Category Archives: Shrub Watch

Joseph Wilson On 60 Minutes – How Valerie Plame Leak Threatens Our National Security

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

Keith Olbermann On Scooter Getting His Go Ahead To Leak The Identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Straight From Bush and Cheney

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.


The Washington Post Chimes In On the Bush – Plame Link

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

Well you can’t get any higher up the chain than that: Both Bush and Cheney We’re Behind Leak

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.

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A Disenfranchised Heather Gold Speaks For A Lot Of Us

Heather Gold explains (in graphic detail) what Bush would have to do to actually be impeached.

But first, she accurately expresses the feeling of disenfranchisement that many Americans feel these days at being powerless to stop or do anything to hold the Shrub responsible for his illegal actions.

In this case, feeling helpless after finding out that the Shrub personally authorized Scooter Libby to conduct the treasonous act of leaking the identity CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, and realize no one’s going to do a damn thing about it.

But Heather, take heart, Patrick Fitzgerald may be on the case!

Shrub Caught In Another Lie: He Knew About Katrina The Night Before

Did the White House make a conscious decision to do nothing about getting Katrina rescue efforts to the people of New Orleans?
If not, how could Bush have been relieved on Tuesday morning when he mistakenly thought that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet?”
This article is from Friday, February 10, 2006.
Now we can’t give the reorganization of the Department of Home Security all the credit for single handedly screwing up the rescue system that Clinton had taken 8 years to build. The Shrub gets some credit for cutting a lot of FEMA funding too, straight across the board.
So in many areas, it didn’t matter who was in charge, there was no money for the program anyway. (Here’s factcheck.org and washington monthly for some more good information on that.)

White House Knew of Levee’s Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton for The New York Times.
via
t r u t h o u t

Washington – In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
“FYI from FEMA,” said an e-mail message from the agency’s public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, “are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought – also a number of fires.”
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet,” he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an “all hands on deck” alarm, the investigators have found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed…
“There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was,” Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.

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Watergate On Steriods – The Truth About Bush’s Domestic Spying Program

The Watchers: Maria Hinojosa on NOW – The Truth About Bush’s Domestic Spying Program
This is from the January 13, 2006 episode of NOW.
Link to NOW website on this story, which includes documents a plenty backing up all the facts mentioned below (and much more).
So really things are getting pretty interesting.
On the one hand we have the Vice President’s right hand man Scooter Libby indicted by the Justice Department for leaking CIA Agent Valerie Plame’s identity.
We have Republican House Leader Tom DeLay having to step down in the face of his indictments in Texas.
We have “Bush Pioneer” Jack Abramoff pleading guilty to various money laundering and fraud charges, and in the process revealing the names of 60 or more other corrupt Republicans that were in on the racket.
But now, it would appear we have something like “Watergate On Steroids.”
This isn’t some office break-in that the President “knew” about via smoke filled rooms. This is an executive order straight from Bush himself self-authorizing a no-warrants-necessary domestic spying program.
Perhaps you saw Condi Rice on Meet The Press a few weeks ago making absolutely no sense whatsoever. She cites FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) as the reason for the President’s authority to issue no-warrant spying. In reality, of course, FISA is actually the reason we can conclude so easily that the President so clearly broke the law; If he had obtained FISA warrants for his Domestic Spying program, it would have been legal.
Programs such as Bush’s are exactly the reason that FISA was created: to protect Americans from the kinds of governement abuses carried out by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the 60’s and early 70’s. It was passed in 1978 after it came out that the government was spying heavily on whoever they wanted — on everyone from Jane Fonda to Martin Luther King.
The point was that “No,” actually, being at War isn’t an excuse to throw the Constitution out the window, in case you were wondering. That part the Founding Fathers wrote about “The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures…” — They meant that. And they meant it *especially* during times of war. Because then, like now, there was always some war going on with someone, somewhere. These rights have to be protected…but…hey, here’s this other court — one set up explicitly for granting these kinds of spying warrants, and quickly. So really, the government can still spy on you if it wants, but not as much as it wants to, willy nilly, and not without having to answer to anyone, ever. (So if you’re doing something that *looks* reasonably suspicious, look out!)
And spy they did. Only 5 of the more than 19,000 spy warrants presented to FISA were ever refused. But Bush wanted to spy on even more people. And on people that maybe didn’t have any connections to foreigners on the outside – what FISA was initially set up for.
Bush’s supporters are also saying that Congress explicitly gave Bush permission to commit these acts under the Joint Resolution passed almost unanimously by Congress in the days immediately following 911, referring to the passage that authorizes the President “To use all necessary and appropriate force against those…planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks…” But we already know that the types of people being spied on in what came to be known as “The Program” went far beyond those directly connected to Al Quaeda or 911.
Here’s NOW’s take on this story. They let both sides tell there story.
But I think you will agree, after seeing the details for yourself, that it’s pretty matter of fact.
I’ve split it up into 4 pieces. I’m learning to list them all individually now so video RSS readers, such as FireAnt will download the media.
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 1 of 4 (11 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 2 of 4 (11 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 3 of 4 (7.3 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 4 of 4 (8.6 MB)
MP3s
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 1 of 4 (MP3 6.8 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 2 of 4 (MP3 7.1 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 3 of 4 (MP3 5.2 MB)
Now The Watchers – Domestic Spying 4 of 4 (MP3 6.2 MB)