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Video: Alternative
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Censured Casualties
features rare footage
of war crimes against the Iraqi people suffered during
and after the Gulf War. The footage is from former Attorney
General Ramsey
Clark in his attempt to document the injustice
of United States military actions in the region.
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Video: Alternative
Views
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Another Unknown
War
features a film on the
struggle of the indigenous people of West Papua to remain
sovereign in the face of an Indonesian invasion backed
by world capital. Footage of Noam
Chomsky on Western involvments in the region and
the relation to East Timor.
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Doug's New Books & Related
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TV/Radio
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Monday, October 31, 2005
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Salon.com - War Room
initial reactions from the Left on ScaliaLito from Salon
"Samuel Alito: The reaction from the left
George W. Bush wasted no time in naming a replacement for Harriet Miers, and his nominee isn't wasting any time in making the rounds of the United States Senate. Samuel Alito joined Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist this morning in the Capitol Rotunda, where he paid his respects to the late Rosa Parks, and just sat down for a before-the-cameras event with the Senate Republican leadership.
With Alito at his side, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter brushed away a question about early opposition to the nominee by saying, "Well, this is Washington, D.C." And Frist -- the man who had no trouble telling the White House it was time to yank Harriet Miers' nomination when it was his base that was upset -- said that the Senate has an obligation to "rise above" the political "positioning" on Supreme Court nominees and fulfill its constitutional obligation of "advise and consent and confirmation."
As for Democrats and progressives, the reaction is exactly what you'd expect it to be to a nominee whose views on abortion rights, on race, on the rights of criminal defendants and other issues put him far to the right of the justice he would replace.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: "I am disappointed in this choice for several reasons. First, unlike previous nominations, this one was not the product of consultation with Senate Democrats. . . . Second, this appointment ignores the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the Supreme Court. The president has chosen a man to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, one of only two women on the court. For the third time, he has declined to make history by nominating the first Hispanic to the Court. And he has chosen yet another federal appellate judge to join a court that already has eight justices with that narrow background. President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club."
Sen. Chuck Schumer: "This controversial nominee, who would make the court less diverse and far more conservative, will get very careful scrutiny from the Senate and from the American people."
Sen. Ted Kennedy: "President Bush has picked a nominee whom he hopes will stop the massive hemorrhaging of support on his right wing. This is a nomination based on weakness, not on strength."
Sen. John Kerry: "Has the right wing now forced a weakened president to nominate a divisive justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia? With civil rights, privacy rights, and mainstream American values hanging in the balance, the president’s sagging political position in his own party is no excuse to reopen wounds in America which a president should seek to repair."
People for the American Way President Ralph Neas: "We had hoped President Bush would nominate someone with a commitment to protecting Americans' rights and freedoms. That’s what the American people want, and it's what they deserve. Unfortunately, with Judge Alito, that's not what President Bush has given us. He has chosen to divide Americans with a nominee guaranteed to cause a bitter fight."
National Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Eric Stern: "President Bush has nominated a socially conservative judicial activist to appease the socially conservative political activists who control the Republican Party and this White House. Every Supreme Court nominee deserves a fair and thorough investigation into their judicial record. While judgments on this nomination should not be rushed, the giddy salivation of anti-gay activists over their preferred nominee should disturb fair-minded Americans."
NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan: "Instead of unifying the country, President Bush has chosen the path of confrontation. Sandra Day O’Connor has been the court’s swing Justice, casting the deciding votes over the years to protect women’s reproductive freedom. Alito’s confirmation could shift the court in a direction that threatens to eviscerate the core protections for women’s freedom guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, or overturn the landmark decision altogether."
While NARAL has already announced its opposition to Alito's nomination, Democrats have generally stopped just short of saying they'll vote against him. But with the notable exception of Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- who said she hoped "both sides would hold their fire" on Alito -- Democrats are making it clear that there is a very fine line between criticizing Alito's nomination and voting against it. Harry Reid said this morning that he's looking forward to meeting Alito -- but only, it seems, to learn "why those who want to pack the court with judicial activists are so much more enthusiastic about him than they were about Harriet Miers."
Tim Grieve"
Salon.com - War Room
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Democrats Demand Rove's Firing
This weekend there was surprisingly critical Dem response to WMDgate scandals, calls for Rove's resignation, for Bush to pledge that he wasn't going to pardon Libby, for investigations of Cheney and the WMD scandals and so and both ABC and CBS pursued the story in their main news and talk shows....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/30/AR2005103000348.html
The Alito nomination may knock the story off the news cycle and already there is a backlash with a reprehensible report by Howard Kurtz in the WP attacking the media for "overkill" on the story! really, get a grip Howie the MSM has been totally negligent in failing to criticize the Bush administration and once they start doing what they are supposed to do it is disgusting to call the media's minimal efforts to get at the truth of Iraq and WMD spin and lies "overkill"; a big Thumbs Down for Howie on this one
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html
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Sunday, October 30, 2005
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Reid Calls for Rove to Resign
whoah! are the Dems finally getting backbone! it appears so from Kerry, Reid, and other comments. Its finally open season on all the Bush crooks and cons and in the mainstream media....
Reid Calls for Rove to Resign
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White House Ethics, Honesty Questioned
the other very positive development in fallup from Fitzgerald investigation is declining public confidence in Bush as his poll numbers continue to head south....
White House Ethics, Honesty Questioned
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A Leak, Then a Deluge
Gellman's very detailed story ties Libby to Cheney and NeoCon disinformation about Iraqi WMD, including the Italian connection, although not with the detail or edge of the Repubblica stories that I provided link to yesterday. Still, its good that the media in the US is investigating the issue; Fitzgerald's indictment legitimates and may inspire investigative reporting into the whole Iraq morass...
A Leak, Then a Deluge
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In Indictment's Wake, a Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role - New York Times
While Fitzgerald's mandate was narrow, his indictment of Libby opens the door for the media, Dems, and public to go after Cheney, Rove and other purveyors of lies about Iraq in the Bush administration. The weekend news reports were doing precisely this as did the NYT story listed here, as well as Times OpEd pieces (no long available for free!). It's up to us to keep the story alive and expand the heat....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/politics/30cheney.html?hp&ex=1130734800&en=e0bf76a2584ac179&ei=5094&partner=homepage
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Saturday, October 29, 2005
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calendarlive.com: In blame game, take a number
good summary by Tim Rutten of how major US print media have to take responsibility for buying into NeoCon WMD con:
" The leading American newspapers bear a special responsibility in this matter because they all swallowed the administration's argument hook, line and sinker.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, worried editorially that the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq gave Bush too much power but stated unequivocally: "It is well established that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction."
The New York Times flatly told its readers that "no further debate is needed to establish that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator whose continued effort to build unconventional weapons ... threatens the Middle East and beyond."
The Washington Post editorially declared that Congress was "right" to pass the resolution and singled out Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) for praise because he "acknowledged [that Hussein's] 'pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated.' " The Wall Street Journal's editorial similarly singled out the House and Senate Democrats who publicly accepted the reality of Iraq's nuclear and biological weapon programs.
Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack" remains the best basic introduction on the administration's march to war. It outlines an extreme preoccupation with Iraq initially shared only by Cheney and a circle of ideologically neoconservatives on his staff and around then-Deputy Secretary of State Paul D. Wolfowitz. Then, there was a murky progress in the intelligence used to intensify that preoccupation into a national security imperative. In 2000, according to Woodward, "[t]he CIA had never declared categorically that it believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction."
Two years later, Cheney had told a group, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Shortly afterward, the National Intelligence Council began resifting intelligence on the matter and, according to Woodward, concluded that "the real and best answer was that [Hussein] probably had WMD, but that there was no proof and the case was circumstantial." One year later, on the eve of war, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet sat in the Oval Office and told President Bush that the case for Hussein's possession of nuclear and biological weapons was "a slam dunk."
The American people need to know how that progression occurred because that knowledge is key to the responsible exercise of citizenship in the upcoming midterm elections and beyond. In an address to the Online News Assn. on Friday, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the New York Times' publisher, said that his paper had been far too slow to correct its prewar news reports that Hussein, in fact, had weapons of mass destruction. "It was an institutional failure. We didn't own up to it quickly enough," he said.
The New York Times clearly wasn't the only journalistic institution that failed, and the duty to set the public record straight about how this mistake was made is a shared one. There will be shame enough for all if the media as a whole fail to accept this obligation."
href="http://www.calendarlive.com/columnists/rutten/cl-et-rutten29oct29,0,1803270,print.column?coll=cl-home-more-channels">calendarlive.com: In blame game, take a number
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Rove Is Spared -- for Now - Los Angeles Times
LAT has good definition of Turdblossum: " for now, Rove appeared to live up to the nickname bestowed upon him by Bush: "Turdblossom," a moniker that spoke to the strategist's uncanny pattern of surviving unpleasant situations, and sometimes seeming to thrive on them."
Rove Is Spared -- for Now - Los Angeles Times
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Nur al-Cubicle: 10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005
here's a blog that argues that the while CIA-Gate was result of war between the CIA and Cheney's group that Cheney appears to have won; I would say, however, that the war is still going on and that there are significant factions of the establishment arrayed against the Cheneyites....
Then, there are translations of some Italian Republicca articles that document how Italian intelligence fabricated and disseminated the bogus Niger uranium story, plus the tubes for nuclear weapons stories that the Bush-Cheney-Neocon crowd used to sell Iraq-- through Judith Miller and compliant media. This is quite a story and there are ongoing investigations of the Italian-NeoCon fake WMD connections that could be explosive....
Nur al-Cubicle: 10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005
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Salon.com - War Room
Upon further reflection, it is now clear that Libby, Cheney, Rove, and Novak, for starters, outed Valerie Plame. If Rove is Official X, then he is centrally involved in the outing. The fact that Rove wasn't indicted seems to imply that Fitzgerald decided not to go after the CIA-outing issue and settled instead for perjury and lies. Here's latest on Rove from Salon's Tim Grieve:
"Official A" and the mystery of Karl Rove
Is Karl Rove"Official A"? Sources tell the New York Times and the Associated Press that he is.
Patrick Fitzgerald alleged Friday that Scooter Libby spoke on July 10 or 11, 2003, with a "senior official in the White House" identified only as "Official A." "Official A" allegedly told Libby of of a conversation earlier in the week in which Joseph Wilson's wife -- Valerie Plame -- was "discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson's trip" to Niger. "Official A" also allegedly told Libby that Novak was going to be writing about Wilson's wife in his column.
Asked yesterday to say more about "Official A," Fitzgerald refused: "I know that people want to know whatever it is that we know, and they're probably sitting at home with the TV thinking, 'I want to jump through the TV, grab him by his collar and tell him to tell us everything they figured out over the last two years,'" he said. "We just can't do that. It's not because we enjoy holding back information from you; that's the law."
Fitzgerald still isn't talking, but "people briefed on the case" tell the Times and "three people close to the investigation" tell the AP that "Official A" is Rove. It's not exactly a blockbuster revelation: Fitzgerald isn't alleging necessarily that "Official A" was the first to leak Plame's identity to Novak, as we suggested in the rush of things yesterday, and we've known for months now that Rove was at least one of those who leaked to Novak.
If "Official A" is really Rove, the more intriguing question may be this: Why won't Fitzgerald just say so? Coming from a man who says he doesn't do "tea leaves," this sure seems like some kind of tea leaf suggesting Rove is still a subject of some interest for the special prosecutor. Maybe he is.
That said, a report in this morning's Los Angeles Times suggests that Rove may be close to clear. The Times says that "new information, reevaluation of older evidence and negotiations with Rove's lawyers" persuaded Fitzgerald not to indict Rove, at least not now. Among the evidence: An email exchange between Rove and former White House communications aide Adam Levine. The emails apparently came just after Rove leaked Plame's identity to Time's Matthew Cooper, and Rove's team is arguing that the fact that the emails don't mention the Plame leak are a sign that it wasn't particularly important to Rove and was therefore something he could have forgotten, innocently, when he was first asked about it by federal investigators.
-- Tim Grieve"
Salon.com - War Room
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With Vice President, He Shaped Iraq Policy
Its clear after the dramatic events of the Fitzgerald indictment that Cheney and his men were running US foreign policy and that they were an exceptionally rotten lot, as the article I posted yesterday by Juan Cole documents.
"http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/28/vice_president/print.html
The WP article from today linked here confirms that Cheney-Libby were the center of the Iraq fiasco and that Libby going down is a big hit for Cheney and the neocons. BUT there is speculation that Libby deliberately lied and took the hit to deflect attention from Cheney and others involved in WMD lies and fiercely attacking critics like Joe Wilson. The question now, of course, is whether the investigation will end with Libby or expand. If the former, Libby could plea bargain, take a quick indictment-- and get pardoned by Bush. If the latter, Cheney, Rove and others are still in play.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102802139.html
A disgusting NYT story by Anna Kornblut is almost gleeful that Karl Rove has returned to the center of Bush White House and business as usual. The question is whether Rove is now under extreme heat and has his hands tied, will get hit with an indictment, or go back to his slimy, corrupt business as usual.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/29/politics/29rove.html
The MSM, as usual, keeps focused on the small issues. In fact, the Fitzgerald investigation uncovered aspects of the whole Bush administration conspiracy to cook up false WMD info, fiercely attack critics, and coverup any evidence of their infamity. It also shows the complicity of the MSM, especially Judith Miller but also all of the hacks from Tim Russert to Matt Cooper who regularly talked with Cheney and Rove and fed their lies and agendas to the public as "news."
It looks like the Fitzgerald inquiry is too limited to uncover the whole conspiracy, pretty well outlined in the case, that involves Cheney, Libby, a house full of Neocons, and Rove, for starters, so only continued Congressional or media investigations are going to uncover more indictable crimes, like the Bush-Cheney cabal lying to Congress, producing false information, and the like. Unless, Fitzgerald knows something that the MSM and Bush critics don't yet know or has some smoking guns that will smoke out the bad guys. Here's a reasonable summary of what to expect and what not to:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=23388
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Friday, October 28, 2005
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Salon.com - War Room
here's the latest buzz from Salon. The Big Mystery is how did Rove wiggle out of the indictment? is he in the clear or does Fitz have a trap for him? Finally, Libby's indictment at least creates possibility of watergate effect or it could be contained with Scooter scapegoated? But how could anyone imagine Libby doing anything this big that was directed by or with full knowledge and assent of Cheney?
"What comes next for Karl Rove?
So what will become of Karl Rove? At the press conference that just ended, reporters tried every way imaginable to get Patrick Fitzgerald to explain his plans for the president's chief political advisor. Fitzgerald gave them virtually nothing. He said reporters were trying to read "tea leaves" he wasn't giving, and he reminded them that they're not "supposed" to know what's going on with a grand jury.
Here's what we know, or at least what we think we know. Over the course of the last week, the New York Times reported repeatedly that Rove had been advised that he "may be in serious legal jeopardy." The Washington Post reported that one of Fitzgerald's prosecutors was still asking a former White House aide about Rove as late as this week. And Roll Call reported that Fitzgerald met personally with Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, on Tuesday.
So what happened? Fitzgerald won't say. He wouldn't say today if he expected more indictments; he wouldn't say today if anyone other than Libby is still in legal jeopardy; he wouldn't say today if he would enlist the assistance of another grand jury; and he wouldn't say today whether the grand jury whose term expired today had declined to issue any indictments that he sought.
Luskin issued a statement today, but it was both careful and cryptic. He said that Fitzgerald hasn't made a decision and that Rove's "status" hasn't changed, meaning -- if the Times had its story straight -- that Rove still may be in "serious legal jeopardy." But if that's the case, wouldn't Fitzgerald have wanted to keep his grand jury alive just in case he decides to seek an indictment? Probably, but there's another purely speculative possibility to consider: In return for an agreement not to indict him today, Rove could have signed an agreement waiving his right to have charges brought by way of indictment. With such an agreement in hand, Fitzgerald could take the time he needs to make a decision and then charge Rove -- if he decides to charge him -- by way of a criminal complaint issued by the prosecutor himself.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [16:20 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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The president speaks, then leaves
George W. Bush just offered the briefest possible statement on the indictment of Scooter Libby. He said that he has accepted Libby's resignation, that he believes that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation is "serious," and that he's got a job to do for the American people. The president said he'll be nominating "somebody" to serve on the Supreme Court soon, then he headed for Marine One, which will take him to Camp David for the weekend. Joining Bush on the helicopter: Chief of Staff Andy Card and White House Counsel -- and former Supreme Court nominee -- Harriet Miers.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:53 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Fitzgerald's press conference: Many questions, few answers
Patrick Fitzgerald is taking questions from the press, but he isn't answering many of them. What will become of Karl Rove? He can't comment. Who's the mysterious "Official A" who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak? He won't say. Did Dick Cheney encourage Scooter Libby to leak Plame's name or to lie about the leak afterward? He won't discuss anyone who hasn't been charged with a crime. Did he seek any criminal charges that the grand jury wouldn't give him? Fitzgerald looked to an aide before saying that he couldn't say.
What Fitzgerald will say: The fact that Plame worked for the CIA was classified and not widely known when it was leaked -- and that Libby was the first one to leak it. "Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003," Fitzgerald said, in a reference to the July 14, 2003, column in which Novak outed Plame, but, he also said, Novak wasn't the first reporter to get the leak of Plame's identity. That reporter was the New York Times' Judy Miller, and Libby was the one who leaked to her.
"Mr. Libby is presumed innocent," Fitzgerald said. "But if what we allege in the indictment is true, then what is charged is a very, very serious crime." When a reporter asked Fitzgerald about GOP criticism suggesting that he shouldn't have sought an indictment if he couldn't charge someone for the leak itself, he said: "That talking point won't fly. It it's proven that the chief of staff of the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied repeatedly and fabricated a story ... that's a very, very serious matter."
Asked whether he thought it was worthwhile to keep Miller in jail for 85 days, Fitzgerald defended himself by explaining that he was obliged to follow up on Libby's claims that he hadn't leaked information about Plame's job to reporters. Confronted with the possibility that the vice president's chief of staff had committed perjury, Fitzgerald said he couldn't simply "fold up" his "tent" and "walk away."
Is Fitzgerald "walking away" with respect to Karl Rove? That's not at all clear. While Rove's lawyer said earlier today that his client's "status" has not changed, Fitzgerald said that his grand jury's term expires today and won't be extended. However, he added that prosecutors in long investigations like this one generally "have available a new grand jury" to which they can return if they have the need to do so. What does that mean for Rove or anyone else under investigation? Fitzgerald was asked again and again to explain, but he declined to do so. "We're not quite done, but I don't want to add to a feverish pitch," he said. "It's very very routine that you keep a grand jury available."
Could more indictments come? Fitzgerald wouldn't say.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [14:49 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Was Libby obsessed with Wilson? Fitzgerald seems to think so
It has been reported previously that Scooter Libby was so obsessed with Joseph Wilson that other White House aides found themselves "puzzled" by it. The press release issued today by Patrick Fitzgerald certainly seems to confirm as much:
May 6, 2003: The New York Times publishes a Nicholas Kristof column that raises questions about the Iraq-Niger connection set forth in George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address and says that an unnamed former ambassador who had been sent to investigate the claims had reported back that they were wrong.
On or about May 29, 2003: Libby asks an undersecretary of state for information concerning the unnamed ambassador's trip to Niger. The undersecretary investigates and provides Libby periodic oral reports, eventually advising him that Wilson was the former ambassador in question.
On or about June 9, 2003: Libby and "another person in the vice president's office" receives classified documents from the CIA that discuss Wilson's trip but don't identify him by name. Libby writes "Wilson" and "Joe Wilson" on the documents.
On or about June 11 or 12, 2003: Libby is advised by an undersecretary of state that Wilson's wife works for the CIA and that State Department personnel said that Wilson's wife was involved in the organization of his trip to Niger.
On or about June 11, 2003: Libby gets similar information about Wilson's wife from a CIA official.
Prior to June 12, 2003: Libby participates in discussion within the vice president's office about how to respond to an inquiry about Wilson's trip from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.
On or about June 12, 2003: Dick Cheney tells Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in its Counterproliferation Division.
On or about June 14, 2003: Libby meets with a CIA briefer, complains that CIA officials are making comments critical of the vice president, and discusses both Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, by name.
On or about June 19, 2003: After the New Republic publishes an article titled "The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War," Libby speaks with his principal deputy, who asks whether criticism of Cheney's office could be rebutted by sharing information about Wilson's trip with the press. Libby says there would be trouble with the CIA if the information were leaked -- and that he couldn't discuss the matter further on a nonsecure telephone.
On or about June 23, 2003: Libby tells the New York Times' Judy Miller that Wilson's wife might work at the CIA.
On or about July 7, 2003: A day after Wilson's Op-Ed appears in the New York Times, Libby tells Ari Fleischer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA -- but that the information isn't widely known.
On or about July 8, 2003: Libby talks with Miller again about Wilson and his wife, this time asking that he be identified in print not as a White House official but as a "former Hill staffer." The same day, Libby asks Cheney's counsel about documents that might exist about Wilson's trip to Niger.
Between June 2003 and July 8, 2003: The assistant to the vice president for public affairs tells Libby that he has learned that Wilson's wife works at the CIA.
On July 10 or July 11, 2003: Libby talks with a senior White House official, identified by Fitzgerald only as "Official A," who tells him that he has discussed Wilson's wife with Robert Novak.
On or about July 12, 2003: Libby confirms for Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife works for the CIA.
On or about July 12, 2003: Libby talks about Wilson and his wife with Miller once again.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [14:30 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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The indictment: Libby lied to investigators and to the grand jury
The indictment of Scooter Libby is now available online at the Web site of the special prosecutor's office.
The highlights:
Obstruction of justice and false statements: Libby was interviewed by investigators in the Valerie Plame case in October and November of 2003. During those interviews, the indictment says, Libby told investigators (1) that NBC's Tim Russert had told him on July 10 or July 11 that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA; (2) that he had told Time's Matthew Cooper on July 12 that the administration was hearing from reporters that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA but that he didn't know if it was true; and (3) that he hadn't discussed Plame with the New York Times' Judy Miller during a meeting on or about July 8.
The indictment alleges that all of those statements were false: At the time of his conversations with reporters, Libby had already learned -- from an undersecretary of state, from a senior CIA official and from Dick Cheney himself -- that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Moreover, the indictment says, Libby shared that information with Miller and confirmed it for Miller.
Perjury: Libby appeared before Fitzgerald's grand jury at least twice in 2004, and he repeated, under oath, his story about his July 2003 conversation with Russert. Once again, Libby claimed that Russert had told him about Wilson's wife -- and that he did not recall at the time of that conversation whether he knew about Wilson's wife or not. The indictment alleges that this statement is false: that Russert didn't tell Libby about Wilson's wife's employment during that conversation, and that Libby wouldn't have been surprised by the information if he had.
The indictment says that Libby also testified under oath that he told Matthew Cooper and other reporters that the information he had about Plame's employment was information that the administration was hearing from reporters. "I was very clear to say, 'Reporters are telling us that,' because in my mind I didn't know it as fact," he said. "I thought I was -- all I had was this information coming from reporters." Pressed repeatedly if he was certain of this recollection, Libby testified that he was. Again, the indictment says that Libby's testimony was false -- that he had obtained information about Wilson's wife not from reporters but from the State Department, the CIA and the vice president, and that he provided Cooper with "unqualified" confirmation that she worked at the CIA.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [13:32 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Libby resigns
Scooter Libby has resigned.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [13:14 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Novak's source? Still a mystery
If Patrick Fitzgerald knows who first leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak, he still isn't saying. The indictment filed against Scooter Libby today refers to the "senior administration official" as "Mr. A" -- and says that Libby was aware that "Mr. A" had leaked to Novak.
Correction: The reference to the "senior administration official" who leaked Plame's identity to Novak comes from the press release issued by Fitzgerald's office, not from the indictment, and Fitzgerald identifies the official as "Official A," not "Mr. A."
-- Tim Grieve
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Libby indicted on charges of lying in Plame case
Scooter Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements for allegedly lying about how and when he learned and disclosed then-classified information about Valerie Plame, the office of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has just announced.
The indictment against Libby alleges that he learned of Plame's identity from Cheney. It alleges that Libby discussed Plame's identity with Time's Matthew Cooper, NBC's Tim Russert and the New York Times' Judy Miller -- and that revealing Plame's identity had the potential of putting CIA agents at risk and damaging national security.
The 22-page indictment charges that Libby began looking into Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger in May 2003. That's several months before Robert Novak revealed Valerie Plame's identity but around the same time that Nicholas Kristof wrote a column in the New York Times in which he mentioned -- without using Wilson's name -- Wilson's criticism of the Bush administration's use of pre-war intelligence. The indictment charges Libby with lying to investigators about what he told reporters -- and lying to reporters about what, and how, he knew about Plame.
Although the indictment does not appear to charge Libby with a crime in connection for the leak itself, Fitzgerald has issued a statement that seems to take issue with the early Republican spin -- articulated over the weekend by Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison -- that charges related to the cover-up rather than to an underlying crime would be "perjury technicalities." Fitzgerald said: "Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens."
-- Tim Grieve
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Indictment news?
Patrick Fitzgerald has entered the courtroom of a federal magistrate, presumably with one or more indictments in his hands. We should know more within minutes. Here's his Web site.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [12:24 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Indictments, non-indictments and the fallout for the White House
Assuming that they are what they now seem to be, today's developments in the Valerie Plame case will be spun as a victory for the White House. Dick Cheney won't have been indicted. Karl Rove won't have been indicted. And while Scooter Libby will be facing charges, does anyone other than those who have long since made up their mind about the president even know who he is?
But is this really a victory? Hardly. What the White House wants -- what, on some levels, the White House needs -- is for the Plame case to go away. That's not happening. If Libby is indicted, a criminal case is just beginning. If that case proceeds -- if Libby doesn't cop to a plea or get the charge dismissed or persuade the president to grant him a pardon -- the Plame cloud will linger over the White House for months and years to come, and it will a cast a much more visible shadow than it has so far. The president and the vice president can meet privately with a special prosecutor during the investigation stage of a case; when that investigation becomes a prosecution, people are called to testify in court, and that kind of testimony, as a general matter, becomes a matter of public record: What did the president know, and when did he know it?
As for Rove, it's certainly better for him that he lives to fight another day. Is it better for the White House? Maybe. If Rove had been indicted today, it was widely expected that he would have resigned immediately. Instead, he'll keep showing up for work at the White House even as Fitzgerald continues to investigate. Is he any closer to being off the hook today than he was a day or a week ago? It's hard to read that into the bits and pieces we're seeing. The New York Times has said again and again over the last week that Rove has been warned that he's in serious legal jeopardy. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said today that his client's "status" hasn't changed. While Luskin said that he's "confident" that Fitzgerald will ultimately decide that Rove has "done nothing wrong," that's what lawyers always say; he also acknowledged that Fitzgerald has "made no decision" yet.
That sort of no news isn't good news for the White House. More news wouldn't be, either. We'll know in a few minutes whether Scooter Libby has been indicted. We may also know whether anyone else -- aside from Rove -- is still in Fitzgerald's sights.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [11:48 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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Fitzgerald will answer questions today. What about Bush?
Whatever happens in the next few hours -- regardless of whether Scooter Libby is the only one who gets indicted, regardless of how the GOP spins away charges as "perjury technicalities," regardless of how quickly George W. Bush hops on Marine One and high-tails it up to Camp David -- it's fair to remember this: Two years ago, when the Valerie Plame investigation and George W. Bush's reelection campaign were just getting started, the White House prejudged the case by announcing pretty unequivocally that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with it.
This was the back-and-forth at Scott McClellan's White House press briefing on Oct. 10, 2003:
Reporter: Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
McClellan: Those individuals -- I talked -- I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.
And that is, in fact, where it stood until this summer, when leaks from the grand jury room and then firsthand reports from reporters made it clear that Rove and Libby were both very much involved in leaking Plame's identity. The press has much to answer for: Reporters, sworn to secrecy by their sources, remained complicit in the administration's lie even as their readers stepped into the polling booths in November. And whatever Patrick Fitzgerald announces today, the White House has some long-overdue explaining to do, too.
McClellan started that process this week. For months, a lot of us have been asking this about McClellan's 2003 denials: Did Rove and Libby lie to McClellan, or did McClellan lie to the American people? At a press briefing three days ago, McClellan insisted that it was the former, that he had merely passed on -- accurately -- the assurances he'd received from Rove and Libby.
Reporter: Scott, a couple of years ago, you told us that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove had nothing to do with the CIA leak. It appears that you may have gotten bad information before you made that statement ... My question is: Can we be confident that when we hear statements from the White House in public that they are truthful?
McClellan: I think you can because you know that our relationship is built on trust, and I have earned that trust with you all. As you pointed out, you pointed back to some past comments that I gave and I've talked to you about the assurances that I received on that.
Translation: Rove and Libby lied to me.
So maybe we can check that one off the list, at least so far as McClellan's culpability is concerned, and at least so far as we can believe McClellan this time. But then there's still this: At a press briefing on Sept. 29, 2003, McClellan acknowledged that Bush knew that he was proclaiming Rove's innocence and was standing by and letting it happen. "The president knows" that Rove wasn't involved, McClellan said. He wouldn't explain then how the president "knew," and -- with the cloud of investigation still hanging over Rove -- it's unlikely that he's going to explain it now.
Early on his administration, George W. Bush said: "We must always ask ourselves not only what is legal but what is right." Patrick Fitzgerald will begin to address the "legal" part of that equation when he announces his decisions today. As for the "right" part? We're still waiting.
-- Tim Grieve
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Meanwhile, the president talks about 9/11
As a federal grand jury meets to consider indictments against one or more members of his administration, George W. Bush is in Norfolk, Va., where he's standing before a sea of digitized American flags and talking about the threat that terrorists pose to the United States.
-- Tim Grieve
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No Rove indictment today -- but the investigation continues
Karl Rove's lawyer has just issued a statement that seems to confirm what we've been hearing: The president's top political advisor won't be indicted today, but he will remain under investigaton for his role in the Valerie Plame case. Robert Luskin says that "Mr. Rove's status" has not changed and that the investigation is continuing.
The Associated Press says that Patrick Fitzgerald's office told Luskin last night that the special prosecutor has not completed his investigation into Rove's role and still has matters to resolve before deciding "what he is going to do."
We'll learn more when Fitzgerald releases documents around noon today and goes before the cameras at 2 p.m.
-- Tim Grieve
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An indictment for Libby? More time for Rove? And why?
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is back inside the federal courthouse in Washington, and CNN says he'll make an announcement at 2 p.m. today. Until then, we're at a more advanced stage of where we've been all week: Waiting, speculating and watching the smoke signals.
The Associated Press says Dick Cheney arrived at work an hour early today!
Conventional wisdom seems to have converged quickly on two core assumptions. The first is that Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, will be indicted today, probably on charges that he lied to the grand jury about his involvement in Valerie Plame's outing. Libby reportedly told the grand jury that he learned about Plame from reporters; his own notes reportedly say that he learned about her from Cheney, and Judy Miller has testified that Libby told her about Plame, not the other way around. That's a problem, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal suggest that it's likely to lead to his indictment.
The second bit of late-breaking conventional wisdom is that Karl Rove will be spared an indictment -- for now. The Wall Street Journal, relying on "a person briefed on the matter," says that Rove was "informed yesterday evening that he may not be charged today but remains in legal jeopardy." NBC News is reporting it the same way. And the Associated Press, relying on a source "familiar with recent developments in the case," is reporting this morning that Fitzgerald "signaled" last night that "he might simply keep Rove under investigation."
Everyone seems to agree that Fitzgerald might -- or might not -- obtain or announce additional indictments today. Everyone seems to agree that Fitzgerald might -- or might not -- indict or at least reveal the identity of whoever it was that first leaked Plame's identity to Robert Novak. Everyone seems to agree that everything is still fluid and that just about anything could change between now and the time of Fitzgerald's expected midday announcement -- or even after.
So here's what we want to know. First, if the supposition about Rove's status is true, why does Fitzgerald need more time before making a decision? Maybe, after two years of work, he's still got more investigating to do: Earlier this week, his investigators were out interviewing Plame's neighbors, and one of his prosecutors was still asking a former White House aide questions about Rove. Or maybe Fitzgerald knows what he needs to know, and "more time to investigate" really just means "more time to negotiate." Fitzgerald was in contact with Rove's criminal defense lawyer this week; it's possible that they're working on some sort of plea bargain and just aren't done with it yet.
And that leads to our second question. In Robert Luskin, Rove has a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense. In Joseph Tate, Libby has a lawyer with some criminal experience but whose focus seems to be antitrust work. It's looking like Rove won't be indicted today. It's looking like Libby will be. Coincidence? Maybe. But most criminal defense attorneys will tell you that your best chance of beating an indictment comes before one is handed down. The Washington Post says that Libby is looking for a criminal defense attorney now. Why didn't he do that a long, long time ago? Why did he reportedly tell the grand jury that he heard about Plame from reporters when he knew, presumably, that his notes said otherwise? Did Libby think he could somehow outsmart or outlast Fitzgerald? That's another way of asking this: Has the same arrogance that led the country to war led Scooter Libby to the brink of a criminal indictment?
-- Tim Grieve
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NYT: Libby indictment likely, Rove indictment not -- maybe
Patrick Fitzgerald still hasn't made announcements yet, but the New York Times seems to think it has things figured out -- sort of.
In a two-steps-removed-from-firsthand-knowledge lead, the Times says that "lawyers in the case" are saying that "associates" of Scooter Libby "expect" that he'll be indicted on a charge of making false statements to the grand jury. Meanwhile, the Times says, "people briefed officially" on the case are saying that Karl Rove won't be indicted but will continue to be investigated. Fitzgerald, the "people briefed officially" say, likely will seek an extension of the grand jury term.
It all sounds a little speculative, and we haven't even gotten to the Times' disclaimers yet: A "flurry of behind-the-scenes discussions" has "left open the possibility of last-minute surprises," people "involved in the case" won't "rule out the disclosure of previously unknown aspects of the case," and the question of whether anyone other than Libby or Rove might be charged remains an "unresolved mystery." And then there's this: Contrary to the Times' suggestion, the Washington Post quotes "legal sources" who say that Fitzgerald has indicated that he won't be extending his investigation. But then there's this: Contrary to the Post's suggestion, the Associated Press says that a "person outside the legal profession familiar with recent developments in the case" says that Fitzgerald "signaled" Thursday that he'll keep his investigation open -- and that Rove will remain in legal jeopardy even if he isn't indicted Friday.
The Post isn't predicting who will or won't be indicted, only observing that Libby is shopping for a criminal defense attorney -- a move we would have recommended, if he'd asked us, long before today. As for Rove? He already has a criminal defense attorney. But as of Thursday night, "people close to the investigation" tell the Los Angeles Times, Rove hadn't yet received notice that he was going to be indicted. The paper said that Fitzgerald is expected to make his decisions known around midday Friday.
Here's the part of the story the New York Times -- and everyone else -- can be sure is right: If any indictments come down Friday, the Times says, the Bush administration will be keeping "as low a profile as possible." The White House press secretary hasn't scheduled a briefing for Friday, and the president is leaving town early for a weekend at Camp David.
-- Tim Grieve"
Salon.com - War Room
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Salon.com News | All the vice president's men
Here's a first-rate analysis by the excellent Juan Cole of Cheney's men that shows the complex of reasons that drove the Bush administration into Iraq; the nutty neocons in Cheney's office; and that Libby with Wolfowitz wrote the first crazed paper in 1992 urging the US to invade Iraq and was also active in the Project for a New American Century that was major influence on Bush administration Iraq debacle....
"All the vice president's men
The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is blowing up in their faces.
By Juan Cole
Oct. 28, 2005 | As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called "a cabal" that "on critical issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove.
Although the investigation has focused on Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who are these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the Bush administration's foreign policy?
Most of the members of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. This does not mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is undeniable that Israeli concerns played an important role. The actual motivation behind the war was complex, and Cheney's team was not the only one in the game. The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces -- country club Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate interests, evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and neoconservative Jews allied with Israel's right-wing Likud party. Each group had its own rationale for going to war with Iraq.
Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.
None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes -- or, in this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction -- Cheney and Bush's underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations.
"Cheney Assembles Formidable Team," marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single staffer on security affairs.
The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using U.S. troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international security environment.
Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 signaled a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself with the neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The James Baker branch of the Republican Party had long been critical of Israel for causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East with its expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West Bank, and Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not vote Republican.
Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on speaking terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal felt by his old colleagues was summed up by Bush I's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who told the New Yorker he considered Cheney a friend, "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." As time went on, however, he increasingly chose to ally with neoconservatives and the Jewish right in the U.S. and Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and constituents for his vision of a post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged American hegemony that would be backed by a vast military-industrial establishment fed by U.S. tax dollars. He continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a democratic Iraq would benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice president demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives.
But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview -- in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy -- and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire." And the neocons' dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns," offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible military threat menaced the U.S. Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense" against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.
Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no U.S. constituencies for such wars in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed American militarism, given that the U.S. public held deep prejudices against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it.
A key, but less well-known, Cheney advisor on the Middle East is John Hannah, a former Soviet expert. He had been part of a policy group assembled by Cheney when he was secretary of defense, in 1989, under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. Hannah was distinguished for his distrust of Soviet reformist Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the New Republic.
Hannah then came to head the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a stridently pro-Israel think tank that has gained enormous influence in Washington. WINEP had been founded in the 1980s with the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the legendarily powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings Institution were felt to be insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to support the government in power in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of the right-wing, expansionist Likud Party.
WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a contract from the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the future of the main political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was specifically instructed, as part of his contract, to depend on the material at the WINEP Web site. State Department officials and U.S. military officers are detailed to WINEP to learn about the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers' expense. Despite its highly political activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a nonprofit charitable foundation.
When Hannah was at WINEP, he was still deeply concerned with post-Soviet Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East. The Soviets had been major patrons of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria and Iraq, all of whom Hannah viewed as enemies. In a 1993 interview with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, another pro-Israel, right-wing organization, Hannah expressed anxiety about the rise of Russian nationalists who, he claimed, sought to undermine United Nations sanctions against Libya and to position Russian companies to invest in Iraq should the sanctions on that country begin to slip. For figures such as Hannah, Russian nationalism and Middle Eastern rogue states like Libya and Iraq represented unfinished business left over from the Cold War. For the Israeli hawks and their American supporters, the Cold War was not really over as long as the former Soviet allies in the Middle East continued to express enmity to Israel.
As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked, the U.S. State Department probably owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key personnel. From the institute, Hannah came to work for Christopher (who served from 1993 to 1997). During this period, Hannah cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, an expatriate group funded by the CIA and the State Department to overthrow Saddam. One of the things that made Chalabi attractive to Hannah and other neocons was that he promised them that if he came to power he would recognize Israel and take Iraq in the same direction as Turkey, a Muslim country allied with the Zionist state.
We next meet Hannah as an aide to John Bolton. Bolton, a curmudgeonly lawyer who helped stop the Florida recount in 2000, was rewarded by Bush by being made undersecretary of state for arms control and international proliferation. Bolton detailed Hannah to Cheney's office as chief adviser on the Middle East. (Hannah actually knew little about the Middle East and knows no Arabic, being primarily an old Russia hand.)
Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David Wurmser, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in international relations. He served as project officer at the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 1994. He then moved for two years to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was director of institutional grants until 1996. In the latter year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," that advocated a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the Shiites of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel. Since post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some actual knowledge.
The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than Iraq, since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, "A Clean Break" advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein."
This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein's branch of the Baath Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I's coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Wurmser is married to Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East programs at the right-wing Hudson Institute. She was listed as a co-author of "A Clean Break." She had also co-founded, with a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, the MEMRI translation service, which cherry-picks Arabic newspapers for the more outrageous articles and political cartoons, and translates them into English for the purpose of creating a negative view of the Arab world.
In 1999 David Wurmser published "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein." In 2000, Wurmser authored a paper urging the U.S. government to push Syria out of Lebanon and to refuse to engage with Damascus that was published by the Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes. The Middle East Forum advisory board is primarily composed of leaders of right-wing organizations such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Zionist Organization of America.
Wurmser was picked by fellow neoconservative and Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith (whom the departing Colin Powell denounced to George W. Bush as a "card-carrying member of the Likud") after Sept. 11 to form part of the notorious Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia division of the Department of Defense. That unit cherry-picked intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaida, singling out unreliable, single-sourced accounts and stripping them of any context that would show where they came from. These were then stovepiped to Libby and Hannah in Cheney's office, so as to go directly to Bush and make an end run around the professional intelligence agencies. When allegations emerged that corrupt Iraqi businessman and longtime expatriate politician Ahmad Chalabi had been given classified information about U.S. intelligence efforts against Iran, and had promptly passed it on to Tehran, Wurmser was among the officials the FBI interviewed searching for the leak.
When the OSP was dissolved after the Iraq war, Wurmser went back to work for Bolton. Although Wurmser only came to Cheney's shadow national security council in September 2003, after the Plame leak, he had been in close contact with Libby and Hannah all along. Close observers noted a distinct turn toward belligerency against Syria in White House pronouncements soon after Wurmser's advent. (He replaced old Soviet hand Eric Edelman, who was sent as ambassador to Turkey.)
On Sept. 10, 2002, the Boston Globe had reported that ascendant hawks in the Bush administration saw the overthrow of Saddam as a first step toward democratizing and transforming the Middle East. John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid wrote, "The argument for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has been pushed for years by some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. It is now being considered as a possible US policy with the ascent of key hard-liners in the administration -- from Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the Pentagon to John Hannah and Lewis Libby on the vice president's staff and John Bolton in the State Department, analysts and officials say."
Cheney and other advocates of this policy promised that an Iraq war would break the deadlock between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Donnelly and Shadid quote Meyrav Wurmser, "Everyone will flip out, starting with the Saudis ... It will send shock waves throughout the Arab world ... But if we can get a democracy in the Palestinian Authority, democracy in Iraq, get the Egyptians to improve their human rights and open up their system, it will be a spectacular change. After a war with Iraq, then you really shape the region." Since both Wurmsers and their circle had argued forcefully for the destruction of the Oslo peace process and against the surrender by Israel of any of the Palestinian territories captured in 1967, it seems most likely that they hoped that getting the U.S. to produce chaos in the Middle East by undermining its allies would give hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a free hand to annex most of the West Bank, and perhaps other Arab lands, rather than that it would lead to a just peace. Weakened by the loss of their backers in Baghdad and Damascus, the Palestinians would be forced to make peace on Sharon's terms.
Libby, Hannah and Wurmser were at the center of the production and purveying of bad intelligence on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Hannah received intelligence directly from the Iraqi National Congress, according to a leaked memo from that organization. He was also a liaison with Wurmser when the latter was in the Office of Special Plans.
According to a Newsweek article of Dec. 15, 2004, "a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department." The article explains that the program arranged for the raw information coming from defectors and other sources to be "reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.'" The memo explicitly mentioned Hannah as "a principal point of contact" for the program. The other point of contact, according to Newsweek, was William Luti, who headed the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon under Feith. (Luti, also known as "uber-Luti," was such a zealot that he denounced retired Gen. Anthony Zinni as a "traitor" for expressing reservations about the impending Iraq war.) Chalabi's lie factory thus had two main customers, both of them wholesalers to Cheney. (These alleged contacts are an apparent violation of the National Security Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in unauthorized intelligence gathering.)
These, then, were the key neocon players gathered around Cheney. Cheney's office was key to the manufacturing of the bogus case for Iraq being close to having a nuclear bomb (it had no nuclear weapons program at all after the mid-1990s) and for it having a biological weapons program on wheels (biological weapons labs require clean rooms and cannot be mounted in Winnebagos). Cheney's office was among the originators of the smears against critics of such allegations, such as Joseph Wilson. Wilson's attack on the integrity of their intelligence gathering deeply threatened them. At the time he began speaking out, no high U.S. government official had dared name their fantasy for what it was -- a tissue of innuendo and falsehoods fed to them by the ambitious and swallowed by the greedy and the gullible. That he was connected to the CIA's own unit on weapons proliferation through his wife, Valerie, made him all the more dangerous in their eyes, once Cheney had ferreted out that link.
The New York Times reported on Oct. 24, 2005, that it was Cheney who told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. White House chief of staff Karl Rove also learned of Plame's identity, although it is not known how. Both of them shared the information with the press, including Matt Cooper of Time magazine, Robert Novak of CNN and Judith Miller of the New York Times. Their aim was to discredit Wilson in official Washington as a tool of CIA disinformation, someone determined to make the White House the fall guys in the intelligence scandal, so as to spare the Company criticism. Some have a dark suspicion that they may also have wished to disrupt the CIA unit on anti-proliferation, which continued to doubt the case they were making about the rogue Middle East states. When confronted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby and Rove seem to have claimed that they did not reveal the name of Valerie Plame Wilson. In fact, they had called her "Joe Wilson's wife." This denial, however, is strikingly disingenuous and unconvincing.
Clearly Cheney's men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to destroy Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons in Cheney's inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it could be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and Wilson and Plame were getting in the way of the next projects.
With the war in Iraq a disaster, possible indictments looming and polls showing that 80 percent of Americans believe that revealing Plame's identity was either illegal or unethical, those dreams of world domination have crumbled to dust.
-- By Juan Cole "http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/28/vice_president/print.html
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Rove Apparently Is Not Indicted Today; Fitzgerald to Speak Soon - New York Times
very serious charges have been levelled against Libby but so far nothing else; curiously, CNN has been going on for half an hour, detailing that false statements to the FBI and perjory to Grand Jury about Libby, mentioning that report claimed Cheney told him about Plame, thus bringing Veep into the story, but so far CNN hasn't mentioned Rove or anything else whereas NYT has a story about possible extension of Grand Jury and continued inquiry into Rove
Rove Apparently Is Not Indicted Today; Fitzgerald to Speak Soon - New York Times
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Salon.com - War Room
Here's the latest from Salon's War Room: Rove's lawyer says he won't be indicted; Fitzgerald will reportedly speak today at 2:00 pm; all the buzz about the Harriet Miers case and what's next.... From Salon=
"Meanwhile, the president talks about 9/11
As a federal grand jury meets to consider indictments against one or more members of his administration, George W. Bush is in Norfolk, Va., where he's standing before a sea of digitized American flags and talking about the threat that terrorists pose to the United States.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [10:14 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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No Rove indictment today -- but the investigation continues
Karl Rove's lawyer has just issued a statement that seems to confirm what we've been hearing: The president's top political advisor won't be indicted today, but he will remain under investigaton for his role in the Valerie Plame case. Robert Luskin says that "Mr. Rove's status" has not changed and that the investigation is continuing.
The Associated Press says that Patrick Fitzgerald's office told Luskin last night that the special prosecutor has not completed his investigation into Rove's role and still has matters to resolve before deciding "what he is going to do."
We'll learn more when Fitzgerald releases documents around noon today and goes before the cameras at 2 p.m.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:54 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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An indictment for Libby? More time for Rove? And why?
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is back inside the federal courthouse in Washington, and CNN says he'll make an announcement at 2 p.m. today. Until then, we're at a more advanced stage of where we've been all week: Waiting, speculating and watching the smoke signals.
The Associated Press says Dick Cheney arrived at work an hour early today!
Conventional wisdom seems to have converged quickly on two core assumptions. The first is that Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, will be indicted today, probably on charges that he lied to the grand jury about his involvement in Valerie Plame's outing. Libby reportedly told the grand jury that he learned about Plame from reporters; his own notes reportedly say that he learned about her from Cheney, and Judy Miller has testified that Libby told her about Plame, not the other way around. That's a problem, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal suggest that it's likely to lead to his indictment.
The second bit of late-breaking conventional wisdom is that Karl Rove will be spared an indictment -- for now. The Wall Street Journal, relying on "a person briefed on the matter," says that Rove was "informed yesterday evening that he may not be charged today but remains in legal jeopardy." NBC News is reporting it the same way. And the Associated Press, relying on a source "familiar with recent developments in the case," is reporting this morning that Fitzgerald "signaled" last night that "he might simply keep Rove under investigation."
Everyone seems to agree that Fitzgerald might -- or might not -- obtain or announce additional indictments today. Everyone seems to agree that Fitzgerald might -- or might not -- indict or at least reveal the identity of whoever it was that first leaked Plame's identity to Robert Novak. Everyone seems to agree that everything is still fluid and that just about anything could change between now and the time of Fitzgerald's expected midday announcement -- or even after.
So here's what we want to know. First, if the supposition about Rove's status is true, why does Fitzgerald need more time before making a decision? Maybe, after two years of work, he's still got more investigating to do: Earlier this week, his investigators were out interviewing Plame's neighbors, and one of his prosecutors was still asking a former White House aide questions about Rove. Or maybe Fitzgerald knows what he needs to know, and "more time to investigate" really just means "more time to negotiate." Fitzgerald was in contact with Rove's criminal defense lawyer this week; it's possible that they're working on some sort of plea bargain and just aren't done with it yet.
And that leads to our second question. In Robert Luskin, Rove has a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense. In Joseph Tate, Libby has a lawyer with some criminal experience but whose focus seems to be antitrust work. It's looking like Rove won't be indicted today. It's looking like Libby will be. Coincidence? Maybe. But most criminal defense attorneys will tell you that your best chance of beating an indictment comes before one is handed down. The Washington Post says that Libby is looking for a criminal defense attorney now. Why didn't he do that a long, long time ago? Why did he reportedly tell the grand jury that he heard about Plame from reporters when he knew, presumably, that his notes said otherwise? Did Libby think he could somehow outsmart or outlast Fitzgerald? That's another way of asking this: Has the same arrogance that led the country to war led Scooter Libby to the brink of a criminal indictment?
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [08:55 EDT, Oct. 28, 2005]
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NYT: Libby indictment likely, Rove indictment not -- maybe
Patrick Fitzgerald still hasn't made announcements yet, but the New York Times seems to think it has things figured out -- sort of.
In a two-steps-removed-from-firsthand-knowledge lead, the Times says that "lawyers in the case" are saying that "associates" of Scooter Libby "expect" that he'll be indicted on a charge of making false statements to the grand jury. Meanwhile, the Times says, "people briefed officially" on the case are saying that Karl Rove won't be indicted but will continue to be investigated. Fitzgerald, the "people briefed officially" say, likely will seek an extension of the grand jury term.
It all sounds a little speculative, and we haven't even gotten to the Times' disclaimers yet: A "flurry of behind-the-scenes discussions" has "left open the possibility of last-minute surprises," people "involved in the case" won't "rule out the disclosure of previously unknown aspects of the case," and the question of whether anyone other than Libby or Rove might be charged remains an "unresolved mystery." And then there's this: Contrary to the Times' suggestion, the Washington Post quotes "legal sources" who say that Fitzgerald has indicated that he won't be extending his investigation. But then there's this: Contrary to the Post's suggestion, the Associated Press says that a "person outside the legal profession familiar with recent developments in the case" says that Fitzgerald "signaled" Thursday that he'll keep his investigation open -- and that Rove will remain in legal jeopardy even if he isn't indicted Friday.
The Post isn't predicting who will or won't be indicted, only observing that Libby is shopping for a criminal defense attorney -- a move we would have recommended, if he'd asked us, long before today. As for Rove? He already has a criminal defense attorney. But as of Thursday night, "people close to the investigation" tell the Los Angeles Times, Rove hadn't yet received notice that he was going to be indicted. The paper said that Fitzgerald is expected to make his decisions known around midday Friday.
Here's the part of the story the New York Times -- and everyone else -- can be sure is right: If any indictments come down Friday, the Times says, the Bush administration will be keeping "as low a profile as possible." The White House press secretary hasn't scheduled a briefing for Friday, and the president is leaving town early for a weekend at Camp David.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [23:01 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Another coverup from the vice president's office?
By the time the week is out, Dick Cheney's chief of staff may be indicted on charges that he tried to cover up his role in the outing of Valerie Plame. If it happens, it won't be the first time that Scooter Libby and his boss have been accused of interfering with an investigation involving the vice president's office.
Journalist Murray Waas is now reporting that Cheney and Libby withheld "crucial documents" from the Senate Intelligence Committee as it investigated the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Waas says that Cheney and Libby, over the objections of some White House staffers and lawyers, withheld documents that included drafts of passages Libby wrote for inclusion in the deeply flawed speech Colin Powell would deliver before the United Nations in February 2003.
A Bush administration spokesman told Waas that the White House's refusal to turn over some documents to the committee reflected nothing other than its commitment to protect "deliberative discussions" among "executive branch principals." But Waas says that a former "senior administration official" who was familiar with the issue told him that there was also a "political element" at play. Waas explains: "This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could be used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [16:54 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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What really happened to Harriet Miers?
On CNN a few minutes ago, Texas Sen. John Cornyn insisted that Harriet Miers' nomination died as a result of pressure from "pundits" rather than from Republican senators -- and that Miers, not George W. Bush, made the decision to bail out. "The president didn't go to her and say, 'Let me withdraw your nomination,'" Cornyn said. "She went to him."
Sources tell the National Journal's Hotline that it played out a little differently. Late yesterday, the Hotline says, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told White House Chief of Staff Andy Card "in no uncertain terms that Miers would probably not be confirmed ... After that call, according to White House sources, Bush and Card met privately with Miers, and they decided jointly that preserving White House privilege on documents was too important a principle to risk. Miers officially informed Bush at 8:30 pm ET."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:56 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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If the shoes look right, you must indict
This just in: As Washington searches for clues of indictments in the Valerie Plame case, Reuters is reporting that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald took a break from a meeting with his legal team today to get his shoes shined at a Washington barber shop.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:27 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Bush's line on Miers: Is anyone buying it?
Did Arlen Specter just call George W. Bush a liar?
When the president issued a statement this morning announcing Harriet Miers' withdrawal, he said that senators' requests for documents from Miers' White House tenure made it impossible for her confirmation process to continue. As we argued earlier today, the explanation was a sham, carefully orchestrated cover for the fact that right-wing opposition forced the president to abandon his nominee before she even got a hearing.
Specter seems to agree. On the Senate floor a short while ago, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee lamented the fact that the "constitutional process was not completed" for Miers, but he suggested that a dispute over documents had nothing to do with it. "The Judiciary Committee carefully did not intrude on the president’s executive privilege," Specter said. "The committee studiously avoided asking what advice Ms. Miers gave to the president, and that limitation would have been continued in any hearing with an adequate range of questions available to enable the committee to decide on her qualifications for the court."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:08 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Meanwhile, from the Valerie Plame desk ...
When reporters asked George W. Bush last month whether the war in Iraq had left the National Guard stretched too thin to respond to Hurricane Katrina, the president said that his administration could handle more than one crisis at a time. So, too, can the press. The president tried to shift the media's attention to the Supreme Court this morning, but reporters are still paying more than a little attention to events at the slightly less glamorous E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse nearby.
Here's what we're seeing and hearing now:
No announcement today: A spokesman for Patrick Fitzgerald says, on the record, that he's not expecting any announcements in the Valerie Plame investigation today. The Associated Press says that Fitzgerald is "huddled" with his legal team today, and the Los Angeles Times sees signs that the grand jury will meet again Friday.
Rove and Libby: Libby -- whose indictment is seen by many as a foregone conclusion -- didn't appear at this morning's White House senior staff meeting, but the AP notes that Libby misses those meetings frequently. Rove was there today, but the AP says his legal team is hard at work on "contingency plans" and is "consulting with former Justice Department official Mark Corallo about what defenses could be mounted in court and in public." The Washington Post says that Rove is engaged in a "furious" effort to fight off a perjury charge -- but that he still didn't know as of last night whether he'd be indicted.
Niger: The mainstream American press hasn't done much yet with an Italian newspaper's three-part report on how the information from forged documents about a supposed Irag-Niger deal on uranium -- the information that led to Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger in the first place -- made its way to the White House. Bloggers are continuing to dig in, however, suggesting that the infamous "16 words" about a Niger connection in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech were based on some very old intelligence. Meanwhile, the office of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has denied that his government had any "direct or indirect involvement in the packaging and delivery of the 'false dossier' on Niger's uranium."
The toll on Bush: The Plame case surely isn't the only cause for buyer's remorse, but a new Fox News poll out today says that 6 percent of Americans who voted to reelect the president in November would vote for John Kerry if they had the chance to do it all over again today. Six percent may not sound like much, but it would have been enough to turn Bush's 51-48 popular vote win into a 51-48 defeat 11 months ago.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [14:09 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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A replacement for Miers this week?
What were we saying about curious timing? According to a Reuters report, a spokesman for Patrick Fitzgerald has confirmed, on the record, that no announcements will come in the Valerie Plame case until tomorrow. According to a report in the National Journal's Hotline White House advisors are saying that George W. Bush will nominate a replacement for Harriet Miers as soon as today or tomorrow and by the middle of next week at the latest.
Who will get the nomination? The Hotline says it's hearing a lot of talk about Michael McConnell, the federal appellate court judge who has called Roe v. Wade "an embarrassment to those who take constitutional law seriously."
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [12:53 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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The cost -- to the right -- of Miers' scalp
The religious right may be celebrating the withdrawal of Harriet Miers this morning, but the victory may come at a cost. As Lyle Denniston notes today at SCOTUSblog, starting the process over again means it's likely that Sandra Day O'Connor will still be on the bench when the Supreme Court takes up three abortion-related cases on Nov. 30.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [12:18 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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A coincidence of timing -- or a dog well wagged?
July 19, 2005: On the heels of news that, despite prior White House denials, Karl Rove was very much involved in the outing of Valerie Plame, the Washington Post reports that George W. Bush has backtracked on his pledge to fire anyone involved in leaking Plame's identity. Later that day, the president announces that he's nominating John Roberts to replace retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Sept. 5, 2005: Amid mounting criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the New York Times reports that the White House has put Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett in charge of trying to control the "political damage." Later that day, the president announces that he's nominating John G. Roberts to replace the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Oct. 2, 2005: As Washington awaits Judy Miller's testimony before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, the Washington Post reports that it is becoming "increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated." Early the next morning, the president announces that he's nominating Harriet Miers to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Oct. 26, 2005: As all of Washington watches, Patrick Fitzgerald meets for three hours with his grand jury and then with the federal judge overseeing his case, leading the Los Angeles Times to speculate that one or more White House officials may be the subjects of sealed indictments. Early the next morning, the president announces that he's withdrawing Harriet Miers' nomination.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [11:11 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Miers is gone. Who's up next -- and when?
After diverting John G. Roberts to the chief justice spot and accepting the withdrawal of Harriet Miers, George W. Bush now gets his third shot at naming somebody to replace the retiring -- but not yet retired -- Sandra Day O'Connor.
Who's on the shortlist this time?
Having used a dispute over White House documents as an excuse for dumping Miers, Bush can't very well turn now to Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination would pose precisely the same document issue that Miers' did. And having, in reality, lost the Miers nomination to opposition from the right, Bush can't really be thinking about naming some kind of centrist, political-consensus nominee this time around. What the president needs is a well-respected conservative who comes with plausibly deniable clues of antiabortion views and a record of accomplishment sufficient to counter any charges of cronyism.
What the president needs is another John Roberts.
But with Roberts already spoken for, our money is on tried-and-true conservative judges like J. Michael Luttig or J. Harvie Wilkinson. Neither is a woman -- astute observers will note that Bush's first nominee for O'Connor's seat wasn't, either -- but neither presents the problems that the Miers nomination posed. Luttig and Wilkinson are beloved by conservatives, and there's no question about their judicial accomplishments, their intellectual capabilities or their independence from the president himself. If Bush is looking for a bigger splash -- and if the Valerie Plame case continues to dominate the news, he will be -- watch out for Larry Thompson, who was, as Bush's deputy attorney general, the highest-ranking African-American law enforcement officer in the administration.
What about Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown? They would certainly satisfy the right. But the Senate just went through a bruising fight over their nominations to the federal appeals court, and it's not clear that Bush has the political capital to force either of them through a second time around. With Bush so weak, the John McCains of the world will have even less incentive than usual to do the president's heavy lifting. And while the left didn't kill Miers' nomination -- it didn't have to -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid warned Bush before he nominated Miers that Democrats wouldn't take kindly to the nomination of someone they've fought before. How about Edith Clement? Sources close to the White House fronted her name the first time Bush was faced with the O'Connor vacancy, apparently as a bluff to throw reporters -- and Democrats -- off the scent of John Roberts. She could be back in the hunt this time around, although her abortion views might not be clear enough for the forces that derailed the Miers nomination.
And then there's the question of when. Back in July, Bush accelerated his announcement of Roberts' nomination when the news of Karl Rove's involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame became too much for the White House to bear. He announced Miers' withdrawal today as Washington waits on tenterhooks for word of indictments. The president said this morning that he'll announce a new nominee in a "timely manner." Translation: I'll tell you the next time I need something else to talk about.
-- Tim Grieve
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Thursday, October 27, 2005
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Robert Parry: ''Plame-gate' and the myth of the renegade aide'
Bob Parry has a good comparative analysis of current ScandalGate with Watergate and Iran/Contra and indicates in all three cases it was the top guys doing the dirty stuff with Nixon going down and Reagan and Bush Daddy surviving; the Bush-Cheney Scandals are much bigger than Watergate and Iran/Contra combined and it will be highly interesting to watch them play out....
The Smirking Chimp: "Robert Parry: ''Plame-gate' and the myth of the renegade aide'"
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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: 'Powerful Government Accounting Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings'
Here's a strong account of GAO report that strongly suggests, what many of us have long suspected, that Election 2004 election was STOLEN and that the electronic voting machines could easily be, and probably were, RIGGED!
This suggests three dimensions to Bush-Cheney Scandalgate:
1) Iraq. Behind the Plame/Wilson case are the systematic lies about Iraqi WMD and the destruction of anyone who questioned these claims by the rightwing attack apparatus orchestrated by Cheney's office and Rove. Gen. Shinseki said many more troops were needed for the Iraq operation and was driven out of Pentagon; Bush's economic advisor Lawrenc Lindsey said quite correctly that an Iraq operation could cost $200 billion and he was sacked; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil wrote memoir indicating Bush-Cheney obsession with an Iraq invasion since the beginning of thei administration and he was viciously attacked on and on until Joe Wilson criticized one small claim in the arsenal of lies about Iraqi WMD and he and his wife were the subject of a a vicious attack and smear operation. The fact that Wilson was a relatively minor player in the whole affair and yet was subjected to such fierce attacks AFTER it was already clear that there were no Iraqi WMD and that the Niger uranium claim was bogus shows how vicious, petty and UNBALANCED the Bush-Cheney Gang were in going after critics. Rove and Libby just couldn't help attacking Wilson again and again and left a paper trail and witnesses who can affirm that they smeared Wilson and outed his wife. Which brings us to the second dimension:
2) The CIA and National Security. In elections it appears that the Rove-Bush-Cheney attack apparatus could lie and smear all it wanted against its political opponents but National Security Honchoes don't appreciate getting smeared themselves and can be organized to fight back. Joe McCarthy went down when he took on the Pentagon and CIA, claiming they were hotbeds of Commies like the State Department, and McCarthy went down....
From the beginning, the Bush administration has been waging a war against the CIA, and had Bush Daddy CIA types in their corner, but evidently they went too far, endangering national security and pissing off some serious people....
3) the fate of democracy in the US. The Bush administration has systematically undermined US democracy, as well as wrecking the economy and endangering the US in a hostile world, stealing two elections; getting back civil liberties; carrying out a reign of secrecy; and doing thousands of things we probably don't even know about. To save US democracy, and probably the economy, the Bush-Cheney-Rove Gang has to go and perhaps finally some corporate powers and media elites understand this. Hopefully, CIA Scandalgate will open the doors to the full array of Bush-Cheney Gang infamy and the whole rotten lot will go down.
Anyway, here's an excellent account of the stealing of Election 2004 and indication that basically US democracy is at stake in the contemporary moment.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=23354&mode=nested&order=0
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Salon.com - War Room
here's quick response to Meiers withdrawal and summary of ScandalGate by Salon. The Big News is that Honey Fitz has reportedly rented expanded office space in DC that could signify an expanded inquiry....
" coincidence of timing -- or a dog well wagged?
July 19, 2005: On the heels of news that, despite prior White House denials, Karl Rove was very much involved in the outing of Valerie Plame, the Washington Post reports that George W. Bush has backtracked on his pledge to fire anyone involved in leaking Plame's identity. Later that day, the president announces that he's nominating John Roberts to replace retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Sept. 5, 2005: Amid mounting criticism of his administration's handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the New York Times reports that the White House has put Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett in charge of trying to control the "political damage." Later that day, the president announces that he's nominating John G. Roberts to replace the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Oct. 2, 2005: As Washington awaits Judy Miller's testimony before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, the Washington Post reports that it is becoming "increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated." Early the next morning, the president announces that he's nominating Harriet Miers to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Oct. 26, 2005: As all of Washington watches, Patrick Fitzgerald meets for three hours with his grand jury and then with the federal judge overseeing his case, leading the Los Angeles Times to speculate that one or more White House officials may be the subjects of sealed indictments. Early the next morning, the president announces that he's withdrawing Harriet Miers' nomination.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [11:11 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Miers is gone. Who's up next -- and when?
After diverting John G. Roberts to the chief justice spot and accepting the withdrawal of Harriet Miers, George W. Bush now gets his third shot at naming somebody to replace the retiring -- but not yet retired -- Sandra Day O'Connor.
Who's on the shortlist this time?
Having used a dispute over White House documents as an excuse for dumping Miers, Bush can't very well turn now to Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination would pose precisely the same document issue that Miers' did. And having, in reality, lost the Miers nomination to opposition from the right, Bush can't really be thinking about naming some kind of centrist, political-consensus nominee this time around. What the president needs is a well-respected conservative who comes with plausibly deniable clues of antiabortion views and a record of accomplishment sufficient to counter any charges of cronyism.
What the president needs is another John Roberts.
But with Roberts already spoken for, our money is on tried-and-true conservative judges like J. Michael Luttig or J. Harvie Wilkinson. Neither is a woman -- astute observers will note that Bush's first nominee for O'Connor's seat wasn't, either -- but neither presents the problems that the Miers nomination posed. Luttig and Wilkinson are beloved by conservatives, and there's no question about their judicial accomplishments, their intellectual capabilities or their independence from the president himself. If Bush is looking for a bigger splash -- and if the Valerie Plame case continues to dominate the news, he will be -- watch out for Larry Thompson, who was, as Bush's deputy attorney general, the highest-ranking African-American law enforcement officer in the administration.
What about Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown? They would certainly satisfy the right. But the Senate just went through a bruising fight over their nominations to the federal appeals court, and it's not clear that Bush has the political capital to force either of them through a second time around. With Bush so weak, the John McCains of the world will have even less incentive than usual to do the president's heavy lifting. And while the left didn't kill Miers' nomination -- it didn't have to -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid warned Bush before he nominated Miers that Democrats wouldn't take kindly to the nomination of someone they've fought before. How about Edith Clement? Sources close to the White House fronted her name the first time Bush was faced with the O'Connor vacancy, apparently as a bluff to throw reporters -- and Democrats -- off the scent of John Roberts. She could be back in the hunt this time around, although her abortion views might not be clear enough for the forces that derailed the Miers nomination.
And then there's the question of when. Back in July, Bush accelerated his announcement of Roberts' nomination when the news of Karl Rove's involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame became too much for the White House to bear. He announced Miers' withdrawal today as Washington waits on tenterhooks for word of indictments. The president said this morning that he'll announce a new nominee in a "timely manner." Translation: I'll tell you the next time I need something else to talk about.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [10:35 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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A document dispute forced Miers' withdrawal? Don't believe it
George W. Bush is blaming his withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination on senators who sought documents reflecting her work at the White House. "It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel," Bush said.
If the White House has ever floated a more transparently false cover story, it's hard to remember it. The fact is this: Opposition from the right, and not a dispute with the Senate, forced Bush to bail on Harriet Miers. The right was always iffy on Miers. Pro-Bush groups began running anti-Miers TV ads this week, and -- after the Washington Post unearthed a 1993 speech in which Miers seemed way too squishy on abortion rights -- Concerned Women for America called for the nominee's withdrawal yesterday.
With the Valerie Plame scandal threatening to hurt Bush further with the middle of the country, the White House needed to move quickly to keep its base on board. Charles Krauthammer laid out a plan for an exit strategy last week, and the White House has followed it to a "T": Manufacture a dispute over White House documents, declare an impasse and let the honorable Harriet Miers spare the nation an irreconcilable dispute between the legislative and executive branches by graciously withdrawing her nomination. When the president was asked Monday about a report that the White House was considering a contingency plan for Miers' withdrawal, Bush blurted out instead that he would never turn over documents from the White House "about the decision-making process, what her recommendations were." It wasn't an answer to the question Bush had been asked, and yet it was: The trumped-up, or at least not yet fully realized, document dispute was, in fact, the "contingency plan."
That dispute still hadn't come to a head this morning, when the White House announced Miers' withdrawal and said that the dispute was the cause. Indeed, in the last day or so, Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter was still talking about ways to work with the White House to limit the Senate's document requests in such a way as to avoid problems of executive privilege.
But Bush didn't need a solution. He needed an out. The document dispute, such as it was, provided him one, and now he has taken it.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:37 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Bush withdraws Miers nomination
We thought something was strange last night as the deadline for Harriet Miers' second take on the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire came and went without a response. We were right: George W. Bush has just "reluctantly" accepted Miers' request to withdraw her nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court. Miers reportedly told Bush that her nomination had become a "burden" on the White House.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:03 EDT, Oct. 27, 2005]
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Waiting on Fitzgerald -- and wondering why he might need office space
As War Room began its day this morning, we flipped on the television that's usually tuned to CNN and saw a pack of police officers frog-marching a bare-chested man out of his house in the middle of the night. "Could it be," we began to think, then just as quickly remembered that we'd been watching the World Series on Fox the night before.
This was a reality TV rerun, not reality itself.
In the real world, we wait.
When will we hear? The Washington Post says that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald summarized his case for the grand jury Wednesday and is expected to announce his decision Friday.
Has anyone been indicted yet? Some "lawyers close to the case" tell the Los Angeles Times that it's possible that Fitzgerald has obtained one or more indictments but is holding them under seal. The New York Times says that Fitzgerald's three-hour meeting with the grand jury, coupled with a private session with Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, has "ratcheted up" exactly that fear at the White House. On the other hand, the Times says that maybe Fitzgerald was just requesting an extension from Hogan -- something CBS News says he didn't do and a prospect the L.A. Times calls doubtful.
So what's really happening? No one knows for sure, but everyone has a theory. On "Hardball" last night, Time's Mike Allen floated the idea that Fitzgerald may already have obtained indictments and is using them to persuade his targets to plead guilty to the charges set forth in them or risk having him return to the grand jury Friday for more. That theory dovetails, more or less, with the Post's report that Karl Rove's legal team is still engaged in a "furious" effort to avoid a perjury charge related to whatever he told the grand jury about his discussion with Time's Matthew Cooper. The Post says that one of Fitzgerald's prosecutors was in touch as late as Tuesday with former White House communications aide Adam Levine, asking him questions about Rove. Meanwhile, most press accounts seem to assume -- some, like the Wall Street Journal, more explicitly than others -- that Scooter Libby will be indicted if he hasn't been already.
Any other clues worth noticing? Yep. As the grand jurors left the federal courthouse Wednesday, the L.A. Times heard one of them tell another, "See you Friday," suggesting that the grand jury will meet again as its term expires. But the biggest clue as to what the future may hold comes from blogger Steve Clemons, who reports that, in addition to his new Web site, Patrick Fitzgerald is getting new office space in Washington. If Clemons is right, it would seem that the prosecutor from Chicago plans to spend some time in the nation's capital beyond, say, Friday.
Is the wait taking its toll? On refresh buttons around America, yes, but also on the White House. The White House isn't happy about sitting in this state of suspended animation, but this is a case in which the waiting might not be the hardest part. While most press accounts have focused on the practical, who-will-replace-Rove aspects of potential indictments, the Journal explains today that the political fallout could be much greater than that. Because of the high-profile nature of the case and the fact that Fitzgerald will want to explain, right out of the box, why he's bringing charges if he does, the Journal says that indictments will likely be "very detailed and discuss the involvement of other White House officials who aren't being charged." David Pitofsky, a former New York prosecutor, tells the Journal: "In this case, an indictment could cause serious reputational damage to unindicted officials by describing their roles, criminal or not, in what appears to have been an orchestrated effort to unfairly discredit [Joseph] Wilson in order to clear the way for an increasingly unpopular war."
How 'bout them White Sox, Mr. President?
-- Tim Grieve"
Salon.com - War Room
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Salon.com | Shipwrecked
here's a really excellent analysis by Sidney Blumenthal on the destruction wreaked by the callow and incompetent Boy King George on the Republican Party-- and, I would add, on the nation....
"Shipwrecked
Bush has so thoroughly destroyed the Republican establishment that no one, not even his dad, can rescue him now.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Oct. 27, 2005 | There is no one left to rescue the Republican Party from George W. Bush. He is home alone. The Republican-establishment wise men whose words were once quiet commands are shouting unheeded warnings. The Republican leaders of Congress are distracted and obsessed with their own crises of corruption.
Suspended House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is under indictment for criminal campaign practices while Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider stock trading in his family-owned Hospital Corporation of America. The only revolt brewing in the Senate is on the right against President Bush's nomination of his White House legal counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court; some Republican senators fear her potential for secret liberal heresy despite the president's protestations of her conservative purity.
On Aug. 7, 1974, three Republican leaders of Congress made a fateful journey down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Sen. Barry Goldwater, tribune of the conservative movement; Sen. Hugh Scott, the stalwart minority leader from Pennsylvania; and Rep. John Rhodes, the minority leader in the House, informed President Richard Nixon that as a result of the Watergate scandals he must resign the presidency in the interest of the country and the Republican Party. Two days later, Nixon quit.
On Nov. 25, 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced at a White House press conference that tens of millions of dollars from illegal sales of weapons to Iran had been siphoned to Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua by a far-flung conspiracy centered in the National Security Council. National Security Advisor John Poindexter immediately resigned and NSC military aide Oliver North was fired. Within the next month, President Reagan's popularity rating had collapsed from 67 to 46 percent; it did not recover until a year and a half later, in May 1988, when he negotiated an arms control treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and traveled to Moscow to declare the Cold War over. After the revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan purged his administration of right-wingers and neoconservatives in particular. The Republican establishment in all its aspects took control. Former Sen. Howard Baker, who had been the Republican leader at the Watergate hearings, became White House chief of staff; Colin Powell was named national security advisor; neocon protector and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was forced out and replaced by pragmatic bureaucratic player Frank Carlucci; and Secretary of State George Shultz was given charge of foreign policy in order to negotiate terms with Gorbachev.
The storm enveloping President Bush is a consequence of his adoption of the vicious smear tactics of the Nixon political operation, learned there by Karl Rove, who was called as a witness to testify about them before the Watergate inquiry, and of Bush's elevation to power of the neoconservatives removed by Reagan and excluded from office by Bush's father. Bush is haunted by the history he insisted on defying.
The elements of the Republican establishment that Bush brought into his first administration as a sort of symbolic tribute were gone by his second. By their nature, these people are discreet, measured and private. It is not their impulse to voice disagreement in public. Their sweeping and emotional jeremiads against what Bush has wrought are extraordinary not only in their substance but in having been made at all. Those expressing their disquiet about Bush are more than simply losers in bureaucratic struggles for primacy of place. Once representative of the heart and soul of the Grand Old Party, they are historical castaways. They stand for another Republican Party that has been supplanted by Bush's version.
Paul O'Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, was shocked at the degradation of policymaking he witnessed as Bush's first secretary of the Treasury. He had anticipated that the councils of government under Bush would be no different from those he had experienced as an economic aide under Nixon. Nixon had rigorously insisted on objective analysis, hearing all sides and considering all options. In Cabinet meetings, O'Neill wrote in his memoir, "The Price of Loyalty," Bush was like "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." The White House struck back at O'Neill by falsely charging him with leaking classified materials and subjecting him to an investigation, which had the desired effect of silencing him. In retrospect, the accusation of leaking classified information can only appear ironic.
Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, was stunned by her denigration and the suppression of science when she was Bush's first director of the Environmental Protection Agency. After her resignation, she compared Bush unfavorably to Reagan, who, she said, "didn't reach out in a way that indicated that there was no room for others." Whitman's book, "It's My Party Too," was a meek plea for attention from the "social fundamentalists" she claimed had seized control of the family firm. She would not name names, as though she might have another go at riding the tiger that had already devoured her.
John Danforth, for 18 years a U.S. senator from Missouri, served briefly before resigning as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations. He did not stipulate the reasons for his departure, but he did publish an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on March 30 of this year decrying how "Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians." The GOP, he wrote, has become "a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement." Danforth, an old friend of George H.W. Bush's, lamented the loss of the party's heritage: "Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots." Danforth was replaced at the U.N. not with a believer in old-fashioned bipartisan internationalism but with John Bolton.
Lawrence Wilkerson, the former head of the Marine War College who had served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, revealed the inner struggles of the Bush administration in a speech before the New America Foundation on Oct. 19. A "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" ran U.S. foreign policy for a president "not versed in international relations and not too much interested." Wilkerson defined the Bush doctrine as "cowboyism." Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor was "extremely weak" and more interested in "her intimacy with the president" than in acting as an honest broker. Cleaning up after Bush's tarnishing of America's image in the world was an impossible task. "It's hard to sell shit," said Wilkerson.
Powell, Wilkerson's principal, has remained publicly quiet since his September outburst, in which he said that his speech before the United Nations arguing the case for the existence of WMD and an invasion of Iraq, which subsequently was revealed to be filled with disinformation, was a "blot" on his record and continues to be "painful now." Behind the scenes, however, Powell has been active in countering the Bush torture policy, which he opposed from the beginning. Powell sent personal letters and made telephone calls to Republican senators urging them to support the amendment to the military appropriations bill that would end the torture policy. As a result of Powell's lobbying, 90 senators voted for it. It was a stinging rebuke to Bush, who has threatened to veto the entire military appropriations package if the amendment is attached.
Brent Scowcroft, perhaps more than anyone else, personifies the realist, bipartisan Republican tradition of internationalism. He is also the former national security advisor to the elder Bush and among his closest friends. President Bush dismissed him early this year from the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, having ignored his advice through the first term. Scowcroft's candid views appear in an article in the current issue of the New Yorker, in which he details his rejection by Bush at length. "I don't want to go there," Scowcroft replied when asked about the difference between the father and son. He said dismissively of the Iraq policies of a leading neoconservative, former Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there." On Cheney, Scowcroft sounded perplexed: "The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney. I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."
But Scowcroft the foreign policy mandarin may not have been exposed to the partisan Cheney when he served as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush Sr. He may have missed Cheney's tenure as a representative in the House leadership, where he compiled a far-right voting record and, as House minority whip during the 1980s, was the hidden hand behind the rise of Newt Gingrich and his band of radicals. When he was slated to be Bush's running mate, it was widely assumed that Cheney would act as a stabilizing and moderating presence. Only those who understood his congressional career knew of his affinities with the radical right, his vengeful instincts and his mean-spiritedness. His emergence at the center of the "cabal" now under investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald should not surprise those who have penetrated his avuncular image to see the hard man beneath. Cheney was not the substitute father figure but the false father.
Bush's highhanded treatment of the few Republican moderates of his first term all but eviscerated what was left of the establishment that once controlled the party. The story of the old party's fall from grace and Bush's part in it is a well-known bildungsroman, a family saga that begins with the father.
The son of Prescott Bush, a patrician moderate Republican senator from Connecticut and a Wall Street investment banker, George H.W. Bush traveled to Texas to make his fortune in the wildcat oil industry. He was hardly a roaring success, but he took up his father's line of work, getting elected to the House from suburban Houston. It was then that he opened the negotiations of his Faustian bargain. His father had been the head of the United Negro College Fund; he and his wife were prominent members of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. But George Bush Sr., seeking political advantage in Texas, declared his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bush spent the next decade advancing himself as a consummate Republican loyalist in positions ranging from chairman of the Republican National Committee under Nixon to Gerald Ford's CIA director and United Nations ambassador. After losing the Republican presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1980, he swallowed his criticism of Reagan's supply-side nostrums as "voodoo economics" when he became his running mate.
The Faustian negotiations deepened. In 1988, he ran for president as Reagan's anointed successor. Faltering on his own, with unenthusiastic backing from Reagan's evangelical supporters, he ran a series of nativist and racially charged attacks on his Democratic opponent. Bush won that election with the right-wing Republican base voting for him but still doubtful of his authenticity. As president his compromises on taxation and realism in foreign policy led to their open disillusionment.
His son George lost his first campaign for the House from Texas, tainted by association with his father, who was tarnished by the right as a member of the Trilateral Commission international conspiracy. From then on, Bush was never outmaneuvered on his right flank. His political field marshal, Karl Rove, managed the right wing for his benefit. The Faustian bargain of the father became business as usual for the son.
Now the old establishment is faded. Its remnants largely consist of his father's superannuated retinue. Not even the old Texas establishment in the person of James A. Baker III, Bush's father's field marshal and the former secretary of state (among his many official posts), who managed the Florida contest that gave the presidency to the son, is welcome in this White House.
The Republican Party after Bush, minus its traditional establishment, threatens to become the party of its irreducible base, the party of the old Confederacy and the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. But this base, however loyal and obsequious to Bush, regardless of any crisis, does not offer statesmen to step in to handle his shaken White House.
A sharp reversal of policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of his father and his father's friends, has reached its culmination.
-- By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com | Shipwrecked
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Name of Rove's Aide Appears in Two Washington Inquiries - New York Times
the only new twist today is that Rove's staff has been under scrutiny and one key staff member is tightly linked to the corruption scandals whirling around Jack Abramhoff; this could indicate that scope of the investigations, or eventual fallout, could go beyond SpyGate
Name of Rove's Aide Appears in Two Washington Inquiries - New York Times
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Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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Salon.com - War Room
Waiting, waiting, waiting
speculation, rumors amok. Salon and Tim Grieve continues to cover the Event closely....
"Conflicting clues: Fitzgerald met with judge; has he notified targets?
CBS News correspondent John Roberts is reporting that Patrick Fitzgerald "has informed targets of the investigation of his intentions -- and that can only mean indictments are coming." Maybe, maybe not. CNN is reporting that the clerk of the U.S. District Court in Washington has confirmed that Fitzgerald met for about half an hour today with Chief Judge Thomas Hogan -- which could mean that the prosecutor is seeking an extension of the grand jury term that would otherwise expire Friday.
Update: So can we expect indictments or an extension? How about both? As several readers -- and the Huffington Posts's Lawrence O'Donnell -- have noted, it's possible that Fitzgerald will obtain some indictments this week while simultaneously extending the term of the grand jury so that he can investigate further or more broadly down the road. That possibility leads to a question that the White House can't be too excited about considering: What if indictments of the likes of Karl Rove or Scooter Libby are only the beginning?
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [16:27 EDT, Oct. 26, 2005]
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Fitzgerald meets with the judge: A sign of an extension?
Amid all the rumors and speculation about the Valerie Plame investigation, the New York Sun has sniffed out a detail that may be more telling than anything else. After his session with the grand jury ended today, the Sun says, Patrick Fitzgerald spent some time in the chambers of U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan. If Fitzgerald were in the process of indicting somebody, a private conversation with the judge might have been inappropriate. But if he was looking to extend the term of his grand jury, Hogan would have been the man to see.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:27 EDT, Oct. 26, 2005]
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As Washington waits for Fitzgerald, rumors fill the void
Patrick Fitzgerald has left the federal courthouse in Washington, and nobody who wasn't inside the grand jury room can really be certain of what happened there. What we can be sure of is this: Until an official announcement is made, leaks and rumors about indictments -- or non-indictments -- will rush in to fill the void.
We've offered up some of our own speculation today, but we hope we've made it clear that it's exactly that: speculation. Here's what else we're seeing out there.
On CNN a few minutes ago, former Republican Rep. Bob Barr floated the idea that former CIA Director George Tenet might be in the mix of potential defendants.
At Red State, they're separating Plame reports into two categories: "credible" and "living room gossip." In the first category goes reports of increased White House "optimism" that Karl Rove won't be indicted. In the latter goes everything else.
At Raw Story, they're saying that lawyers close to the investigation believe that Fitzgerald has asked for indictments of Rove and Scooter Libby -- both men on perjury and obstruction charges and Libby for the leak itself -- and that two other officials outside the White House will also be indicted.
Counterterrorism expert Larry C. Johnson passes along a report suggesting that Libby and Rove will be indicted -- not on obstruction or perjury charges but on conspiring to violate Joseph Wilson's civil rights.
And over at the National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg and Byron York are tossing around this admittedly "far-fetched" idea: Could Wilson himself be indicted?
In the absence of real news, there's wishful thinking coming from every conceivable direction. Who's right and who's wrong? Who knows? For the moment, at least, it's Patrick Fitzgerald's world, and we just live in it.
-- Tim Grieve"
Salon.com - War Room
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Russ Baker: 'Karl's new war'
Will Turd Blossom be able to Wag the Dog or is he into too deep doodoo this time? In any case, the US moves against Syria are alarming
The Smirking Chimp
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Maybe tomorrow and Peter Lee: 'A cancer on the presidency'
According to CNN via Salon, we're going to have to wait a day....
"CNN: No announcement from Fitzgerald today
A source "very deeply involved" in the Valerie Plame investigation tells CNN not to expect an announcement from Patrick Fitzgerald today. The report, if true, could mean any number of things. Maybe the grand jury is going to wait until later this week. Maybe Fitzgerald is going to seek an extension of his grand jury's term. Maybe there won't be any indictments at all.
But it's also possible that the grand jury will, in fact, issue indictments today but simply keep them under seal until Fitzgerald is ready to have them announced. Grand jury indictments typically remain under seal until they have been "returned" to a federal magistrate, but that procedure usually takes place on the same day an indictment is handed down. A prosecutor can keep an indictment under seal longer but usually does so only when there's a risk that the subject of the indictment may flee if he learns of the indictment before he's arrested. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby aren't exactly flight risks. Is the grand jury indicting someone -- someone outside the White House -- who might be? Would Fitzgerald have some other reason for keeping his indictments secret for now?"
As Peter Lee says, ultimately It's All About Bush
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=23345&mode=nested&order=0
Blogger Steve Clemons said yesterday that an "uber-insider" source had told him that the grand jury would hand down indictments today but that Fitzgerald wouldn't make an announcement about them until tomorrow. Is that what's happening now? We'll know soon enough, even if for many "soon enough" isn't nearly soon enough.
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Salon.com - War Room
Something's Happening via Salon:
"On Plame, the waiting game could continue
If you're waiting on tenterhooks for news from the grand jury room, Salon's Michael Scherer offers one agonizing possibility from his stakeout at the federal courthouse. Even if the grand jury hands down indictments today, we still might not know who's charged or with what. As others have speculated from the left and from the right, the indictments could be handed down under seal and remain that way for some time to come.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [10:09 EDT, Oct. 26, 2005]
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Is Judy Miller done at the Times?
As Patrick Fitzgerald discusses the fate of Bush administration officials with a federal grand jury, Judy Miller is discussing her own fate with the New York Times. After engaging in a public pissing match with Times editor Bill Keller, Miller might not have much left to discuss. But the Wall Street Journal says that Miller had a face-to-face meeting with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Monday, and that the words "severance package" are now on the table.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [09:47 EDT, Oct. 26, 2005]
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Game on? Fitzgerald arrives at the courthouse
Salon's Michael Scherer tells us that Patrick Fitzgerald has just arrived at the federal courthouse in Washington. On his way in, Fitzgerald was asked if today's the day for indictments. He declined to comment, then boarded an elevator for the grand jury room.
-- Tim Grieve
Salon.com - War Room
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Salon.com - War Room
Salon's War Room is providing excellent accounts of issues in the Event with up to the minute reports: here are a few:
As Fitzgerald nears the end, are the Niger forgeries on his radar?
Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said she hoped that if Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone for anything, it will be for a real crime and not "some perjury technicality." Is it possible that she'll get her wish?
The internets are alive today with speculation -- fueled by clues from UPI and a report in an Italian newspaper -- that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating not just the leak of Valerie Plame's identity and the coverup that may have come after it but the way in which forged documents led to Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger and became a part of the Bush administration's case for war.
The CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger after Dick Cheney asked for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report indicating that Iraq had struck a deal to purchase 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. That intelligence report was based, in large part, on what was said to be the "verbatim text" of Iraq's agreement with Niger.
The problem: No such agreement ever existed, and the documents from which the "verbatim text" appeared were obvious forgeries written on stationery that was apparently stolen from the Nigerien Embassy in Rome. The questions: Who forged the documents, and how did the text from them find its way into the hands of insufficiently skeptical Bush administration officials? The intriguing possibility: Are the forged documents and the way in which they were used a part of Fitzgerald's probe?
As we noted yesterday, NATO sources have told UPI's Martin Walker that Fitzgerald requested and received an unpublished report of the Italian parliament's investigation into the forged documents. Now, as Josh Marshall and the American Prospect are noting, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is running a series of articles examining how the text of the forged documents made its way from Italy to the United States. The paper says that Nicolo Pollari, the chief of Italy's military intelligence service, may have known that the underlying documents were fakes, but that he shopped the story of them around Washington until he found someone willing to take them seriously -- then Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The American Prospect has confirmed that Pollari and Hadley met on Sept. 9, 2002.
As the Prospect explains, Pollari's direct contact with a senior member of the president's national security staff suggests one reason why the president included those famous -- and famously wrong -- 16 words about Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address over the objections of the CIA and the State Department. It may also explain why White House officials were so sensitive about Joseph Wilson's efforts to debunk the Niger claim that they revealed the identity of his wife as a way to discredit him.
Evidence from Italy may help Fitzgerald with questions of motive and intent. But can we be sure that Fitzgerald is looking directly at the question of the Niger forgeries and the way in which the Bush administration used them? No. It's not at all clear that Fitzgerald has made the forgeries a significant part of his investigation or even that he has the authority to do so. But as we all go about opining, speculating and generally hyperventilating, you might as well feed this into the buzz machine: On his blog the other day, former CIA officer and counterterrorism expert Larry C. Johnson said that Hadley has told friends that he expects to be indicted.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [16:56 EDT, Oct. 25, 2005]
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Could Cheney be indicted?
Can the vice president be indicted? It's probably an academic question -- despite the report in today's New York Times, we haven't seen evidence establishing that Dick Cheney violated any laws in the Valerie Plame case -- and here's the academic answer: Yes, or at least probably.
The Constitution says that sitting presidents and vice presidents can be removed from office through impeachment, but it doesn't say that they can't be indicted too. Time was, there was a pretty broad consensus that presidents, at least, were immune from criminal prosecution. That's the position then Solicitor General Robert Bork took in a legal brief he filed on behalf of the government in 1973, and it's the position that many of Bill Clinton's supporters took during the investigations into Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky affair. Ken Starr apparently thought he had the authority to indict Clinton, but he didn't test his theory.
As for vice presidents? There is precedent for indicting one: Aaron Burr was indicted while serving as vice president, but he avoided prosecution by staying away from the two states -- New York and New Jersey -- where indictments had been brought against him. And there's a legal argument for why a vice president can be indicted even if a president can't be. As Bork argued in that 1973 memo -- he was trying to make the case that Spiro Agnew could be indicted even as he sought to protect Richard Nixon from ever having to face a similar fate -- presidents can't be indicted because subjecting them to criminal prosecution would make it all but impossible for the executive branch to operate. The balance is different when it comes to vice presidents, Bork said: "Although the office of the vice presidency is of course a high one, it is not indispensable to the orderly operation of government. There have been many occasions in our history when the nation lacked a vice president, and yet suffered no ill consequences." Bork noted that a vice president has only three constitutional responsibilities -- to replace the president, to make a determination that the president is unable to discharge his duties and to preside over the U.S. Senate -- and that none of these functions would be "substantially impaired" if the vice president were subjected to a criminal prosecution.
In a memo written in 2000, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel reiterated and seemed to adopt the analysis Bork had put forth nearly three decades earlier.
Could the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department reach a different conclusion? Yes. Would the federal courts have the final word anyway? Yes. Will we ever get to that? Probably not. As we said at the outset, we haven't seen evidence yet that Cheney engaged in any criminal wrongdoing in the Plame case.
But before we consign this question to the world of law review articles and moot court competitions, let's take note of this. Dan Froomkin, who first walked us through the immunity-to-indictment question last week, notes this week that there's something we all may have missed in today's Times story about Cheney's role in Plamegate. When the Times first reported last summer on Cheney's meeting with Patrick Fitzgerald, it said that the vice president hadn't been interviewed under oath. Today's story says that he was.
Does it matter? Not if Fitzgerald is considering an obstruction of justice or false statements charge, which wouldn't turn on whether the defendant was under oath. As for perjury? The sworn versus unsworn distinction wouldn't matter there, either -- so long as Dick Cheney told the truth.
-- Tim Grieve
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Permalink [15:06 EDT, Oct. 25, 2005]
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What they did, what they said, why it matters
We could spend days -- and people have -- constructing timelines related to the Valerie Plame investigation. But if Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to bring a case charging somebody in the White House with perjury, obstruction of justice or making false statements, we're betting that he cares most about a handful of dates and the conflicting stories that have been told about what happened on them. Here's our version of an essential Plame calendar. If you have other entries, post them in the comments below, and we'll amend our list as appropriate.
June 12, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney tells his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, that Joseph Wilson's wife works for the CIA and may have helped arrange Wilson's trip to Niger. Although the conversation is reflected in Libby's notes, Libby subsequently tells Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned of Plame's identity from NBC's Tim Russert.
June 23, 2003: Libby meets with the New York Times' Judy Miller in the Old Executive Office Building, where he suggests to her that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Miller initially fails to mention the meeting when she testifies before the grand jury but begins to remember it when shown Secret Service logs suggesting that it happened. Later, she says she finds notes from the meeting that indicate that Libby told her about Wilson's wife.
July 6, 2003: The New York Times publishes an Op-Ed piece in which Wilson says that he has "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." In the wake of Wilson's column, a still-unidentified "senior administration official" tells Robert Novak that Wilson was sent to Niger "by the CIA's counter-proliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife." Patrick Fitzgerald apparently knows who this "senior administration official" is, even if the rest of us don't.
Sometime before July 14, 2003: Rove and Libby discuss the fact that Wilson's wife works for the CIA.
July 8, 2003: Rove confirms for Novak that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Asked by an ABC producer two months later whether he'd had "any knowledge" or the CIA leak, Rove said, "No."
July 11, 2003: Rove tells Time's Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. He fails to mention the conversation when he is first interviewed by investigators several months later.
July 14, 2003: Robert Novak publishes his column identifying Wilson's wife as Valerie Plame, whom he identifies as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Oct. 10, 2003: White House press secretary Scott McClellan says that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove have "assured" him that they were "not involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the press.
Sept. 15, 2005: Scooter Libby sends a letter to Judy Miller in jail in which he says that he always thought it would be in his "best interests" to have all reporters testify about their contacts with him. "As I'm sure will not be news to you," he writes, "the public report of every other reporter's testimony now makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call." Miller subsequently testifies that one could read Libby's letter as a hint she and Libby had not discussed Plame's identity when, in fact, they had. "
Salon.com - War Room
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Salon.com | The real meaning of the Plame scandal
Joan Walsh is right: CIA Gate is about Iraq, see her account:
The real meaning of the Plame scandal
It isn't about indictments or Washington gossip. It's about the 2,000 Americans who have died in a deeply dishonest war.
By Joan Walsh
Oct. 25, 2005 | As the days dwindle down to a precious few for the grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame's undercover CIA status to journalists in mid-2003, most news stories about the controversy feel like filler and speculation right now: Who will Fitzgerald charge, and with what? How will Democratic and Republican leaders spin whatever Fitzgerald decides? What kind of a guy is the special prosecutor, anyway: crime fighter or nitpicker? And what if he brings no charges at all?
But two news items Tuesday managed to stand out from what President Bush last week called "the chatter." (Funny how he used the term associated with intercepted information from al-Qaida, subtly linking terrorists and journalists. "Subliminable"? You decide.) One was the amazing New York Times report that lawyers close to Fitzgerald say the prosecutor has notes showing that I. Lewis Libby learned Plame's identity from his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, not from journalists, as Libby apparently claimed. The other is the sad but predictable fact that the 2,000th American soldier died in Iraq today. If you miss those two pieces of news while playing Fitzgerald guessing games, you'll miss the bigger point of Plamegate.
Even in the unlikely event that Fitzgerald doesn't bring charges, we already know enough to conclude that something was seriously corrupt in the White House in the days before and after the Iraq war. Clearly the leak of her name harmed Plame, as well as her husband, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who traveled to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons, and who revealed in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that "it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." But the much greater harm was to the nation. The mind shrinks from taking in the outlines of the truth, but every day it becomes clearer that a cabal of White House insiders sold a disastrous war based on faulty intelligence that they invented or suborned, and that they engaged in a highly organized and vicious campaign to smear, discredit and sideline those who dared to raise questions about it all. The Fitzgerald investigation just examines some of the laws they may have broken to do it.
It has always been clear that Cheney was at the center of the story, but the Times revelation Tuesday about his role in the campaign against Wilson reveals the strange mixture of pettiness, fear and arrogance that prevailed in the White House as its lovely little war, and the rationale for it, came crashing down. It's easy to say now that the White House overreacted to Wilson; it's unlikely he'd have gained the stature he has if the White House hadn't become obsessed with his Niger trip. Certainly his July New York Times Op-Ed piece boldly and directly challenged the underpinnings of the war, but we now know the White House was absorbed with discrediting Wilson even before that. The Los Angeles Times reported how Libby was personally driven to distraction by Wilson, monitoring his every utterance and urging a crusade to counter him.
But Libby clearly wasn't acting alone. We know Rove was talking to journalists about the former ambassador, and now we know Cheney was the first to tell his loyal chief of staff about Plame. There's always been something icky about the way the administration smeared Wilson: by implying he was an out-of-work nobody whose wife got him a gig for which he wasn't qualified. Among the macho boys and girls peddling the war, that must have seemed like quite the insult. (Somehow it brings to mind Cheney and Bush's priceless moment on the campaign trail, slurring the New York Times' Adam Clymer just loud enough that their faux-manly exchange could be heard: When Bush calls Clymer a "major league asshole," his veep just grunts, "Big time!")
But the smearing of Wilson wasn't just an escapade on the campaign trail, or in a gossipy, dysfunctional workplace; this was the White House, and Scooter Libby may now face charges for obscuring his boss's role in the effort to discredit Wilson. Whatever laws were broken, though, the obsession with Wilson suggests a dysfunctional workplace indeed, a White House out of control, so obsessed with punishing political enemies that it ignored the nation's real enemies -- all that time spent discrediting a former ambassador, exactly when the Iraq insurgency was building strength and the real nature of the war was becoming clear, notwithstanding Bush's silly "Mission Accomplished" photo op (just days before Wilson talked to the Times' Nicholas Kristof, off the record, about his Niger trip).
There are still so many unanswered questions: According to the Times, Fitzgerald's notes say CIA Director George Tenet gave Cheney Plame's name, but a "former" high-ranking intelligence officer denies it. Meanwhile, there are tantalizing hints that Fitzgerald has taken his inquiry beyond the limits of who leaked Plame's name -- UPI reported that he's looking into the forged Niger documents, and many news outlets say he's been examining the workings of the White House Iraq Group, the high-level team of Bush insiders that came together to, in Chief of Staff Andy Card's words, sell the "product" of war with Iraq with at best questionable, at worst forged, intelligence. There are also reports that Fitzgerald is investigating whether the actual target of the Cheney-Libby smear wasn't Wilson or Plame, but the CIA front group Plame worked for, Brewster-Jennings, which posed as an energy consulting firm but was engaged in weapons nonproliferation work.
Ah, but we're back in the dark but irresistible realm of speculation, and why bother when we'll have answers soon. For now it's best to stick to the facts. Cheney was in charge of the crusade to sell the Iraq war with faulty and forged intelligence, and he was central to, if not the head of, the effort to smear Joe Wilson. And 2,000 Americans have died as a result of his work.
In many ways the Fitzgerald investigation is a sideshow; we have plenty of evidence showing what happened. The secret Office of Special Plans, the "stovepiped" intelligence, the Pentagon's war against State and the CIA -- it has all been reported, and new evidence and accusations keep coming in. Just in the last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, blamed the war on "a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense ... that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." In the Oct. 31 issue of the New Yorker, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security advisor under Bush I, blasted the neocons who dreamed up the Iraq war, and uttered this amazing statement: "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."
Whatever Fitzgerald decides, it's high time -- past time -- for Congress to begin asking deeper questions about how this war was sold to the American people. The 2,000 Americans who have given their lives deserve nothing less.
-- By Joan Walsh
Salon.com | The real meaning of the Plame scandal
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Bush Aides Brace for Charges
The WP has a much better story on the coming possible indictments than the NYT that focused on Rove; WP story suggests, as have many others, that Cheney and Libby are at the center of the whole scandal-- as they were on Iraq
Bush Aides Brace for Charges
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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Margie Burns: 'Cheney rumors, fall-out, and fallings-out'
Could it be possible that Fitzgerald is going to take out the whole rightwing cabal, including Cheney?! Rumors are floating fast and furious as the story posted here notes. Last night CBS floated a story that there was a Mysterious X who actually revealed Plames name to the reporters, a White House outsider. This would make sense that the Bush-Cheney Gang would use others to do their dirty work but its also clear that Rove and Libby just couldn't resist blabbing to reporters and may have sealed their fate....
The Smirking Chimp: "Margie Burns: 'Cheney rumors, fall-out, and fallings-out'"
More and more stories are putting Cheney at the center of attacking Joe Wilson and while the NYT story posted below distances Cheney from actually leaking names it too, like many other stories, puts him at the center of the antiWilson operation and puts another nail in Libby's coffin by citing documents that Libby found out about Plame's CIA connections from Cheney and not reporters as he testified under oath
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/politics/24cnd-leak.html
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Sunday, October 23, 2005
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Leak Prosecutor Is Called Exacting and Apolitical - New York Times
If US democracy is to survive, its because there are a Few Good Men (and Women) who will take on the villains....
Watch for the Republican attack apparatus to start sliming Patrick Fitzgerald once he indicts White House Villains...
here's a good portrait of the Prosecutor....
Leak Prosecutor Is Called Exacting and Apolitical - New York Times
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Mark Borkowski: 'God, Iraq and the power of the President's PR'
the utterly boorish and provincial texan karen hughes is better seen as Bush's Brain while Karl Rove is his Id; if Rove, Libby, etc go down this week it will be interesting to see if Karen Hughes will be brought back to help "save" the Bush administration; in fact, she is the same kind of incompetent Bushie Cronie as the hapless head of FEMA, Brownie
The Smirking Chimp
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George McEvoy: 'Bush is nothing if not consummate con man'
Bush's Con and Flim-Flam isn't working well any more except upon the rubes who drink the rightwing cool-aid everyday
The Smirking Chimp: "George McEvoy: 'Bush is nothing if not consummate con man'"
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Wayne Brown: 'Life on political skid row'
good overview of full array of scandals that could bring down the Bush-Cheney Gang
The Smirking Chimp
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In the Spotlight And on the Spot
it looks for sure like Scooter Libby is going to be indicted this week and the big question is whether Cheney and others will go down with him; here's a good overview on Libby who has managed to keep out of the press
In the Spotlight And on the Spot
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Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale - New York Times
this week may well begin the collapse of Bush-Cheney administration and this NYT story gives good background that what is behind the CIA leak case is a big battle over Iraq and the extent to which information was cooked; behind the leak case is whether Cheney, Rove and country lied to Congress about Iraq
Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale - New York Times
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Saturday, October 22, 2005
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CIA leak linked to Weapons of no destruction
The hornet's nest of lies and shamelessness is beginning to unravel. See the NY times article that draws a link between Iraq war and the massive cover up.
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Caro's Commentaries 10/22/05 - Pre-Emptive Pardons?
As Carolyn Kay points out, its highly possibly that we will see preemptive strikes against Fitzgerald or Syria this week, or preemptive pardons for all Bush crooks
Caro's Commentaries 10/22/05 - Pre-Emptive Pardons?
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Financial Times: Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy
many insider attacks on Bush administration as it goes down....
The Smirking Chimp: "Financial Times: Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy"
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TJohn W. Dean: 'Waiting for the Valerie Plame Wilson grand jury: The big question is whether Dick Cheney was a target'
John Dean, Nixon's Watergate lawyer on the Big Questions in the Plame-Wilson case....
The Smirking Chimp: "John W. Dean: 'Waiting for the Valerie Plame Wilson grand jury: The big question is whether Dick Cheney was a target'"
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Ray McGovern: 'A long overdue frog-march'
this could be the week that Rove, Cheney's chief of staff and maybe Cheney himself will be indicted in PlameGate. The Bush White House is reportedly disfunctional and preparing for the worst.... keep tuned....
The Smirking Chimp
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Friday, October 21, 2005
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DeLay's record
As Tom Delay made his first appearance today in criminal court, his history of political and moral corruption is undeniable. See Salon article below for some of Delay's shady past.
The Hammer fallsIt isn't just Tom DeLay. The vast corrupt money machine that funded the Republican Revolution is exploding before our eyes.
Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, talks to reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday after resigning as House majority leader.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Michael Scherer
Sept. 29, 2005 At its height, the first great political machine of the 21st century worked like this: In Congress, Texas Rep. Tom DeLay controlled the votes like a modern-day Boss Tweed. He called himself "the Hammer." His domain included a vast network of former aides and foot soldiers he installed in key positions at law firms and trade groups, a network that came to be called the "K Street Project." He gathered tithes in the form of campaign cash, hard and soft, and spread it out among the loyal. He legislated for favored donors. He punished those who disobeyed, and bought off those who could be paid.
Conservative activists, who had grown up in the heady days of Reagan's America, patrolled the badlands of American politics for new opportunities. None did it better than Jack Abramoff, a former president of the College Republicans, who had a taste for expensive suits. Abramoff opened a restaurant, Signatures, where the powerful came to be seen and, in many cases, treated to free meals from a menu that included $74 steaks. He pulled in tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes and the Northern Marianas Islands to help fund other operations -- skyboxes at the MCI Center where DeLay could hold his fundraisers and all-expense trips to Scotland where DeLay and friends could play golf.
Others were drawn into the web as well. Abramoff kicked down money to his old college buddy Grover Norquist, an anti-tax crusader whose role was to keep the right-wing ideologues in line. He hired Ralph Reed, a former advisor to the Christian Coalition, who helped keep the religious right on good terms with the Republican leadership. He hired Michael Scanlon, a former aide to DeLay, as his assistant. He leaned on former lobbying colleagues, like David Safavian, who was working in the Bush administration and could do favors for his clients. Susan Ralston, Abramoff's former gatekeeper and executive assistant, went to work for Karl Rove in the White House.
For a while, the whole operation seemed unstoppable. DeLay, Abramoff, Norquist, Reed and Rove vanquished their Democratic opponents, winning election after election. The loyalty that ensued allowed for a historic cohesion in Congress. Tax breaks passed like clockwork, as did subsidies for favored industries and cuts to long-standing Democratic initiatives. The Democratic Party, which had ruled Capitol Hill for half a century, imploded in confusion.
But the machine may now be coming to an end. The prosecutors have arrived, and they are handing out indictments at a blistering rate. "It's a house of cards," says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Jack Abramoff has been the ace of spades, but Tom DeLay has been linked arm in arm with him." Now the house is on the brink of collapse, he added. "Everything that surrounded the K Street Project and what flowed from it ... all of that is under intense pressure."
On Wednesday, DeLay was indicted with two aides by a Texas grand jury, accused of flouting campaign finance laws by illegally sending corporate funds to GOP candidates in the state. Two months ago, Abramoff was arrested and charged with fraud in connection with a casino deal in Florida. On Tuesday, two employees of a company owned by Abramoff were charged with murdering the casino's former owner. Last week, the feds arrested David Safavian, who has been working in the White House, on charges of lying to investigators about a trip to Scotland with DeLay and Abramoff. Scanlon, the former DeLay aide who worked with Abramoff, is said to be cooperating with investigators, who are likely to file even more charges.
For those who have followed the machine from its inception, these developments are striking. "It represents the beginning of the end of an era," said Vic Fazio, a Democratic lobbyist at the law firm Akin, Gump and a former California congressman. "A powerful group of people who had consolidated their power in the mid- to late 1990s is now vulnerable to legal attack."
Even some conservatives have begun to distance themselves. "The Tom DeLay machine that he built, there were corruptive elements to it," said Stephen Moore, a longtime conservative activist who sat at the head table at a recent dinner celebrating DeLay's career. Moore, who founded the Free Enterprise Fund, still describes himself as a "Tom DeLay fan," who considers the congressman a "conservative hero." But he has misgivings as well. "All of these guys getting rich off this process rubs some conservatives the wrong way," Moore said. "It's going to be difficult for Tom to recover from this no matter what happens."
Though DeLay may not recover, his machine has not yet collapsed entirely. Late Wednesday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert appointed Rep. Roy Blunt, the Republican whip from Missouri and a disciple of DeLay, as the new majority leader. Republicans, meanwhile, began working to portray the torrent of indictments as politically motivated charges against one individual. "Tom DeLay is a tremendous public servant," said Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, in a statement. "It is our sincere hope that justice will remain blind to politics." DeLay also lashed out, as is his fashion, saying he was a victim of "one of the most baseless indictments in American history."
Perhaps the best news for Republicans is the relative disorganization of the Democratic Party, which remains weakened after the 2004 elections and lacks a unified message. Democratic politicians, like Rep. William Jefferson, of Louisiana, and Rep. Maxine Waters, of California, also face their own ethical scandals. As one congressional Republican, Arizona's Rep. Jeff Flake, boasted in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, "endemic Democratic ineptitude makes Republicans more attractive when graded on a curve."
But even if the collapse of Abramoff and the weakening of DeLay does not end the Republican reign, it will at least expose its workings. For years now, Republicans across Washington have been scratching each other's backs as they march in lockstep with a unified message. With each release of a subpoenaed e-mail, and every new indictment, more information about the workings of the machine -- and the money that was its lifeblood -- comes to light.
In recent weeks, for instance, Timothy Flanigan, a former attorney in the Bush White House, has been answering questions from Congress about his relationship to Abramoff. Flanigan, who has been nominated as deputy attorney general, went to work for the Bermuda-based corporation Tyco after he left the White House. Once there, he hired Abramoff as a lobbyist to reach out to Karl Rove on a tax issue. According to a report in the Washington Post, Abramoff boasted to Flanigan that "he had contact with Mr. Karl Rove" and that Rove could help fight a legislative proposal that would penalize U.S. companies that had moved offshore. Flanigan oversaw a $2 million payment to Abramoff for a related letter-writing campaign that never materialized. Flanigan says the money was diverted into other "entities controlled by Mr. Abramoff."
The charges surrounding DeLay also concern the misuse of money. With two associates, the former majority leader is charged with conspiring to raise $155,000 in 2002 from several major corporations, including Sears Roebuck, the Williams Companies and Bacardi USA. The indictment alleges that DeLay conspired to funnel that money through the Republican National Committee into seven Texas state campaign accounts, where he was helping Republican candidates as part of his effort to redraw Texas voting districts. If the charge is proven, DeLay and his associates would have violated a Texas campaign finance law that prohibits corporate donations to local races.
The ability of DeLay and Abramoff to collect and distribute enormous sums of money was always a key to their success. They used the money to buy friends and crush enemies. They used the money to fund the Republican revolution. As Abramoff told the New York Times in March, "Eventually, money wins in politics."
Those words form a perfect epitaph for a political machine gone awry.
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Delay's day in Court
Delay, in an effort to obstruct and avoid justice, seeks new judge in his first day in court for his criminal case.
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
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Rice's no exit strategy
If obtuseness were a virtue Rice and Bush would be living on the top of Mt. Olympus. Check out Salon article below for our country's philosophic position on war and more war.
Rice Won't Rule Out Force on Syria, Iran
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By LIZ SIDOTI Associated Press Writer
October 19,2005 WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday refused to rule out U.S. troops still being in Iraq in 10 years or the possibility that the United States could use military force against neighboring Syria and Iran.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rice demurred to the decisions of President Bush and military commanders as Republicans and Democrats alike pressed her for more specifics on the U.S. strategy in Iraq.
Asked specifically whether the United States would have troops in Iraq in five or 10 years, Rice said: "I think that even to try and speculate on how many years from now there will be a certain number of American forces is not appropriate."
Lawmakers also pressed her on strategy for dealing with Iran and Syria. U.S. officials have accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to flow across its borders into Iraq and Iran of supporting the insurgency.
Rice said the United States was using diplomatic means to urge a change in the behavior of both countries -- but she stopped short of ruling out military force. "I'm not going to get into what the president's options might be," Rice said. "I don't think the president ever takes any of his options off the table concerning anything to do with military force."
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Global Warming or Just Weather Cycles?
In the face of the strongest hurricanes in recorded history, the Bush administration, as well as the rest of the right, deny global warming and its effects. As hurricane Wilma is boiling in the Caribbean, setting the table for another monster hurricane, it is going to be harder to sell the "weather cycle" theory to those who pay most dearly.
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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War on Education
In an age where education is needed more than ever, Bush's education plan coupled with increasing privitization has made it more difficult for people to attend places of higher education. Creating the conditions for a more informed and educated citizenry does not seem to be high on the agenda for the current Bush administration--not exactly a newsflash.
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Monday, October 17, 2005
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Big suprise
Bush's disaster in Iraq has no end in sight; this is not a big suprise but a sober reminder that a long and messy situation has just begun and talk of exit plan is not even on the table.
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Sunday, October 16, 2005
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NY Times shoddy coverage
This Nation piece sheds some light on NY times inadaquate reporting on Judy Miller CIA leak. Another example of mainstream media choosing to protect its interests as opposed to delivering the truth.
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Saturday, October 15, 2005
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More results of Bush's education policy
Starving schools have many consequences, this article by Laurie Udesky in Salon articulates some of the worst of these.
No school nurses left behindOnce a comforting presence in most public schools, full-time nurses are increasingly scarce. Now teaching assistants, secretaries and other nonmedical personnel are trying to care for sick children -- with often tragic results.
- - - - - - - - - - - -By Laurie Udesky
Sept. 29, 2005 On June 2, 2005, 15-year-old Clare McKenna was gripped by an asthma attack in the middle of her class at City Honors High School in Buffalo, N.Y. Within seconds McKenna -- an avid volleyball and softball player -- was gasping for breath. The teen collapsed as two friends helped her to the nurse's office, where her asthma medication was stored. Terrified, the students struggled to carry her the rest of the way. When they finally reached the office, however, the door was locked and nobody was inside.
Unfortunately, this was business as usual. In its last round of budget cuts, the Buffalo Public School District had slashed nursing staff from 40 full-time employees down to 15, which meant some nurses could only spend as little as 45 minutes a day at one school. Slumped on the floor, McKenna began to hyperventilate. School staff, looking frantically for the key to the health office but unable to find it, called 911, then Clare's mother. Anna McKenna raced to meet her daughter at the hospital as ambulance workers used a nebulizer to blow life-saving medication through an oxygen mask into Clare's lungs.
It was her daughter's fifth asthma attack at school. "I was praying, 'Dear God, please help my daughter,'" McKenna says. "I found myself thinking, Is it going to take a death for this community to start taking children's health issues seriously?"
But even children's deaths may not be enough to expand nationwide funding for school nurses. A full nine years before McKenna's close call, fifth-grader Philip Hernandez, who had asthma, began having trouble breathing in class. He made his way to the nurse's office at Lee Richmond Elementary School in California's Central Valley: By the time he reached it, he was in the middle of a full-blown asthma attack, according to court documents. The nurse, however, was at another school. Paramedics arrived and found Phillip on the floor in her office, surrounded by school staffers, his face and lips a purplish hue and his pulse failing. The paramedics tried to revive him, to no avail. The youngster died on May 13, 1996, four months shy of his 12th birthday.
School nurses -- once available every day in most public schools -- have virtually disappeared as a full-time presence in many schools around the country. At the same time, chronic illnesses among schoolchildren have mushroomed. Although there are no precise figures, experts say anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of schoolchildren suffer a chronic health condition, many of which require treatment during the school day. In West Virginia schools, for example, more than 16,000 children required healthcare plans in 2002, more than double the number six years earlier. These illnesses include life-threatening asthma and food allergies, diabetes, seizure disorders and cancers as well as mental health problems like severe depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
It's well-known that the academic testing demands of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program has forced many already financially strapped school districts to make deep cuts in music, art and physical education. There's been little outcry over the impact the legislation has had on school nursing -- perhaps because few parents realize that a school nurse may be at their child's school as little as once a week, if at all.
But in this era of high-stakes testing and local budget constraints, "unless there is big pressure from parents and other community members, student support services such as nursing become vulnerable, because any extra money goes to academic support," says Julia Graham Lear, the director of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, based in Washington.
In place of nurses, teachers and other medically untrained staff are being put in the thankless position of overseeing the illnesses and emergencies of schoolchildren -- sometimes with severe or tragic consequences. Government reports say the nation has 60,000 full-time nurses to cover the approximately 90,000 elementary and secondary schools. Just how much time they spend at a school, however, is unclear. "Our best guess is that some schools have a full-time nurse, many have a part-time nurse, and many have no nurse at all," Lear says.
The likelihood that school nurses are often unavailable is particularly alarming because of the sheer number of children taking regular medication. Nine million students, about 13 percent of children between kindergarten and 12th grade, take medication regularly for at least three months during the year, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The types of medication can run the gamut from several kinds of inhalers and inhalation therapy by machine for asthma, to insulin pumps, glucagon or insulin injections for children with diabetes, to suppositories for children with seizure disorders and epinephrine for children with food allergies. Some schools allow children to medicate themselves. Because of budget constraints, the immediate health needs of schoolchildren are often put in the hands of school secretaries, minimally trained health clerks, teacher's aides, teachers and other school staff who lack medical training. If caught in a bind, they try to page a school nurse, who may be miles away.
Cory Sanfilippo is often mistaken for the school nurse by parents at Sutter Elementary School in Santa Clara County, California, where she works as a school secretary. "I always correct them," Sanfilippo says. But it seems to be a constant misconception. Sanfilippo takes her job seriously: She answers the phone, writes school reports and letters for the principal, responds to parents' questions, deals with children who've been sent to the office because they're misbehaving or have wet their pants, signs off on package deliveries -- and gives medication to students.
Because the school nurse is on campus only once a week, it falls on Sanfilippo to hand out medication to students and deal with emergencies. She's skilled in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, injecting epinephrine to prevent shock in food-allergic children, and has used her own familiarity with the care of a diabetic grandmother to help her respond to the needs of children with diabetes at school. But Sanfilippo is uncomfortable with the role she's been forced to assume.
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"I'm lucky that we haven't had a near-death experience. My greatest fear is: Is today going to be the day?" says Sanfilippo.
On any given day, Sanfilippo will have to deal with five to 15 children coming to the office because they need their medication or they don't feel well or because there's an emergency. "We have asthma big time," she says. "We have some visually impaired this year and 13 students that have autism. We have severe allergies to milk and peanuts and bee stings, five or six kids with EpiPens (injection pens to prevent anaphylactic shock), and a couple of children with cancer in remission."
Hard-working and conscientious, Sanfilippo distributes medication, making sure that the children swallow their pills or get the right number of puffs of an asthma inhaler. It's at this point that she enters an unknown -- and dangerous -- zone: "I can tell if a child with asthma is having trouble breathing, but I cannot tell what stage of distress a child is in," Sanfilippo says.
Sanfilippo's worries are well grounded. Mistakes are more than three times as likely to occur when an unlicensed person and not a nurse is responsible, according to a 2000 University of Iowa survey, whose results were reported in the Journal of School Health. Unfortunately, the vast majority of school employees handing out medications have no medical background, the report continued. The randomized national survey of 649 school nurses in 49 states showed that more than 75 percent of school nurses had to delegate medication administration to school staff lacking medical training, referred to as "an unlicensed assistive personnel."
The types of errors included "missed doses, overdoses, giving the child the wrong medication or not writing down that medication had been given."
Seeing those problems first-hand is Juanita Hogan, a school nurse in Pittsburgh, Pa., who circulates among four to six schools each week. She has seen the risks to schoolchildren when medically untrained staff that work in her absence are at the helm: "I had a student on Ritalin [for ADHD] at a school I visited once a week," says Hogan, a nurse practitioner. "The following week he had a protrusion on his tongue," indicating he was on too high a dose. The doctor, she explains, should have been notified immediately that the medication was at a toxic level and should be stopped. "That was very dangerous," Hogan recalls. "The child could have had trouble swallowing, choking and breathing."
In another survey compiled by the California School Nurses Association in 2003, a nurse who covers eight schools had trained a school aide to hand out medication. After a student with a seizure disorder died, she looked at his medication card, noting in horror that the student wasn't called in by school staff to take his medication, as he was supposed to, and had missed seven out of 15 doses. "I saw this omission three weeks late when I checked his card," writes the nurse. "The parent had not been notified of the omissions. He had a seizure when home alone ... He hit his head on a sharp table corner and was found dead by his parents."
This crisis in school medication errors has received little publicity, although teachers have pleaded for help in state hearings. "I sat in a room and watched a teen pass away, " says Curtis Washington, a science teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, Calif. Pausing to compose himself at the California State Board of Education hearing in February 2003, he recounts the death of a student who suddenly fell unconscious during badminton practice in 2001 -- there was no on-duty school nurse, and paramedics could not revive him. "Would that have been different if there was a school nurse?" Washington asks. "I don't know. But that's a question I have to live with.
"We talk about how we have to have qualified teachers," Washington continues, his voice rising. "If I mess up on a lesson, I could have a negative impact on a child's future, but if we mess up their medical care or their medication, that child may not even have a future."
It's hard to understand why healthcare services in schools would not be automatically guaranteed. In fact, laws and regulations on the issue are a tangled maze, differing from state to state and even district to district. Only Delaware and the District of Columbia, for example, require that there be at least one nurse for every 750 students. States also interpret federal mandates differently. In some states children with severe chronic health conditions and those with learning disabilities are covered by section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act, so that schools are required to provide them with health services. Other states allow a child's chronic health condition to be covered by section 504 only if that child also has a learning disability.
Even if schools try to maintain health services for students, many have been forced to make cuts in those services in order to pay for programs to meet the test scores demanded by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program. A recent report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, for example, said that "in the best-case scenario, federal funding marginally covers the cost of complying with the administrative processes." However, the February 2005 report continues, "states still face a separate set of costs to reach the law's standards of proficiency." If states choose not to comply with the law, they lose massive amounts of federal school funding.
Yet schools also lose funding -- because of decreased enrollment -- if children have absences or drop out due to illness. Dr. Pat Cooper, the superintendent of schools in McComb, Miss., thinks the tie between health and performance is obvious: "No Child Left Behind is going to leave a lot of children behind if we don't start looking at the health needs of our students," Cooper says.
When Cooper became superintendent nine years ago, he looked at the high dropout rates, absences from the district's seven schools, and poor test scores. He found a significant link between the health needs of the children and poor performance. "I decided that we had to stop investing in stuff and start investing in people," Cooper says. "We had good teachers, great training, good textbooks. But we realized part of the problem was we weren't reaching kids because the kids weren't in school." The district was plagued with asthma, type 2 diabetes and childhood obesity issues, which cut into students' attendance. Such illnesses are more common among low-income children, which Cooper says describes the majority of students in his district.
Cooper worked with community and health experts to come up with a five-year plan to meet students' health needs and get them back in school. "First we hired two nurses in each school -- not as window dressing, but to treat kids and to do prevention," Cooper says. Daily attendance rates began going up, he says and, consequently, so did the school district's money from the state.
Cooper didn't stop there. He eventually hired master's-level social workers to help manage the emotional and mental health needs of students. Since the majority of students in his district are poor, the schools qualified for a Medicaid-funded clinic on-site. In the McComb School District, dropout rates were 30 percent when Cooper came; now they're down to less than 2 percent, he says.
Dr. Cynthia Mears, who started a school-based health clinic in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and three in other states, says that in order to get a clinic or even school nurses in each school, you have to have a champion like Cooper. "The problem is that healthcare isn't always high on a school district's agenda, because they have to answer to test scores," says Mears, who is on the American Academy of Pediatrics School Health Committee. "But you have to have healthy children if they're going to learn."
Regrettably, students in many parts of the country are not as fortunate as the students in McComb, Miss. In Buffalo, this September, Clare McKenna began her sophomore year at City Honors School. Although her mother, Anna McKenna, has worked furiously on state legislation to fund school nurses, her daughter started school with no nurse on-site.
Although Buffalo has one of the highest asthma rates in the nation, New York Gov. George Pataki vetoed a bill in early August that would have funded a nurse in each school in Buffalo and surrounding areas lacking school nurses. It was a bill championed by parents like McKenna, who was outraged by its veto. "We have this beautiful, vital child who goes to a wonderful school that's provided her with perfect potential," McKenna says. "But if kids' primary health concerns are being ignored, how safe are our schools?"
McKenna's advocacy has finally paid off. City Honors High School gained a full-time nurse on Sept. 19, after the local school board agreed to increase the number of nursing positions to 20. Most schools in the district, though, have not fared as well. "Right now I have some schools that don't even see a nurse," says Sue Ventresca, director of health-related services for the Buffalo Public Schools, who says she's hopeful that more money will be found. Presumably, the schools left without nurses feel the same.
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Friday, October 14, 2005
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Geraldo or Bush?
As failure and devestation surround the Bush administration, the need to concoct "good news" has reached an all time high. The recent staged video conference with US troops gives a new meaning to the word contrived. See below Salon article for a good account of the pageantry.
Bush's fake photo op with U.S. soldiers
In Washington yesterday, President Bush spoke with U.S. soldiers via satellite in a video conference billed as a "conversation with U.S. troops." Unfortunately, it turned out to be nothing more than a scripted photo op designed to shore up support for the conflict in Iraq and that country's upcoming constitutional referendum.
According to a report in the Associated Press, deputy assistant defense secretary Allison Barber rehearsed the soldiers beforehand on what Bush was going to discuss with them when he arrived.
Barber told the troops that "the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops." The AP report also included some of the exchanges between the deputy secretary and the soldiers:
"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"
"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.
"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.
"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.
"If the question comes up about partnering -- how often do we train with the Iraqi military -- who does he go to?" Barber asked.
"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.
"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit -- the hometown -- and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.
Bush later thanked the soldiers for their service, saying that America was behind them and declaring, "So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory."
Total victory, huh? What exactly does that mean? Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas grilled press secretary Scott McClellan on the issue, after McClellan had previously denied that there was any stagecraft involved, and the press secretary lashed out at Thomas, saying that she didn't support the "war on terror."
As always when the chips are down for this president, the bombast goes up. And considering recent reports depicting a "jittery" White House mired in scandal, it shouldn't be surprising that Rove and company would try again to sell Bush to the American public as a competent "war leader." The trouble is, it has worked before. Will it work again?
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Rove's Plight
After the media dropped the scrutiny, a renewed interetst in Karl Rove's criminal activity has refocused attention to the house of crooks that runs our country's administration.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
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David Corn: 'Rove scandal: New mysteries, new props, new legal theories'
the Rove case is still a mystery, when and how will it break, will it break and take them down?
The Smirking Chimp
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DK Review of Steve Fuller, The Intellectual
here's a review I just published of a new book on the Intellectual
'Review Forum: Steve Fuller, The Intellectual.' Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, September - October 2005. <http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/intellectual.html>
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Monday, October 10, 2005
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Sunday, October 09, 2005
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Zbigniew Brzezinski: 'American debacle'
old colder warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski describes Bush post-9/11 policy as an 'American debacle'
The Smirking Chimp: "Zbigniew Brzezinski: 'American debacle'"
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Saturday, October 08, 2005
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TJulian Borger: 'How born-again George became a man on a mission'
another Bush and God story....
The Smirking Chimp
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Sidney Blumenthal: 'Republican tremors'
no doubt but the Republicans have much to worry about
The Smirking Chimp: "Sidney Blumenthal: 'Republican tremors'"
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Arianna Huffington: 'Bush on terror plots: More numbers that don't add up'
did anyone notice that everytime there is a cycle of really bad stories attacking the Bush administration, suddenly its All Terror, All the Time; this time all the cable networks were dominated once again by Terror stories, the Republican mayor of NY was complicit, and its another cycle of distraction....
The Smirking Chimp
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Robert Parry: 'Making sense of the Miers nomination'
here's a probing analysis of why Bush would choose an obviously unqualified candidate for Supreme Court Justice: not only would it be a stealth candidacy, with little paper trail, but it would assure a died in the wool swalloed the koolade loyalist if he, Cheney, Rove or others were under serious judicial assault a la Nixon....
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=23051&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
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Friday, October 07, 2005
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Larry Johnson: 'A case of treason'
Ex-CIA agent sees PlameGate as a matter of Treason
The Smirking Chimp
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Sheila Samples: 'A horrid reality...'
the Image and increasingly terrible Reality
The Smirking Chimp: "Sheila Samples: 'A horrid reality...'"
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Bush: God told me to invade Iraq
the Fist of God
The Smirking Chimp: "Bush: God told me to invade Iraq"
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Salon.com | Rove's nightmare
Waiting for the indictment... Joe Conason's report in Salon=
"Rove's nightmare
If Karl Rove told federal officials in 2003 he wasn't involved in outing Valerie Plame, he could face charges.
By Joe Conason
Oct. 07, 2005 | To understand why Karl Rove is believed to be in grave danger of indictment for his role in the Wilson leaks, let's return to the earliest days of the investigation. If Rove is found criminally liable for lying, then the falsehoods that led to his downfall may well have been uttered during the weeks when his old friend and client John Ashcroft was still in charge of the leaks probe -- and before the case was turned over to the special counsel, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
During the autumn of 2003, after repeated requests from the CIA, Ashcroft finally exercised his duty as attorney general to investigate the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity by administration officials to various journalists. Although the CIA first notified the Justice Department as early as July 30 of a potentially serious crime -- namely, a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- Justice didn't open an investigation until the end of September, after the CIA informed the department that it had completed its own review of the facts.
For three months, until Ashcroft decided to recuse himself, the investigation remained under his control, despite the well-founded suspicions of Rove's involvement. Ashcroft willfully ignored his own inherent conflict in overseeing a case that might lead to an indictment of Rove, who had assisted his political campaigns in Missouri and had directed the process that led to his appointment as attorney general. Only after repeated protests from Democrats in Congress, strong editorial comment on the unseemliness of Ashcroft's conduct, and polls showing public demand for an independent counsel did he finally recuse himself from the Wilson matter.
By then, however, the investigation had already begun, and Rove, among others in the White House, was already on record publicly denying any involvement in the leaks. Indeed, those denials by Rove himself and White House press secretary Scott McClellan returned to haunt them and the president earlier this year, following evidence provided by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about his July 2003 conversation with Rove concerning the Wilsons.
So now we know the truth about Rove's role -- or at least part of the truth -- and we know that he wasn't being honest back then. The question is what he may have told the FBI agents assigned to investigate the matter during those autumn weeks, before Ashcroft turned over the case to Fitzgerald in late December.
On Oct. 24, 2003, the Washington Post reported that Rove and McClellan, among dozens of others, had submitted to FBI interrogation about the leaks. Two months later, the Post quoted administration officials saying that Rove had been among the very first people to be interviewed by the FBI in pursuit of information about the case.
Back then, Rove might well have assumed that the case would be buried without any undue inconvenience to him. The president had publicly predicted, after all, that the perpetrators of the leak were unlikely to be identified. There was no reason, at the outset, to think that an independent-minded prosecutor would take over from Ashcroft a few months later.
If Rove told the FBI agents the same story that he and McClellan were telling the press, then he might have set himself up for a felony charge of lying to a federal law enforcement official. And if he lied, then he need not have been under oath to have committed a crime.
Another intriguing possibility in the leaks case brings back the baroque personality of right-wing pressroom denizen Jeff Gannon, born James Guckert.
The New York Times reported Friday that in addition to possible charges directly involving the revelation of Valerie Wilson's identity and related perjury or conspiracy charges, Fitzgerald is exploring other possible crimes. Specifically, according to the Times, the special counsel is seeking to determine whether anyone transmitted classified material or information to persons who were not cleared to receive it -- which could be a felony under the 1917 Espionage Act.
One such classified item might be the still-classified State Department document, written by an official of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, concerning the CIA's decision to send former ambassador Joseph Wilson to look into allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. Someone leaked that INR document -- which inaccurately indicated that Wilson's assignment was the result of lobbying within CIA by his wife, Valerie -- to right-wing media outlets, notably including Gannon's former employers at Talon News. On Oct. 28, 2003, Gannon posted an interview with Joseph Wilson on the Talon Web site, in which he posed the following question: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
Gannon later hinted, rather coyly, that he had learned about the INR memo from an article in the Wall Street Journal. He also told reporters last February that FBI agents working for Fitzgerald had questioned him about where he got the memo. At the very least, that can be interpreted as confirming today's Times report about the direction of the case.
All such speculation about criminal indictments must be tempered with caution. Nobody outside Fitzgerald's office can be certain what charges he is considering or whose fate he is mulling over. Even the highest-ranking figures in the Bush White House, which would deprive others of their constitutional rights and has already done so, deserve the presumption of innocence.
But certain persons in this government committed a serious offense against the national security of the United States to serve political partisan ends -- and they don't deserve to get away it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/10/07/rove_inquiry/print.html
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Thursday, October 06, 2005
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TBush administration officials brace for decisions in CIA leak case
let this be the Big One that takes them down...
The Smirking Chimp: "Bush administration officials brace for decisions in CIA leak case"
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Wednesday, October 05, 2005
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AlterNet: Katrina's 25 Biggest Questions
very serious questions concerning race and class issues over who was devastated by Katrina and why....
http://www.alternet.org/story/26349/
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Monday, October 03, 2005
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Sunday, October 02, 2005
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Robert Parry, “Can Bush Be Ousted?”,
Just Imagine: Bush's Impeachment.... or forced resignation....
Consortiumnews.com
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Saturday, October 01, 2005
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Charles Cutter: 'America's immoral majority'
could there be a tipping point when majority of americans wake up and demand Bush's ouster or will he keep getting away with it because people just don't care....
The Smirking Chimp: "Charles Cutter: 'America's immoral majority'"
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"White House under siege after DeLay's downfall"
While DeLay has been shown laughing there are reports that Bush White House is in major crisis with the fall of their Hammer
The Smirking Chimp:
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Salon.com News | What's the story with Judy?
The Times continues to present Miller as a heroine and martyr; what's the real story? Salon speculation=
"What's the story with Judy?
The New York Times has a lot of explaining to do about Judith Miller, now that she's been released from jail. So what's the hang-up?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo
Oct. 1, 2005 | When New York Times reporter Judith Miller was suddenly released from jail late on Thursday afternoon, it was the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose intrepid court reporter John Shiffman had received a tip-off, that broke the news on its Web site. According to an account in Editor and Publisher, editors at the Inquirer then began checking the Times' Web site for the paper's own story of its star reporter's release -- but it took hours for the Times to catch up and say what had happened in a case that critics say the Paper of Record should have been all over.
The Times' nighttime silence on the story served as a good indicator of the paper's general mood on the Miller case Friday. Management at the paper is saying nothing -- even, to judge from the paper's coverage of itself, to the reporters who work there. The Times has clammed up. Indeed, the day's most thorough account of what happened with Miller -- of why, after holding herself up as a martyr to press freedoms for months she suddenly decided to testify about her sources -- can be found in the Washington Post; as David Corn writes, the Times' account, which covers basically the same ground as the Post, is so convoluted it makes your head hurt.
Doesn't the New York Times owe its readers more than that? At this moment, the main story of Miller's release from jail is that we don't know the story -- every published account sparks more questions than answers. Yet there is one obvious way for one of the main players involved to clear some of the air: The Times could publish an editor's note or some other account documenting all it knows, and all it doesn't know, about the Plame case and its reporter's involvement in the matter, in much the same way Time magazine did after its reporter, Matthew Cooper, testified to the grand jury.
"Their audience would appreciate it if the paper was in position to say what its position was and why it took the position it did at the time," says Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "In general readers appreciate when there's a controversial story if a paper tries to explain itself."
And all across the Web Friday -- from Salon's War Room to Dan Froomkin to Arianna Huffington -- commentators asked Times to explain itself. The questions generally boil down to this: If Miller has decided to recognize the validity of a waiver she received during a phone call last week with Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, why didn't she recognize a similar waiver Libby's lawyer says he offered Miller last year? Was she hiding something then? Is she hiding something now? What is the real story here -- for Miller, for the Times, and for the inquiry into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity?
As Huffington put it: Miller should "publish a full and truthful account of her involvement in Plamegate. And the New York Times must publish it on Page One. Without fear or favor. All the news that's fit to print. No ifs, ands, buts. And no more grandstanding statements from Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller."
Representatives for the Times declined Salon's interview requests, so it was impossible to say whether the paper was considering such a step. When reporters attempted to grill Miller on these details as she left court on Friday, she mostly sidestepped the questions.
If the Times doesn't want to publish an editor's account of what happened, there's another way it could elucidate its readers on the mysterious Miller saga -- by doing what it does best, unleashing a team of reporters to investigate the case. But so far, the Times own reporting on itself, says Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor and proprietor of the blog PressThink, has been inadequate, and instead of giving us answers, it "has created a real question mark." Douglas Jehl, the paper's main reporter on the case, seems to be on the right reportorial track, but in several stories he's written on the case it's evident that Jehl's access has been constrained by management at the paper, Rosen points out.
Reporting on your own company -- your own bosses -- is a difficult thing, Kunkel notes. But after the Jayson Blair scandal broke at the paper, the Times did an admirable job of digging it up by handing the investigation to a team of veteran reporters who were given inside access to the paper's operations. The Judy Miller story is certainly different from the Blair story; Miller didn't fabricate articles. But the mysterious circumstances surrounding her jailing and then her release cast a similar cloud over the paper's reputation and would seem to beg for some kind of internal inquiry, if only to satisfy the public's curiosity.
As it stands, though, the Times' actions don't seem leading down that path. Indeed, at the moment, the whole story "doesn't look explicable on its surface," Rosen says.
For instance, in reacting to the news of Miller's release, Rosen says he keeps thinking of a statement that Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, made around the time Miller first went to jail -- Miller was prepared to be incarcerated as an act of "civil disobedience," Keller had said. Civil disobedience, Rosen points out, applies when you know what you're doing is illegal. While Miller may have acknowledged that the law compelled her to reveal her sources, by choosing jail she was saying that she wouldn't respect it. From the start, in other words, Miller and the Times saw this case as a way to make a statement about press freedoms; they took an absolutist view, one that held that any intrusion by the government into the relationship between a reporter and her source should be verboten.
So what's the paper's position now? Has it relented on its absolutist view about press freedoms? Is it more interested in keeping its reporters out of jail or getting to the bottom of the Plame case? "Some critical facts are missing," Rosen says. That's another way of saying we just don't know what in the world folks at the Times could be thinking right now. "
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/01/judy/print.html
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Arianna Huffington: 'Who is Judy Miller kidding?'
will Judy Miller's testimony take down Cheney's chief of staff and redeem her or is she part of a neocon propaganda cabal?
The Smirking Chimp: "Arianna Huffington: 'Who is Judy Miller kidding?'"
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Nailed: Grand jury foreman cites 'stacks' of evidence against DeLay
evidence against DeLay is significant and should embarass him and republicans, but so far DeLay presents it as a joke; who will have the last laugh?
The Smirking Chimp: "Nailed: Grand jury foreman cites 'stacks' of evidence against DeLay"
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