis."

Moreover, she said, it ignores the value of openness, which "creates public pressure for improvement." When risk analyses of chemical plants were available on the Internet, she said, people could pressure companies to do better, or move away.

Mr. Fleischer contends that there is no secrecy problem. "I make the case that we are more accessible and open than many previous administrations — given how many times [Secretary of State Colin L.] Powell, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft have briefed," he said.

Asked if there was anyone in the administration who was a consistent advocate of openness, who argued that secrecy hurt as well as helped, Mr. Fleischer said President Bush was that person. He said that was exemplified by the fact that while "the president reserved the authority to try people under military tribunals, nobody has been tried under military tribunals."

In the cases of Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, he said, Mr. Bush has opted for the more open and traditional route of the criminal justice system.

Shielding Presidents

The Bush administration's first major policy move to enforce greater secrecy could affect how its own history is written.

On March 23, 2001, Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel, ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from Ronald Reagan's presidency that scholars had requested and archivists had determined posed no threat to national security or personal privacy. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents were to become available after Jan. 20, 2001, twelve years after Mr. Reagan left office. Mr. Reagan's administration was the first covered by the 1978 law.

Continued
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The New York Times The New York Times Washington January 3, 2003

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records

(Page 3 of 5)

The directive, which also covered the papers of Mr. Reagan's vice president and the president's father, George Bush, was to last 90 days. When Mr. Gonzales extended the sealing period for an additional 90 days, historians like Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University attacked the delays, saying they were designed to prevent embarrassment and would nullify the records law's presumption of public access to those documents.
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On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued an even more sweeping order under which former presidents and vice presidents like his father, or representatives designated by them or by their surviving families, could bar release of documents by claiming one of a variety of privileges: "military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, presidential communications, legal advice, legal work or the deliberative processes of the president and the president's advisers," according to the order.

Before the order, the Archivist of the United States could reject a former president's claim of privilege. Now he cannot.

The order was promptly attacked in court and on Capitol Hill. Scott L. Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters, maintaining that the new order allowed unlimited delays in releasing documents and created new privileges to bar release.

House Republicans were among the order's sharpest critics. Representative Steve Horn of California called a hearing within a few days, and Representative Doug Ose, another Californian, said the order "undercuts the public's right to be fully informed about how its government operated in the past." The order, Mr. Horn said, improperly "gives the former and incumbent presidents veto power over the release of the records."

On Dec. 20, the White House sought to silence the complaints by announcing that nearly all the 68,000 pages of the Reagan records were being released. Legislation introduced to undo the order never made it to the House floor, where leaders had no interest in embarrassing the president. And a lawsuit challenging the order languishes in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Historians remain angry. Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, said, "This order of Bush, we feel it's a disgrace — what it means is if this policy applies, they can hold presidential documents close to the vest in perpetuity, the way Lincoln's papers were held by the family until 1947."

Battling the Congress

The administration's most publicized fight over secrecy, and its biggest victory to date, has come over its efforts to keep the investigative arm of Congress from gaining access to records of the energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.

This fight is only the showiest of many battles between the Bush administration and members of Congress over information. Such skirmishes happen in every administration. But not only are they especially frequent now, but also many of the loudest Congressional complaints come from the president's own party, from Republicans like Senator Grassley and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.

The vice president framed the fight as being less about what the papers sought by the General Accounting Office might show than over power — what Congress could demand and how it could get it or what essential prerogatives the executive branch could maintain, especially its ability to get confidential advice. And he welcomed the battle. In an interview the day before the suit was filed, he said. "It ought to be resolved in a court, unless you're willing to compromise on a basic fundamental principle, which we're not." And on Dec. 9, Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court ruled for the vice president.

Judge Bates ruled that David M. Walker, who as comptroller general heads the General Accounting Office, had not suffered any personal injury, nor had he been injured as an agent of Congress, and therefore the suit could not be considered. An appeal is all but certain to be filed, but for the time being, the administration clearly has a victory.

Continued
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The New York Times The New York Times Washington January 3, 2003

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records

(Page 4 of 5)

"Vice President Cheney's cover-up will apparently continue for the foreseeable future," said Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who pressed Mr. Walker to act, hoping to find evidence of special interest favoritism for Republican donors in the Cheney documents.

There have been other bitter fights over disclosure between the White House and the Congress. While the Democrats controlled the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the chairman, James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, repeatedly threatened last year to subpoena the Environmental Protection Agency for documents explaining the scientific basis and potential impact of its proposed air pollution rule changes requiring aging power plants to install new pollution controls when their facilities are modernized. Mr. Jeffords, who never got around to issuing the subpoena, argued that the administration had broken its promises of cooperation.

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was infuriated last August when the Justice Department said it would send answers to some of his questions about how it was using the USA Patriot Act to the more pliant Intelligence Committee, which was not interested. Mr. Sensenbrenner threatened to issue a subpoena or "blow a fuse."

Mr. Grassley, the incoming chairman of the Finance Committee, said administration obstruction required him to go and personally question government officials working on Medicare fraud cases, instead of sending his staff. But his new chairmanship and the Treasury confirmations before it may give him a lever. He said he told a White House aide of his problems and asked, "How can I get a presidential nominee through if I have to be spending my time doing things my investigators could be doing?"

Closing the Courtroom

Legal policy is where the administration's desire to maintain secrecy has excited the most controversy. Since the first few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has insisted on a rare degree of secrecy about the individuals it has arrested and detained.

The immigration hearings held for hundreds of people caught in sweeps after the bombings have been closed to relatives, the news media and the public.

The names of those detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been kept secret, along with details of their arrests, although on Dec. 12 the Justice Department told The Associated Press there had been 765 of them, of whom only 6 were still in custody.

A few dozen individuals have been held as material witnesses, after the Justice Department persuaded federal judges that they had information about terrorism and might flee if released. Neither their names nor the total number of them have been made public.

The administration has also kept a tight lid on the identities of the military detainees being held at Guantánamo, Cuba. But in considering how to deal with them, in military tribunals, the government has moved away from secrecy. When Mr. Bush directed the Defense Department in November 2001 to set up military tribunals to try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, one reason cited was the ability to hold those proceedings in secret, to protect intelligence and to reduce risks to judges and jurors. But when the rules were announced in March, they said "the accused shall be afforded a trial open to the public (except proceedings closed by the presiding officer)."

While the government's policy in the immigration cases has suffered some judicial setbacks, appeals and stays have allowed it to remain in effect.

Fundamentally, the government has argued against opening hearings by contending that they would make available to terrorists a mosaic of facts that a sophisticated enemy could use to build a road map of the investigation, to know what the government knew or did not know, and thus to escape or execute new attacks.

That argument was also made in the main case involving releasing the names of those detained, where the government also maintains that the Freedom of Information Act's right to privacy would be violated by a release of the names.

***

The New York Times The New York Times Washington January 3, 2003

Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds On to Records

(Page 5 of 5)

Legal scholars have objected particularly to the decision to close all the immigration hearings, rather than parts of them. Stephen A. Schulhofer, a professor at New York University Law School, said there was already a legal provision for closing a hearing when a judge was shown the necessity.

The "road map" explanation seemed implausible, Mr. Schulhofer said, because the detainees had a right to make phone calls, in which "a real terrorist could alert cohorts who would not have known he was detained."
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At a recent seminar at Georgetown University Law School, Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said protecting privacy was the main reason for suppressing the names. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, dismissed that rationale, asking Mr. Chertoff, "How can you even say that with a straight face?"

So far, the government has won challenges to the detention of material witnesses.

On releasing the names, it lost in a Federal District Court here, but appeared to have impressed two of the three appeals court judges who heard the case in November.

On the question of a blanket closing of "special interest" immigration hearings, an appeals court in Cincinnati ruled against the government in August and one in Philadelphia ruled in its favor in October. The Supreme Court is likely to be faced with choosing between them.

Putting Sand in the Gears

Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, governments at all levels feared that information they made publicly available could be useful to terrorists, and began moves to curtail access, a trend the Bush administration encouraged.

The first of the strictures on information resulting from Sept. 11 were described by Ms. Graham, the Brookings and Kennedy School scholar, in her book, "Democracy by Disclosure" (Brookings Institution Press, 2002).

"Officials quickly dismantled user-friendly disclosure systems on government Web sites," she wrote. "They censored information designed to tell community residents about risks from nearby chemical factories; maps that identified the location of pipelines carrying oil, gas and hazardous substances; and reports about risks associated with nuclear power plants."

Many of those withdrawals mirrored efforts industry had been making for quite a few years, arguing that the public did not really need the information. Some information has been removed from public gaze entirely. James Neal, the Columbia University librarian, said that officials of libraries like his around the country that serve as depositories for federal information "have some concern about the requests to withdraw materials from those collections." Perhaps even more important, Mr. Neal said, was that "we also do not know what materials are not getting distributed."

Some material that has been removed from Web sites is still available, though obviously to fewer people, in government reading rooms. The chemical factory risk management plans cited by Ms. Graham are no longer available through the Internet, said Stephanie Bell, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency. But individuals can look at up to 10 of them and take notes (but not photocopies) in 55 government reading rooms around the country, Ms. Bell said. There is at least one reading room in every state except Maine, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Last March the Defense Department issued a draft regulation concerning possible limits on publication of unclassified research it finances and sharp restrictions on access by foreign citizens to such data and research facilities.

This prompted some concerted resistance from scientists. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who heads the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, told the academy's annual meeting on April 29:

"I am worried about a movement to restrict publication that has been proceeding quietly but quickly in Washington. Some of the plans being proposed could severely hamper the U.S. research enterprise and decrease national security. It is being suggested that every manuscript resulting from work supported by federal funds be cleared by a federal project officer before being published, with serious penalties for violations. Another rule could prevent any foreign national from working on a broad range of projects."

Even though the department withdrew its proposal and officials say there has been no decision on whether to try again, the scientists say they are still worried.

The new Ashcroft directive on Freedom of Information requests has also begun to be felt. A veteran Justice Department official said he believed that fewer discretionary disclosures were being made throughout the government because "as a matter of policy, we are not advocating the making of discretionary disclosures."

Delays are one clear reality. The General Accounting Office reported last fall that "while the number of requests received appears to be leveling off, backlogs of pending requests governmentwide are growing, indicating that agencies are falling behind in processing requests."

To Thomas Blanton, who helps run the National Security Archive, which collects and posts documents gained through Freedom of Information Act, that is a clear effect of the Ashcroft order.

"What these signals from on high do in a bureaucracy, they don't really change the standards," Mr. Blanton said, "but they put molasses or sand in the gears."

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Comments on the Judge Rebuffs Effort to Obtain Records on Cheney Task Force By David Stout for the New York Times.
(Quote below from William Rivers Pitt for Truthout)

Federal Judge and Bush appointee John D. Bates has thrown out the case, based on a separation of powers argument that claims the GAO "had not suffered any personal injury and had no genuine stake in the outcome of the litigation." Judge Bates spent two years working for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel's office during the investigation into President Bill Clinton's sex life. Section 455 of Title 28 of the United States Code stipulates that a judge "shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." That, and the incredible narrowness of the legal parameters of this decision, almost guarantees this case a contentious trip before the United States Supreme Court.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.11A.bates-cheney.htm

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(*Editors Note [1] -- William Rivers Pitt | When crafting the energy policy for America, Dick Cheney went behind closed, locked doors with the moguls of the energy industry. On at least six different occasions, those moguls belonged to the Enron Corporation, the company that is now the gold standard for corporate fraud. Enron stands accused of a variety of crimes, including the gerrymandering of the California energy grid; they darkened the state on several occasions to line their pockets. The General Accounting Office sued Cheney to try and get to the bottom of these meetings, so as to determine whether or not Enron and the others sought to bend American energy policies around their own profit motives, in defiance of the needs of the people.

Federal Judge and Bush appointee John D. Bates has thrown out the case, based on a separation of powers argument that claims the GAO "had not suffered any personal injury and had no genuine stake in the outcome of the litigation." Judge Bates spent two years working for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel's office during the investigation into President Bill Clinton's sex life. Section 455 of Title 28 of the United States Code stipulates that a judge "shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." That, and the incredible narrowness of the legal parameters of this decision, almost guarantees this case a contentious trip before the United States Supreme Court.

(*Editors Note [2] -- Jennifer Van Bergen | D.C. District Court Judge Bates dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Comptroller of General of the United States brought in furtherance of an investigation by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), which Judge Bates referred to as "an agent of the legislative branch." The suit sought "to require the Vice President to produce information relating to the President's decision-making on national energy policy." Bates dismissed the suit because "the Comptroller General has suffered no personal injury as a private citizen, and any institutional injury exists only in his capacity as an agent of Congress -- an entity that itself has issued no subpoena."

The decision is puzzling given that, according to Bates, "[u]nder statute, the Comptroller General is granted broad authority to carry out investigations and evaluations for the benefit of Congress," and is specifically authorized under the same statute "to enforce these investigatory powers by bringing a civil action ... to require 'the head of [an] agency to produce a record." Bates claims, however, that the court does not need to reach the issue of GAO's powers, since the Comptroller has suffered no injury.

The decision stands in stark contrast to statements made by Bates during his tenure as Deputy Independent Counsel during the Whitewater investigation from 1995 to 1997. He declared that the special prosecutors intended merely to "diligently and properly follow[] relevant leads in an attempt to discover the truth.")

Go To Original:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/politics/09CND-CHEN.html

Judge Rebuffs Effort to Obtain Records on Cheney Task Force
By David Stout
New York Times

Monday, 9 December, 2002

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 -- In a case involving bedrock constitutional issues, a federal judge today threw out a lawsuit brought by an agency of Congress against Vice President Dick Cheney over the formulation of the administration's energy policy.

Judge John D. Bates of Federal District Court found that Comptroller General David M. Walker, the head of the General Accounting Office, did not have sufficient standing to sue the vice president.

Mr. Walker had asked the judge to order the White House to reveal the identities of industry executives who helped the administration develop its energy policy last year.

In declining to do so, and in dismissing Mr. Walker's suit, Judge Bates said that granting the G.A.O. chief's request "would fly in the face of the restricted role of the federal courts under the Constitution."

When arguments were held before Judge Bates on Sept. 27, lawyers for Mr. Cheney argued -- successfully, as it turned out today -- that the comptroller general lacked standing because he had not suffered any personal injury and had no genuine stake in the outcome of the litigation.

In deciding for Mr. Cheney on relatively narrow grounds, Judge Bates said the Supreme Court has made it clear over the years that a would-be party to a case involving constitutional separation of powers must meet "especially rigorous" standards just to have standing to bring such a suit.

This, Mr. Walker has simply failed to do, the judge said, because he has suffered no personal injury and was merely acting to aid Congress.

The issues raised in the suit are so important that an appeal, perhaps to the Supreme Court eventually, would not be surprising. But Mr. Walker said he would confer with Congressional leaders "on a bipartisan basis" before deciding what to do next.

"We are very disappointed with the judge's decision," Mr. Walker said in a statement. "We are in the process of reviewing and analyzing the decision to fully understand the bases for it and its potential implications."

Over the years, the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, has conducted thousands of investigations and evaluations of government programs and activities, submitting stacks of reports to the lawmakers.

But the case of Walker v. Cheney marked the first time in the 81-year history of the G.A.O. that the comptroller general had asked a court to order a member of the executive branch to turn over records to Congress.

The development of the Bush administration's energy policy has been marked by deep differences between the White House and Democratic lawmakers. Numerous energy executives, including some from the Enron Corporation, met on several occasions in 2001 with Mr. Cheney and the energy task force that he headed.

The comptroller general, with the backing of some Democrats in Congress, wanted Mr. Cheney to reveal the names of industry executives who helped the administration develop its policy. The administration argued that such an order would be an unprecedented and unwarranted intrusion into executive branch powers and would hobble an administration's essential, legitimate ability to receive frank information and advice.

Judge Bates, who was appointed to the bench last year by President Bush, noted that neither House of Congress and no Congressional committee had authorized the comptroller general to file the suit. Rather, the judge noted, the suit was filed as the result of a G.A.O. investigation begun at the request of Representatives John D. Dingell and Henry A. Waxman, both Democrats.

Mr. Dingell was the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, while Mr. Waxman was the ranking minority member on the Government Reform Committee.

"Plaintiff is not an independent constitutional actor," Judge Bates said of Mr. Walker. Rather, the judge said, the comptroller general is "subservient to Congress."

Significantly, Judge Bates said, the full Congress had issued no subpoena for the information sought in the suit. The absence of full Congressional backing leaves to "the realm of speculation" whether there is any need, or justification, for the court to try to exercise its power by ordering the executive branch to do something, the judge said.

(Judge Bates's ruling can be read online by clicking onto the Web site of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia: www.dcd.uscourts.gov/.)

-------

You may read the entire decision in Walker v. Cheney here.)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Statement on the Cheney Energy Task Force from Henry Waxman

The decision is another Bush v. Gore. It is a convoluted decision by a Republican judge that gives Bush and Cheney near total immunity from scrutiny. In Bush v. Gore, five Republican justices gave the election to George Bush and Dick Cheney. Today, another Republican judge has decided that, once in office, Bush and Cheney can operate in complete secrecy with no oversight by Congress.

The only good news is that this decision is not the final word. It is inconceivable that the appellate court will uphold the embarrassing reasoning used by the district judge.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.12A.wax.bsh.v.gore.p.htm

t r u t h o u t | Statement
Henry A. Waxman Ranking Member House Judiciary

Statement on the Cheney Energy Task Force

Monday, 9 December, 2002

By Henry A. Waxman

The decision is another Bush v. Gore. It is a convoluted decision by a Republican judge that gives Bush and Cheney near total immunity from scrutiny. In Bush v. Gore, five Republican justices gave the election to George Bush and Dick Cheney. Today, another Republican judge has decided that, once in office, Bush and Cheney can operate in complete secrecy with no oversight by Congress.

The only good news is that this decision is not the final word. It is inconceivable that the appellate court will uphold the embarrassing reasoning used by the district judge.

Under President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the Administration has developed plans to keep secret files on the activities of all Americans. But at the same time, the Administration wants to keep everything it does from the public. In fact, under today¹s court ruling, Americans can¹t even learn the identity of the energy lobbyists who asked for special favors in the White House energy plan.

This is an ominous decision that defies fundamental and traditional American values of open government.

Judge Again Bars Effort to Keep Cheney Files Secret
By Katharine Q. Seelye

A federal judge today again rejected Bush administration efforts to protect as confidential documents from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy committee.

The 36-page ruling is the latest step in a lengthy procedural dispute between the White House and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.

Nothing of substance was resolved in the ruling. The White House has ignored Judge Sullivan's rulings, going over his head by asking a higher court to exempt Mr. Cheney from having to comply with the judge's orders over the last five months to turn over the documents.

The judge set Dec. 12 as the next time for the administration to meet back in court with the two groups, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, that brought the case. The earlier order compelling the White House to release the documents by Dec. 9 remains in effect.
The case is also in two other forums, and either could see action before Dec. 9.

First, the administration has gone directly to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to appeal Judge Sullivan's earlier orders that require it to produce nonprivileged documents or explain in detail why it does not want to.

Second, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is suing Mr. Cheney, arguing that the White House has to disclose whom Mr. Cheney met as he formulated energy policy and what they discussed.

The Sierra Club suit says the administration violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by refusing to tell the public how it developed that policy. Environmental groups say energy companies that were big contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 wielded undue influence in formulating the policy.

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/politics/28CHEN.html

The New York Times The New York Times Washington November 28, 2002

Judge Again Bars Effort to Keep Cheney Files Secret
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — A federal judge today again rejected Bush administration efforts to protect as confidential documents from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy committee.

The 36-page ruling is the latest step in a lengthy procedural dispute between the White House and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.

Nothing of substance was resolved in the ruling. The White House has ignored Judge Sullivan's rulings, going over his head by asking a higher court to exempt Mr. Cheney from having to comply with the judge's orders over the last five months to turn over the documents.

The judge set Dec. 12 as the next time for the administration to meet back in court with the two groups, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, that brought the case. The earlier order compelling the White House to release the documents by Dec. 9 remains in effect.
The case is also in two other forums, and either could see action before Dec. 9.

First, the administration has gone directly to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to appeal Judge Sullivan's earlier orders that require it to produce nonprivileged documents or explain in detail why it does not want to.

Second, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is suing Mr. Cheney, arguing that the White House has to disclose whom Mr. Cheney met as he formulated energy policy and what they discussed.

The Sierra Club suit says the administration violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by refusing to tell the public how it developed that policy. Environmental groups say energy companies that were big contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 wielded undue influence in formulating the policy.

The administration says that it has made public 36,000 pages of documents and that releasing additional files would jeopardize the ability of advisers to speak candidly with the president and vice president.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Monica Goodling, said: "What is at issue at this point is a limited number of additional documents from the president's closest advisers, the disclosure of which would raise serious constitutional concerns.

"We believe that the president's constitutional authority to gather candid advice from his advisers is so important that we are appealing this issue through the court of appeals and an application to the D.C. Circuit."

A lawyer for the Sierra Club, Sanjay Narayan, said the administration had not produced any of the documents that his group sought.

"The question is whether the White House is subject to discovery at all," Mr. Narayan said. "The administration says the White House is beyond the court's reach and can't be asked any questions. The judge has rejected that. So they went to the Court of Appeals, saying that what Judge Sullivan did was so extraordinary that it requires their immediate intervention."

In his ruling today, Judge Sullivan said the administration's merely disagreeing with his opinions was not a sufficient basis for circumventing his court.

"Sullivan," Mr. Narayan said, "basically said he doesn't want to hear this anymore and that he thinks they are basing their arguments to the Court of Appeals on mischaracterizations of the law and of the record."

Our country's Vice President is still making money from companies he supposedly doesn't have any financial interest in anymore (Halliburton and its subsidiaries -- which he claimed income from on his 2001 Tax Return).

Let me say that again: The Vice President is personally profiting from the War On Terrorism.

Who knows how much he plans to make directly from defense contracts for the War On Iraq?

Conflict Of Interest For Vice President?
By David Lazarus for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Let's say there's a businessman -- in China, for example -- with stellar public-sector connections. He wins billions of dollars in government contracts for his company. Let's say this businessman becomes a high-ranking government official himself. And let's say the government begins throwing its enemies into prison without trials or access to attorneys.

Would anyone be surprised if the official's former company wins the contract for building all those new prison cells? Probably not. We'd just assume that's how things work in a place like Beijing. Only this isn't a hypothetical situation, and it's not really about China. We're actually talking about the U.S. government and an American company. And the official in question is none other than Vice President Dick Cheney...

...Cheney, of course, previously served as chief executive officer of Halliburton, the Dallas oil-services giant. Less well-known is that Halliburton owns a subsidiary called Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is one of the Defense Department's leading contractors.

KBR, as the company's called, is profiting handsomely from America's war on terror. Among other things, it's responsible for feeding most of the troops at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan.

KBR's contract to provide support services for the Army lasts 10 years and contains no limit on spending. It could end up being worth billions. KBR has a similar deal with the Navy.

In July, the government announced that KBR had been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-unit detention center at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of "enemy combatants" have been held since January.

This is on top of $16 million received by KBR in February to get the Guantanamo prison facility off the ground, as well as another $7 million in April to expand the compound.

Most of the detainees have been denied any form of due process since being taken prisoner. This is slippery stuff. Cheney plays a central role in shaping Washington's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A company he once ran benefits directly from the government's actions.

"You can't get a clearer example of conflict of interest," said Bill Allison, managing editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington, DC. "It's a troubling phenomenon, to say the least."

...Cheney retired from Halliburton in August 2000. He received $4.3 million in deferred compensation that year, plus $806,332 in salary. He subsequently sold more than $40 million in stock options. Even though he's no longer in Halliburton's executive suite, Cheney reported on his 2001 tax return that he received nearly $1.6 million in deferred compensation from the company last year.

Cheney is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton, but neither the company nor the White House would specify how large his payment will be this year or how long the payments will continue. This is cash that he's already earned. Yet it's also cash that Halliburton is accruing in part from its activities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"He's receiving money from the government and money from a private-sector company with government contracts," said Allison. "Whose payroll is he on?" The answer: Both of them. And that couldn't be right.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/03/BU231196.DTL

Conflict Of Interest For Vice President?
By David Lazarus
San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, 3 November, 2002

Let's say there's a businessman -- in China, for example -- with stellar public-sector connections. He wins billions of dollars in government contracts for his company. Let's say this businessman becomes a high-ranking government official himself. And let's say the government begins throwing its enemies into prison without trials or access to attorneys.

Would anyone be surprised if the official's former company wins the contract for building all those new prison cells? Probably not. We'd just assume that's how things work in a place like Beijing. Only this isn't a hypothetical situation, and it's not really about China. We're actually talking about the U.S. government and an American company. And the official in question is none other than Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney, of course, previously served as chief executive officer of Halliburton, the Dallas oil-services giant. Less well-known is that Halliburton owns a subsidiary called Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is one of the Defense Department's leading contractors.

KBR, as the company's called, is profiting handsomely from America's war on terror. Among other things, it's responsible for feeding most of the troops at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan.

KBR's contract to provide support services for the Army lasts 10 years and contains no limit on spending. It could end up being worth billions. KBR has a similar deal with the Navy.

In July, the government announced that KBR had been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-unit detention center at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of "enemy combatants" have been held since January.

This is on top of $16 million received by KBR in February to get the Guantanamo prison facility off the ground, as well as another $7 million in April to expand the compound.

Most of the detainees have been denied any form of due process since being taken prisoner. This is slippery stuff. Cheney plays a central role in shaping Washington's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A company he once ran benefits directly from the government's actions.

"You can't get a clearer example of conflict of interest," said Bill Allison, managing editor for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington, DC. "It's a troubling phenomenon, to say the least."

That's not how Halliburton sees it. The company says Cheney currently plays no role whatsoever in any business dealings between Halliburton and the government. As for the $3.8 billion in government contracts and loans received by the company during Cheney's tenure as CEO, from 1995 to 2000, Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall stressed that Cheney steered clear of all defense matters. "He didn't want the appearance of being influential over any contracts awarded to KBR," she said.

Allison at the Center for Public Integrity all but laughed off this claim. "It's beyond belief that the CEO is not involved in all aspects of the company's business," he said. Indeed, it does seem a stretch to think that a former U.S. defense secretary, with a Rolodex stuffed full of Pentagon contacts, would have nothing to do with his company's lucrative defense business.

In any case, KBR did quite well under Cheney's watch. The company's defense contracts during the period ranged from $10 million for removal of hazardous waste at military bases and $5 million for maintenance of Florida missile facilities to $470 million for supporting U.S. forces in Bosnia and Croatia.

Moreover, documents uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity show that Halliburton received $1.5 billion in government loans and loan guarantees during the five years Cheney was CEO. That compares with just $100 million during the previous five years.

And the government contracts keep rolling in. Last year, for example, KBR was one of a number of defense-industry heavyweights handed a $5 billion government contract to dispose of outmoded weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.

In March, KBR received an almost $47 million contract to provide support services at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro (Imperial County), not far from the Mexican border.

And in August, a team of companies led by KBR received a $725 million, five- year contract to provide maintenance services at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the country's premiere nuclear weapons lab.

Cheney retired from Halliburton in August 2000. He received $4.3 million in deferred compensation that year, plus $806,332 in salary. He subsequently sold more than $40 million in stock options. Even though he's no longer in Halliburton's executive suite, Cheney reported on his 2001 tax return that he received nearly $1.6 million in deferred compensation from the company last year.

Cheney is still receiving deferred compensation from Halliburton, but neither the company nor the White House would specify how large his payment will be this year or how long the payments will continue. This is cash that he's already earned. Yet it's also cash that Halliburton is accruing in part from its activities in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"He's receiving money from the government and money from a private-sector company with government contracts," said Allison. "Whose payroll is he on?" The answer: Both of them. And that couldn't be right.

Transcription of a clip I saw from Thursday's session in congress on the Daily Show. They were making fun of Byrd's dramatic gestures, but if you listen to what he was saying, it's no laughing matter.

"I've been in this Congress fifty years. I have never seen a President of the United States or the Vice President of the United States stoop to such low levels," said Senator Robert Byrd (D) West Virginia, as he turned and pointed at the people watching at home. "It's your blood," he said. "Your sons and daughters."

Nelson Mandela: The United
States of America is a Threat to
World Peace
In a rare interview, the South African demands that George W. Bush win United Nations support before attacking Iraq

Nelson: "...there is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like. And of course we must consider the men and the women around the president. Gen. Colin Powell commanded the United States army in peacetime and in wartime during the Gulf war. He knows the disastrous effect of international tension and war, when innocent people are going to die, young men are going to die. He knows and he showed this after September 11 last year. He went around briefing the allies of the United States of America and asking for their support for the war in Afghanistan. But people like Dick Cheney… I see yesterday there was an article that said he is the real president of the United States of America, I don’t know how true that is. Dick Cheney, [Defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, they are people who are unfortunately misleading the president. Because my impression of the president is that this is a man with whom you can do business. But it is the men who around him who are dinosaurs, who do not want him to belong to the modern age. The only man, the only person who wants to help Bush move to the modern era is Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State.

(Interviewer) I gather you are particularly concerned about Vice President Cheney?

Nelson: Well, there is no doubt. He opposed the decision to release me from prison (laughs). The majority of the U.S. Congress was in favor of my release, and he opposed it. But it’s not because of that. Quite clearly we are dealing with an arch-conservative in Dick Cheney.

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/806174.asp?cp1=1





The former South African president with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz at the Earth Summit last week

Nelson Mandela: The United
States of America is a Threat to
World Peace
In a rare interview, the South African demands that George W. Bush win United Nations support before attacking Iraq

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Sept. 10 — Nelson Mandela, 84, may be the world’s most respected statesman. Sentenced to life in prison on desolate Robben Island in 1964 for advocating armed resistance to apartheid in South Africa, the African National Congress leader emerged in 1990 to lead his country in a transition to non-racial elections. As president, his priority was racial reconciliation; today South Africans of all races refer to him by his Xhosa clan honorific, Madiba. Mandela stepped down in 1999 after a single five-year term. He now heads two foundations focused on children. He met with NEWSWEEK’S Tom Masland early Monday morning in his office in Houghton, a Johannesburg suburb, before flying to Limpopo Province to address traditional leaders on the country’s AIDS crisis. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why are you speaking out on Iraq? Do you want to mediate, as you tried to on the Mideast a couple of years ago? It seems you are reentering the fray now.
Nelson Mandela: If I am asked, by credible organizations, to mediate, I will consider that very seriously. But a situation of this nature does not need an individual, it needs an organization like the United Nations to mediate. We must understand the seriousness of this situation. The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken. Unqualified support of the Shah of Iran led directly to the Islamic revolution of 1979. Then the United States chose to arm and finance the [Islamic] mujahedin in Afghanistan instead of supporting and encouraging the moderate wing of the government of Afghanistan. That is what led to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the most catastrophic action of the United States was to sabotage the decision that was painstakingly stitched together by the United Nations regarding the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms. And you will notice that France, Germany Russia, China are against this decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America. If you look at those factors, you’ll see that an individual like myself, a man who has lost power and influence, can never be a suitable mediator.

--inserted quote-- What about the argument that’s being made about the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s efforts to build a nuclear weapons. After all, he has invaded other countries, he has fired missiles at Israel. On Thursday, President Bush is going to stand up in front of the United Nations and point to what he says is evidence of... -- end inserted quote

…Scott Ritter, a former United Nations arms inspector who is in Baghdad, has said that there is no evidence whatsoever of [development of weapons of] mass destruction. Neither Bush nor [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair has provided any evidence that such weapons exist. But what we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. Nobody talks about that. Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white.

So you see this as a racial question?
Well, that element is there. In fact, many people say quietly, but they don’t have the courage to stand up and say publicly, that when there were white secretary generals you didn’t find this question of the United States and Britain going out of the United Nations. But now that you’ve had black secretary generals like Boutros Boutros Ghali, like Kofi Annan, they do not respect the United Nations. They have contempt for it. This is not my view, but that is what is being said by many people.

What kind of compromise can you see that might avoid the coming confrontation?
There is one compromise and one only, and that is the United Nations. If the United States and Britain go to the United Nations and the United Nations says we have concrete evidence of the existence of these weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we feel that we must do something about it, we would all support it.

Do you think that the Bush administration’s U.N. diplomatic effort now is genuine, or is the President just looking for political cover by speaking to the U.N. even as he remains intent on forging ahead unilaterally?

Well, there is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like. And of course we must consider the men and the women around the president. Gen. Colin Powell commanded the United States army in peacetime and in wartime during the Gulf war. He knows the disastrous effect of international tension and war, when innocent people are going to die, young men are going to die. He knows and he showed this after September 11 last year. He went around briefing the allies of the United States of America and asking for their support for the war in Afghanistan. But people like Dick Cheney… I see yesterday there was an article that said he is the real president of the United States of America, I don’t know how true that is. Dick Cheney, [Defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, they are people who are unfortunately misleading the president. Because my impression of the president is that this is a man with whom you can do business. But it is the men who around him who are dinosaurs, who do not want him to belong to the modern age. The only man, the only person who wants to help Bush move to the modern era is Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State.

I gather you are particularly concerned about Vice President Cheney?
Well, there is no doubt. He opposed the decision to release me from prison (laughs). The majority of the U.S. Congress was in favor of my release, and he opposed it. But it’s not because of that. Quite clearly we are dealing with an arch-conservative in Dick Cheney.

I’m interested in your decision to speak out now about Iraq. When you left office, you said, “I’m going to go down to Transkei, and have a rest.” Now maybe that was a joke at the time. But you’ve been very active.
I really wanted to retire and rest and spend more time with my children, my grandchildren and of course with my wife. But the problems are such that for anybody with a conscience who can use whatever influence he may have to try to bring about peace, it’s difficult to say no.

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc

I'll let this comic from Tom Tomorrow speak for itself.

No, wait. Just so we know this isn't just a comic strip, this is real life, here's a Reuters article.

Reuters story in case the link goes bad (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0727-02.htm):

Halliburton to Build New Cells at Guantanamo Base
by Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. has been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-cell detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to hold additional suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, the Pentagon said on Friday.

The move will expand the high-security prison on the base, where hundreds of such "detainees" from Afghanistan are already being held in 612 small cells.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station has played a major part in the U.S. war on terrorism declared after September's attacks on America in which more than 3,000 people died. No prisoners have been charged, but some could eventually face military trials.

Brown and Root Services, an engineering division of Halliburton, will build the additional 6-by-8-foot cells on the windward side of the remote U.S. base at the southeastern tip of Cuba, the Pentagon said.

The work is expected to be completed by October. But the Pentagon suggested on Friday that the facility could grow even more and that the contract could eventually total as much as $300 million if additional options were exercised over the next four years.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the former chief executive officer of Halliburton, whose main business is providing oilfield services. The company has come under heavy pressure this year because of concerns about its liabilities and a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission into its accounting for cost overruns on construction projects.

ADDITIONAL CELLS SOUGHT BY RUMSFELD

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month asked Congress to approve expanding the prison facility, which currently has 612 cells, by 204 cells.

Army Lt. Col. Joe Hoey, a spokesman for the task force running the prisoner operation at the naval base in Cuba, said earlier that the United States was holding and interrogating 564 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners.

The prisoners were captured in the U.S.-led war against the al Qaeda group blamed for the September attacks and against the Taliban government that sheltered them in Afghanistan.

The captives were moved in April to Camp Delta, a permanent facility built to replace Camp X-Ray, a series of makeshift chain-link cells hastily erected when the U.S. military first brought prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo in January.

The United States drew fire from human rights groups after photographs were distributed of the prisoners squatting in their cells in the blazing Cuban sun. Human rights activists have criticized that U.S. stance that the captives are not prisoners of war under the Geneva conventions.

The fate of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo is still uncertain. The United States government has set guidelines to try some of them before military tribunals but has not said when that might happen.

Camp Delta is made up of solid cells in rows that look like long mobile homes. Unlike Camp X-Ray, they have wash basins with running water and floor-style toilets that flush.

Like X-Ray, Camp Delta is surrounded by fences topped with razor wire and ringed by wooden guard towers manned by sharpshooters. But the new camp is enclosed inside a green mesh curtain, which prevents visitors from seeing in and keeps the prisoners from seeing the tightly guarded shoreline a few hundred yards away.

© Reuters 2002

Meanwhile, back at the White House, upon the recommendation of his counsel VP Cheney shuts up for awhile, and waits for this whole mess to blow over.

See the NY Daily News story by Thomas M. DeFrank:
Veep zips lip as probers dig
-- Plans to stay mum till old firm cleared

Sources told the Daily News yesterday that with the urging of his lawyers, Cheney has scaled back his crucial public cheerleading role until a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Halliburton's accounting practices while Cheney was chairman and CEO has been resolved.

"Contrary to the urgings of some, including the President, he's decided to lower his profile," one official said. "He doesn't want anybody to say later that he was out there trying to jawbone the [SEC] case away."

Cheney isn't exactly disappearing - he has several public events each week and a heavy schedule of campaigning for GOP candidates. But as for media appearances and the Sunday talk show circuit, a second source said he's becoming invisible: "He's not going to be doing anything for a while."

A CNN Internet Survey shows that American's are sick of Cheney's double talking bullshit and are generally ready to see the guy fry for his criminal activities -- just like you or I would be punished.

The results from the survey come as no surprise, of course, but let's see if these same Americans can remember not to vote for the guy in 2003. Sheesh! We knew all this stuff about him during the presidential campaign three years ago, and lord knows nobody seemed to care then.

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that the lawsuit it brought on behalf of Halliburton shareholders against Vice President Dick Cheney, the other involved directors of Halliburton, as well as Halliburton and the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, for alleged fraudulent accounting practices, enjoys overwhelming public support.

Well I hope Dick Cheney enjoyed being president for a few hours last week during Bush's colonoscopy, because it might be the last he sees of either presidential office after all of the facts surrounding his stint as Chairman and Chief Executive of Halliburton come to light.

Now Cheney's being accused of defrauding shareholders -- something even rich people don't take too kindly to.

The public is also being reminded of Cheney's strong ties to Arthur Andersen, courtesy of a recent emergence of a promotional video where he personally vouches for Andersen Consulting.

Here are some BBC stories with more details:

Anti-corruption group sues Cheney

Cheney accused of corporate fraud

Accounts probe at Cheney firm