Yeah I stole this category title from the daily show. I'll embed the vid in the "more" section, if they ever send me my "embed" code...

BarackObama really in the twitterverse?

Does it really even matter?

Update 05-11-07 - so far he hasn't twittered me back! Humph!

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.

Update - 10/30/05 Scoop has it now!

I need it for a project I'm working on this afternoon and tomorrow.

I know it's gotta be out there. ...:-) lisa@lisarein.com

And yes, I am pretty happy right about now. Thanks for asking.

Hopefully, this trial will be many other facts to light about how this administration has been operating.

More on this in a jiffy! (unless I get sidetracked :-)

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.

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.

page 2 of 3

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’. ”

page 3 of 3

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

Naming of Agent 'Was Aimed at Discrediting CIA'
By Edward Alden for The Financial Times.

The Bush administration's exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.

In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq...

Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: "She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme."

The leak was a way to "demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular".

He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.

While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq "we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy", Mr Cannistraro said.

In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts...

The administration has refused to appoint an independent special counsel on the leak investigation, and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said this week that John Ashcroft, attorney-general and close political ally of President George W. Bush, was involved in the investigation.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who said he voted for Mr Bush and contributed to his campaign, said the White House needed to authorise a more independent investigation. "Unless they come up with a guilty party, it will leave the impression that the administration is playing politics."

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

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1066565362612

Naming of Agent 'Was Aimed at Discrediting CIA'
By Edward Alden, The Financial Times

Saturday 25 October 2003

The Bush administration's exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.

In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq.

Senior administration officials in July revealed the name of Valerie Plame, a former clandestine CIA officer and the wife of Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA in 2002 to assess claims that Iraq was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger.

Mr Wilson had angered the White House by concluding that there was no evidence to support the claim, and then going public with that information after the war.

The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation to determine the source of the leak, which in effect ended Ms Plame's career as a CIA operative and may have endangered agency sources who came in contact with her.

Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: "She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme."

The leak was a way to "demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular".

He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.

While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq "we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy", Mr Cannistraro said.

In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts.

Other agency officials, who said they had been colleagues of Ms Plame when she was trained as a CIA agent, said the leak could do severe damage to the morale of the intelligence agencies. "The US government has never before released the name of a clandestine officer," said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer. "My classmates and I have been betrayed."

Senate Democrats are pressing for an independent investigation of the intelligence leading up to the war, and are calling for a special counsel to investigate the leak.

The Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee is preparing a highly critical report of the pre-war intelligence, the Washington Post reported yesterday, which will conclude that the CIA overstated any evidence about Iraq's weapons programmes and ties to terrorism.

But the report will not look at the issue of whether the White House put pressure on the CIA to reach such conclusions.

The administration has refused to appoint an independent special counsel on the leak investigation, and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said this week that John Ashcroft, attorney-general and close political ally of President George W. Bush, was involved in the investigation.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who said he voted for Mr Bush and contributed to his campaign, said the White House needed to authorise a more independent investigation. "Unless they come up with a guilty party, it will leave the impression that the administration is playing politics."

The Crime and the Cover-Up
By William Rivers Pitt for t r u t h o u t.

The simple fact is that America went to war in Iraq because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and virtually every other public face within this administration vowed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. America went to war because these people vowed that Iraq had direct connections to al Qaeda, and by inference to the attacks of September 11.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said Bush on March 17, 2003.

"We know now that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," said Cheney on August 26, 2002.

"There is no doubt'' that Saddam Hussein ''has chemical weapons stocks,'' said Powell to FOX News on September 8, 2002.

"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," said Bush in his State of the Union address. On September 26, 2002, Don Rumsfeld laid the groundwork for Bush's statement by claiming that America had "bulletproof" evidence of Iraqi involvement with al Qaeda.

These public statements, augmented by hundreds more in the same vein, stoked fears within an already shellshocked American populace that Iraqi nuclear weapons and anthrax would come raining out of the sky at any moment, unless something was done. This same information was delivered in dire tones to Congress, which voted for war on Iraq based almost exclusively on the testimony of CIA Director George Tenet.

None of it was true. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 82 days since "hostilities ceased" on May 1, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 124 days since the shooting in Iraq officially started on March 19, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 230 days since the UNMOVIC weapons inspections began in Iraq in late November of 2002. No proof whatsoever of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda has been established.

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

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/072103A.shtml

The Crime and the Cover-Up
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 21 July 2003

The scandal axiom in Washington states that it is not the crime that destroys you, but the cover-up. Today in Washington you can hear terms like 'Iraqgate' and 'Weaponsgate' bandied about, but such obtuse labels do not provide an explanation for the profound movements that are taking place.

Clearly, there is a scandal brewing over the Iraq war and the Bush administration claims of Iraqi weapons arsenals that led to the shooting. Clearly, there is a cover-up taking place. Yet this instance, the crimes that have led to the cover-up are worse by orders of magnitude than the cover-up itself.

The simple fact is that America went to war in Iraq because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and virtually every other public face within this administration vowed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. America went to war because these people vowed that Iraq had direct connections to al Qaeda, and by inference to the attacks of September 11.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said Bush on March 17, 2003.

"We know now that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," said Cheney on August 26, 2002.

"There is no doubt'' that Saddam Hussein ''has chemical weapons stocks,'' said Powell to FOX News on September 8, 2002.

"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," said Bush in his State of the Union address. On September 26, 2002, Don Rumsfeld laid the groundwork for Bush's statement by claiming that America had "bulletproof" evidence of Iraqi involvement with al Qaeda.

These public statements, augmented by hundreds more in the same vein, stoked fears within an already shellshocked American populace that Iraqi nuclear weapons and anthrax would come raining out of the sky at any moment, unless something was done. This same information was delivered in dire tones to Congress, which voted for war on Iraq based almost exclusively on the testimony of CIA Director George Tenet.

None of it was true. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 82 days since "hostilities ceased" on May 1, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 124 days since the shooting in Iraq officially started on March 19, 2003. Not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry has been found in Iraq in the 230 days since the UNMOVIC weapons inspections began in Iraq in late November of 2002. No proof whatsoever of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda has been established.

Recently, the scandal over the missing Iraq weapons and the Bush administration claims has focused on whether or not Iraq was trying to procure uranium "yellow cake" from Niger in order to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. The last two weeks have shown decisively that the Bush administration used manufactured evidence, which had been denounced from virtually all corners of the American intelligence community, to justify their war. The administration's explanation for this has changed by the hour - They weren't told by the CIA, and then they were told but Bush and Cheney never heard about it, but it was only sixteen words in one speech, so everybody calm down.

No one is calming down. When the President of the United States terrifies the American people in his constitutionally-mandated State of the Union speech with nuclear threats based upon evidence that was universally known to be shoddily forged garbage, no one should calm down. When he uses that terror to make war on a nation that was no threat to America, no one should calm down. When over 200 American soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians die because of this, no one should calm down. When that grisly body count rises every single day, no one should calm down.

The Niger nuclear forgery scandal is merely an accent in this criminal symphony. It has become all too clear that a small cadre of ultra-conservative hawks within the administration led us to where we are today with absolutely no oversight from the rest of the government. This group managed the run-up to war by creating demonstrably exaggerated interpretations of intelligence reports, and used 'insider data' from people with many good reasons to help lie America into this war.

The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. The OSP was staffed by rank amateurs, civilians whose ideological pedigree suited Rumsfeld and his cabal of hawks. Though this group was on no government payroll and endured no Congressional oversight, their information and interpretations managed to prevail over the data being provided by the State Department and CIA. This group was able to accomplish this incredible feat due to devoted patronage from high-ranking ultra-conservatives within the administration, including Vice-President Cheney.

The highest levels of the OSP were staffed by heavy-hitters like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, and William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Cheney before joining the Pentagon. These two men, along with their civilian advisors, worked according to a strategy that they hoped would recreate Iraq into an Israeli ally, destroy a potential threat to Persian Gulf oil trade, and wrap U.S. allies around Iran. The State Department and CIA saw this plan as being badly flawed and based upon profoundly questionable intelligence. The OSP responded to these criticisms by cutting State and CIA completely out of the loop. By the time the war came, nearly all the data used to justify the action to the American people was coming from the OSP. The American intelligence community had been totally usurped.

When the OSP wanted to change or exaggerate evidence of Iraqi weapons capabilities, they sent Vice President Cheney to CIA headquarters on unprecedented visits where he demanded "forward-leaning" interpretations of the evidence. When Cheney was unable to go to the CIA, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, went in his place.

On three occasions, former congressman Newt Gingrich visited CIA in his capacity as a "consultant" for ultra-conservative hawk Richard Perle and his Defense Policy Board. According to the accounts of these visits, Gingrich browbeat the analysts to toughen up their assessments of the dangers posed by Hussein. He was allowed access to the CIA and the analysts because he was a known emissary of the OSP.

The main OSP source of data on Iraqi weapons, and on the manner in which the Iraqi people would greet their 'liberators,' was Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi was the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group seeking since 1997 the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been hand-picked by Don Rumsfeld to be the leader of Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that he had been convicted in 1992 of 32 counts of bank fraud by a Jordanian court and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison. It apparently never occurred to Rumsfeld and the OSP that Chalabi had a lot of reasons to lie. It seems they were too enamored of the data he was providing, because that data fully justified the course of action they had been set upon since September 11, 2001.

Chalabi was the main source behind claims that Iraq had connections to al Qaeda. Chalabi was the main source behind claims that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi was the main source behind claims that the Iraqi people would rise up and embrace their American invaders. Chalabi's claims on this last matter are the main reason post-war Iraq is in complete chaos, because Rumsfeld assumed the logistics for repairing Iraq would be simple - The joyful Iraqis would do it for him.

According to a story entitled "Planners Faulted in Iraq Chaos" by Knight-Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, published on July 13, Chalabi proved to be a dangerous wild card. Chalabi's association with and influence over the OSP, however, continued unabated:

"The Chalabi scheme was dealt another major blow in February, a month before the war started, when U.S. intelligence agencies monitored him conferring with hard-line Islamic leaders in Tehran, Iran, a State Department official said. About that time, an Iraqi Shiite militia that was based in Iran and known as the Badr Brigade began moving into northern Iraq, setting off alarm bells in Washington. Cheney, once a strong Chalabi backer, ordered the Pentagon to curb its support for the exiles, the official said. Yet Chalabi continued to receive Pentagon assistance, including backing for a 700-man paramilitary unit. The U.S. military flew Chalabi and his men at the height of the war from the safety of northern Iraq to an air base outside the southern city of Nasiriyah in expectation he would soon take power."

Chalabi never took power. Instead, Paul Bremer was installed as the American proconsul in Iraq, ostensibly with orders to bring stability and liberty to the country. This last aspect is the final lie, the most repugnant crime, perpetrated against the civilians of that ravaged nation.

I spoke last week with a woman named Jodie Evans, long-time peace activist and organizer of a group called the International Occupation Watch Center, or IOWC. The purpose of the IOWC is to stand as watchdogs in Iraq over the corporate contracts being doled out, and to view in person what is happening to the Iraqi people. "I think that if you were against the war, then you need to be there," said Evans, "because there is no one in Iraq who is for the Iraqi people, and the people know it. They know it."

Evans had just returned from Baghdad. Upon her arrival to the city, she saw the demonstrable chaos caused by the war, and by the abject failure to repair the country in the aftermath. "It was 120 degrees, it was dusty, the air had a haze that makes everything gray," said Evans. "The buildings you see on the road are bombed out. In some, you can see the fire coming up. In some, you only see the scaffolding of contorted metal. We got across our bridge and turned right onto the street we know so well, the one we've stayed on, and every building was either boarded up or bombed out, including the United Nations DP. It was all bombed in, the windows were black from the fire."

"Immediately after we arrived," said Evans, "we hear that it is not only worse than before the war. It is worse than during the war. People are upset, people are angry. There were lots of stories about how the Americans are doing this on purpose. A month after the '91 war, which was much worse than this one, everything was back and working. Now, the people live in this chaos they can't even imagine. People can't go outside. Women haven't left their homes. Lots of people haven't come back from Syria or Kuwait or wherever they fled to get away from the bombing, because life in Iraq is unlivable. There is 65% unemployment, and even the doctors and nurses and teachers who are going to work don't get paid, so there's no money."

Evans met a number of Americans in Iraq who are part of the 'rebuilding process.' One such person was in the Compound, a guarded palace that is now home to Bremer's office and staff along with a number of other groups. The overall organization is called the Iraqi Assistance Center, or IAC. The man Evans met was a professor of religion and political theory at a religious college in America. He explained that his job was to collect intelligence for Bremer.

"That professor I spoke to, the one doing intelligence for Bremer, I told him that I had spoken to countless Iraqis and all of them felt this chaos was happening on purpose," said Evans. "He basically said this was true, that chaos was good, and out of chaos comes order. So what the Iraqis were saying - that this madness was all on purpose - this intelligence guy didn't discredit. He said, 'If you keep them hungry, they'll do anything for us.'"

"I met the man who was hired to create a new civil government in Baghdad, to bring Baghdad back to order," said Evans. "His name was Gerald Lawson. I asked him what his background was that allowed him to get this job. He said he was in the Atlanta Police for 30 years. I asked how this gave him the ability to create a stable, civil government. He said he was a manager. I asked him what he knew about Iraqis. He knew nothing, and didn't care to know anything. He didn't know their history, their government, didn't speak a word of Arabic and didn't care to learn. This guy doesn't work for the American government, doesn't work for the State Department, and doesn't work for the CPA. He works for a corporation created by ex-Generals. Their job is to create the new Iraqi government structure."

"We met the man whose job is to make sure the hospitals have what they need," said Evans. "He is a veterinarian. We met a British guy who showed up at the Compound gates one day and said he was a volunteer who wanted to help. The next day he was named the head of rubbish control in Baghdad, which is a huge problem there because there is garbage all over the street. I asked him what he had been doing with his time. He said he'd been hanging out at Odai's palace playing with the lions and the cheetahs. I met the guy in charge of designing the airport, where major jumbo jets are supposed to land. He had never designed an airport before."

"Another man I spoke to associated with this process is named Don Munson," said Evans. "His job is civilian affairs policy. He said to me, 'We are replacing one dictatorship with another.' He's there for two years, and he works in the palace on the first floor."

"Remember," said Evans, "that the first thing America did was to fire 80,000 police officers. These guys weren't associated with the Hussein regime. That's like connecting a cop in LA to the Bush administration. All the people I've talked to over there, the ambassadors and others, said they warned Bremer not to do that. The cops knew who the criminals were, and 80,000 cops are gone. So now there are these little mafias that run neighborhoods. With no other work and no way to survive, people are going to become criminals. The borders are wide open - we didn't even get stopped when we came in - so everything is just flowing into Iraq."

"A friend of mine's husband is an ambassador," said Evans. "I asked him if this was normal operating procedure. He said that, basically, no one will work on this Iraq project who has any respect for their work or career, because it is so clearly a farce. He said that later we will go in after these guys have blown it, but right now with Bremer there it is a farce. Even the press is over there are just shaking their heads and asking, can anyone fail so badly? Can anybody make so many mistakes? You can't imagine they can be so dumb."

"One Iraqi woman I spoke to," said Evans, "said she feels like Iraq is a wounded animal, and everyone is coming in to take their piece of flesh."

The cover-up is one thing, the crime is another. The Bush administration, mainly in the form of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, disregarded any and all intelligence which said Iraq was no threat. They supplanted reliable data with a slew of lies and exaggerations that were fed daily to the American people and Congress, and got their war. In the aftermath, nothing is being done for the millions of Iraqi civilians who suffer daily under their newfound 'liberty.'

American soldiers continue to die. Two more, men from the 101st Airborne, were killed early Sunday when their convoy was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. "You have these young American soldiers sitting in turrets," said Jodie Evans, "just sitting ducks for the rage and frustration and vengeance that is coming out."

This is a crime without peer in the annals of American history. The cover-up currently underway must not be allowed to succeed.

When the American government gets hijacked by extremists like the men staffing the Office of Special Plans, when intelligence data stating flatly that Iraq presents no threat to America is disregarded or exaggerated because the truth does not fit ideological desires, when Congress is lied to, when the American people are lied to, when innocent civilians at the sharp end of these lies are left to rot in the dust and the bomb craters on purpose, when American soldiers are shot down in the street because of these lies, no kind of cover-up can be allowed to succeed.

The time has indeed come for a reckoning. Let it begin, and let it begin soon.

Author's Note: The data surrounding this developing story is voluminous, and seems to change every time an administration representative opens his or her mouth. I have collected below the last few stories I have written on this subject in chronological order. Please utilize this data to further your understanding of this matter.

We Used To Impeach Liars (6/3/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/060303A.shtml

The Dog Ate My WMDs (6/13/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/061303A.shtml

Slaughtergate (6/23/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062303A.shtml

Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern (6/26/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml

The Insiders Are Coming Out (7/8/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/070803A.shtml

Mr. Bush, You Are A Liar (7/11/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/071103A.shtml

The Dubious Suicide of George Tenet (7/14/03)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/071403A.shtml

- - - - -

William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto Press at SilenceIsSedition.com.

Oh, ok. That quote was his reaction to a "draft" and not the final report.
(Theoretically the report was transformed accordingly into something Powell could stomach before reading it to the world.)

Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

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

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030531/wl_mideast_afp/us_iraq_powell&cid=1514&ncid=1480

Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report
Fri May 30, 8:42 PM ET
Add Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) was under persistent pressure from the Pentagon (news - web sites) and White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons of mass destruction he delivered at the United Nations (news - web sites) last February, a US weekly reported.

US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in late January.

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the CIA (news - web sites), US News reported.

The White House also pressed Powell to include charges that the suspected leader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer prior to the attacks, despite a refusal by US and European intelligence agencies to confirm the meeting, the magazine said.

The pressure forced Powell to appoint his own review team that met several times with Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) to prepare the speech, in which the secretary of state accused Iraq of hiding tonnes of biological and chemical weapons.

US News also said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September, arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."

However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress shortly after that that the Iraqi "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas," according to the report.

The Xanax Cowboy
By Maureen Dowd for The New York Times

As he rolls up to America's first pre-emptive invasion, bouncing from motive to motive, Mr. Bush is trying to sound rational, not rash. Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.

But the Xanax cowboy made it clear that Saddam is going to pay for 9/11. Even if the fiendish Iraqi dictator was not involved with Al Qaeda, he has supported "Al Qaeda-type organizations," as the president fudged, or "Al Qaeda types" or "a terrorist network like Al Qaeda."

We are scared of the world now, and the world is scared of us. (It's really scary to think we are even scaring Russia and China.)

Bush officials believe that making the world more scared of us is the best way to make us safer and less scared. So they want a spectacular show of American invincibility to make the wicked and the wayward think twice before crossing us.

Of course, our plan to sack Saddam has not cowed the North Koreans and Iranians, who are scrambling to get nukes to cow us.

It still confuses many Americans that, in a world full of vicious slimeballs, we're about to bomb one that didn't attack us on 9/11 (like Osama); that isn't intercepting our planes (like North Korea); that isn't financing Al Qaeda (like Saudi Arabia); that isn't home to Osama and his lieutenants (like Pakistan); that isn't a host body for terrorists (like Iran, Lebanon and Syria).

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/09DOWD.html

The Xanax Cowboy
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Sunday 9 March 2003

You might sum up the president's call to war Thursday night as "Message: I scare."

As he rolls up to America's first pre-emptive invasion, bouncing from motive to motive, Mr. Bush is trying to sound rational, not rash. Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.

But the Xanax cowboy made it clear that Saddam is going to pay for 9/11. Even if the fiendish Iraqi dictator was not involved with Al Qaeda, he has supported "Al Qaeda-type organizations," as the president fudged, or "Al Qaeda types" or "a terrorist network like Al Qaeda."

We are scared of the world now, and the world is scared of us. (It's really scary to think we are even scaring Russia and China.)

Bush officials believe that making the world more scared of us is the best way to make us safer and less scared. So they want a spectacular show of American invincibility to make the wicked and the wayward think twice before crossing us.

Of course, our plan to sack Saddam has not cowed the North Koreans and Iranians, who are scrambling to get nukes to cow us.

It still confuses many Americans that, in a world full of vicious slimeballs, we're about to bomb one that didn't attack us on 9/11 (like Osama); that isn't intercepting our planes (like North Korea); that isn't financing Al Qaeda (like Saudi Arabia); that isn't home to Osama and his lieutenants (like Pakistan); that isn't a host body for terrorists (like Iran, Lebanon and Syria).

I think the president is genuinely obsessed with protecting Americans and believes that smoking Saddam will reduce the chances of Islamic terrorists' snatching catastrophic weapons. That is why no cost - shattering the U.N., NATO, the European alliance, Tony Blair's career and the U.S. budget - is too high.

Even straining for serenity, Mr. Bush sounded rattled at moments: "My job is to protect America, and that is exactly what I'm going to do. . . . I swore to protect and defend the Constitution; that's what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath, and that's exactly what I am going to do."

But citing 9/11 eight times in his news conference was exploitative, given that the administration concedes there is no evidence tying Iraq to the 9/11 plot. By stressing that totem, Mr. Bush tried to alchemize American anger at Al Qaeda into support for smashing Saddam.

William Greider writes in The Nation, "As a bogus rallying cry, `Remember 9/11' ranks with `Remember the Maine' of 1898 for war with Spain or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964. . . ." A culture more besotted with inane "reality" TV than scary reality is easily misled. Mr. Greider pointed out that in a Times/CBS News survey, 42 percent believe Saddam was personally responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and in an ABC News poll, 55 percent believe he gives direct support to Al Qaeda.

The case for war has been incoherent due to overlapping reasons conservatives want to get Saddam.

The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats.

And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a "statement of principles," signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials - Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41's realpolitik and shaping what would become 43's pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," with America extending its domain by challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values."

Saddam would be the squealing guinea pig proving America could impose its will on the world.

With W., conservatives got a Bush who wanted to be Reagan. With 9/11, they found a new tragedy to breathe life into their old dreams.