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Vice President Lied as White House Sought to Defuse Leak Inquiry
    By Jason Leopold
    ZNet.com

    Monday 07 November 2005

    Did Vice President Dick Cheney help cover-up the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson in the months after conservative columnist Robert Novak first disclosed her identity?

    That's one of the questions Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is likely trying to figure out. It's unclear what Cheney said to investigators back in 2004 when he was questioned - not under oath - about the leak, particularly what he knew and when he knew it.

    The five-count criminal indictment handed up by a grand jury last month against Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, sheds new light on a pattern of strategic deception by the Vice President and the White House to defuse an inquiry into who leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the press. Months after Plame's identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, Cheney continued to hide the fact that he and his aides were intimately involved in disseminating classified information about her to journalists.

    What the Vice President Denied Knowing

    The indictment against Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, clearly states that Cheney and Libby discussed Plame's undercover CIA status and the fact that her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, traveled to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from the African country in early June of 2003.

    Yet the following month, Cheney and then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer asserted that the vice president was unaware of Wilson's Niger trip, who the ambassador was, or a classified report Wilson wrote about his findings prior to the ambassador's July 6, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times.

    We now know, courtesy of the 22-page Libby indictment, that Cheney wasn't being truthful. Cheney did see the report; he knew full well who Wilson was. He also knew that the CIA arranged for Wilson to travel to Niger, and he personally sought out information about Wilson's trip to Niger, was briefed about the fact-finding mission, and even obtained classified information about Plame's covert CIA status. He also came to know one other important nugget: that Plame may have recommended her husband for the trip.

    Cheney's public campaign and that of other White House officials to discredit Wilson and strategically lie about the Plame leak started on Sept. 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press."

    During the interview, Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or anything about his trip.

    "I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in response to Russert who quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson - I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back ... I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came ..."

    "The CIA did," Russert said, interjecting.

    "Who at the CIA? I don't know," Cheney said. "He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back."

    What happened once Cheney received information on Plame and Wilson in June 2003 remains unclear. But the indictment illustrates - in no uncertain terms - that the vice president's office staged a concerted effort to undermine Wilson for questioning the veracity of the Niger claims.

    Fitzgerald has eyed Cheney in seeking to ascertain who ordered the leak, as previously reported. While the Vice President stands accused of no wrongdoing, his role may come into greater focus during a trial.

    In an interview with the syndicated radio program "Democracy Now," Wilson argued that Cheney may have been lying to Russert when he said he didn't know about the ambassador's Niger trip.

    "While we've never met, he certainly knows who I am and should know unless his memory is flawed and faulty," Wilson said during the Sept. 16, 2003 interview. "There were at a minimum three reports that had been generated shortly after the Vice President had asked the question, 'what do we know about this?'"

    The Vice President certainly must have known Wilson during his tenure as secretary of defense during the first President Bush's administration. In the weeks leading up to the first Gulf War, Wilson served as the acting US ambassador on the ground in Baghdad. In fact, Wilson was the only line of communication between Washington and Saddam Hussein. The White House held daily briefings with Wilson, and Cheney sat in on a majority of those briefings.

    White House Suggested Investigation Was Waste of Time

    In hindsight, it now seems that the White House, including President Bush, attempted to steer reporters away from covering the Plame leak by saying the "leaker" would never be found.

    On October 7, 2003, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that the White House ruled out three administration officials - Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as sources of the leak - a day before FBI questioned the three of them - based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.

    The very next day, however, Rove was questioned by FBI investigators and said that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak's column was published - a lie, it appears - based on Time reporter Matthew Cooper's emails which stated that Rove told Cooper about Plame.

    Bush told reporters the same day he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.

    "I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush said. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea."

    Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) responded to the president's statement in the New York Times.

    "If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?" Lautenberg asked. "Would he say that about a bank robbery investigation?"

    Facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs to Justice Department officials, Bush said that the White House could invoke executive privilege and withhold some "sensitive" documents related to the leak case. Democrats speculated that the White House had something to hide.

    Classified Leak or Truthful Rebuttal?

    Unable to keep emails from investigators, the White House mounted a defense. They would seek to distinguish between "unauthorized leaks" and something perfectly legal: "setting the record straight."

    On Oct. 6, 2003, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak's source, McClellan tried to explain the difference between unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the record straight" about Wilson's public criticism of the Administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq.

    "There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out," McClellan said.

    "There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that it was not the vice president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger."

    Wilson, it turned out, had never said that the vice president's office had sent him to Niger.

Lying with Intelligence
    By Robert Scheer
    The Los Angeles Times

    Tuesday 08 November 2005

    Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?

    That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.

    The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

    Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi - a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001 - was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

    He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the U.S. that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the U.S. overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA.

    Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key Oct. 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.

    Leading up to the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to sell it to the United Nations, while Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated it breathlessly for homeland audiences. The con worked, and Americans came to believe the lie that Hussein was associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

    Even CIA Director George Tenet publicly fell into line, ignoring his own agency's dissent that Libi would not have been in a position to know what he said he knew. In fact, Libi, according to the DIA, could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training allegedly occurred. In January 2004, the prisoner recanted his story, and the next month the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his false information.

    One by one, the exotic intelligence factoids Bush's researchers culled from raw intelligence data files to publicly bolster their claim of imminent threat - the yellowcake uranium from Niger, the aluminum tubes for processing uranium, the Prague meeting with Mohamed Atta, the discredited Iraqi informants "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi - have been exposed as previously known frauds.

    When it came to selling an invasion of Iraq it had wanted to launch before 9/11, the Bush White House systematically ignored the best available intelligence from U.S. agencies or any other reliable source.

    It should be remembered that while Bush and his gang were successfully scaring the wits out of us about the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda alliance, U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. Weapons inspectors Hans Blix and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei promised they could finish scouring the country if given a few more months. But instead, they were abruptly chased out by an invasion necessitated by what the president told us was a "unique and urgent threat."

    Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9/11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence. The Bush defense of what is arguably the biggest lie ever put over on the American people is that everyone had gotten the intelligence wrong. Not so at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, as DITSUM No. 044-02 so clearly shows. How could the president not have known?

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great posts, avery, it's hard to believe that scooter will be the only one to go down from this disaster...i hope he is singing like a canary to try to cut a deal for himself...i hope he brings down the whole ugly cabal...it's about time this country got back to some sanity...every major poll shows that bush* and his people have no credibility left, and there is talk of impeachment even in the mainstream media...too late to bring back the dead but seeing those bastards in disgrace and driven from office will be some satisfaction...we cannot let up...they are nasty little roaches scuttling for the shadows...see one, another thousand got away...keep reading, keep talking, keep voting...

it's their arrogance that gets me, and i'm sure a lot of others...how they felt they could lie, then lie again to cover the first, then lie some more about lying...it does not end ever with them, until they have been publicly told, you're done, fired, go home, no more of this...

it can't happen soon enough...

Yes, They Lied
    By William Rivers Pitt
   

    Tuesday 08 November 2005

The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.
     - Ari Fleischer, 12/4/2002


    Find a defender of the White House on your television these days, and you are likely to hear them blame Bill Clinton for Iraq. Yes, you read that right. The talking point du jour lately has focused on comments made by Clinton from the mid-to-late 1990s to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat. The pretzel logic here, of course, is straightforward: this Democratic president thought the stuff was there, and that justifies the claims made by the Bush crew over the last few years about Iraqi weapons.

    Let's take a deeper look at the facts. Right off the bat, it is safe to say that Clinton and his crew had every reason to believe Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s. For one thing, they knew this because the previous two administrations - Reagan and Bush - actively assisted the Hussein regime in the development of these programs. In other words, we had the receipts.

    After the first Gulf War, the United Nations implemented a series of weapons inspections under the banner of UNSCOM, and scoured Iraq for both weapons and weapons production facilities. They lifted bombed buildings off their foundations, they used a wide range of detection technologies, and after seven years of work, they disarmed Iraq.

    A good place to start any detailed discussion of this matter is with former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who spent seven years in Iraq searching out and destroying Iraq's weapons and weapons manufacturing capabilities. "After 1998," Ritter reports in a book I wrote in 2002 titled War on Iraq, "Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed. What this means is that 90%-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability, including all of their factories used to produce chemical, biological, nuclear long-range ballistic missiles, the associated equipment of these factories, and the vast majority of the product produced by these factories, had been verifiably eliminated."

    The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal that has recently encompassed the White House stems from claims made by Bush in 2003 that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program. In 2002, Ritter described the status of Iraq's nuclear program. "The infrastructure, the facilities, had been 100% eliminated," he said. "In this, there is no debate. All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facility had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted down and destroyed, and we had in place one of the more effective monitoring mechanisms - gamma detection - that we operated in Iraq both from vehicles and airborne, looking for gamma rays that would be emitted if Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never found anything. The fact is, in terms of the industrial infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce nuclear weapons, this had been eliminated."

    Ritter went into great detail on the status of Iraq's chemical weapons capabilities during our 2002 interview. "The Iraqis were able to produce a nerve agent of sarin and tabun successfully and stabilize it," said Ritter, "but even stabilized stuff stored under ideal conditions will degenerate within five years. The sarin and tabun were produced in the Muthanna State establishment - a massive chemical weapons factory - and this place was bombed during the Gulf War, and then weapons inspectors came and completed the task of eliminating this facility. What that means is that Iraq lost its sarin and tabun manufacturing base."

    "Let's also keep in mind," he continued, "that we destroyed thousands of tons of chemical agent. It's not as though we said, 'Oh we destroyed a factory, now we're going to wait for everything else to expire.' No. We had an incineration plant operating full-time for years, burning tons of the stuff every day. We went out and blew up in place the bombs and missiles and warheads filled with this agent. We emptied out SCUD missile warheads filled with this agent. We destroyed this stuff - we hunted it down and we destroyed it."

    "Now, there are those who say that the Iraqis could have hid some of this from us," continued Ritter. "The problem with that scenario is that whatever they diverted would have had to have been produced in the Muthanna State establishment, which means that once we blew up the Muthanna State establishment, they no longer had the ability to produce new agent, and in five years science takes over. Sarin and tabun will degrade and become useless sludge. It's no longer a viable chemical agent that the world needs to be concerned about."

    "So," concluded Ritter, "all this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons - most of it is based upon speculation that Iraq could have hid some of this from UN weapons inspectors. That speculation is no longer valid, not in terms of the Iraqi ability to hide this stuff from inspectors - although I believe we did such a good job of inspecting Iraq that if they had tried to hide it, we would have found it. But let's just say that they did try to hide it, and we never found it. So what? It's gone today, so let's throw out that hypothetical. It's not even worth the time to talk about it anymore."

    On the subject of Iraqi biological weapons, Ritter said in 2002, "The two main biological weapons weaponized by the Iraqis were anthrax and botulinin toxin. Both factories have been destroyed, the means of production destroyed, and even if Iraq was able to hide these weapons, they're useless today. For Iraq to have biological weapons today, they would have had to reconstitute a biological manufacturing base. And again, biological research and development was one of the things most heavily inspected by weapons inspectors. We blanketed Iraq - every research and development facility, every university, every school, every hospital, every beer factory, anything with a potential fermentation capability was inspected, and we never found any evidence of ongoing research and development or retention."

    That's a lot of information, so let's boil it down. Yes, Iraq was at one time in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. By 1998, however, those weapons had been destroyed. The manufacturing base for the production of these weapons had been destroyed. Even if Iraq had been able to squirrel away a portion of these weapons, the basic chemistry involved means that the stuff degraded to utter uselessness within five years. Without a manufacturing base for the production of weapons material, said base having been eliminated by 1998, anything stashed away was pudding by 2003.

    If Bush's people are going to argue that invading Iraq in 2003 because of weapons of mass destruction was the responsible thing to do, they must certainly acknowledge that the efforts of the Clinton administration and UNSCOM to eliminate these weapons was also responsible. The tough talk from the Clinton administration in 1998 regarding Iraq's WMD was of a piece with this process; they were keeping the heat on to make sure the threat was eliminated.

    Flip to the end of the chapter, however, and you'll come across the pages being left out of the discussion by Bush's defenders. One, the stuff was destroyed by 1998, a fact that weapons inspections in 2003 could have easily established (and did establish, thanks to Bush's inspector, Dr. David Kay, who stated bluntly the stuff wasn't there, but only after the killing had begun). Two, Clinton did not invade Iraq and throw the United States into a ridiculous, endless, bloody quagmire. He managed to disarm Hussein without taking this disastrous step.

    In short, the contortions that defenders of Bush are going through to justify the invasion do not hold water. Further, evidence that the Bush administration lied with their bare faces hanging out to get this war is piling up in snowdrifts.

    Take, for example, the dire claims made by Bush administration officials about the imminent threat posed by Iraq, claims made as early as 2002. "The Iraqi regime," said Bush in October of 2002, "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

    If the threat was so dire, why is Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to Washington in the run-up to the war, claiming that the Bush administration would have been happy to hold off on invading Iraq until after the presidential election? Meyer, according to the UK Guardian, "reveals that Karl Rove, the political advisor to the president, told him there would have been no problem for Mr. Bush in waiting until the end of 2003 or even early 2004 and this would not have risked entanglement in the US presidential campaign."

    Some dire threat.

    Finally, there is the recent report in the New York Times about an al Qaeda operative captured in 2001 who deliberately lied to US interrogators about an al Qaeda presence in Iraq. The operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was exposed as a liar by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February of 2002. Their report bluntly stated that al-Libi was deliberately misleading interrogators, and any information he provided was not to be trusted. By 2004, al-Libi had completely recanted all of his testimony.

    "The (Defense Intelligence Agency) document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility," reported the Times. "Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'"

    It makes you wonder. Why did al-Libi lie about an al Qaeda presence in Iraq? Did he do this in order to help push the US into an invasion of that country? If true, this means that Bush, by invading Iraq, did exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted him to. He gave bin Laden the war, and the rallying cry, he was looking for. That's leadership.

    The stuff was destroyed by 1998. Bush and his crew were prepared to delay the invasion if it meant smoother sailing for the election, despite all their claims of an imminent threat. They used a fully discredited source to justify the invasion, even after being told the source was certainly making things up as he went along.

    Tack this to the wall:

How the United States should react if Iraq acquired WMD. The first line of defense ... should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence - if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.
     - Condoleeza Rice, 2/1/2000


We are greatly concerned about any possible linkup between terrorists and regimes that have or seek weapons of mass destruction ... In the case of Saddam Hussein, we've got a dictator who is clearly pursuing and already possesses some of these weapons. A regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction.
     - Dick Cheney, 6/20/2002


Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
     - Dick Cheney, 8/26/2002


There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.
     - Ari Fleischer, 9/6/2002


We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
     - Condoleeza Rice, 9/8/2002


Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
     - George W. Bush, 9/12/2002


Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.
     - George W. Bush, 10/5/2002


And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.
     - George W. Bush, 10/7/2002


After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.
     - George W. Bush, 10/7/2002


We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.
     - George W. Bush, 10/7/2002


Iraq could decide on any given day to provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group or to individual terrorists ...The war on terror will not be won until Iraq is completely and verifiably deprived of weapons of mass destruction.
     - Dick Cheney, 12/1/2002


If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.
     - Ari Fleischer, 12/2/2002


We know for a fact that there are weapons there.
     - Ari Fleischer, 1/9/2003


The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
     - George W. Bush, 1/28/2003


Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.
     - George W. Bush, 1/28/2003


We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.
     - Colin Powell, 2/5/2003


There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling.
     - Colin Powell, 2/5/2003


If Iraq had disarmed itself, gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction over the past 12 years, or over the last several months since (UN Resolution) 1441 was enacted, we would not be facing the crisis that we now have before us ... But the suggestion that we are doing this because we want to go to every country in the Middle East and rearrange all of its pieces is not correct.
     - Colin Powell, 2/28/2003


Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We know that based on intelligence, that has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.
     - Dick Cheney, 3/16/2003


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.
     - George W. Bush, 3/17/2003


Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly ... all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.
     - Ari Fleischer, 3/21/2003


We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
     - Donald Rumsfeld, 3/30/2003


We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them.
     - George W. Bush, 4/24/2003


I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now.
     - Colin Powell, 5/4/2003


It's going to take time to find them, but we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth. One thing is for certain: Saddam Hussein no longer threatens America with weapons of mass destruction.
     - George W. Bush, 5/25/2003


But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
     - George W. Bush, 5/30/2003


No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were, where they were stored.
     - Condoleeza Rice, 6/8/2003
 


  Yes, they lied.


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The President Should Be Held Accountable
    By Senator Ted Kennedy


    Thursday 10 November 2005

Kennedy's statement on the administration's efforts to exaggerate threats in their march to war in Iraq - and as Chalabi, the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi dissident, visits DC - he reminds the Senate of Chalabi's own words.
    (As prepared for delivery.)

    Earlier this week, several of our Republican colleagues came to the Senate floor and attempted to blame individual Democratic Senators for their errors in judgment about the war in Iraq.

    It was little more than a devious attempt to obscure the facts and take the focus off the real reason we went to war in Iraq. 150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq because the Bush Administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence to justify a war that America never should have fought.

    As we know all too well, Iraq was not an imminent threat. It had no nuclear weapons. It had no persuasive links to al Qaeda, no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

    But the President wrongly and repeatedly insisted that it was too dangerous to ignore the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and his ties to al Qaeda.

    In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people. It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war.

    Administration officials suggested the threat from Iraq was imminent, and went to great lengths to convince the American people that it was.

    At a roundtable discussion with European journalists last month, Secretary Rumsfeld deviously insisted: "I never said imminent threat."

    In fact, Secretary Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on September 18, 2002, "... Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain."

    In May 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether we went to war "because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the United States." Fleischer responded, "Absolutely."

    What else could National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have been suggesting, other than an imminent threat - an extremely imminent threat - when she said on September 8, 2002, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

    President Bush himself may not have used the word "imminent", but he carefully chose strong and loaded words about the nature of the threat - words that the intelligence community never used - to persuade and prepare the nation to go to war against Iraq.

    In the Rose Garden on October 2, 2002, as Congress was preparing to vote on authorizing the war, the President said the Iraqi regime "is a threat of unique urgency."

    In a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, President Bush Specifically invoked the danger of nuclear devastation: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

    At an appearance in New Mexico on October 28, 2002, after Congress had voted to authorize war, and a week before the election, President Bush said Iraq is a "real and dangerous threat."

    At a NATO summit on November 20, 2002, President Bush said Iraq posed a "unique and urgent threat."

    In Fort Hood, Texas on January 3, 2003, President Bush called the Iraqi regime a "grave threat."

    Nuclear weapons. Mushroom cloud. Unique and urgent threat. Real and dangerous threat. Grave threat. These words were the Administration's rallying cry for war. But they were not the words of the intelligence community, which never suggested that the threat from Saddam was imminent, or immediate, or urgent.

    It was Vice President Cheney who first laid out the trumped up argument for war with Iraq to an unsuspecting public. In a speech on August 26, 2002, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he asserted: "... We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." As we now know, the intelligence community was far from certain. Yet the Vice President had been convinced.

    On September 8, 2002, he was even more emphatic about Saddam. He said, "[We] do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." The intelligence community was deeply divided about the aluminum tubes, but Vice President Cheney was absolutely certain.

    One month later, on the eve of the watershed vote by Congress to authorize the war, President Bush said it even more vividly. He said, "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes ... which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed ... Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists."

    In fact, as we now know, the intelligence community was far from convinced of any such threat. The Administration attempted to conceal that fact by classifying the information and the dissents within the intelligence community until after the war, even while making dramatic and excessive public statements about the immediacy of the danger.

    In October 2002, the intelligence agencies jointly issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that "most agencies" believed that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program after inspectors left in 1998, and that, if left unchecked, Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

    The State Department's intelligence bureau, however, said the "available evidence" was inadequate to support that judgment. It refused to predict when "Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon."

    About the claims of purchases of nuclear material from Africa, the State Department's intelligence bureau said that claims of Iraq seeking to purchase nuclear material from Africa were "highly dubious." The CIA sent two memorandums to the White House stressing strong doubts about those claims.

    But the following January, in 2003, the President included the claims about Africa in his State of the Union Address, and conspicuously cited the British government as the source of that intelligence.

    Information about nuclear weapons was not the only intelligence distorted by the Administration. On the question of whether Iraq was pursuing a chemical weapons program, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in September 2002 that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."

    That same month, however, Secretary Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam has chemical weapons stockpiles.

    He said, "We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction," that Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of chemical weapons." He said that "he has stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," and that Iraq has "active chemical, biological and nuclear programs." He was wrong on all counts.

    Yet the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate actually quantified the size of the stockpiles, stating that "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 metric tons of CW agents - much of it added in the last year." In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went further, calling the 100 to 500 metric ton stockpile a "conservative estimate."

    Secretary Rumsfeld made an even more explicit assertion in his interview on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on March 30, 2003. When asked about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

    The Administration's case for war based on the linkage between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda was just as misguided.

    Significantly here as well, the Intelligence Estimate did not find a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. On the contrary, it stated only that such a relationship might develop in the future if Saddam was "sufficiently desperate" - in other words, if America went to war. But the estimate placed "low confidence" that, even in desperation, Saddam would give weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.

    A year before the war began, senior al Qaeda leaders themselves had rejected a link with Saddam. The New York Times reported last June that a top al Qaeda planner and recruiter captured in March 2002 told his questioners last year that "the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among al Qaeda leaders, but Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals." According to the Times, an al Qaeda chief of operations had also told interrogators that it did not work with Saddam.

    Mel Goodman, a CIA analyst for 20 years, put it bluntly: "Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam was the socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing for power in their own way and Saddam Hussein made very sure that al Qaeda couldn't function in Iraq."

    In February 2003, investigators at the FBI told the New York Times they were baffled by the Administration's insistence on a solid link between al Qaeda and Iraq. One investigator said: "We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there."

    But President Bush was not deterred. He was relentless in playing to America's fears after the devastating tragedy of 9/11. He drew a clear link - and drew it repeatedly - between al Qaeda and Saddam.

    On September 25, 2002, at the White House, President Bush flatly declared: "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

    In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President Bush said, "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," and that he could provide "lethal viruses" to a "shadowy terrorist network."

    Two weeks later, in his Saturday radio address to the nation, a month before the war began, President Bush described the ties in detail, saying, "Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks..."

    He said: "Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. An al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad."

    Who gave the President this information? The NIE? Scooter Libby? Chalabi?

    In fact, there was no operational link and no clear and persuasive pattern of ties between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. A 9/11 Commission Staff Statement in June of 2004, put it plainly: "Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." The 9/11 Commission Report stated clearly that there was no "operational" connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. That fact should have been abundantly clear to the President. Iraq and al Qaeda had diametrically opposing views of the world.

    The Pentagon¹s favorite Iraqi dissident, Ahmed Chalabi, is actually proud of what happened. "We are heroes in error," Chalabi said in February 2004. "As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush Administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords, if he wants."

    What was said before does matter. The President's words matter. The Vice President's words matter. So do those of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and other high officials in the Administration. And they did not square with the facts.

    The Intelligence Committee agreed to investigate the clear discrepancies, and it's important that they get to the bottom of this, and find out how and why President Bush took America to war in Iraq. Americans are dying. Already more than 2000 have been killed, and more than 15,000 have been wounded.

    The American people deserve the truth. It's time for the President to stop passing the buck and for him to be held accountable.

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http://benfrank.net/blog/ (http://benfrank.net/blog/)

"The Kucinich resolution of Inquiry into WHIG was voted down 25-23…

    More than 100 House Democrats joined Kucinich in cosponsoring this resolution, even before it never made it to the floor! Only 2 Republicans stood up for finding out the truthâ€"Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

    The Democrats on the committee were unitedâ€"at least those who bothered to show up. Every single Republican showed, with 25 of them determined to continue their whitewash for the White House. But for some strange reason, 2 Democrats on the committeeâ€"Rep. Faleomavaega and Rep. Bermanâ€"were too burdened with other pressing concerns to bother showing up to vote."

Am not much of a blog reader, but that one has some interesting info, thanks for posting it Dendro.


Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Tuesday 15 November 2005

    To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

    Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

    It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

    Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

    Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

    It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - an view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

    The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

    The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

    Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

    Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

    Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

    Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

    The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

    Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

The Big Lie Technique
    By Robert Scheer
    The Nation

    Wednesday 16 November 2005

    At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President's recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique-which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

    The basic claim of the President's desperate and strident attack on the war's critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus President when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.

    His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship, Al Qaeda's sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush's "evidence" for this, available to top Administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.

    Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.

    "Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," the President said at an Air Force base in Alaska. "Leaders in my Administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat."

    This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat-to somebody, somewhere, in some context-is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the President of the United States is just a lie on its face-it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.

    It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq-the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee-shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short "summary" of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

    The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush Administration's key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance-said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction-was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers."

    Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon's intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate's vote to authorize the war, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

    The false Al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush's argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.

    Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops-references to "a mushroom cloud" and calling Hussein an "ally" of Al Qaeda-to convince the rest of us it was necessary.

    The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.

    Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new cold war, never acknowledging that he has handed Al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his "Axis of Evil" member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush Administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-US slogans.

    Under Bush's watch, we not only suffered the September 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given Al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.


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blog,  blog, blog,
http://benfrank.net/blog/2005/11/12/rec ... uav_claim/ (http://benfrank.net/blog/2005/11/12/recall_the_uav_claim/)

Report on US Intelligence Communities Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (US SENATE REPORT)

full report
http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf (http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf)

conclusion summary PDF
http://intelligence.senate.gov/conclusions.pdf (http://intelligence.senate.gov/conclusions.pdf)
(she's a long read, but worth skipping around to the conclusions.)

Debunking Prewar Intelligence Falsehoods
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/28308/ (http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/28308/)

Report: 9/11-Iraq link refuted days after attack
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478/ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478/)

MSNBC
Updated: 7:09 p.m. ET Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush was advised that U.S. intelligence found no credible connection linking the attacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein, or evidence suggesting linkage between Saddam and the al-Qaida terrorist network, according to a published report.

The report, published Tuesday in The National Journal, cites government records, as well as present and former officials with knowledge of the issue. The information in the story, written by National Journal contributor Murray Waas, points to an abiding administration concern for secrecy that extended to keeping information from the Senate committee charged with investigating the matter.
In one of the Journal report's more compelling disclosures, Saddam is said to have viewed al-Qaida as a threat, rather than a potential ally.
Presidential brief
The president's daily brief, or PDB, for Sept. 21, 2001, was prepared at the request of President Bush, the Journal reported, who was said to be eager to determine whether any linkage between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraqi regime existed.

And a considerable amount of the Sept. 21 PDB found its way into a longer, more detailed Central Intelligence Agency assessment of the likelihood of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection.

The Journal story reports that that assessment was released to Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other senior policy-makers in the Bush administration.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has requested from the White House the detailed CIA assessment, as well as the Sept. 21 PDB and several other PDBs, as part of the committee's continuing inquiry into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the months before the start of the war with Iraq in March 2003.

The Bush administration has refused to surrender these documents.

“Indeed,” the Journal story reported, citing congressional sources, “the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004.”

Long-alleged connection
After Sept. 11, the administration insisted that a connection existed between Iraq and al-Qaida. President Bush, in an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, said the United States had “learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gas.”

And Vice President Cheney, in a September 2003 appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press,” alleged there was “a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s.”

But the National Journal report said that the few believable reports of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida “involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group.”

Saddam considered al-Qaida “as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime,” the Journal reported. “At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks” of al-Qaida with Iraqi intelligence operatives as a way to get more information about how the organization worked, the Journal said.

Journal: Little has changed
The Journal story asserts that little has changed to refute the initial absence of information linking Saddam and the al-Qaida network.

“In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed” between Iraq and al-Qaida, the Journal reported.

Reporter Waas quotes one former administration official, whose assessment is a problematic contradiction of the administration’s longstanding assertions:

“What the President was told on September 21 was consistent with everything he has been told since â€" that the evidence was just not there.”

The Phony War against the Critics
    By Michael Kinsley
    The Washington Post

    Friday 25 November 2005

    "One might also argue," Vice President Cheney said in a speech on Monday, "that untruthful charges against the commander in chief have an insidious effect on the war effort." That would certainly be an ugly and demagogic argument, were one to make it. After all, if untruthful charges against the president hurt the war effort (by undermining public support and soldiers' morale), then those charges will hurt the war effort even more if they happen to be true. So one would be saying in effect that any criticism of the president is essentially treason.

    Lest one fear that he might be saying that, Cheney immediately added, "I'm unwilling to say that" - "that" being what he had just said. He generously granted critics the right to criticize (as did the president this week). Then he resumed hurling adjectives like an ape hurling coconuts at unwanted visitors. "Dishonest." "Reprehensible." "Corrupt." "Shameless." President Bush and others joined in, all morally outraged that anyone would accuse the administration of misleading us into war by faking a belief that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear and/or chemical and biological weapons.

    Interestingly, the administration no longer claims that Hussein actually had such weapons at the time Bush led the country into war in order to eliminate them. "The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight," Cheney said on Monday. So-called WMD (weapons of mass destruction) were not the only argument for the war, but the administration thought they were a crucial argument at the time. So the administration now concedes that the country went to war on a false premise. Doesn't that mean that the war was a mistake no matter where the false premise came from?

    Cheney and others insist that Bush couldn't possibly have misled anyone about WMD since everybody had assumed for years, back into the Clinton administration, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That's why any criticism of Bush on this point is corrupt, reprehensible, distasteful, odiferous, infectious and so on. But this indignation is belied by Cheney's own remarks in the 2000 election. In the vice presidential debate, for example, Cheney was happy to agree with Bush that Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction would be a good enough reason to "take him out." But he did not assume that Hussein already had such weapons. And he certainly did not assume that this view was the general consensus. "We'll have to see if that happens," he said. "It's unfortunate we find ourselves in a position where we don't know for sure what might be transpiring inside Iraq. I certainly hope he's not regenerating that kind of capability."

    If you're looking for revisionist history, don't waste your time on the war's critics. Google up Cheney's bitter critique, in the 2000 campaign, of President Bill Clinton's military initiatives, specifically the need for more burden sharing by allies and a sharply defined "exit strategy." At the time, there were about 11,000 American troops in Bosnia and Kosovo, working alongside about 55,000 from allied countries. If only!

    Until last week, the antiwar position in the debate over Iraq closely resembled the pro-war position in the ancient debate over Vietnam. That is: It was a mistake to get in, but now that we're in we can't just cut and run. That was the logic on which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over the Vietnam War four years after major American involvement began and kept it going for another four. American "credibility" depended on our keeping our word, however foolish that word might have been. In the end, all the United States wanted was a "decent interval" between our departure and the North Vietnamese triumph - and we didn't even get that. Thousands of Americans died in Vietnam after America's citizens and government were in general agreement that the war was a mistake.

    We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war. Do you believe that if Bush, Cheney and company could turn back the clock, they would do this again? And now, thanks to Rep. John Murtha, it is permissible to say, or at least to ask, "Why not just get out now? Or at least soon, on a fixed schedule?" There are arguments against this - some good, some bad - but the worst is the one delivered by Cheney and others with their most withering scorn. It is the argument that it is wrong to tell American soldiers risking their lives in a foreign desert that they are fighting for a mistake.

    One strength of this argument is that it doesn't require defending the war itself. The logic applies equally whether the war is justified or not. Another strength is that the argument is true, in a way: It is a terrible thing to tell someone he or she is risking death in a mistaken cause. But it is more terrible actually to die in that mistaken cause.

    The longer the war goes on, the more Americans, "allies" and Iraqis will die. That is not a slam-dunk argument for ending this foreign entanglement. But it is worth keeping in mind while you try to decide whether American credibility or Iraqi prosperity or Middle East stability can justify the cost in blood and treasure. And don't forget to factor in the likelihood that the war will actually produce these fine things.

    The last man or woman to die in any war almost surely dies in vain: The outcome has been determined, if not certified. And he or she might die happier thinking that death came in a noble cause that will not be abandoned. But if it is not a noble cause, he or she might prefer not to die at all. Stifling criticism that might shorten the war is no favor to American soldiers. They can live without that kind of "respect."

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Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 27 November 2005

    George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

    The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

    The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

    Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

    The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

    Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

    The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

    What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

    The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

    If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

    Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

    No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

    "We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Yah know I'm just baffled, it seems obvious to me that the U.S. was dragged into this war under false pretenses and downright lies masked the soothing sounds of plucked heart strings.  The evidence is there and it's just not being addressed.  I look at the right and they say their is no proof, that it was just bad intelligence and that this should not be discussed further because it undermines the troops and dismiss as they attack their accusers as unpatriotic.  Then you go to the left and their just isn't an organized attempt at exposing the proof.  It's a big, I know you are, but what am I fest.  I know, I know, I've been barking up this tree since before the war even started, but dammit.  Why are the lies not being exposed?  We need more accountability and less catch phrases.  Clarity needs to be brought to the table.  Direct answers, not double speak.


............ Is this thing on?

The way I see it, this stuff has been brought out.  The truth has been told, the lies and manipulations have been exposed; problem is, The normal garden variety AmeriKKKan just is so media sickened by a constant barrage, that they are virtually apathetic to anything that does not directly affect them.  I mean really, people are not that naieve..  Unfortunately they do know, but will not react.  Every single person I talk to does not hesitate to agree that this is the most corrupt country on the face of the earth, and that we, as a people are headed for ruination...  :cry: ------------  sal

Well Sal, you could be right.  I mean, I could state polling figures to you about how people view the war and the president, but 9 out of 10 people know that statistics can prove anything.  I just, I've fallen into the sad trap of watching right wing news every once in a while like the O'Reily factor and his ilk i.e. Fox News and it makes me so angry when I watch these guys.  They appear to have equally strong convictions that my thoughts on these things are completely off base.  And news outlets like that have huge followings.  It's like the abortion debate all over again.  People develop such strong emotional attachments to opinions and conventions that theirs just no convincing them otherwise.  (me included maybe.)  I mean, I'm pretty convinced in my opinion on this.  I'd love to be proven wrong however.  But I don't see it happening.

It just burns me up......... to the point where apathy would be such a sweet escape from it all.  I've just been so mad about all of this for so long and I fucking hate politics.

Avery: "Yah know I'm just baffled, it seems obvious to me that the U.S. was dragged into this war under false pretenses ... Why are the lies not being exposed?"

I've seen this before, at least with the evangelicals.  They have been told Bush and this war are God's will.  They have been supporting the war, believing it is God's work.  To find out now this War is a lie, means their ministers, Bush (Gods right hand man on earth), Jesus and maybe God as well, lied.   Its easier to just have blind faith and stick your head in the sand then to admit your belief structure has serious flaws.  Its more than "strong emotional attachments"  it is their religious faith being challenged.

French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence 2001
    By Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin
    The Los Angeles Times

    Sunday 11 December 2005

The foreign spy service warned the US various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say.
    Paris - More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

    The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

    The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.

    Chouet's account was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.

    However, the essence of Chouet's account - that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA - was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

    It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.

    In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.

    The case of the forged documents that were used to support claims that Hussein was seeking materials in Africa launched a political controversy that continues to roil Washington.

    A special prosecutor continues to investigate whether the Bush administration unmasked a covert CIA operative in a bid to discredit her husband, a former diplomat whom the CIA dispatched in February 2002 to investigate the Niger reports. The diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, like the French, said he found little reason to believe the uranium story. The investigation into the leak led to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.

    The French opposed U.S. policy on Iraq and refused to support the invasion. But whether or not that made top U.S. officials skeptical of the French report on Niger, intelligence officials from both countries said that they cooperated closely during the prewar period and continued to do so. And the French conclusions on Niger were supported by some in the CIA.

    The CIA requested French assistance in 2001 and 2002 because French firms dominate the uranium business internationally and former French colonies lead the world in production of the strategic mineral.

    French officials were particularly sensitive to the assertion about Iraq trying to obtain nuclear materials given the role that French companies play in uranium mining in France's former colonies.

    "In France, we've always been very careful about both problems of uranium production in Niger and Iraqi attempts to get uranium from Africa," Chouet said. "After the first Gulf War, we were very cautious with that problem, as the French government didn't care to be accused of maintaining relations with Saddam in that field."

    The French-U.S. communications were detailed to The Times last week by Chouet, who directed a 700-person intelligence unit specializing in weapons proliferation and terrorism.

    Chouet said the cautions from his agency grew more emphatic over time as the Bush administration bolstered the case for invading Iraq by arguing that Hussein had sought to build a nuclear arsenal using uranium from Niger.

    Chouet recalled that his agency was contacted by the CIA in the summer of 2001 - shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11 - as intelligence services in Europe and North America became more concerned about chatter from known terrorist sympathizers. CIA officials asked their French counterparts to check that uranium in Niger and elsewhere was secure. The former CIA official confirmed Chouet's account of this exchange.

    Then twice in 2002, Chouet said, the CIA contacted the French again for similar help. By mid-2002, Chouet recalled, the request was more urgent and more specific. The CIA was asking questions about a particular agreement purportedly signed by Nigerian officials to sell 500 metric tons of uranium to Iraq.

    Chouet dispatched a five- or six-man team to Niger to double-check any reports of a sale or an attempt to purchase uranium. The team found none.

    Chouet and his staff noticed that the details of the allegation matched those in fraudulent documents that an Italian informant earlier had offered to sell to the French.

    "We told the Americans, 'Bull - -. It doesn't make any sense,' " Chouet said.

    Chouet said the information was contained in formal cables delivered to CIA offices in Paris and Langley, Va. Those communications did not use such coarse language, he said, but they delivered the point in consistent and blunt terms.

    "We had the feeling that we had been heard," Chouet said. "There was nothing more to say other than that."

    The former CIA official could not confirm the specifics of this 2002 communication, but said the general conclusions matched what many in the CIA were learning at the time.

    Chouet left the French government in the summer of 2002, after the center-right coalition led by President Jacques Chirac won control, forcing out top officials who had been aligned with the outgoing Socialist Francois Mitterand.

    When Bush gave his State of the Union address in January 2003, citing a report from the British that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Africa, other French officials were flabbergasted.

    One government official said that French experts viewed the statement attributed to the British as "totally crazy because, in our view, there was no backup for this." Nonetheless, he said, the French once again launched an investigation, turning things "upside-down trying to find out what was going on."

    Chouet's comments come as the FBI and the Italian government reopen investigations into the origins of the documents that surfaced in 2002 purporting to prove the Iraq-Niger link. The documents in question originally surfaced in Rome.

    Before speaking with The Times last week, Chouet had told part of his story to La Repubblica, a Rome newspaper, prompting Italian investigators to resume their inquiry and seek Chouet's testimony.

    In the U.S., the FBI recently reopened its inquiry into the documents in part because it had won access to new information.

    Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the allegations, said he believed that his trip was inspired by the forged documents. He said the briefing he received at the CIA referred to a sales agreement between Iraq and Niger that sounded like the forged documents.

    Bush attributed the African uranium information to British intelligence in his 2003 address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

    The British government maintains that its conclusions were based not on the forged documents but on other, more reliable sources. In fact, British officials have said that they reached their conclusions long before the forged documents surfaced.

    Still, Chouet said in the interview that the question from CIA officials in the summer of 2002 seemed to follow almost word for word from the documents in question. He said that an Italian intelligence source, Rocco Martino, had tried to sell the documents to the French, but that in a matter of days French analysts determined the documents had been forged.

    "We thought they [the Americans] were in possession of the documents," Chouet said. "The words were very similar." The former CIA official said that in fact the U.S. had been offered the same documents in 2001 but had quickly rejected them as forgeries.

    A spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Washington declined to comment on Chouet's remarks, reiterating that the British government continued to stand behind its conclusions that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium in Africa.

    A British report on prewar intelligence found the Africa claims in Bush's speech to be "well-founded," noting that British suspicions on Iraq's efforts to buy uranium originated with visits in 1999 by Iraqi officials to Niger and the Congo.

    Bush's assertions in his 2003 State of the Union speech had previously been made by other U.S. officials in speeches and internal documents.

    On Sept. 8, 2002 - within months of the third French warning - Cheney and then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice spoke in dire terms of Iraq's alleged efforts to pursue nuclear materials. Rice warned: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

    Chouet, asked for his reaction to Bush's speech and the claims of his lieutenants, said: "No proof. No evidence. No indication. No sign."

    White House officials scrambled to explain how the 16 words found their way into the 2003 speech when so much doubt surrounded the claims. Ultimately, then-deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley took responsibility for allowing them to remain.

    On June 17, 2003, five months after Bush's State of the Union, the CIA clarified its position on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.

    "Since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad," the agency said in an internal memorandum that was disclosed by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

    Bush critics now say that - in light of the warnings from the French and others - the White House owes the public a better explanation.

    Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the Niger claims first surfaced in 2002, said some officials in the U.S. State Department were also expressing doubts: "The big mystery is why did the administration, in the face of at least a very persuasive contrary view, feel the president should take the risk of stating this?"

    --------

    Hamburger and Wallsten reported from Paris and Washington, Drogin from Washington. Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella in Paris contributed to this report.

  -------

December 15, 2005
FBI Pressured to Gin Up Iraq-al-Qaeda Links
 
by Paul Sperry
In the run-up to the Iraq war, FBI veterans say they were pressured by the Bush administration to come up with links, no matter how tenuous, between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda to help sell the planned military incursion.

They came up empty, however, and were told to redouble their efforts, scraping the bottom of the barrel, former officials say. When they still came up empty, the administration did not invite the bureau to the critical prewar National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB) meeting that produced the dossier on Iraq used by the White House to sway Congress.

The FBI normally has a seat at the NFIB. But in this case, it was not represented, even though the dossier makes judgments about the likelihood of Hussein launching terrorist attacks inside the U.S. â€" a topic clearly within the FBI's realm of expertise.

John M. Cole, who retired late last year from the FBI as program manager for foreign intelligence investigations covering Pakistan and Afghanistan, says he and other managers were tasked before the war with exhausting all sources in the field for information tying Iraq to al-Qaeda.

"Everybody was tasked," he recalls in a exclusive interview. "Right before we attacked, my unit chief [in Washington] came over and said, 'OK, I want you to e-mail the field divisions and ask them to check their sources to find if they're aware of any connection between al-Qaeda or any terrorist groups and the Iraqi government.'"

Cole, who worked out of FBI headquarters, says the bureau-wide search did not turn up any substantive links.

"We had some very good sources, and I sent the communication out, and they all came back negative â€" nothing that they were aware of," he says. "Some of them said al-Qaeda doesn't even get along with the Iraq regime because they're not fundamentalist enough, and there were other reasons why they didn't associate with each other."

However, FBI sources did find links between Hussein's regime and the Palestinian Intifada against Israel. Hussein had sent millions of dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

"The only connection they came even close to establishing was that the Iraqi government was providing funds to the suicide bombers' families in the Palestinian territories," Cole says. "That was the only thing we could find, but that hardly amounted to a direct threat against the United States."

When they reported back to headquarters that they'd struck out finding a solid Iraq-al-Qaeda link, top FBI brass insisted they dig harder. "They said, 'Look again,'" Cole recalls.

"I remember thinking it was bullsh*t, because it just seemed to me they were grasping at anything they could find to justify this war," Cole says. "And I was sitting there telling [a colleague] this is wrong â€" we should never attack somebody unless they're a threat to us. Saddam's not attacking us, he hasn't attacked us, he's not the threat. The al-Qaeda group is the threat. Why are we even looking at Iraq?"

Phone calls seeking comment from FBI headquarters were not immediately returned.

Cole, who voted for Bush in 2000, says the president's decision to invade Iraq in the middle of a war on al-Qaeda played right into Osama bin Laden's hands, and only made America a bigger target for terrorists.

"We're in a mess now though. Bin Laden started this thing, but now we've played right into his hands. Iraq validates everything he's been saying about America," he says. "By attacking Iraq we've increased the terrorist problem."

"Bush says we're fighting the terrorists over there and not here," he adds. "Well, he's made the whole situation worse, as far as I'm concerned."

Before the war, CIA analysts were tasked with the same assignment of turning over every stone to see if a link between Hussein and bin Laden could be made.

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's al-Qaeda unit at the time, says then-CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 asked his team to review all their classified files going back 10 years. Scheuer and his analysts combed through some 20,000 documents totaling more than 65,000 pages and found no connection in Iraq of a state sponsorship of al-Qaeda.

The agency took its findings to the White House, and it had "no impact," Scheuer says. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials nonetheless went on TV and said a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaeda could be clearly documented.

The CIA's inconvenient findings made their way into the final judgments section of the dossier on Iraq called the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which was the consensus of the intelligence community (sans FBI input) regarding the Iraqi threat. It was presented to the White House and Congress on Oct. 1, 2002.

Page four of the 92-page NIE concluded that there is no evidence to suggest Hussein's regime "directed attacks against U.S. territory" or formally collaborated with al-Qaeda.

In fact, it said that Hussein would not even attempt to join forces with bin Laden unless he feared an attack by the U.S. that threatened the survival of his regime. Then, and only under those desperate circumstances, the secular leader might seek "revenge" by taking the "extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists," according to the document.

"The point we made to the NIE was he [Hussein] would only provide weapons and material support to terrorists to attack the United States if he was cornered," confirms then-deputy CIA director John McLaughlin.

Indeed, the NIE gave "low confidence" to the view that "Saddam would engage in clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland" or would â€" even "in desperation" â€" "share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qaeda." (Of course, it now turns out that he did not have such weapons â€" or even the programs in place to build them.)

Curiously, the findings downplaying a terror threat from Iraq were removed from the unclassified version of the NIE, or "white paper," that the administration posted on the CIA Web site for public viewing later in October 2002.

The white paper, which was quoted often by the media, focused instead on the threat from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. It turns out that it was adapted from an earlier document drafted by the White House Iraq Group, a secret shop set up by Bush's chief of staff and other top advisers to sell the war to Congress and the public.

In speeches, Bush contradicted the classified findings of the NIE â€" which of course were unknown to the public at the time â€" insisting that Hussein's regime was an "ally of al-Qaeda" and posed a direct terrorist threat to America.

Less than a week after the NIE was published, for example, he warned that "on any given day" â€" provoked by U.S. attack or not, sufficiently desperate or not â€" Hussein could team up with bin Laden and conduct a joint terrorist operation against America using weapons of mass destruction.

The next week, in an Oct. 14 speech in Michigan, Bush claimed Hussein was in league with bin Laden and planning to use his network of terrorists as a "forward army" to attack America.

"This is a man that we know has had connections with al-Qaeda," he said, referring to Saddam. "This is a man who would like to use al-Qaeda as a forward army. And this is a man that we must deal with for the sake of peace."

Last year, the 9/11 Commission concluded in its exhaustive report that there were no operational ties between Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda before Bush invaded Iraq.

Former FBI official I.C. Smith says that point would have been made even more forcefully in the prewar NIE report if the FBI had been present at the critical NFIB meeting held at Langley on Oct. 1, 2002.

Smith, who has represented the FBI at NFIB meetings in the past, says it's no coincidence the bureau was not represented along with the other intelligence agencies, which included: the CIA; Defense Intelligence Agency; National Imagery and Mapping Agency; National Security Agency; INR, the State Department's intelligence unit; and the Energy Department's intelligence unit. Tenet chaired the meeting and later briefed the president and Rice on the key findings of the NIE, which was drafted by the National Intelligence Council, based at Langley.

"I was against going to war in Iraq simply because I didn't trust the intelligence. I knew that there were few, if any, human source assets in Iraq," Smith says. "But more important, I didn't trust Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney or Rice and their motives."

He says they hammered the FBI and CIA, as well as other agencies, to gin up negative information to justify attacking Iraq.

But when they couldn't come up with what they needed, he says they turned to Iraqi defectors and other sources outside the government â€" many of whom they knew to be unreliable â€" to help them make the terror case against Iraq.

For example, a report repeatedly cited by Cheney that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable source â€" a drunk, no less. And the claim cited by several officials, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush himself, that Iraq was coaching al-Qaeda on chemical warfare came from an al-Qaeda informer that the Defense Intelligence Agency identified as a fabricator in reports circulated months earlier.

"It was clear to me when I saw Powell make his presentation before the UN, that most of the information, most of the suppositions, were based on intercepts and imagery â€" that is, photographs and even drawings [in the case of the phantom mobile bioweapons labs] â€" and not on human-source reporting" from reliable assets on the ground inside Iraq, Smith says.

And the little human-source reporting Bush officials relied on came from Iraqi defectors who had been out of the country for years, or other unreliable informers with a motive to lie, he adds.

he Patriot Act Amendments to HR3199 include a portion for creating a Secret Service Uniformed Devision.

This "Secret Police" will have rights to warrantless arrest. They can be called upon by the president at special events of national significance, as determined by the President.

(1) When directed by the President, the United States Secret Service is
authorized to participate, under the direction of the Secretary of Homeland
Security, in the planning, coordination, and implementation of security
operations at special events of national significance, as determined by the
President.

the entire text:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R ... 0:@1(hr333 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R?cp109:FLD010:@1(hr333))
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r ... 001:H11280 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r109:FLD001:H11280)

******

SEC. 605. THE UNIFORMED DIVISION, UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE.

(a) In General- Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by
inserting after section 3056 the following:

`Sec. 3056A. Powers, authorities, and duties of United States Secret Service

Uniformed Division

`(a) There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be

known as the `United States Secret Service Uniformed Division'. Subject to
the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States
Secret Service Uniformed Division shall perform such duties as the Director,

United States Secret Service, may prescribe in connection with the
protection of the following:

`(1) The White House in the District of Columbia.

`(2) Any building in which Presidential offices are located.

`(3) The Treasury Building and grounds.

`(4) The President, the Vice President (or other officer next in the order
of succession to the Office of President), the President-elect, the Vice
President-elect, and their immediate families.

`(5) Foreign diplomatic missions located in the metropolitan area of the
District of Columbia.

`(6) The temporary official residence of the Vice President and grounds in
the District of Columbia.

`(7) Foreign diplomatic missions located in metropolitan areas (other than
the District of Columbia) in the United States where there are located
twenty or more such missions headed by full-time officers, except that such
protection shall be provided only--

`(A) on the basis of extraordinary protective need;

`(B) upon request of an affected metropolitan area; and

`(C) when the extraordinary protective need arises at or in association with

a visit to--

`(i) a permanent mission to, or an observer mission invited to participate
in the work of, an international organization of which the United States is
a member; or

`(ii) an international organization of which the United States is a member;

except that such protection may also be provided for motorcades and at other

places associated with any such visit and may be extended at places of
temporary domicile in connection with any such visit.

`(8) Foreign consular and diplomatic missions located in such areas in the
United States, its territories and possessions, as the President, on a
case-by-case basis, may direct.

`(9) Visits of foreign government officials to metropolitan areas (other
than the District of Columbia) where there are located twenty or more
consular or diplomatic missions staffed by accredited personnel, including
protection for motorcades and at other places associated with such visits
when such officials are in the United States to conduct official business
with the United States Government.

`(10) Former Presidents and their spouses, as provided in section 3056(a)(3)

of title 18.

`(11) An event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special
event of national significance.

`(12) Major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and, within 120
days of the general Presidential election, the spouses of such candidates,
as provided in section 3056(a)(7) of title 18.

`(13) Visiting heads of foreign states or foreign governments.

`(b)(1) Under the direction of the Director of the Secret Service, members
of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division are authorized to--

`(A) carry firearms;

`(B) make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States
committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of
the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person

to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony; and

`(C) perform such other functions and duties as are authorized by law.

`(2) Members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall
possess privileges and powers similar to those of the members of the
Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia.

`(c) Members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall be

furnished with uniforms and other necessary equipment.

`(d) In carrying out the functions pursuant to paragraphs (7) and (9) of
subsection (a), the Secretary of Homeland Security may utilize, with their
consent, on a reimbursable basis, the services, personnel, equipment, and
facilities of State and local governments, and is authorized to reimburse
such State and local governments for the utilization of such services,
personnel, equipment, and facilities. The Secretary of Homeland Security may

carry out the functions pursuant to paragraphs (7) and (9) of subsection (a)

by contract. The authority of this subsection may be transferred by the
President to the Secretary of State. In carrying out any duty under
paragraphs (7) and (9) of subsection (a), the Secretary of State is
authorized to utilize any authority available to the Secretary under title
II of the State Department Basic Authorities Act of 1956.'

The Bonfire of the Inanities; Seriously, Could It Get Any Worse?
    By Barry Crimmins
    The Boston Phoenix

    Thursday 22 December 2005

    For 2005, my annual task of reviewing the past year has been complicated by an old adage: oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Here I sit, tangled in a web that many people began weaving way back when the Gipper was protecting us against deadly pollutants released by old-growth forests. It was a jumble out there this year - one that defies linear documentation.

    So let me borrow from our friend Mark Twain and offer this admonition: persons attempting to find chronology in this narrative will become lost; persons attempting to find morals in its subjects will be generally disappointed; persons attempting to find a plot will be overwhelmed (because it contains more plots than Arlington National Cemetery).

    And anyone expecting a comprehensive review will end up feeling they have a lot more coming.

    Scandalous to the End

    California Republican congressman Duke Cunningham had a narrow window of opportunity. It was late November, and he had 15, 20 minutes tops, to become a late entry in the scumbag sweepstakes that was 2005. The aging Navy fighter-jock did not miss his chance. At an impromptu press conference, Cunningham announced both his resignation from Congress and his guilty plea to several corruption charges. On that sunny autumn afternoon, the Dukester secured his place in history - as a simpering, blubbering jellyfish.

    Most years, Cunningham's weepy guilty plea and resignation would have been a major news story for weeks, but in 2005, it barely merited a "So what else is new?" shrug of the shoulders.

    By the time we got to Cunningham's sobbing exit, no one - absolutely no one - could keep track of all the scandals involving the Bush-Cheney administration, the Republican Congress, and state and local Republican leaders and their corporate and evangelical cronies. There were procurement scandals, media scandals, emergency-preparedness scandals, even treason scandals. These people stole everything, from coins in Ohio to billions in Iraq - including, in the estimation of some, the 2004 election, giving George W. Bush a matched set of nebulous claims to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Which is where we entered 2005: believe it or not, Bush and Cheney's second inaugural was a scant 11 months ago. Feels more like 11 years, doesn't it? I've suppressed almost all memory of the inauguration except for two things: a hazy recollection of the halftime show for the Crusades and the faint hope that Bush-Cheney arrogance would lead to such brazenly incompetent and unconstitutionally criminal behavior that not even Rupert Murdoch would be able to conceal it.

    In mid December, Wally O'Dell, a big GOP fundraiser who promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for Bush, resigned as CEO of Diebold, the company whose electronic balloting machines at least in part delivered Ohio to Bush. O'Dell left over allegations of insider trading. The same week, a Florida county announced it would no longer use Diebold machines because they're vulnerable to backdoor hacks and could be used to manipulate vote tallies.

    You know that saying "the fix is in"? Well in this case, was the fixer an inside trader?

    I mean how much more naïveté can we afford? We have a president who has twice been "elected" despite polling data that told us it wasn't going to happen. And then his administration is fraught with every possible insider scandal. They fix intelligence, they fix the media, they fix government contracts, and now the man that promised to hand them Ohio leaves his job at the secret voting-booth company because he was caught insider trading. Is it paranoid to connect the dots and understand that we have been living, for the past five years, under an unelected criminal regime? Or is it, to put it in W-era parlance, a slam-dunk? Use your own intelligence and trust it.

    The Ever-Helpful Press

    Bush-Cheney's cynicism and contempt for the media, and their administration's repeatedly exposed practice of fabricating and/or planting stories became so blatant in 2005 that newscasts should have begun with the disclaimer "I'm George W. Bush and I approved of this message."

    In January, we learned that neo-con columnist Armstrong Williams was on the federal dole to tout Bush's No Child Left Behind program. In February, "Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert" the "Washington Bureau Chief" of "Talon News," who had been given media access to the White House more than 100 times, was exposed as a male prostitute by bloggers who decided to investigate the "reporter" whose Nerf-ball questions made him White House press secretary Scott McClellan's go-to guy when things got sticky. (It's simply impossible to write this without cheap jokes.)

    The bloggers no doubt figured the guy to be an escaped mental patient but soon learned that he was the driving force behind several pornographic gay-escort sites that promoted his patriotic desire to continue the rigid discipline of military service to America long after he'd been ... um, discharged. (Simply impossible.)

    He even asked a question of W from the fourth row of a rare presidential press conference. As I recall it was "Who do I have to blow to get in the first row?"

    Who's to Plame?

    Perhaps the answer was whomever it was on Bush's staff assigned to disclose to "Jimmy-Jeff" the identity of the soon-to-be world's most famous secret agent, Valerie Plame. Plame was a CIA WMD expert working undercover for the "brass plate" front firm, Brewster Jennings & Associates. Blowing her cover was meant as revenge against her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, after he went to Niger in 2002 and established that the Saddam Hussein/yellowcake-uranium story was nonsense and then wrote about it later in the New York Times. Within days, Robert Novak, a man with a voice so shrill only dogs can hear it and a column so odious only rodents read it, outed Plame. And then, in a follow-up piece, he disclosed Brewster Jennings and its true purpose, endangering not only Plame but dozens of other operatives as well.

    I'm no fan of the CIA, but treason is treason, and although betraying our nation is nothing new for this administration, this time the charge just might stick. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is still preparing the case, but if justice is served, presidential puppeteer-in-chief Karl Rove, clearly up to his splotchy pink neck in Traitorgate, could be back in Texas for good by the new year.

    Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was indicted for obstruction of justice and perjury in the case. Cheney, a man who makes Donald Trump look like a hands-off guy, would have us believe that he was shocked to learn that his top aide had become a rogue operative in this criminal conspiracy.

    Traitorgate was the epicenter of the snarl in the Bush-Cheney web of deceit, combining as it did the administration's media manipulation, its phony case for war, and its low-blow tactics. New York Times reporter Judith Miller was the gray lady down on the administration for exclusive access to every falsehood it wanted planted in the paper of record to make its phony case for war in Iraq. Miller, a viciously ambitious, narcissistic journalist made up of equal parts tenacity and wrong-headedness, had been informed of Plame's identity by Scooter Libby.

    This was a cynically wise move considering how furious she had become with Wilson's Times op-ed piece that refuted some very specific lies she had run above the fold in the mislead-up to war. Miller spent several weeks in jail for contempt of court rather than reveal Libby as her source in the Plame leak. But really all she was covering was her own complicit ass, which eventually was booted out on the street by the paper that allowed her to so compromise it.

    The Washington Post's Bob Woodward also traded ethics for access and got caught in the swirl of Traitorgate. As the story was exploding, Woodward went on Larry King and matter-of-factly implied the whole affair was a tempest in a teapot. He failed to disclose his own involvement, but we soon learned that he was just another rat in the sewer that ran between the White House and the corporate media. Richard Nixon would be so proud of him!

    Congressional Record/Rap Sheet

    The Republican Congress was a disgrace throughout the year. Low points included the ethics scandals that embroiled both the House and Senate majority leaders. Congressman Tom DeLay was indicted for money laundering, the only known connection to anything clean in his sordid career. A primary player in DeLay's K Street (soon to be renamed Shakedown Street) Project was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who funneled funds, goods, and junkets to DeLay and others in exchange for right of first refusal on all legislation. The scandal is complicated and far-reaching and, as such, is my pick to click in 2006 - an ideal year for all Americans to take a good look at just how bought and paid-for their legislators really are.

    Dr. Bill Frist, the Senate's majority leader, was plagued by vision problems that actually caused him to see too much - like the contents of his blind trust, which now has him under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His super vision also allowed him to use a home video to pronounce that Terri Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state. Of course he was wrong - she was in Florida.

    Camp Followers

    By July, polls showed 51 percent of the country felt it had been misled into war. The slide has continued. Dick Cheney is now trailing cholera in opinion surveys.

    In early August, with Traitorgate unwrapping and the country, his war, and his administration collapsing around him, Bush did what he always does in a tight spot. He went on an extended vacation. Prior to leaving for his Crawford, Texas, ranch, where he raises photo-ops, he made one of his boilerplate comments about why the war had to continue. It would be a disservice, he maintained, to abandon the "just cause" for which so many brave Americans had died.

    This raised a question in the mind of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of one of those brave slain soldiers, Sergeant Casey Sheehan. Since she was in nearby Dallas speaking at the Veterans for Peace conference, she decided to take a ride on the VFP bus over to Crawford to see if the president would take a moment from his busy leisure activities to see her. All she wanted to know was, "Exactly what just cause had Casey died for?"

    She let the gatekeepers know she was there and asked if she could please have a word with the president. The answer, more implied than articulated, was "NO!" And one of the great standoffs in American political history ensued. Soon, other members of Gold Star Families for Peace, the fledgling but instantly morally authoritative Iraq Vets Against the War, representatives of Military Families Speak Out, local activists from the Crawford Peace House, and concerned citizens of the United States and the world joined Sheehan. Camp Casey sprung up, then Camp Casey II was pitched on land loaned by a courageous Crawfordian who had become disgusted by the behavior of some of the locals toward the respectful assembly of citizens who still clung to the belief that the president of the United States is accountable to the people he serves.

    This attracted the national media, myself included, who was dispatched there by Air America's Randi Rhodes. Nineteen days later, I returned inspired by the rebirth of the American peace movement. Bush could have avoided the whole mess by facing one sincere mother; instead he stuck to form and hid from conflict that would require his actual participation. Sheehan gave Bush a shove down a slope that was about to become much slipperier.

    A Mighty Wind

    Camp Casey was so traumatic for W that he was probably relieved when Hurricane Katrina's epic storm surge washed Cindy Sheehan out of the headlines. As ever, Bush was careless about what he wished for, and soon the world was looking at shocking aerial views of a country run by dim frat boys.

    George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sold themselves as offering the kind of adult supervision this country needs in time of crisis. Homeland security is their alleged strong suit, but apparently someone forgot to brief them on the fact that the most important part of homeland security is land itself. Their slow response to thousands of stranded victims made many realize that terra firma is an even bigger concern than terror.

    Bush sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency's director Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown (W has such a knack for nicknames!), who had risen to the top of our nation's crisis-management team because he was the most qualified former college roommate of a Bush crony available. Ever detail-oriented, Brown immediately distinguished himself by surveying the area for suitable restaurants and carefully considering the proper attire to wear to a massive human calamity. As the water rose and the evacuees' plight grew worse, Brown assured a concerned nation that there was really nothing we could do right away for those thousands of people yelling, "Help! Help! Help!" in unison. Now what's for lunch?

    Eventually, FEMA distinguished itself by evacuating the one most truly helpless person on the Gulf Coast: Brownie. Bush then made a series of visits to the region, promising all who would listen that rebuilding the area, and particularly New Orleans, was his top priority - at least until he could distract the American people from the crucial city that had been lost on the "watch" he's always reminding us he's on.

    Bottoms Up?

    After Katrina, it began to seem that Bush's actions and policies were nothing more than the result of drunken bar bets. In fact, the very reputable National Enquirer posited that W was back on the bottle. That would explain Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers: Watch this, this'll be funny - the next person that walks in here, I'm naming to the Supreme Court.

    Two interesting stories came out in December. The first exposed Bush's practice of wire-tapping American citizens without so much as clearing the microscopic hurdle of obtaining a special secret-court warrant. But hey, if you don't have anything to hide, what are you worried about?

    And then the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University, discovered that the administration, breaking with a tradition of openness that began in 1816, has decided to withhold the names and work locations of about 900,000 government civilian workers. If we don't know who's working for the government, we don't know who to ask what the government is doing. If they don't have anything to hide, why are they hiding 900,000 people? Too bad they didn't have this policy when Valerie Plame still had her job.

    And They Call It Democracy

    Shortly following Bush's feudal fiesta of an inauguration was the first of three Iraqi elections. The January 30 vote was memorable because it marked a novel approach to democracy - the candidates for the interim government were anonymous but the voters were fingerprinted. The Bush-Cheney administration touted the vote as a major turning point. Ditto for an October vote for an Iraqi constitution and for December's permanent-legislative elections. In each case, this wildly optimistic assessment was then parroted by the mainstream media and accepted as an important marker on the invaded nation's road to democratic self-rule. Unfortunately, after the first two votes, that road was lined with improvised explosive devices, and the year in Iraq was to become much more notable for bloodshed than watersheds.

    In the lead-up to the December election, Bush finally attempted to answer Cindy Sheehan's question in a series of four identical speeches. In each of them, he'd open with a joke and then immediately mention 9/11. He reminded us that everything has changed since 9/11. Yeah, since the year 911 when torture was a widely accepted governmental investigative device. Within a few hundred years, civilization broke out and large groups of human beings began denouncing the practice. Not only was it unjust and unspeakable, it was also highly ineffective. Torture victims were notoriously compliant and would tell interrogators anything they wanted to hear. Even worse, when people learn that torture is being committed, they tend to rise up in anger and seek vengeance against the torturers.

    The Bush-Cheney team has ignored these obvious truths. It's become clear that one of the reasons they wanted Iraqi oil was so they could boil it for use in interrogations. It used to be that an "extraordinary rendition" involved William Shatner singing "Mr. Bojangles"; now it has to do with re-opening Eastern European gulags.

    Notwithstanding attempts by Bush-Cheney to rig Iraqi and American news with phony stories planted by its media operatives in the slimy Rendon and Lincoln Groups, the truth has been announced in the blood-curdling screams of agony from the victims of its torture. Whether at the hands of US military personnel, CIA agents, private contractors, or collaborating thugs from other nations, torture has become synonymous with our nation's foreign policy.

    Despite Bush's strong denials and Condi Rice's assurances that this administration has a strict policy of probably never committing torture, Dick Cheney's legislative arm-twisting on the matter tells the real story. Any agreement the administration may make with John McCain or anyone else will be entered into with all the sincerity of its promise to rebuild New Orleans.

    Regardless of what Bush makes of the latest election in Iraq, his game is up there. Congressman Jack Murtha, a man who never met a military action he'd question, has become the voice of the generals Donald Rumsfeld has censored. He knows the cause is lost, and that it's time to get out. He knows that US troop presence will do nothing more than provoke perpetual violence. And he's earned a crisp salute for saying so.

    History's Stooge

    Bush keeps accusing the Dems of rewriting history - excuse me, George, but a point of literal order. You never write the history of the rise and fall of any Reich until after the fall. In this case, we're hoping for the fall of 2006.

    The majority of Americans now know that Bush justified this needless fight by lying to Congress, the American people, and the entire world. His premises were false, his motives were megalomaniacal. The results are tragic.

    Bush picked a fight he didn't need to pick. And lost. In doing so he weakened our nation and allies, and strengthened our enemies. And he did one more thing: he secured his place in history as a dangerous and soulless lunatic. It would require serious generosity to simply label him as pathetic.

    You know, pathetic like Duke Cunningham.

    When a common streetwalker gets busted, he or she behaves with dignity that Cunningham couldn't buy with all the money in the Pentagon's vault. But then, a common streetwalker is nowhere near the whore Duke Cunningham became. The streetwalker trades in what is his or hers to exchange. Cunningham was just a red, white, and blue pimp, profiteering on what wasn't his to trade.

    But say this much for Cunningham. He set a good example for his fellow Republicans by resigning in disgrace. If by next year at this time we've seen several more Republicans blubbering like defrocked beauty queens after copping pleas, 2006 will seem blessedly shorter than 2005.

    George W. Bush picked a fight he was sure he could win - because the con artists who own and operate him told him he could. So in front of every other kid in the world, he called his victim out to the playground and had six or seven of his goons restrain the little guy while he hit him with everything he could find. In doing so, he pissed off everyone else on the playground.

    So when Bush turned away from his bloodied victim to raise his hands in triumph, he was hit squarely from behind with a two-by-four. Repeatedly.

    And it hasn't stopped for two and a half years.

    Curly or Larry would have thrown in the towel by now.

    Unfortunately, Moe's our president.

NBC: Libby defense will allege Cheney role
Attorneys: Vice president OK'd sharing classified information with reporters

MSNBC
Feb. 9, 2006


WASHINGTON - I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, will in part base his defense on the claim that Cheney instructed and encouraged Libby to share classified information with reporters, sources familiar with the case tell NBC News.

Libby's attorneys discussed the matter with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the judge in the case in a recent conference call, the sources confirmed.
A cryptic reference to the conference call and the alleged Cheney role emerged a few days ago when a series of letters between Fitzgerald and Libby lawyer John D. Cline were released by the court.
Cline wrote to Fitzgerald, “As we discussed during our telephone conversation, Mr. Libby testified in the grand jury that he had contact with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in the course of his interaction with reporters in June and July 2003. ... We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors.”

The case against Libby stems from the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger. A year earlier, the CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Bush made his case for going to war against Iraq in part on the uranium allegations, claiming that Saddam Hussein was trying to build weapons of mass destruction.

Authorization crucial to defense
Legal sources close to the defense indicated the authorization to discuss classified information by superiors, including Cheney, will be a crucial part of Libby's defense. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the case hasn't gone to trial yet.

At the moment, Libby's defense team and Fitzgerald are battling over access to pretrial evidence and classified information. Libby has said that certain classified documents are essential to his defense.

Fitzgerald says the classified documents are irrelevant to whether Libby lied to the grand jury about conversations with reporters. Libby is trying to make the argument that without the classified documents, his due process rights are being violated and therefore the case should be dismissed. The refusal of the White House to turn over the documents could lead to the case being thrown out.

However, most lawyers contacted by NBC News have called Libby's arguments “thin,” and suggest it is highly unlikely that Judge Reggie Walton of federal court for the District of Columbia would agree to throw out the case. And lawyers also told NBC News that prosecutors have made a strong case as to why the classified documents irrelevant.

The attorneys also spoke condition of anonymity because the case hasn't gone to trial.

Judge's rulings expected soon
A ruling from Walton is expected within two weeks.

In their indictment of Libby, prosecutors stated that Cheney may have instructed Libby or been involved in the Plame leak.

According to the indictment, on June 12, 2003, Cheney told Libby that Plame worked at the CIA. On July 12, the indictment says, Cheney gave Libby advice on Air Force Two about how to handle the Plame matter. Later that day, Libby allegedly spoke about Plame with two reporters.

Libby has not been charged with breaking laws by speaking to reporters Plame. He was indicted on Oct. 28 on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements during the course of the investigation.

On Thursday afternoon, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., issued a statement saying that any implication of Cheney as the one who authorized release of classified information would require Bush to honor his promise to "clean house" of anyone who had anything to do with the Plame leak.