Exclusive: Cheney’s admissions to the CIA leak prosecutor and FBI

Murray Waas reports:

"Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer...."

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Technorati tags: Murray Waas, CIA Leak Case, Plamegate, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby

Amy Goodman calls out Pelosi

Cheney, Bush and Habbush
By Amy Goodman (Truthdig) :

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on a book tour in which she is being hounded by activists and questioned about her declaration that “impeachment is off the table.” She responded on the TV talk show “The View,” “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind may have provided the evidence she doesn’t want to see. Suskind has just published a book called “The Way of the World.” He makes an explosive charge: that the Bush administration instructed the CIA to forge a letter that would support its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to al-Qaida. He also charged that the person whose name is on the forged letter, the former head of Iraqi intelligence, the man who was the jack of diamonds in the U.S. military’s “most wanted” deck of cards, Tahir Jalil Habbush, was given $5 million in hush money.

[...]

...The upcoming presidential conventions will be filled with vague promises of change. Congress should prove it and fully investigate Cheney, Bush and Habbush."

Technorati tags: Amy Goodman, Truthdig, Nancy Pelosi, Ron Suskind, "The Way of the World", Habbush, al-Qaida, Bush, Cheney, CIA, Impeachment

The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?

Ron Suskind reports:

"What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way..."

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Technorati tags: Ron Suskind, Forged Iraqi Letter, Saddam Hussein, CIA, George Tenet, Iraq, Iraq war, WMD, Politics, Bush, Bush administration, Politics of Fear

The only way to stop this is impeachment.

NY Times Editorial:

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

¶ Waterboarding.

¶ Using military working dogs.

¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

¶ Conducting mock executions.

¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons....

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Technorati tags: Bush, New York Times, op ed, Torture, CIA, Intelligence Agencies, veto

Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair

The film below has won numerous awards and critical acclaim:

The Los Angeles Times calls Coverup "chillingly lucid and consistent." The Chicago Tribune says It Is "calm, coherent and persuasive...." while the Denver Post calls It "a challenging piece, very much worth seeing, no matter what your politics."

"Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair is the third feature-length documentary produced by the Empowerment Project.

The shadow government of assassins, arms dealers, drug smugglers, former CIA operatives and top US military personnel who were running foreign policy unaccountable to the public, revealing the Reagan/Bush administration's plan to use FEMA to institute martial law and ultimately suspend the Constitution. Strikingly relevant to current events."

Coverup exposes several of the most disturbing chapters in the history of U.S. covert foreign policy. It presents a tale of politics, drugs, hostages, weapons, assassinations, covert operations and the ultimate plan to suspend the U.S.Constitution. Coverup was the first film to reveal the 'October Surprise' hostage deal (the Reagan/Bush campaigndeal with Iran to delay the release of the 52 American hostages until after the 1980 election), and is the only film which presents a comprehensive overview of the most important stories suppressed during the Iran Contra hearings. It is the only film that puts the entire Iran Contra affair into a meaningful political and historical context. The 1988 film is updated with information from recent court cases and events, reconfirming much of the material presented.

Coverup won the American Film & Video Association, Blue Ribbon Award for Best Documentary. Social Issues;National Education Film & Video Festival, Crystal Apple for Best Documentary, Social & Political Issues; Golden HugoBest Independent Video, Chicago International Film Festival; the Prix Du Public for Best Documentary. Women's International Film Festival (Films DC Femmes, Paris, France); Gold Award for Best Video Documentary, Philadelphia International Film Festival Int'l Assn. of Motion Pictures & TV Producers).

Technorati tags: Iran, Iran-Contra, Bush, Reagan, Coverup, CIA, Shadow government, US Military, Martial Law, FEMA

Oh Those Pesky Missing Whitehouse E-mails...

Peter Yost reports:

"Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

The gaps — 473 days over a period of 20 months — are cited in a chart prepared by White House computer technicians and shared in September with the House Reform and Government Oversight Committee, which has been looking into reports of missing e-mail.

Among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney's office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney's chief of staff.

Contents of the chart — which the White House now disputes — were disclosed Thursday by Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the House committee, as he announced plans for a Feb. 15 hearing.

Waxman said he decided to release details from the White House-prepared chart after presidential spokesman Tony Fratto declared 'we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.'"

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Photo Credit: Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. is shown in this 2006 file photo on Capitol Hill in Washington. Waxman said a White House spokesman's statements Thursday in the controversy over missing e-mail conflict with what congressional staffers were told four months ago. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke, FILE)

Technorati tags: White House, CIA, CIA Leak Investigation, Plamegate, Cheney, Bush

No Wonder Impeachment is Off The Table

Bipartisan Brutality: Senior Dems Also Got Sneak Peak at Waterbording in 2002

Melissa McEwan: Democrats have also been engaging in quite the charade with their supposed outrage about the Bush administration's torture policy.

"It's bad enough when an opposition party merely fails to effectively oppose, or when they are give tacit approval to a criminally corrupt majority party's radical policies with passive indifference, but when they are active supporters of extremist departures from the nation's most basic principles, they make themselves complicit in the coup by a thousand cuts. Per Lambert, no wonder Pelosi took impeachment off the table....

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Technorati tags: Democratic Party, CIA, Jay Rockefeller, Torture, Nancy Pelosi

Unfit to Serve

Olbermann: "You, Mr. Bush, are a bald faced liar."

"A Special Comment about the President’s cataclysmic deception about Iran."



Trouble viewing this video? CLICK HERE.

For a complete transcript CLICK HERE.

Technorati tags: Keith Olbermann, Bush, Iran, CIA, Youtube, video

The C.I.A. Report

The New York Times reports: :

"The C.I.A. inspector general's report on the agency's failures before Sept. 11 was devastating-- but not because it showed that America's spies missed the rise of Al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the 'war' with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president's closest advisers to agitate for a strike on a Qaeda base in Afghanistan.

The disturbing thing was that this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job (through such innovative antiterrorism measures as naming the C.I.A.'s Langley, Va., headquarters for Mr. Bush's father).

The Bush team was so busy in 2001 trying to upend America’s global relationships according to a neo-conservative agenda that the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, did not see any urgency in reports that Al Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States...."

Technorati tags: New York Times, Iraq, George Tenet, CIA, Bill Clinton, Bush, op ed

CIA Analyst Discusses Possible Cheney 9/11 Stand-down Order.

Retired CIA Analyst Ray McGovern discusses the possibility of vice president Cheney issuing a stand-down order that allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed, on a national talk radio program.



Thanks to OpenYourMindsEye for the original post.

Technorati tags: Ray McGovern, CIA, 9/11, Cheney, Conspiracies, news, video

West Will Fail, Says Ex-CIA Operative

Sarah Smiles and Brendan Nicholson report for theage.com.au:

AS PESSIMISM grows in the US about Iraq, the American commander there has warned that the war will take many years to win and a former top CIA officer has told a Sydney conference that defeat is inevitable in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit until 2004, said the West was losing the global battle against Muslim insurgents....

Photo Credit: Former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. (Andrew Meares/theage.com.au)

Technorati tags: CIA, Michael Scheuer, Iraq, War on Terror, news

As If We Didn't Know ...

Before War, CIA Warned of Negative Outcomes

"Analysts in 2002 Described Worst-Case Scenarios, Including Anarchy in Iraq, Global Antipathy to U.S.," reports Walter Pincus for the Washington Post.

"On Aug. 13, 2002, the CIA completed a classified, six-page intelligence analysis that described the worst scenarios that could arise after a U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein: anarchy and territorial breakup in Iraq, a surge of global terrorism, and a deepening of Islamic antipathy toward the United States.

Titled "The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq," the paper, written seven months before the war began, also speculated about al-Qaeda operatives taking "advantage of a destabilized Iraq to establish secure safe havens from which they can continue their operations," according to a report about prewar intelligence recently released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...."

Technorati tags: Iraq, CIA, Washington Post, Walter Pincus, Bush, news

Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran

It just keeps getting worse ...

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report for abcnews.com:

"The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert 'black' operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a 'nonlethal presidential finding' that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

'I can't confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,' said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region.

[...]

'I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,' said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,' Nasr said...."

Technorati tags: ABC News, Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, Iran, Covert Operation, CIA, Bush, news

The Center Of Tenet's Book: Lies

"If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied."
—Rudyard Kipling

By Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com

Must Read: An in-depth look at why the former CIA director deserves jail, not a microphone.

Technorati tags: Ray McGovern, George Tenet, TomPaine.com, CIA, Iraq, news

Slam's Silence

Better Never Than Late
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Instead of George Tenet teaching at Georgetown University, George Tenet should be taught at Georgetown University.

There should be a course on government called “The Ultimate Staff Guy.” A morality saga about how much harm you can do as a go-along, get-along guy, spending so much time trying not to alienate the big cheese so he doesn’t can you that you miss the moment where you have to can him or lose your soul.

If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.

It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naïve president into invading Iraq with junk facts.

General Powell counted on Slam Dunk — a slender reed — to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage Mr. Cheney’s office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public.

Slam Dunk’s book tour is mesmerizing, in a horrifying way.

“The irony of the whole situation is, is he was bluffing,” Slam said of Saddam on “Larry King Live” on Monday night, adding, “And he didn’t know we weren’t.” Mr. He-Man Tenet didn’t understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn’t take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?

If he was really running around with his hair on fire, knowing the Osama danger, shouldn’t he have set off alarms when W. and Vice went after Saddam instead of the real threat?

Many people in Washington snorted at his dramatic cloak-and-dagger description of himself to Larry King: “I worked in the shadows my whole life.”

He was not Jason Bourne, lurking in dangerous locales. He risked life and limb on Capitol Hill among the backstabbers and cutthroat bureaucrats — from whom he obviously learned a lot. He spent nine years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, four as staff director. When Bill Clinton appointed him to run the C.I.A. in 1997, the profile of him in The Times was headlined “A Time to Reap the Rewards of Being Loyal.” It observed that old colleagues had said “he had an ability to make many different superiors feel at ease with him.”

Six former C.I.A. officials sent Mr. Tenet a letter via his publisher — no wonder we’re in trouble if spooks can’t figure out the old Head Spook’s home address — berating him for pretending he wrote his self-serving book partly to defend the honor of the agency and demanding that “at least half” of the profits be given to wounded soldiers and the families of dead soldiers (there needs to be a Son of Slam law). One of the signers, Larry Johnson, told CNN that Slam “is profiting from the blood of American soldiers.”

“By your silence you helped build the case for war,” the former C.I.A. officials wrote. “You betrayed the C.I.A. officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.”

They also said, “Although C.I.A. officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. ...

“In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence.” They concluded that “your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. ... It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated.”

Thus endeth the lesson in our class on “The Ultimate Staff Guy.” If you have something deadly important to say, say it when it matters, or just shut up and slink off.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, CIA, US Foreign Policy, Bush, George Tenet, Colin Powell, news, commentary, op ed

The Whiny Fall Guy

More Like an Air Ball
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Poor Slam-Dunk.

Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused. Slam-Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam’s W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let’s go to war.

No matter how eager Slam-Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing W.’s shoes, that intelligence they craved did not exist. “Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11,” the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled “At the Center of the Storm.” Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.

The president and vice president wanted Slam-Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in! That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was “essentially a marketing meeting,” Slam-Dunk writes, just for “sharpening the arguments.”

Hey, I feel better.

Slam-Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy’s guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi.

He says Condi panicked in October 2002 and made him call a Times reporter, Alison Mitchell, who covered the Congressional debate about invading Iraq. He told Alison to ignore the conclusions of his own agency, which had said the links between Saddam and terrorist groups were tenuous, and that Saddam would only take the extreme step of joining with Islamic fanatics if he thought the U.S. was about to attack him. His nose growing as long as his cigar, he said nothing in the C.I.A. report contradicted the president’s case for war.

“In retrospect,” Slam writes, “I shouldn’t have talked to the New York Times reporter at Condi’s request. By making public comments in the middle of a contentious political debate, I gave the impression that I was becoming a partisan player.”

Can’t a guy be a lickspittle without being an ideologue?

There were so many nasties trying to push Slam around: Vice, of course, and Wolfie, and Wolfie’s neoconcubine Doug Feith. Once, Slam writes, Wolfie “hounded” a C.I.A. briefer to translate the diary of Abu Zubaydah, a captured Al Qaeda official, even though the C.I.A. had decided it was just misogynistic ramblings “about what he wanted to do with women.” Oh, that sexy beast Wolfie. Look out, Shaha!

But even though he was paid a $4 million advance to settle scores, Slam can’t turn on W. Maybe it’s the Medal of Freedom. “In a way, President Bush and I are much alike,” he writes. “We sometimes say things from our gut, whether it’s his ‘bring ’em on’ or my ‘slam-dunk.’ I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him.” (He had me at “slam-dunk.”)

The worst meanie was horrid Bob Woodward. Slam socialized with Bob and gave him lots of intel for his best sellers, but then Bob “painted a caricature of me leaping into the air and simulating a slam-dunk, not once but twice, with my arms flailing. Credit Woodward’s source with ... a fine sense of how to make me look ridiculous, but don’t credit him or her with a deep sense of obligation to the truth.”

A deep sense of obligation to the truth is something Slam keenly understands, even though he scurried around like the butler in “Remains of the Day,” trying to toadie up to the president while, as he belatedly admits, W. was going to invade Iraq without debate or casus belli.

He says he warned Paul Bremer about de-Baathifying the Iraqi Army, but hey, he was just a staff guy. That’s probably how the two worst intelligence disasters in our history happened on his watch. He was merely providing intelligence for the guys who wanted to ignore or warp that intelligence and make bad policy. What could he do?

Slam says he was Cassandra. A C.I.A. paper was given to the president’s national security team in September 2002 tot sum up the possible negatives of invading Iraq, including anarchy and a breakup in Iraq, instability in the neighborhood, a surge of terrorism against U.S. interests, oil disruptions, and seething allies.

But it was discreetly tucked away in the back of the briefing book, after the stuff at the beginning about how great it would be to liberate Iraq and end threats to Iraq’s neighbors, and the stuff in the middle about reforming Iraq’s bureaucracy.

Slam gives tips to others who want to engage in public service, including: Don’t forget that there are no private conversations, even in the Oval Office. Another might be: If you worry about your own survival more than your country’s, you might end up as the whiny fall guy.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, CIA, US Foreign Policy, Bush, George Tenet, news, commentary, op ed

Forging the Case for War

Philip Giraldi asks:

"Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?"

Our 27 Months of Hell

Joseph C. Wilson , the diplomat whose wife's name was leaked by Bush administration officials, makes his case for feeling vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Wilson goes on to describe the, "two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me."

All the Vice President's Men

More facts and intrigue surrounding the Plame investigation from Juan Cole:

"The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is blowing up in their faces."

Who's on First?

You can always rely on Maureen Dowd to cut to the chase:

"The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the CIA, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The CIA, after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.

The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney's poker face has finally met its match - was whether this stops at Scooter."