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 🙂
Category Archives: Bye-Bye Scooter
Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed – White House Implicated Over CIA Agent Outing
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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.
Feds Ready To Nail Cheney Staff Members Hannah and Libby For Outing Joseph Wilson’s Wife
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.
Newsweek: How Dick Cheney Sold The War
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.
Former CIA Operations Chief Says Shrub Administration Outed Agent On Purpose
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.”
William Rivers Pitt On The Shrub’s Iraq-Gate Cover Up
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.
Colin Powell About His Own U.N. Report: “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.”
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.”
Maureen O’Dowd On Our Country’s Xanax Cowboy
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).