Obstruction of justice. A larger number of people are coming to understand that if Bush lied to a prosecutor, we have serious grounds for impeachment. From the Vichy Democrats site:Bush refused to be sworn or, IIRC, to allow a court reporter at his meeting with Fitzgerald. But perjury isn't an element of the crime of obstruction, so being under oath is irrelevant, and Fitzgerald -- who was accompanied by "several assistants" during his 70-minute interview with the President -- unquestionably has meticulous notes, which are more than sufficient and are what most obstruction prosecutions are based on.Greg Palast expands this into a fantasia in which Fitz prepares a RICO case against Bush and Cheney, and a federal judge "impounds" the 82nd Airborne. Cute, but not bloody likely.
The NIE document. Libby claims that Bush authorized him to spill a "key judgement" of the NIE document to Judith Miller -- the part that fingered Iraq as making a vigorous effort to acquire uranium. Unfortunately, no such "key judgement" existed within that document. The CIA guys who wrote the thing have confirmed as much to the Washington Post.Yet Judy insists that Libby said the NIE "firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium" and that "the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version."
So. Bush did not just authorize a leak, he also authorized a lie. And what does poor Scotty have to say about this?
The National Intelligence Estimate is the collective judgment of the intelligence community. It served as the underlying basis for how we viewed the regime's weapons program.According to Libby and Judy, "misrepresenting the intelligence" was the entire point of the leak. But even if you stuck needles into his nipples, Scott McClellan would never admit that.
Now, an independent commission looked at all these issues and found out that the intelligence was wrong, and that's why we've taken steps to implement a bunch of reform. But at the time there were those who were making these wild accusations that we were misusing, or misrepresenting the intelligence. That's why it was in the public interest to declassify that information, because it provided important historical information.
Getting back to obstruction of justice: Can the Bushites argue that the "authorized" leak of the NIE was not part of an "authorized" campaign to discredit Joe Wilson? Right now, that's their story and they're sticking to it. That story is the only thing protecting Bush from the accusation that he gave the go order: "Sure, burn a CIA agent. Screw 'em. Serves 'em right."
We learn from Jason Leopold that Bush was in on the Plame matter early on:
In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.I've argued previously that Card, motivated by his antipathy for Rove, has been blabbing.
Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
And Libby made Joe Wilson a key topic of his June 8 disclosures to Judith Miller. Over on the Next Hurrah, emptywheel presents evidence that Libby deliberately misrepresented Wilson's findings.
Now here's an interesting bit from the Grand Jury document:
Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials – including Cabinet level officials – were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson’s trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003.What the hell is this January 24 document? I don't know. Emptywheel thinks it could be an early draft of the State of the Union address, but that suggestion doesn't feel right to me. I suspect that anyone pushing for a declassification of the Wilson report (which, despite Libby's misrepresentations to Judith Miller, did not aid W's cause) would have pushed for the simultaneous release of a document that could somehow be useful in the "get Wilson" effort.
In other words, I'm thinking that this January 24 text included the truth about Wilson's wife.
Did Libby discuss the contents of this document in any of his conversations (there were several) with Judith Miller? If so, she has never mentioned anything about it. But if he did, and if Libby sticks to his "I vas only followink or-duhs" defense, then we must blame Plame-gate on Bush himself.
Joseph Wilson spoke at California State University at Northridge last Thursday; alas, I did not find out about his appearance "in a timely fashion" (as they say in court), and was thus unable to attend. He told the students that he had tried for five months to tell the White House that the Niger uranium claim was fraudulent:
"I had direct discussions with the State Department, Senate committees," Wilson said during a speech last Thursday. "I had numerous conversations to change what they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."The Niger forgeries. Until now, I haven't discussed the conflicting and skewed information we've been getting about the origins of the fake documents. Frankly, I can't understand what the big deal is. As the La Repubblica investigation (a translation of which I published here and here) makes clear, there were two separate conspiracies involving these texts.
Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and finally decided to write an op-ed in the New York Times and expose the administration for knowingly "twisting" the intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear threat to make a case for war.
The first was a relatively unimportant, low-level conspiracy in which the shady info-peddler Rocco Martino tried to palm off the forgeries to the French, who weren't in the mood to pay good money for merde. Martino got them from his old buds in SISMI, Italian intelligence; naming the folks who cobbled the pages together is of academic interest only.
That happened in 2000.
Later -- about a month after the WTC disaster -- someone shopped the same damn fraud to the Americans, specifically to Dick Cheney and the Office of Special Plans. (They didn't bother with the CIA because they, like the French, weren't buying it.) This is the second conspiracy. La Repubblica fingers Michael Ledeen as part of the cabal which stumbled across these papers and decided to make evil use of them; Ledeen denies the accusation and has made lawsuit noises against the newspaper.
What we are seeing now is a bunch of inconsequential, trumped-up hoo-ha concerning conspiracy #1. This is all a distraction. The neocons want you to boggle your brain attempting to sort out that nonsense so that you don't pay attention to conspiracy #2.
That's the important conspiracy. The one that helped brings us to war.
The real motive? When W first went into Iraq, Ron Reagan was hardly the only person to predict that the administration would plant evidence of WMDs. Wayne Madsen -- yes, I know how problematical he is -- believes that the White House retaliated against Valerie Plame because
the CIA Counter-Proliferation Division prevented the shipment of binary VX nerve gas from Turkey into Iraq in November 2002. The Brewster Jennings network in Turkey was able to intercept this shipment which was intended to be hidden in Iraq and later used as evidence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.As always, Madsen derives this data from unspecified "intelligence sources," so caveat lector. Still, the idea does have a certain attraction.
2 comments:
Aww, c'mon, Joe. Let's go ahead and stick the needles in his nipples. I betcha a quarter he squeals like a pig.
And, I suspect Madsen is right about Valerie's group interfering with the neocon plan to plant WMD in Iraq. No wonder they put Goss in charge of the CIA--its goals were more in the national interest than theirs were.
Oh, those neocons must have been pissed beyond words at Wilson and his wife! Between the two of them, they constituted a wrecking crew!
A sample of what was happening on 1/24/2003. Choose any "classified" material from these snippets to answer your question.
Ho, Hum, this was all known in 2002/2003 and everyone sat on their hands. Same thing they will do in 2006
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/jan-june03/sens_1-24.html
We received a good briefing yesterday from Sec. Powell and Sec. Rumsfeld clearly pointing out and presenting to the Senate a case, which I tell you personally, I accept as a strong case to justify any force that the president and other world leaders may decide to use in the future.
"Why We Know Iraq is Lying" A Column by Dr. Condoleezza Rice
Iraq's behavior could not offer a starker contrast. Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq's concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.
For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq's accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.
7:42 AM Iraq 'preparing troops for chemical warfare' - report
Wolfowitz: Iraq Knows More About Missing U.S. Airman
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2003 -- Saddam Hussein's government has information it hasn't shared about the fate of a U.S. pilot shot down over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said here Jan. 21.
Navy Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher's F/A-18 Hornet fighter was downed by enemy fire during the first day of the air war over Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, according to DoD.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/international/middleeast/24DEFE.html?ex=1144900800&en=ef2f08da2ca92ab3&ei=5070
Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say
By JUDITH MILLER
aving concluded that international inspectors are unlikely to find tangible and irrefutable evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is preparing its own assessment that will rely heavily on evidence from Iraqi defectors, according to senior administration officials.
Former Iraqi scientists, military officers and contractors have provided American intelligence agencies with a portrait of Saddam Hussein's secret programs to develop and conceal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that is starkly at odds with the findings so far of the United Nations weapons inspectors.
In a speech in New York yesterday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz made a rare public acknowledgment of the administration's reliance on defectors. He said, for instance, that defectors had told the United States government about Iraq's construction of mobile unit to produce biological weapons.
"Today, we know from multiple sources that Saddam has ordered that any scientist who cooperates during interviews will be killed, as well as their families," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "Furthermore, we know that scientists are being tutored on what to say to the U.N. inspectors and that Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as scientists to be interviewed by the inspectors." This was the first time the administration had accused Iraq of specific acts of intimidation against its scientists.
Elsewhere, Mr. Wolfowitz said pointedly, "For a great body of what we need to know, we are very dependent on traditional methods of intelligence — that is to say, human beings who are either deliberately or inadvertently communicating to us."
The administration has been offered information from a growing number of Iraqis who have fled in the last 18 months, officials said. But the number deemed credible is small, around a dozen or so, officials said. The three or four thought to have the most valuable firsthand information have been placed in a witness protection program and offered asylum.
Nevertheless, there are deep divisions in Washington over the value of information from defectors. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most receptive, saying that defectors are critical to penetrating Iraq's deceptive practices. The C.I.A. has often been dismissive of the defectors and questioned their credibility, according to administration officials.
Despite the reservations, the White House asked administration intelligence analysts last week to use the information from the defectors as part of a "bill of particulars" that the administration hopes will convince skeptical allies and the American public that Iraq's behavior warrants military action, the officials said. In addition, they said, it may be incorporated into President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28.
Last week, the administration began sharing information from defectors with the inspectors, but with trepidation, officials said. Given the past actions of the Iraqi government, there is reason to believe that the families and friends of the defectors would be murdered if their identities were revealed, the officials said.
Intelligence officials said that some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor who fled Iraq in the summer of 2001. He later told American officials that chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals and inside presidential palaces.
Mr. Haideri was relocated anonymously to a small town in Virginia. Administration officials and experts on Iraq said members of his family in Iraq had disappeared, and there were fears they were executed as a message to potential defectors.
Because of the debate in Washington over defectors' credibility, Mr. Haideri was not interviewed by American intelligence agents until months after he left Iraq. Richard Perle, chief of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon, and a leading hard-liner on Iraq, said that until recently, C.I.A. officials were so hostile to defectors brought out of Iraq by the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella opposition group, that they refused to interview them and even tried to discredit their information. "But ultimately, the flow of information was so vital and so overwhelming that they could no longer ignore it," Mr. Perle said.
Post a Comment