As CIA leak probe passes Rove, Cheney is eyed

As CIA leak probe passes Rove, Cheney is eyed, lawyer says

RAW STORY

Excerpted to highlight Cheney's role from an article Saturday in the New York Times. The Times' reporters remark: "Ms. Miller's grand jury appearance increased anxiety in the White House and throughout Republican circles about how the investigation might end.

A lawyer who knows Mr. Libby's account said the administration efforts to limit the damage from Mr. Wilson's criticism extended as high as Mr. Cheney. This lawyer and others who spoke about the case asked that they not be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules.

On July 12, 2003, four days after his initial conversation with Ms. Miller, Mr. Libby consulted with Mr. Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president's role in sending Mr. Wilson to Africa in early 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq was trying acquire nuclear material there for its weapons program, the person said.

In that account, Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby to direct reporters to a statement released the previous day by George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence. His statement said Mr. Wilson had been sent on the mission by C.I.A. counter-proliferation officers "on their own initiative."

Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, saying that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," and that his mission to Africa had been set in motion because of questions that Mr. Cheney's office had put to the C.I.A. The account, which Mr. Libby has provided to the grand jury, portrays his conversations with journalists as intended not to leak Ms. Wilson's name or to smear Mr. Wilson, but to distance the vice president from the criticism raised by Mr. Wilson.

A spokesman for Mr. Cheney, Stephen E. Schmidt, said he could not comment because of the inquiry.

The investigation has found that at least two senior White House officials, Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush's political strategist, spoke with reporters about Mr. Wilson's wife and her employment at the intelligence agency in the week after the publication of the Op-Ed article. People who have been briefed on their accounts have said the officials did not know of Ms. Wilson's status and did not supply journalists her name.

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Scooter-gate- by Justin Raimondo klvnetacom
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October 3, 2005
Scooter-gate - A criminal conspiracy
by Justin Raimondo

It isn't generally known that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff – now revealed as New York Times reporter Judith Miller's source in the Plame affair – is a novelist, as well as a policymaker. Aside from being a co-author of the Bush administration's narrative of "weapons of mass destruction" and Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda – a story that turned out to be a fable – he is also the author of The Apprentice, published in 1996, a novel set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese war. Unlike Lynn Cheney and Richard Perle, whose literary efforts in this vein have garnered less than stellar reviews, Libby appears to have some genuine talent as a fabulist. "As a work of prose, The Apprentice is easily the best of all neoconservative novels ever written," writes the journalist Jeet Heer, adding: "A dismal compliment, you could say, given the competition. Still, Libby has written a strong first novel that convincingly re-creates an exotic world." Since becoming the vice president's chief adviser and confidante, however, Libby has had little time to indulge his artistic imagination. In a profile of Libby published in the National Journal at the beginning of Bush's first term, he said:

"I try to stay up somewhat with fiction. I am looking forward to writing again some day. But the job is pretty demanding, and I haven't been progressing very far on the next novel."

It could be that Libby will have plenty of time to work on his next novel in the very near future – that is, if federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has anything to say about it. A stretch in prison could very well give Libby the space to hone his literary talent and fulfill his promise as the foremost neocon novelist – a possibility that seems increasingly likely.

Now that Libby has been identified as Ms. Miller's source, the focus in the investigation into who "outed" CIA agent Valerie Plame has shifted from Miller and Bush adviser Karl Rove to one of the most powerful men in Washington: "Libby Is to Cheney What Cheney Is to Bush," as a recent Washington Post headline put it. "Plame-gate" – always a bit of an awkward phrase, and not that descriptive, in any case – has now become Scooter-gate, which, you'll have to agree, is a much more mellifluous and catchy all-purpose rubric for Fitzgerald's ever widening investigation, which now seems to be reaching its dramatic climax.

In a denouement worthy of a good novel, prosecutor Fitzgerald is getting ready to wind up his probe and either decline to press any charges – unlikely, but within the realm of the remotely possible – or start issuing indictments. If the latter, then the indictments are likely to fly fast and furious, as this widely discussed clip from a Washington Post story would indicate:

"A new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose."

"A criminal conspiracy" – but what was its purpose? Aside from sliming former U.S. diplomat Joseph S. Wilson, who had the temerity to debunk the most egregious of the administration's tall tales of Iraqi WMD, and outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, that is.

The characters in this Washington drama share a single characteristic, and it isn't just that they all appear to be inveterate liars: the major players in this case were part of the campaign of deception that lured us into Iraq and dropped us into the middle of a maelstrom from which there seems to be no escape. Ms. Miller's "reporting" on Iraq's alleged WMD required a retraction and apology from the editors of the New York Times: it appears she was using the front page of that venerable paper to broadcast the same sort of propaganda one might expect in the pages of the New York Post or the Weekly Standard.

Scooter was at the epicenter of this threatening storm of misinformation, which eventually reached Katrina-esque proportions in its intensity: he and his boss were pushing hard on the CIA to come up with the evidence of Saddam's WMD in order to justify an invasion. They both personally visited CIA analysts at Langley and berated them for not coming up with the goods; when the spooks demurred, they did an end-run around the intelligence community, setting up what Mother Jones magazine has called "the lie factory."

This is the criminal conspiracy Fitzgerald has set about uncovering. It isn't about Karl Rove, as I said months ago; it isn't about a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, as I maintained from the beginning. It's about how a small group of government officials, in tandem with their overseas allies, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to falsify "intelligence" – and, in the process, lie the nation into war.

The event that ostensibly precipitated Fitzgerald's probe – the publication of Valerie Plame's name in a column by Robert Novak published in the Chicago Sun-Times – has garnered the lion's share of media attention, but Fitzgerald's concerns appear to have extended way beyond this starting point. As the Washington Post reported back in July:

"Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed."

From the possible violation of a law that had only been successfully prosecuted on a single occasion, and for which the penalty is a few years in the hoosegow and a hefty but payable fine, the investigation morphed into a probe of one of the most baffling mysteries of recent times: how did the White House fall for the Niger uranium forgeries, crude fabrications of documents that purported to show Saddam's Iraq was trying to procure fissionable uranium – yellowcake – from the African nation of Niger? It only took the International Atomic Energy Agency a few hours with Google to debunk this "evidence" of Iraq's efforts to build nukes, yet somehow the infamous 16 words pinpointing "Africa" as the site of Iraq's supposed violation made it into the president's 2003 State of the Union address. Who snookered the White House?

The idea that a special prosecutor was appointed, and an 18-month investigation launched, solely because Joe Wilson's wife was out of a job never made much sense. The outing of a CIA agent was only the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, the latest in a series of incidents that underscored a gaping hole in our national security defenses. The outing of Plame – an act of utter disdain for the country, and provocative in itself – provided investigators, already hot on the trail of possible treason in high places, with an opening to make their inquiry public. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald had a bone to pick with the neocons, and once he got his teeth into it he wasn't going to let go.

Many are wondering why Miller went to jail rather than utilize the waiver Libby's lawyer now says was given her months ago. The reason is because Floyd Abrams, her lawyer, insisted on gaining a key concession from Fitzgerald: that he would limit his questioning to Miller's conversations with Libby.

This narrowing condition was essential if Miller was going to continue to protect her other friends. Miller was at the center of the propaganda campaign that suckered us into war. As the War Party's major megaphone in the American media, retailing the tall tales spun by the INC and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Miller is a fitting martyr for the neocon cause: self-promoting, shameless, and an accomplished liar on a grand scale, she masquerades as the upholder of freedom – the "freedom" of journalists to protect government insiders engaged in criminal actions that can only be described as treasonous.
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