May 8, 2007 -- Cheney on DC Madam's list. Yesterday, WMR reported on the DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list: "WMR has been informed that the CEO of a major corporation is a former CEO but, nonetheless, the aforementioned extremely high-level official of the Bush administration. The individual, who is definitely "newsworthy," reportedly engaged the services of Palfrey's escort firm while he was the CEO and maintained a residence off Chain Bridge Road in the Ballantrae neighborhood in McLean, Virginia, a few blocks from the headquarters of the CIA."
Cheney "X'd" off the DC Madam's list by ABC/Disney.
WMR has confirmed with extremely knowledgeable CIA and Pentagon sources that the former CEO who is on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's list is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton during the time of his liaisons with the Pamela Martin & Associates escort firm. Palfrey's phone invoices extend back to 1996 and include calls to and from Cheney. Ironically, in 2000 Cheney was appointed by Bush to head his Vice President selection committee, a task that enabled Cheney to gather detailed personal files on a number of potential candidates, including Bill Frist, George Pataki, John Danforth, Fred Thompson, Chuck Hagel, John Kasich, Chris Cox, Frank Keating, Tom Ridge, Colin Powell, and Jim Gilmore, before he selected himself as the vice presidential candidate.
The White House saw to it that ABC/Disney killed the DC Madam's story before yet another scandal swamped the Bush administration. Cheney is departing Washington today for a trip to the Middle East, where he will visit the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the USS John C. Stennis in the Gulf.
George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm, reveals something extremely important about events in the final weeks before 9/11. For the first time, the former CIA Director admits he flew to Crawford in late August, just weeks before the attack by al-Qaeda cells known to be in the U.S., and briefed President George W. Bush personally about the threat.
This briefing followed a CIA PDB read to the President on August 6 in a meeting with Harriet Miers, then the President's lawyer, and an emergency meeting between Tenet and Condi Rice on July 10 on the same subject.
It also reveals that in order to cover up the last meeting, Tenet committed perjury before the 9/11 Commission when he denied meeting with Bush in the month before the attack. According to the White House website, Bush met in Crawford with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and the present and former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals Meyers and Pace, on August 24, 2001.
Actually, this is not the first time Tenet has referenced that meeting. During April 2003 testimony before the Commission, Tenet "misspoke" and let it slip that he had met with the President in the weeks leading up to 9/11.
At the time, three years ago, the corporate media virtually ignored a pair of wire service reports about Tenet's revelation, and practically no one followed-up on it, except two bloggers, one of whom was me.
"A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events," Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. "This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,"
UQ Wire: Tenet Lied Under Oath To 9/11 Commission Wednesday, 9 June 2004, 1:37 pm
TENET LIED UNDER OATH TO 9/11 COMMISSION ABOUT 8/24/2001 MEETING WITH PRESIDENT - AGENCY COMPOUNDS MISREPRESENTATION
CIA Statement Omits Key Date From List of Bush-DCI Meetings in Weeks Before 9/11
What Did Bush, Tenet, Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers Talk About in Crawford, TX Three Weeks Before the Attacks - One Day After the Flt. 77 Hijackers Were Watchlisted by the CIA?
From Mark G. Levey
Washington, DC, June 7, 2004 - Former CIA Director George Tenet committed perjury in his April 14 testimony before the 9/11 Commission when he claimed he had not met with President Bush in the month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That misrepresentation in Tenet's testimony was noted within hours by Agence France-Presse, below.
The following day, AP reported the CIA issued what was described as a correction after the Director "misspoke." The Agency asserted that its records showed Tenet meeting with Bush on August 17 and 31, and then on at least six occasions in September prior to Tuesday, the 11th, below.
However, that CIA announcement omits mention of the visit that then DCI Tenet apparently made to the President's Crawford, Texas ranch on August 24. The White House website on August 25 quotes a remark made by George W. Bush that he met with Tenet the previous day.
In a verbatim transcript, the President is quoted during an impromptu walking tour of Bush's Crawford, TX ranch that he had met the day before with CIA Director and newly appointed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Rice were also present at a Presidential press conference in Crawford on the 24th, according to the White House press notice issued that day. In the August 25 transcript, the President Bush states to reporters and visitors:
THE PRESIDENT: " . . . Yesterday, we spent -- well, they arrived at 10:00 a.m. It took a while to get the press conference. We got back here at about 11:30 a.m. and met until 5:15 p.m. I think they left. That's the longest meeting I've had in a long time, on a very important subject . . .
Q When you have those business meetings, like the Joint Chiefs briefing, do you like to keep it separate from the living quarters on the ranch?
THE PRESIDENT: Actually, you know, what we call the governor's house, the place where you all came out during the -- that's where we went. Condi and Karen Hughes stayed there. And right across the street from that is a -- it's a nice looking government doublewide. (Laughter.) And that's where the mil aide, the nurse, the WHCA head, the doc, they stay.
The CIA briefings, I have on our porch, the end of our porch looking out over the lake. When Tenet came up, that's where we visited, out there.
You know, everybody wants to see the ranch, which I'm proud to show it off. So George Tenet and I -- yesterday, we piled in the new nominees for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman and their wives and went right up the canyon. " Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
The "very important subject" discussed for almost six hours by Bush with his core national security team would likely have been the CIA's action the day before placing four wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists on the "watchlist" of persons to be detained if located in the US. On August 23 the Agency sent "cables to the State Department, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, requesting that 'four bin Laden related individuals' including Almidhar and Alhazmi, be placed on the watchlist." (Washington Post, A8, September 21, 2002) Two of those - Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi - subsequently led the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.
The pair had been the subject of CIA-directed surveillance since at least late 1999, when they were followed by the CIA to an Al-Qaeda planning session in Kuala Lumpur, at which they were observed meeting with a ranking terrorist operations director and Mohamed Atta's roommate, Ramzi Binalshibh, who subsequently wired money to them from Germany. Binalshibh also sent funds to Zacarias Moussaoui, who in October 2000 stayed at the same Al-Qaeda safehouse in Malaysia while on his way to the United States. On August 15, Moussaoui was arrested by the FBI at a Minnesota flight school.
If Tenet did not take the opportunity to discuss these events with the President, he committed one of the worst acts of derelection of duty in CIA history. Former DCI George Tenet is generally held to be a thorough and responsible intelligence executive. It is simply implausible that Tenet and Bush did not discuss the 9/11 hijackers when they met in Crawford on August 24.
A special prosecutor needs to be appointed to investigate CIA Director Tenet's apparent perjury on April 14 and the Agency's material misrepresentation of fact in its statement the next day. The former CIA Director and the President need to reveal publicly, and under oath, what was discussed at their numerous meetings in the weeks before 9/11, and why this has been concealed.
WASHINGTON, April 15 (AFP) The CIA today said that its director, George Tenet, personally briefed President George W. Bush in August 2001, countering a statement Tenet made to the commission investigating the September 11 attacks. "We looked at his schedule," a CIA spokeswoman told AFP. "Mr. Tenet did fly down to Texas and briefed the president on August 17." He also briefed Bush on August 31 in Washington, she added. Tenet briefed Bush at least six times in the first eight days of September 2001, as well, the spokeswoman said. And "the whole time that President Bush was in Texas," vacationing on his ranch, he had a senior CIA analyst with him and received a daily report from the CIA, she said. Tenet yesterday told the commission he did not meet with Bush in August 2001. "I didn't see the president. I was not in briefings with him during this time. He was on vacation; I was here" in Washington, he said. "In this time period, I'm not talking to him," Tenet added, noting that they had not even spoken by phone at the time. The month before the attacks has come under particular scrutiny after the inquiry discovered that Bush received a briefing on August 6, 2001 about al-Qaeda activities in the United States.
AP Wire Reprint (April 15, 2004)
KHOU.com Houston, TX
Tenet misspoke about not meeting Bush in August 2001
Associated Press
WASHINGTON, D.C. - CIA Director George Tenet misspoke Wednesday when he told a federal panel reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks that he did not meet with President Bush in August 2001. Under questioning by commissioner Tim Roemer, Tenet said he never spoke with Bush during the month before the attacks, a period marked by concern over possible terrorist strike. "He was on vacation and I was here," Tenet said, although he added that he could have picked up the phone and called the president at any time if he had felt the need to communicate with him. In fact, Tenet flew to Texas to brief Bush on Aug. 17, 2001, and briefed the president again on Aug. 31 when Bush returned to Washington, a spokesman for Tenet said later in the day. During the first eight days of September, Tenet briefed Bush at least six times, the spokesman said.
Further Sources:
For more information, go to: http://www.scoop.co.nz/... Part 4 of a four-part series, "The Crimes of 9/11"
For a more general introduction: http://www.democraticunderground.com... (Two-part series, "How US Counterterrorism Failed on 9/11, and Why the Bush Administration Cannot Fix It"
Oh, yes, one last thing. Everyone else who has omitted under oath to mention the 8/24/2001 Crawford meeting with Bush, also committed perjury. And, you can take that one to the bank.
Tehran - The Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari Following talks Wednesday with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran that the Iraqi government has decided to expel the Iranian opposition Mujahideen Khalq from Iraq. Zebari was quoted as saying at a joint press conference held with Mottaki, "that the Iraqi government has formed a committee to ensure the implementation of this resolution." He explained, "talked with a number of countries, including European countries to accept elements of this" group after being discharged from Iraq. The opposition group exists in Iraq before the occupation by the American forces, but the Americans have allowed the group to stay in Iraq. Replying to a question about the Iranian diplomats arrested in Arbil Zebari said that "the Iraqi government will make its utmost efforts for the release of these diplomats and hopes to end this problem and to return to their homeland soon."
By Matthew Cardinale, News Editor, Atlanta Progressive News (April 29, 2007)
APN) ATLANTA – H Res 333, the bill introducing Articles of Impeachment against Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, now has two co-sponsors, for a total of 3 current total supporters, including sponsor US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Atlanta Progressive News has learned.
The two cosponsors are US Reps. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Janice Schakowsky (D-IL). APN currently has press requests in to both Offices since this morning but has not heard back yet; check back here for updates on their comments.
US Reps. Clay and Schakowsky were early cosponsors of US Rep. Conyers’s (D-MI) former bill, H Res. 635, in the last, or 109th, Congressional Session. Conyers’s bill had been introduced December 18, 2005. The first round of cosponsors appeared on December 22, 2005. Clay and Schakowsky had been part of the second round of cosponsors appearing on January 31, 2006.
The cosponsorships are significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows there is more than one Member of Congress willing to entertain real accountability for the Bush Administration, despite the insistence of US Rep. Pelosi that impeachment is off the table.
Also, this bill is calling for actual Articles of Impeachment for Cheney, unlike the last bill which not only was related to Mr. Bush, but created an investigative committee to look into possible impeachment rather than providing for actual possible impeachment.
Therefore, cosponsorships on H Res 333 have even more weight than those which were listed on H Res 635 last Session.
Also, since the time of H Res 635, Democrats have taken control of both the US House and Senate. Thus, impeachment is even more a real possibility on account of having the potential Democratic support for the bill, even though most Democrats currently aren’t rushing to impeach Bush.
Because Democrats are now the Majority in Congress, we also now know that Bush refuses to be accountable to Congress, particularly on the US Invasion of Iraq. Bush has now vetoed historic legislation to attach funding for the Occupation with a deadline for withdrawal. Thus, it is now even more clear that traditional oversight mechanisms will not be effective.
Just over the weekend there had been a flurry of events supporting impeachment, including several here in Atlanta, organized by World Can’t Wait and other groups. Organizing and public outcry for impeachment is ever-increasing, and Atlanta activists say that the crowd response to impeachment events are overwhelmingly positive.
The House Judiciary Committee told APN there are no plans to have hearings on impeachment of Cheney or anyone else at this time.
"It’s not at this time on the Committee’s immediate agenda," spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said.
"Once its referred it has to be on the Committee’s agenda for the Committee to take it up," Roussell said.
"In order to move a bill you have to have hearings scheduled on it," Roussell said.
When asked by APN if Conyers taking impeachment "off the table" meant based on present information or whether it was complete abdication of a constitutional mechanism no matter what information comes forward, "All we can speak to is the present time," Roussell said, adding it would be unwise to speculate about the future.
"I don’t think it’s prejudging," she said.
Impeachment activist David Swanson said he was very encouraged by the two cosponsorships. "It’s wonderful. There are now three heroes in the US Congress. They deserve all the thanks and credit in the world. They have merely done their duty," Swanson told Atlanta Progressive News.
About the author:
Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor and National Correspondent for Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.
Syndication policy:
This article may be reprinted in full at no cost where Atlanta Progressive News is credited.
Democratic senator: Impeachment 'sucks all of the oxygen out of the air'
05/02/2007 @ 1:45 pm
Filed by Miriam Raftery
Gravel: Impeachment 'will come, in due course'
At last week’s debate, Democratic Presidential candidates were asked to raise their hands if they would support impeachment. Other than Rep. Dennis Kucinich (who introduced impeachment papers against Cheney), not a single candidate raised their hand. So RAW STORY decided to find out why.
At the California Democratic Convention in San Diego over the weekend, RAW STORY obtained responses directly from Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CONN), and 2008 candidates New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel, then elicited help from a blogger present to pose the question to Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) did not host a press conference and was not available to the media. The question was posed slightly differently for various candidates, depending on availability.
The most detailed response came from Gravel during a press conference. RAW STORY listed several potential grounds for impeachment, including starting a war on apparently false premises, issuing signing statements that ignore the will of Congress, abolishing habeus corpus, and declaring the "right" to spy on Americans’ e-mails even as the White House itself "loses" thousands of e-mails now requested by Congress.
“Don’t worry about impeachment,” Gravel said in a reassuring tone, adding that he has held discussions with House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI). “That will come, in due course.”
Gravel plan could land Bush 'behind bars'
Gravel criticized the President as a “lousy and immoral” commander in chief, but also levied criticism at Democrats for only passing a non-binding resolution to end the war. Nor does the former senator believe simply cutting off funds would work. “I filibustered to end funding in the Vietnam War, but it was not successful,” he recalled.
Instead, Gravel revealed a novel plan to bring about an end to the Iraq War, impeachment, or possibly both—and perhaps even land the President 'behind bars.'
“I have drafted a law that says we must get troops out of Iraq in 60 days,” he said. “Leave all the equipment behind…The President must certify that he took troops out. If he violates this law he should go to jail for five years with no parole, and pay a $1 million fine. It says so right in the law.”
He believes he could muster enough support in the House to pass the bill. If the Senate filibusters, he would urge Reid to call for a cloture vote daily. “The media will feed on this like maggots,” said Gravel, who predicts the measure would pass and that a veto could ultimately be overridden. If the President and Vice President then refuse to enact the law, he concluded, “once you have them breaking the law, now you impeach.”
Dodd: 'I've been down that road'
RAW STORY caught up with Dodd at a dinner honoring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We asked what kind of example it sets for kids across America if Congress fails to impeach the President and Vice President for lying about the justification for war, violating the Constitution, and issuing signing statements declaring the right to ignore laws passed by Congress.
“I’ve been down that road,” said Dodd, who shook his head and recalled the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton as he hastened away. “It sucks all of the oxygen out of the air.”
In a hallway after a press conference, we asked Richardson what message it sends to kids regarding accountability if Congress fails to hold the President and Vice President accountable for their actions.
“We should enforce our laws,” said Richardson, but stopped short of supporting impeachment. “This is why I’m for the deauthorization,” he added in an apparent reference to deauthorizing the President’s use of military force in Iraq.
Our blogger ally prodded a delegate at a packed meet-and-greet with supporters to pose the question to John Edwards. The blogger phrased the question this way: “If Congress can’t get votes to override the President’s veto, is impeachment a viable alternative to ending this war?”
According to the blogger, Edwards replied, “No, just keep sending him the bill.”
No candidate understands the ramifications of impeachment more fully than former First Lady Hillary Clinton. The New York senator's husband was impeached for 'obstruction of justice' and 'perjury' after denying to a grand jury that he had "sexual relations" with a White House intern, but the Senate acquitted him in 1999. Asked by a bystander to support impeachment of Bush, the former first lady replied, “I understand the sentiment,” then jested, “We will impeach him in November 2008,” according to our blogger source.
You can tell Richard Cohen is educated in hasbara techniques.
One is called "transfer", this is where you take prestige and authority from one concept and apply it to another.
In this case, Cohen knows that if he comes out guns blazing in opposition, he'll damage his credibility. Instead, he takes the idea of impeachment and transfers it to "unforgivable".
Another very telling sign, is how he saves the "transfer" for the very end of his propaganda, so it's the last thought the reader is left with, knowing that that is the one that counts, along with the beginning.
Again, in the beginning, Cohen sets us up, another tactic found in the hasbara handbook, where capturing the readers attention is most important. He does this by trying to minimize the alledged crimes of Cheney by comparing them to simple "lies". He reveals why he suggests this in the first paragraph by, "transferring" his argument to Clinton rhetoric in the second.
Cohen is pretty good, looks like we have more then one tricky dicky in the neocon house of Cheney.
In a similar fashion, two can play this game, because we have now transferred Richard's propaganda, to the tactics used by militant zionist propagandists.
The only difference, unlike Richard Cohen, I am being honest about the technique I'm using and telling you the truth. May 2, 2007 8:51:00 AM MDT ---
Neocon Cohen is a clever obfuscator here, and as usual full of it. Cheney is HIGHLY impeachable. --- A Case Against Cheney
By Richard Cohen Wednesday, May 2, 2007; A15
The resolution offered by the gentleman from Ohio reads sensibly. It alleges crimes high and low, misdemeanors galore -- all of them representing an effort to mislead the American people and take them into war. It is Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment directed at Dick Cheney. The vice president will, of course, deny being a liar. As long as Kucinich is at it, add that to the articles.
The congressman's case is persuasive, although his remedy may be too radical. He calls for Cheney to be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate, just as Bill Clinton was for what turned out to be neither a high crime nor much of a misdemeanor. What was it, anyway, compared with more than 3,300 American dead?
In his articles of impeachment, Kucinich details the many statements Cheney made that turned out to be factually wrong. For instance, he quotes Cheney as saying, "We know they [the Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons," which of course, they didn't. Still, that was excusable, since it was early in the game and little contradictory evidence was being presented. As Condi Rice said Sunday, "When George [Tenet] said 'slam dunk,' everybody understood that he believed that the intelligence was strong. We all believed the intelligence was strong."
But in Cheney's case, the slam-dunking went on and on -- way past the point where it was possible anymore to believe him. He continued to insist that Saddam Hussein had high-level contacts with al-Qaeda -- " the evidence is overwhelming," he once said -- while others in the government not only knew that the evidence was not overwhelming but that it hardly existed. It was the same with Cheney's insistence-- not just wrong, but irrefutably so -- that Hussein "has weapons of mass destruction," and "[t]here is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." The percussive march of these statements is so forceful, one after another after another, that it suggests Cheney wanted war no matter what. If he was lying to himself as well as to the rest of us, that is only a mitigating circumstance -- sort of an insanity defense.
Kucinich also alleges that Cheney "purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress." That, as the expression goes, is the gravamen of the charge. Kucinich doesn't stand a ghost of a chance of making it stick because Congress is not about to vote impeachment. But no one who reads Kucinich's case against Cheney can fail to conclude that this is a rational, serious accusation. It's possible that each individual charge can be rebutted, but the essence of it is shockingly apparent: We were being manipulated.
It is something of a joke that Washington is now transfixed by l'affaire Wolfowitz. This is the contretemps at the World Bank in which an architect of this misbegotten war stands accused of favoring his girlfriend. Do not be concerned with the details -- this is a parody of a Washington scandal -- but concentrate instead on what else Wolfowitz has done in government and how, now, it is a salary increase awarded to a companion that might do him in. This is tantamount to getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
In the same vein, we tend to focus on single events or statements regarding Iraq (to slam dunk or not to slam dunk, that is the question) and how poor George Tenet, a self-deceived careerist, is misunderstood -- as if he had uttered a statement of principle dramatically resigning over the manipulation of intelligence and it is suspiciously missing from the record. In all this back-and-forth, what gets lost is the immensity of the outrage, the enormousness of the breach of trust, the naive faith some of us had that when it came to the making of war, we'd be told the truth. This was not the case. The harping on weapons of mass destruction was an attempt to scare the American people into supporting a war that need not have been fought.
Kucinich is an odd guy for whom the killer appellation "perennial presidential candidate" is lethally applied. But he is on to something here. It is easy enough to ad hominize him to the margins -- ya know, the skinny guy among the "real" presidential candidates -- but at a given moment, and this is one, he's the only one on that stage who articulates a genuine sense of betrayal. He is not out merely to win the nomination but to hold the Bush administration -- particularly Cheney -- accountable. In this he will fail. What Cheney has done is not impeachable. It is merely unforgivable.
(CBS/AP) Britain's defense secretary during the Iraq war says U.K. officials underestimated the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney in White House decision making, and the coalition failed to anticipate the bloody aftermath of the war, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
But Geoff Hoon, who was defense secretary in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government from 1999 until 2005, said intelligence officials had believed that Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction and that the allies did not lie about why they went to war.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Hoon said that "we didn't plan for the right sort of aftermath."
"Maybe we were too optimistic about the idea of the streets being lined with cheering people. Although I have reconciled it in my own mind, we perhaps didn't do enough to see it through the Sunni perspective. Perhaps we should have done more to understand their position," Hoon was quoted as saying.
Hoon said the British side had not comprehended Cheney's influence in the U.S. administration.
Even when Blair and President Bush had agreed on some matter, "sometimes... the decision actually came out of a completely different place."
"And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed Cheney," Hoon was quoted as saying.
He did not cite any examples of decisions apparently reversed by Cheney.
Hoon, who is now minister for Europe in the Foreign Office, said Britain had opposed the wholesale dismissal of Iraq's army and police forces.
"We certainly argued against," Hoon was quoted as saying. "I recall having discussions with Donald Rumsfeld, but I recognized that it was one of those judgment calls. I would have called it the other way. His argument was that the Iraqi army was so heavily politicized that we couldn't be sure that we would not retain within it large elements of Saddam's people."
However, Hoon defended the decision to go to war on the basis of intelligence that believed Iraq was building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction — intelligence he now accepts was wrong.
"I've been present at a number of meetings where the intelligence community was fixed, and looked in the eye and asked are you absolutely sure about this? And the answer came back 'Yes, absolutely sure,"' Hoon was quoted as saying.
"I saw intelligence from the first time I came into office, in May 1999 — week in, week out — that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ... I have real difficulty in understanding why it was, over such a long period of time, we were told this and, moreover, why we acted upon it," he was quoted as saying.
"Whatever else I did, even if people say it was catastrophically wrong, I wouldn't agree with it, but I could live with it," he added. "But I can't live with the idea that I was telling lies, because I wasn't."
Hoon said he felt no need to apologize.
"You can say 'it did not turn out as we expected' and 'we made some bad calls,' but at the end of the day I defy anyone to go through what we went through and come to a different conclusion," he was quoted as saying.
The public, Hoon said, was not interested in perceptions in 2003 or subtle arguments over intelligence or policy.
"I think, especially when British soldiers are being killed, that the public have got to be pretty confident as to why. I think they're not any longer confident, and want us out of Iraq. That's why Tony gets the blame," Hoon said.
Onetime CIA analyst alleges Cheney, Libby lied to Congress about Pakistani nukes
In the era of Ronald Reagan, intelligence officer Richard Barlow was an analyst for the CIA, monitoring Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1989, he moved over to the Pentagon, where he worked for then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Barlow lost that job when he raised objections to his bosses about senior Pentagon officials allegedly lying to Congress concerning Pakistan’s emerging nuclear program.
In a series of interviews with RAW STORY conducted over several weeks, the onetime intelligence officer revealed new details about intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear program—and efforts by the US to quash attempts to stop development. Barlow's story also casts light on recent efforts by the current administration to keep information from Congress on Iraq and other matters.
Pakistan gets the bomb
In 1975, Pakistani scientist AQ Khan “acquired” nuclear blueprints from his Dutch employer and was immediately put in charge of Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1988, Pakistan would detonate its first atomic bomb.
Former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has said that the CIA was monitoring Khan from the beginning. He asserts that the US turned down offers to detain Khan in 1975 and 1986 because they wanted to “gain more information” about the scientist’s activities.
Intelligence information later showed that the US and its allies allowed Pakistan to clandestinely acquire most of the technology for its nuclear program from abroad, unwittingly facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya over the past several decades.
When Richard Barlow joined the CIA in 1985 as a counter-proliferation intelligence officer with particular expertise on Pakistan, he quickly realized that Pakistan was continuing to develop its nuclear program, and that some of its clandestine and illegal procurement activity was occurring within the US.
It didn't take Barlow long to realize that US officials knew what Pakistan was doing. According to Barlow, individuals at the State Department later actively facilitated procurement, tipping off targets of sealed arrest warrants in undercover operations and illegally approving export licenses for restricted goods.
Naturally, this situation created problems.
In 1985—following the arrest of a Pakistani agent in the US who attempted to procure specialized switches for nuclear detonators—Congress took steps to prevent Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons, passing bills that would cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan if it were found to be involved in nuclear activities.
One amendment declared that all overt aid to Pakistan—which came to over $4 billion in 1986—must cease unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Another prohibited aid to any “non-nuclear” nation found to be illegally exporting nuclear materials from the US.
Given Pakistan's proliferation activities, this meant the ongoing aid to Pakistan was illegal. However, President Reagan wanted military and economic aid to continue flowing to Pakistan to ensure its ongoing support of his covert war against the Russians in Afghanistan.
The countervailing view, held by many at the CIA, was that proliferation was an important threat in its own right and shouldn’t take a back seat to fighting communism. In addition, Barlow and others believed that Pakistan would continue to assist in the covert war against the Russians, regardless of sanctions against its nuclear program.
Barlow sparks a firestorm
In 1987, Barlow engineered the arrest of some of Khan’s agents in the US as part of an undercover operation. He says the arrests came with the full support and knowledge of the highest levels of the CIA and the Reagan administration.
The arrest sparked a firestorm. Proof of Pakistan's proliferation activities would trigger the provisions of the the so-called Solarz Amendment and put an end to Pakistani aid.
The amendment’s author, Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs Chairman Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY), called for a top-secret briefing by the CIA. Barlow was sent to represent the agency, armed with talking points.
Under orders from the CIA, Barlow told Solarz’ Subcommittee the truth: There were “scores” of illegal transactions that should have triggered the Solarz Amendment, and the Pakistanis involved—including a retired general—were agents of the government of Pakistan.
Pakistan, Barlow said, had been breaking US nuclear export laws regularly since 1985, and the responsible individuals in the US intelligence and law enforcement communities knew it. Having just approved a multi-billion dollar aid package, Solarz and others in Congress—including Senator Larry Pressler, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee—were outraged to learn about Pakistan's violations of their laws. Solarz was appalled that information had been hidden from Congress.
In contrast, those who had willfully misled Congress were horrified that Barlow had told the truth. They tried to undercut Barlow's testimony but to no avail. Barlow’s classified testimony was unimpeachable.
The pressure on Barlow continued
Barlow was a marked man. While those in his part of the CIA (the Directorate of Intelligence), the State Department non-proliferation staff, and the law enforcement agencies considered him a hero, those running the covert Afghan war—the Directorate of Operations, the former National Intelligence Officer for Proliferation who had been responsible for briefing Congress, and the State Department's regional office—tried to get him fired for engineering the arrest and spilling the beans.
Barlow, however, was soon vindicated. A US court convicted the Pakistani agents and President Reagan triggered the Solarz Amendment for the first and only time.
Immediately afterward, Reagan invoked a national security waiver provision in the law, nullifying the amendment. In the words of veteran intelligence reporter Seymour Hersh, "The President was telling Pakistan that it could have its money—and its bomb."
"These people were determined that nothing like this was ever going to happen ever again—no more arrests, no more truth to the Congress," Barlow recalls. "I had people giving me awards at the same time as other people were trying to fire me—it was unbelievable.”
“I was targeted by some in the Directorate of Operations; they made my life miserable,” he continues. “Nobody at the agency actually tried to destroy my life, but they did make my life miserable and damaged my career prospects.”
“I left of my own free will, relatively speaking,” he adds. “I could have stayed—but I wasn't going to put up with that shit. I was caught in the middle of a massive battle between the cold warriors and the counterproliferation forces in the CIA.”
“The cold warriors were a bunch of arrogant bastards,” he remarks.
F-16s or bust
In early 1989, after George H.W. Bush became president, Barlow joined the Pentagon’s Office of Non-Proliferation Policy—working under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Stephen Hadley, and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Scooter Libby.
Barlow says he continued to be engaged in trying to arrest more Pakistani nuclear agents. He also claims there were other examples of officials lying to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear program in order to keep aid flowing, but now there was a significant difference: The Afghan war was over, so there was no Cold War “justification” for continuing to shovel money at Pakistan. This time, he believes, it was simply about profit.
"They sold out the world for an F-16 sale," Barlow says.
By then, Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons.
"They had nuclear weapons at the time, and we knew they did,” Barlow remarks. “The evidence was unbelievable. I can't go into it—but on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of intelligence evidence, it was a 10 or 11. It doesn't get any better than that.”
Barlow asserts that in 1988 and 1989, Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush illegally certified that Pakistan was free of nuclear weapons in order to keep funds flowing.
In the late eighties, Pakistan, trying to outmuscle India by injecting nuclear and air power steroids into their arms program, was seeking to buy 60 new F-16s worth $1.6 billion.
F-16 manufacturer General Dynamics desperately wanted the sale.
Unfortunately for the firm, Rep. Solarz and others in Congress expected assurances that the planes couldn't be used to drop nuclear weapons.
This was problematic: American intelligence knew that Pakistan had already made the minor modifications to their existing fleet of F-16s so that they could carry, and drop, nuclear weapons.
In fact, US and foreign intelligence and news reports indicated that the Pakistanis had in fact modified their F-16’s for nuclear delivery and had been conducting training exercises where they practiced dropping nuclear weapons from the F-16s. Nonetheless, Barlow says, Pentagon officials lied to Congress under oath, saying that the planes couldn't be used for nuclear purposes without a radical overhaul well beyond the industrial capabilities of Pakistan.
Barlow says he then learned that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes had delivered testimony willfully falsified by officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He realized that Hughes had lied to Solarz' committee because earlier in 1989 he had prepared a comprehensive paper on this very issue for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
“All the top experts had looked at this question in detail for years, and it was a cold hard engineering question,” Barlow says. “There was no question about it—the jets could easily be made nuke-capable, and we knew that Pakistan had done just that."
Barlow says he tried again to inform his bosses that the congressional testimony was false. He was effectively fired two days later.
“They tried to destroy my life”
They've also continued retaliating against him ever since, more than a decade later, including by invoking the State Secrets Privilege—a blunt legal tool that enables the government to shut down cases which they claim might damage national security—to block the evidence in a court case initiated by the entire US Senate.
“They viciously tried to destroy my life, personally and professionally” says Barlow. “Not just my career, but they went after my marriage, my livelihood, and smeared my name in truly extraordinary ways that no one had ever seen before or since—at least not until the Wilsons were victims of the same people years later.”
“In my case, they suspended my security clearances and engaged in the most vicious abuses of security powers that anyone in the Congress had ever seen. They had nothing on me, so first they secretly fabricated the allegation that I was an ‘intended’ Congressional spy. Once that was found to be false, they then the secretly accused me of being an alcoholic, of not paying taxes, of adultery and more. Then they accused me of being psychotic and used that to invade my marital privacy, including that of my now ex-wife who also worked at the CIA, and sought to destroy my marriage as punishment.” He adds, “Of course, I was cleared of all of these charges, but the damage was done, as intended.”
Three years later, Rep. Solarz told Sy Hersh, “If what Barlow says is true, this would have been a major scandal of Iran-Contra proportions, and the officials involved would have had to resign.”
After two decades of investigations by the CIA Inspector General, the Department of Justice Inspector General, the State Department Inspector General, a General Accounting Office investigation, and the public record, we now know that what Barlow was saying was true.
The officials involved didn't resign. They’ve been running the country for the last six years.
Sparked by an insurgency among delegates, the California Democratic Party has taken an historic step forward on the issue of impeachment. In a resolution affirmed by the full state party convention Sunday, the Democrats called on the U.S. Congress to use its subpoena power to investigate misdeeds of President Bush and Vice President Cheney – and to hold the Administration accountable “with appropriate remedies and punishment, including impeachment.” The delegate insurgency was coordinated by Progressive Democrats of America and its allies.
While Speaker Pelosi had declared impeachment “off the table,” the Democratic Party rank-and-file has demonstrated its commitment to putting the issue “on” the table. And it’s no longer just the rank-and-file: Even among the members of the convention’s Resolutions Committee (appointed by the California Party chair), the impeachment resolution was the top vote-getter (tied with one other resolution).
Coming on the heels of mass actions and resolutions across the country in support of impeachment, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s introduction of Articles of Impeachment against Cheney, this action by the powerful California Democratic Party builds on the pro-impeachment momentum.
The resolution refers to Bush and Cheney having acted in a manner “subversive of the Constitution” by. . .
using false information to justify the invasion of Iraq
authorizing “the torture of prisoners of war”
“authorizing wiretaps on U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant”
“disclosing the name of an undercover CIA operative”
suspending “the historic Writ of Habeas Corpus by ordering the indefinite detention of so-called enemy combatants”
“signing statements used to ignore or circumvent portions of over 750 Congressional statutes”
The resolution ends by calling for “vigorous investigation” and “appropriate remedies and punishment, including impeachment.”
This action represents the successful culmination of PDA’s one-month, eleven-city barnstorming tour across California – aimed at putting impeachment and ending the occupation of Iraq at the top of the Party’s agenda.
'IN THE battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." So declared President George Bush on May 1, 2003, in a nationally televised address from the majestic splendour of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished".
On May 14 in the rather less telegenic surroundings of the Australian House of Representatives, the Prime Minister, John Howard, formally advised Parliament that "the coalition's major combat operations in Iraq have been successfully concluded". The media generally shared the political leaders' euphoria.
On the day Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad, the US cable news network CNN played some variation of this symbolic event once every 7.5 minutes while Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network replayed it on average every 4.4 minutes.
Two months later Bush was still in macho mode, telling the Iraqi insurgents to bring it on. Four years and at least 100,000 fatalities later, the triumphalism looks hollow.
Now the news focus has naturally moved to the continuing killings and chaos in Iraq, but four years after the proclamation of victory, it is interesting to trace the path to war, and especially the claims that were made about Iraqi's weapons of mass destruction that justified the war.
Eventually no weapons or programs were found, despite the absolute certainty with which Howard, his Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and other Australian, American and British leaders spoke of their threat.
In those four years a series of books and articles have illuminated the road to war and the problematic claims - sometimes fictions - on which it was based. Some, such as Michael Isikoff and David Corn's Hubris and Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold particularly illuminate the role of various small players - true believers, conmen, victims - whose contributions have largely remained publicly unknown.
Rocco Martino, an Italian who described himself as a security consultant, scrabbled around the fringes of the intelligence world until he got in touch with one of Italy's sources in the Niger embassy in Rome, later dubbed La Signora. Together they forged documents purporting to show that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq, and then tried to peddle these to contacts in the intelligence world. They found their way to the CIA and British intelligence.
Although US intelligence bureaucracies were sceptical, it was included in an intelligence briefing which the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, demanded be followed up.
The CIA sent a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had served in Iraq and West Africa, in February 2002 to investigate. He realised the documents were fairly crude forgeries, with some wrong titles, wrong names and so forth. (A companion document was even less credible, alleging a secret meeting between rogue states and others to advance their anti-Western agenda.) In addition, the logistics of the large export operation were improbable and impossible to keep secret.
After interviewing relevant officials, Wilson concluded there was no basis to the claim. The State Department had reached the same conclusion, as had the US embassy in Niger. France, the former colonial power, still largely controlled Niger's uranium exports, and it also advised that no such transaction had occurred and could not have happened without its knowledge.
Despite this refutation of the claim that Iraq imported uranium from Niger, it could not be killed. It was included the following September in Britain's white paper on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It was included by Bush in his state of the union address in January 2003, despite four earlier explicit warnings by the CIA that it was problematic. Cheney, with the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, and other Administration figures had also used the claim. Howard used it in a speech to Parliament justifying military action against Iraq.
In mid-2003, thanks partly to the energetic efforts of Wilson, the US Government retracted the Niger claim. Downer, in an article in the Herald, made a similar retraction. As in the pattern of such reversals, Howard stressed the claim had been made in good faith and, anyway, was not central to the coalition's case for war.
Joe Turner, a CIA analyst, is perhaps the central bureaucratic player in the other main thread alleging Saddam had a nuclear weapons program. It was the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq, perhaps giving weapons to terrorists, that constituted what Downer and the then defence minister, Robert Hill, called the ultimate nightmare, the sum of all our fears.
To the extent that there was any intelligence basis for asserting Iraq had a nuclear program, beyond the false claims about uranium imports, it involved its importation of aluminium tubes. Western intelligence agencies, including Australia, had tracked these activities, and even intercepted one shipment in early 2001. There was dispute over the purpose of these tubes. Turner was the most persistent and vociferous advocate of the view that the tubes were for a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium; others said it was improbable as they would have needed extensive and expensive modifications to make them suitable.
After a debate inside government circles for the best part of a year, the State Department and the US Energy Department, the group with the strongest expertise on the subject, had concluded the tubes were not for a centrifuge program. British and Australian intelligence seem to have reached a similar view.
For whatever reason, Turner's view prevailed inside the CIA and several reports were sent to government leaders, without the knowledge of the technical experts in State and Energy, who thought the issue was closed. Political expedience trumped technical expertise.
Suddenly the issue burst into public view in early September 2002, the start of the US Administration's campaign to win a congressional resolution authorising action on Iraq. A leaked report appeared in The New York Times, and immediately was referred to on television by the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and others as evidence of the Iraqi threat.
It was included in Bush's September 12 address to the United Nations. In Australian and US official rhetoric, the theme of aluminium tubes kept recurring over the next several months. After Iraq allowed access to UN weapons inspectors, from late 2002, the International Atomic Energy Agency was able to see the tubes being used in hundreds of rockets, as Iraq had said. Turner still said they had to be for a centrifuge but the agency found him unconvincing.
On January 9 the agency reported the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear centrifuge. The New York Times, whose front-page report had begun the public career of this claim and which had carried many prominent references since, reported this on page 10.
The agency's chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, made his final prewar report to the UN in early March 2003, concluding it had no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq, that the Niger documents were not authentic, and that the aluminium tubes were for conventional rockets not a nuclear program.
The Western media, preoccupied with the countdown to war, largely ignored his announcement. In one of the few official responses, Cheney simply said: "I think Mr ElBaradei frankly is wrong", without bothering to address the evidence laid out by the agency.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi had been a major figure in al-Qaeda, and was picked up by Pakistani forces in December 2001 and handed over to the Americans. He was being interrogated in Afghanistan by the FBI, and his interrogator had made good rapport and was gaining excellent information from him about al-Qaeda.
Al-Libi denied any contact between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Then in a bureaucratic turf war, the CIA prevailed and al-Libi was taken out of the FBI's hands and flown to Egypt as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, a program that has been associated with widespread suspicions of torture.
Al-Libi now maintained that Iraq had given training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda. Some in the US intelligence community were sceptical, noting the lack of specificity in his claims, and suspicious that he was saying what his debriefers wanted to hear.
Bush included the training claim in a major speech in October 2002, and Rice, the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell, all included it in public statements. Later al-Libi told the FBI that the claims were false: "They were killing me. I had to tell them something." Once removed from the danger of further torture, and after the war had begun, he retracted the claims, and the reversal was reported in The New York Times in July 2004. Eventually the CIA formally recalled all its reporting based on them. To my knowledge, none of the US leaders has ever publicly recanted their use of these claims.
Curveball was the name given to an Iraqi defector who was living in Germany and who was the major source for claims that Iraq had built a fleet of mobile biological labs. German intelligence would not allow the Americans to question him directly on the grounds that he was strongly anti-American. The official position of both intelligence agencies was that Curveball was reliable, but unofficially there was growing concern he had become unstable, was alcoholic and probably fabricating. He had defected to Germany in 1999, and after first saying he was in trouble for embezzlement, then said he worked on mobile weapons labs.
From January 2000 to September 2001, the US Defence Intelligence Agency disseminated almost 100 reports based on Curveball's claims, and the US Government was soon reporting the existence of mobile biological weapon agent production plants as established fact. Powell, much to the horror of some American officials, included Curveball's claims to great dramatic effect in his major speech to the UN in February 2003.
After the invasion, the discovery of two of these vehicles was hailed as a breakthrough. Bush proclaimed the discovery of weapons of mass destruction, and Downer crowed in Parliament that although "it is disappointing for the Opposition to hear this, it is true". But the trailers proved to be for launching hydrogen balloons for weather forecasting, as the Iraqis had said.
In December 2003, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, who had at first been a strong believer that Iraq had such weapons, but eventually concluded the opposite, reported back to George Tenet, the CIA director, on Curveball. He said his team's investigations had shown Curveball was a liar; that he had been last in his class, not first; that he was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project director; that he had been sacked in 1995, and from then on drove a taxi. The Survey Group reported that the idea that he was an informer caused great laughter among the Iraqis who knew him. No doubt Powell also sees the humour in it all.
John Rendon is the head of the Rendon Group, and describes himself as an information warrior and a perception manager. But the line between perception management and reality creation is often thin. When Kuwait was liberated in 1991, the crowds waved hand-held flags of America and other allied countries, making great television. The flags had been distributed by Rendon.
The Rendon Group is not a shoestring operation. An article in Rolling Stone in November 2005 says the company made nearly $US100 million in the five years after the first gulf war, while between 2002 and 2004 its US Defence Department contracts totalled between $US50 million and $US100 million.
Moreover, sums of money at least as large were paid by the Americans over the years to the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi, an Iraqi Shiite who had been exiled since his teens and was wanted in Jordan for allegedly embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, was the neo-cons' choice to be the next president of Iraq.
Chalabi is a very controversial figure in American politics, with the CIA and State Department both regarding him as a fraud. Moreover, his role in false stories in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion has become very controversial. What fewer people know is that the Iraqi National Congress, including its name, was the creation of Rendon, as part of the anti-Saddam contract he received following the first Gulf War.
In the deliberations on Iraq, Rendon was a regular participant in White House strategy sessions on managing the politics of the war. Few details of his perception management activities have emerged, but one documented case is revealing.
In Pattaya, Thailand, in December 2001, the CIA administered a lie detector test to an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. Al-Haideri told a dramatic tale that he had helped Saddam's men secretly bury tonnes of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in sites around Baghdad.
But the polygraph suggested he had made up the entire story. Nevertheless as the CIA official was flying back to America, Al-Haideri's story was making front-page news in The New York Times, and became the first big post-September 11 news offensive against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The allegations were repeated in media and provided more embroidery for official rhetoric against Saddam, his public claims appearing in various government documents while the CIA's finding of his lack of credibility remained confidential. After the war al-Haideri was returned to Baghdad and unable to identify any of the sites he had alleged.
With a nod to Oscar Wilde: one error might be unfortunate, two carelessness, but a whole series of them shows a flawed and reckless political process.
Rod Tiffen is professor of government and international relations at the University of Sydney.
What Heart of Darkness festers in the center of the Bush/Republican Onion?
We know and read about the small stuff. Of course, it really isn't small stuff; it's just small stuff "relative to" the big stuff -- you know, the treasonous stuff, the planet killing stuff, the 3rd millennia crusade against Islam stuff.
For openers, it's now common knowledge now that 9/11 could have been prevented. Dear God, they had a blizzard of warnings -- all ignored. But how many layers into the onion is the answer to WHY
these warnings were systematically ignored? What "payoff" did Bush & Cheney, etc. get by ignoring these warnings?
Most of us suspect that the answer is that 9/11 was ignored for treasonous political reasons. They knew that a terrorist attack would help Bush's political capital. Simple as that. Plus, there's also the possibility that 9/11 was (how shall we put it?) more than allowed . . .
Now that, my friends, is big BIG stuff!
The question is will the committees (especially the post 2008 committees) be able to shine legal/constitutional light on these all too realistic possibilities? Will they be able to prove once and for all that the fanatical neocons criminally betrayed America just to drag president pinhead out the political toilet he was in before 9/11?
And speaking of neocons, how far down into the onion are the deep roots of the neocon cabal? To what lunatic fringe of what country is the neocon lobby answering to? They certainly don't represent the well being and national security of the United States of America, as their track of record of failure, genocide, and bankruptcy of the American economy abundantly demonstrates. So are we ever going to find out who has "really" been pulling the strings of American foreign policy? And still is.
Of course, much of the core stuff we already know, even though we've spent most of our country's history being in denial about it. The last seven years have rubbed our patriotic faces in the infinitely ugly truth that our country is now (and always has been) a Dictatorship of the Rich. Said differently, this still is the Middle Ages and the one or two percent are still treating all the rest of us like cattle. We pay the taxes, we fight the wars (see any Bush's in Iraq?), and we clean their commodes. Here's just one of thousands of examples: in the last few years, Texas energy company profits of gone up SEVERAL HUNDRED percent. How are you doing at the pumps these days?
So, deep in the onion is a Class War, and boy are the middle and lower Classes getting slaughtered!
Lastly, where in the onion is hard evidence that things like global warming, expanding ozone holes, stifled medical research, etc., etc., are directly related to policies engineered by nutcase religious fanatics who actually WANT the Earth to die? Let's face it, George's Armageddon death wish is right there in that army of brain less religious fanatics who anticipate being "lifted up" any day now. Yeah, right. The point is, the rapturettes have made their choice, and it's ain't the Earth. The Earth is precisely what they can't wait to be "saved" from. Mother Nature for these people is not a mythological goddess, she's a whore to be used and abused.
And speaking of which, isn't it interesting that this whole complex of pug fundamentalists have so much contempt for anything feminine, e.g., "Mother" Nature. No, they like that 'ol time (male) religion that has always subjugated and exploited women.
Here's a final thought. What do you bet that somewhere in this filthy onion is organized crime? We shouldn't forget that the more constitutional governments disintegrate (like now!), the more organized crime has a feeding frenzy. Plus, the pugs are sure plugged into Florida . . .
In his book, former CIA director says aides to Cheney and Rumsfeld inserted 'crap' into public justifications for war
By KAREN DEYOUNG Washington Post
WASHINGTON — White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11 attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George Tenet.
Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to insert "crap" into public justifications for the war. Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the administration's willingness to "mischaracterize complex intelligence information."
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat," Tenet writes in At the Center of the Storm, to be published Monday. The debate "was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did."
White House counselor Dan Bartlett Friday called Tenet a "true patriot" but disputed his conclusions, saying "the president did wrestle with those very serious questions." Responding to reports from the book in Friday's New York Times, Bartlett suggested that the former CIA director might have been unaware of all the discussions. President Bush, Bartlett said on NBC's Today Show, "weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision."
In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration in late 2000, Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention Iraq. But Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested that the outgoing Clinton administration's defense secretary, William Cohen, provide information on Iraq for Bush.
A speech by Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things, that Saddam had restarted his nuclear program and would "acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon ... perhaps within a year." Caught off-guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet says he considered confronting the vice president on the subject but did not.
"Would that have changed his future approach?" he asks. "I doubt it but I should not have let silence imply an agreement." Policy-makers, he writes, "have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts."
For the future, Tenet describes his deepest fear as "the nuclear one." He is convinced, he writes, that this is where Osama bin Laden "and his operatives desperately want to go. They understand that bombings by cars, trucks, trains and planes will get them some headlines, to be sure. But if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history."
The book breaks Tenet's long public silence since he resigned in June 2004 over what he considered White House attempts to turn him into a scapegoat, as U.S. efforts in Iraq were bogging down, for the faulty intelligence used to justify the invasion in the first place.
Tenet writes that Bush talked him out of resigning in May 2003. But he decided it was time to go nine months later when a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward quoted him as telling Bush in December 2002 that the intelligence case against Iraq was a "slam dunk," a statement he says was taken out of context but subsequently used by the administration to blame him for faulty Iraq intelligence. "I couldn't quit immediately over something that appeared in a book," Tenet writes, "but I didn't see any way I could or should stay on much longer." Bush made no attempt to keep him when he finally resigned in June 2004.
Tenet blames himself, among other things, for the hastily compiled October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, issued on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing the war. The NIE, he said, "should have been initiated earlier. I didn't think one was necessary. I was wrong." The document, he acknowledged, was "not cautious in key judgments" and at times used single sources who turned out to be wrong.
A perennial problem, he writes, was a tendency by intelligence analysts to assume other people thought like they did. When judging whether Saddam was lying when he said Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, "we did not account for ... the mind set never to show weakness in a very dangerous neighborhood."
One of the "lowest moments of my seven-year tenure," Tenet recalls, was when a congressman told him in a public hearing in the spring of 2004 that "we depended on you, and you let us down."
He titles one chapter of the 549-page book "Missed Opportunities," but Tenet misses few opportunities himself to settle scores with Cheney and Rumsfeld and their top aides, and with Bush's first-term national security adviser and current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. He characterizes Rice as a "remote" figure who "knew the president's mind well but tended to stay out of policy fights." Under Rice, he says, the National Security Council failed to explore options and reach consensus. Rumsfeld, he says, refused to recognize worsening reality in Iraq and on several occasions undercut CIA efforts with cavalier treatment of secret information.
By contrast, Tenet's treatment of Bush, who presented Tenet with a Medal of Freedom six months after his departure, is relatively gentle. He says he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed. "The president was not well served," he says by way of example, "because the NSC became too deferential to a postwar strategy that was not working."
Tenet writes defensively about the controversial program to intercept domestic telephone calls involving terrorism suspects. The program was Cheney's idea, and the vice president briefed "the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees 12 times prior to its public disclosure" in late 2005.
He reiterates a claim last year by Bush that the CIA's harsh interrogations of captured al-Qaida figures "helped disrupt plots aimed at locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia." He says the agency used "the most aggressive" techniques — which he does not detail — on "a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet" and that the questioning was "carefully monitored at all times to ensure the safety of the prisoner."
The casus belli for “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the invasion of Iraq, was a fraud. We know that now. Even though there was no threat whatever to the United States from Iraq, the decision was made by Richard Cheney in consultation with his junior associate, George W. Bush, to invade and occupy Iraq, a country which had been decimated by an economic embargo and whose army had been cut by two-thirds since 1991. Once the predatory decision had been made, it was necessary to fabricate a plausible justification for it, to “fix the intelligence around the policy”, to use the British phraseology. This required months of a carefully calibrated propaganda campaign to misinform the American public and pressure the U.S. Congress and Senate for the authorization to attack. At the UN in the Security Council, a similar mendacious strategy was underway. At the same time, the White House was suggesting that it did not actually need authorization from the Congress or the UN to initiate hostilities. Why not? Because G.W. Bush is POTUS 43, the commander-in-chief, and as such he can do as he pleases when it comes to national security affairs. The same argument will be made if and when the U.S. attacks Iran.
Let’s be clear. Oil-rich Iraq had nothing to do with the national security of the United States. From the very start, going back to Saddam’s attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was and remains a political football. What has been done to Iraq by successive Administrations in the name of the American people--beginning with H.W. Bush and “Operation Desert Storm” in 1991 and continuing with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and the murderous economic sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990’s, and highlighted by the bizarre 1998 “Iraq Liberation Act” of Congress, which passed 360-38 in the House of Representatives and by unanimous consent in the Senate, and finally in 2003, the invasion of Iraq itself, endorsed by the Democratic leadership on Capital Hill--all of this was based upon American domestic politics and constant pressure from the U.S. Israel Lobby, and not on the legitimate national security concerns of the the United States. What is happening now in 2007 is more of the same, to wit, more politics: the Democrats, many of whom were cheerleaders for the war when it began, are trying to make whatever political mileage they can from the obvious disaster this war has become. There are some intellectually honest individuals, like Congressman John Murtha and Senator Chuck Hagel, but they are the exceptions.
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and what is left of his dwindling gang of “neocons” want to attack Iran, in a last gasp of recklessness and myopia. Bush Jr. is on board, as before, for reasons which remain unclear and unimportant. But the scenario employed to take out Iraq will not work. Why not? Because Cheney and Bush have been exposed as duplicitous. They have hardly an ounce of credibility left. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” has degenerated into a nightmare and many of the “neocon” operatives who carried it out from the Pentagon and from the White House have wisely fled the scene of the crime. One of them, I. “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff as well as a counselor to the President, has been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with covering up the White House disinformation campaign. In short, the same dog won’t hunt.
Still, attacking Iran is on Tel Aviv’s wish list, as clearly evidenced by AIPAC’s “Policy Conferences” in Washington from the last 3 or 4 years, so something has to be worked out before Cheney and Bush leave office. Actually, the situation is not looking all that bad on Capital Hill for reinstating “the clash of civilizations”, despite the Iraq fiasco. The me-too Democrats, in particular those running for President in 2008, and especially the Republicans running for President, are on record that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Iran. To translate, under the right circumstances, Democratic leaders, and all Presidential contenders, will go along with a U.S. attack on Iran. It just requires the right setup. The White House has only to prepare the bogus circumstances, like it did prior to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Fine and dandy. Once again, the Democrats are enabling Cheney and Bush to launch another unprovoked war. It was your country.
But there may be an unforeseen problem for the war party. Two months ago, on April 25th, the London Sunday Times reported (”US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack” by Michael Smith & Sarah Baxter) that a handful of generals and admirals would not obey White House orders to attack Iran, but would resign in the face of such an order. This is astonishing and unprecedented, if true. It appears that a significant number of U.S. military officers have concluded that the two gentlemen in charge at the White House are not playing with a full deck. What does it mean for the warmongers? How will the White House, in cooperation with their “neocon” brain trust, railroad America into another unnecessary war? The largely overlooked and unheralded article in the London Sunday Times provides a good clue. “A second US navy aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS John C Stennis arrived in the Gulf last week, doubling the US presence there. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the US Fifth Fleet, warned: ‘The US will take military action if ships are attacked or if countries in the region are targeted or US troops come under direct attack.’” Read that again. The scenario is in place.
Taking the vice admiral’s statement at face value, this indicates that the White House has ordered the U.S. fleet to attack Iran in the event Iran takes action against any country in the region. An instant war trigger. No need for Congress to act. The me-too Democrats and the brain dead Republicans can relax, sit back and enjoy it. There is no alliance, formal or informal, and no treaty which would require the U.S. to attack Iran in the event Iran “targets” other countries in the region. The only reason Iran would target anybody would be in the event Iran had been targeted first, and Iran was attempting to launch a counter-attack, in other words, defending itself. Get the drift? It is entirely possible that a nuclear-armed Tel Aviv, acting “on its own” but in coordination with Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams, David Wurmser and maybe even with George W. Bush, will initiate hostilities with a bombing run and/or cruise missile attack on Iran. Then, as soon as Iran attempts to react, Iran will get clobbered with a massive “shock and awe” blitzkrieg carried out by the U.S. air force and navy, which attack will virtually destroy the Iranian military and the Iranian nuclear energy program as well. The final mission accomplished. Cheney and Bush will be back on top in Washington. The shameful and shameless me-too Democrats will be out maneuvered yet again. Life is beautiful. The revenge of the neocons will be complete.
Saudi Terror Plot Averted State Dept.: Terrorism up 30%
Condi Rice wanted to delay the news, but it has broken on two fronts.
Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy report that the annual State Department on terrorism will report a nearly 30% rise over the previous year, most of it accounted for by attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In other words Cheney has it exactly backwards. The US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not preventing or lessening it. "They" won't follow us home if we leave. But they might if we don't.
WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.
The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.
“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.
A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.
“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.
It’s astonishing that members of Congress are either unaware George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied the nation into war with Iraq, or they are aware of the fact and don’t care. A Congress grounded in reality would have unequivocally acknowledged the administration’s lies long ago and taken appropriate action -- almost certainly impeachment.
If we say the pre-war lies don’t matter and the country should sweep them under the rug and only focus on the best way out of Iraq, what we’re really saying is that the truth itself doesn’t matter. If we say we should look away from the fact that thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died for a lie, we’re saying the lost lives don’t matter, the war-injured and maimed don’t matter, America’s honor and integrity don’t matter.
The logic-free anti-impeachment excuse is that the nation can’t handle running the country and impeachment simultaneously. John Nichols wrote in The Nation recently, “[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi fears that impeachment would distract from the Democratic legislative agenda and provoke an electoral backlash.”
However, the bottom line is the country can’t afford to let Bush and Cheney get away with deceiving us into a costly and bloody war. Decisions on a matter of this weight shouldn’t be based on fear, whether fear of an impeded agenda or threat of backlash.
According to Nichols, such fears are unwarranted. He mentions the Watergate Congress was able to carry out a complex agenda in addition to conducting impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Nichols also points out that “Democrats had one of their best years ever at the polls after pressuring Nixon out of office.”
The public would likely reward congressional Democrats for their courage if they impeached Bush and Cheney. Impeachment proceedings will shed additional light on the administration’s malfeasance, and the increased exposure would likely cause the country to support the Democrats’ efforts.
Though Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) filed articles of impeachment against Cheney on April 25, he hasn’t gained support from certain members of Congress. According to an article by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer declined to support Kucinich’s efforts. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic caucus, said, “Dennis can do what he wants; I’m not going to support it.”
It’s ironic that Kucinich is dismissed while Hoyer and Emanuel are actually the ones with the frivolous position. What could be more superficial and feckless than Hoyer’s and Emanuel’s writing off the idea of impeachment without first examining the abundant evidence for it?
The case for impeaching Bush and Cheney has already been made by prominent public figures, including former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. In a January 2006 article for The Nation, Holtzman says, “A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war.”
Holtzman continues, “Given that the consequences can be death for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people -- as well as the diversion of vast sums of money to the war effort -- the fraud cannot be tolerated.” Members of Congress should read the entire Holtzman article.
Impeachment opponents say Bush and Cheney haven’t committed documented impeachable offenses. However, Michael Schudson writes in Watergate In American Memory, “A president can be impeached not only for directly engaging in criminal acts but for failing to fulfill his oath of office, failing to see in good faith that the laws of the land are executed. There is no legal ‘bar’ to interpreting impeachment in this light.”
Any member of Congress who doubts the Bush administration lied and fixed the intelligence around the Iraq policy should read the many books and articles which detail the deceptions. In Worse Than Watergate, John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon says, “The evidence is overwhelming, certainly sufficient for a prima facie case, that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have engaged in deceit and deception over going to war in Iraq. This is an impeachable offense.”
Dean states, “Bush deliberately violated the very authorization he sought from Congress, which was not merely a serious breach of faith with a trusting Congress, but a statutory and constitutional crime.” He reminds us that Bush lied to Congress at a classified briefing when he claimed Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and was able to use them, via unmanned drone aircraft, against the United States.
According to Dean, at a congressional leadership meeting on October 3, 2002, Bush falsely claimed Saddam’s regime had the ability and materials needed to build nuclear weapons. Dean also notes that Bush deceived Congress in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address when he falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.
Peter Eisner is a veteran foreign correspondent and is currently an editor at the Washington Post. Recently he discussed his book, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, in a Democracy Now broadcast with interviewer Amy Goodman.
Goodman asked about the CIA’s role regarding the misleading Niger claim. Eisner said, “The CIA actually had attempted to block the statement . . . There was quite an argument between lower CIA officials and White House staff . . . Finally, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, had to intercede on October 7 and demand that the White House remove the sentence describing uranium purchases in Niger.”
However, Bush did include the sentence in his address. He omitted any mention of U.S. intelligence reports, saying only that the information came from British intelligence. During the interview with Eisner, Amy Goodman aired a portion of her earlier Democracy Now interview with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Well before the State of the Union, Wilson had told the CIA the British reports weren’t reliable.
Wilson said Bush referred to British intelligence and left out reference to U.S. intelligence, because the CIA had refuted the claim. He adds, “So there was real deception there. This was not just an accident. This was not a slip of the tongue. These were people who wanted to put something in there that was actually deceptive to the U.S. Congress and to the American people.”
Goodman returned to the discussion with Eisner and asked whether Congress might later consider impeachment. He responded, “What do we know that President Bush himself knew about this, and what do we know the Vice President knew . . . Of all people, Vice President Cheney is not just some latter-day vice president that had no relationship to the intelligence community.”
Eisner added, “[Cheney] was considered one of the most minute analysts of information that was coming in. He knew more than many other people that Italian military intelligence was providing this information, and he also knew there were highly placed doubts about all of the information . . . So there’s a lot of investigation to be done, subpoenas to be issued, before I would know enough to talk about impeachment.”
The investigation and subpoenas should go forward, and Congress shouldn’t let administration officials get away with evading the subpoenas or whitewashing and covering up the facts. Given the vast amount of evidence on public record and easily available to Congress, it’s likely that any honest, rigorous investigation would lead to impeachment.
Though impeachment isn’t the focus of his book, David Corn lists dozens of Bush’s and Cheney’s serious deceptions in The Lies of George W. Bush.The information in this book alone would give any member of Congress ample reason to issue subpoenas and follow up with impeachment proceedings.
Corn makes it clear the Bush administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq and lied about and fixed the intelligence. He describes how Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union Address, falsely implied that U.N. inspectors believed Iraq had large amounts of WMD.
Instead, U.N. inspectors expressed doubt, stating they had dismantled Iraq’s key weapons-making facilities and destroyed most existing WMD. Corn refers to a September 2002 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The document said: “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare production facilities.”
In conclusion, Corn says it was obvious Bush had “misinformed -- if not misled -- his own country and the world. It was undeniable that he had launched a war on the basis of false assertions . . . George W. Bush had also provided the entire world with good reason to doubt the word of America. And that was unlikely to make the nation safer.”
Many Americans act as if we’re aware the administration deceived us into invading Iraq, while others, including some in Congress, operate as if they fail to see that reality. Those who don’t or won’t see and respond to what actually happened are living in a make-believe state of mind, a form of denial that resembles a psychotic break with reality.
Burying the pre-war lies under the rug harms this country on many levels. The national pretending is disturbing, because Bush’s and Cheney’s pre-war fabrications aren’t just any lies; they’re lies that led to, and continue to cause, widespread loss of life and limb, not only for Americans, but also for soldiers of other nationalities and for Iraqi civilians.
Congress’s failure to confront the untruths that led to the death and bloodshed dishonors those who suffered and died for the lies. When people acknowledge on some occasions that Bush and Cheney lied us into war, yet at other times act as if the lies never happened, they have one foot in reality and the other in a world of make-believe.
Many members of Congress, the media and the American public float along day to day, pretending the administration has been truthful, behaving as if nothing can be done to set right the fact that we were lied into war. How did we get to the point where vast numbers of citizens turn a blind eye by choice?
Imagine American streets filled with the blood of the war’s victims, citizens moving forward doggedly, smiling vacantly, with self-centered plans and agendas, oblivious to the wet red substance. This is America today, sloshing through knee-deep blood in the land of make-believe, living in heart crushing denial about gravely significant events.
A nation that doesn’t care enough about the truth to investigate tenaciously and impeach Bush and Cheney if the probe warrants, is a nation divorced from reality and conscience. No fear-based or politically expedient excuse could possibly justify Congress’s hesitating to pursue this issue in a sober, principled and timely manner.
Onetime CIA analyst alleges Cheney, Libby lied to Congress about Pakistani nukes