Reply
Mon 10 Oct, 2005 12:08 am
Published on Monday, October 3, 2005 by JuanCole
Bush Dunnit
by Juan Cole
George Stephanopolous dropped a bombshell on his show on Sunday. Toward the end, as Judd notes, he said,
' Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it's a manageable one for the White House especially if we don't know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions. '
The implication is that Bush and Cheney took part in discussions with Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and other administration spinmeisters about what to do about that pesky Joseph Wilson IV, former acting ambassador to Iraq who had stood up to Saddam in fall of 1990. Wilson had gone to Niger in spring of 2002 to check out the stories circulating in intelligence circles that Saddam had bought uranium there recently. Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney (when people are in legal trouble the tradition is to drop the nicknames) had asked the CIA about the stories. Wilson had found that the structure of the uranium industry in Niger (which frankly was in French hands) made the purchases implausible. What Wilson did not know at the time was that the stories were generated by actual documents, a set of clumsily forged letters generated by Italian military intelligence officer Rocco Martini (who claimed he was the tool of "higher powers.")
Wilson wrote his report and assumed it was passed by then CIA direct George Tenet and thence went to Cheney, who had initiated the inquiry. Wilson watched with amazement and outrage as the Bush administration went on relentlessly to hype Iraq's alleged nuclear program as a basis for the Iraq War that they got up. By May of 2003, Wilson had had enough, and he went public with an editorial in the New York Times, in which he told his story.
The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich, and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence of the Bushes of Connecticut.
So the Bush team ordered an investigation into Wilson. It quickly emerged that he was married to Valerie Plame Wilson (though the government documents the White House could get hold of just called her Valerie Plame), and it transpired that Plame worked on preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at the CIA.
Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, Richard Bruce Cheney, and the Department of Defense mafia considered the CIA an open enemy and not a team player. Richard Perle, their guru on these matters, viewed the CIA as a hotbed of wimpy "liberalism" that especially underestimated the depravity of dark-skinned peoples in the Third World. In short, the CIA was impervious to the Likud lobby and unimpressed with the crackpot theories of far rightwing gadflies like Perle.
So in the hothouse atmosphere of the White House in 2003, when the awful truth was dawning that there was no WMD in Iraq, Rove, Libby, W. and the big Bruce huddled together with others in the administration to think how to discredit Wilson. They care only about image, not substance. It didn't matter to them that Wilson had been proved right. In their world, you only lose if the public sees the truth. The mere discovery of the truth in some obscure quarter is irrelevant. They had to prevent the public from seeing Wilson's truth.
So they would leak it that Wilson's wife was CIA and moreover had had something to do with having him sent on his mission. Apparently among the peculiar tribes that inhabit the press offices in Washington, this information would be enough to tag Wilson as unreliable, as, indeed, a flack for a CIA populated by Walter Mondales who wouldn't recognize a uranium shipment to Iraq if a caterpillar lift truck accidentally dropped it on their toes. In short, Wilson would be not a good-faith witness but a secret agent with a hidden (pinko) agenda, and so safely dismissed.
Rove and Libby were chosen as the hatchet men who would actually talk to the reporters and put the information around. But of course Bush and Cheney were part of the deliberations that set the plan in motion. It involved outing a career CIA operative (and likely getting her contacts in the third world killed). It was very serious business. Bush would have had to have signed off on it, at least orally.
As long as the Republicans control both houses of congress, Bush is probably safe. I'm not sure a special counsel like Fitzpatrick could by himself bring down a president. But if the Democrats can take the Senate in 2006, this scandal could turn into an impeachment trial.
I have long been frustrated by the US press's tendency to talk about Bush's cabinet officers as though they were independent agents, and to put Bush on a pedestal. Let me just follow through on some further assertions in the spirit of Stephanopoulos's remark.
It is fruitless to speculate about who dissolved the Iraqi army in May of 2003, and why. (This move contributed to the rise of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement). Bush did it!
Who ordered the Marines, against their better judgement, to launch a reprisal attack on Fallujah after four Western private security guards were killed and their bodies desecrated there? Bush did it!.
Who authorized torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Bush did it!
Who appointed Michael Brown, a man with no experience in emergency management, head of FEMA? Bush did it!
Who let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora? Bush did it!
Who completely destroyed the fiscal health of the US government and forced us into massive debt, squandering Clinton's surplus and endangering social security? Bush did it!.
Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. If there has been a major bad decision, it has been his.
Who outed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative? Bush did it!
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
NEWSMAN SEES PLAME DANGER TO BUSH
Monday, October 10, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.com
Until recently it seemed as though the alternative Internet press was the only segment of the media questioning how far up the Bush administration chain of command the fallout from the Valerie Plame-CIA leak investigation would travel. Now longtime CBS and NPR correspondent Daniel Schorr has asked the same question in a recent Christian Science Monitor column.
Suprisingly, Schorr's view seems to be that not even President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are necessarily safe, as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald attempts to unravel the twisted story of who knew what and when, regarding Valerie Plame, Judith Miller and the rest.
Schorr relates the history of the whole odd, tangled affair, from Nigerian uranium allegations, to Robert Novak's outing of Plame as a CIA undercover operative, to the cover-ups that are apparently underway. He closes by reminding readers: "It may be remembered that the Watergate grand jury wanted to indict President Nixon for obstruction of justice. When advised that a sitting president could not be prosecuted, the grand jury named him as an un-indicted co-conspirator."
More fuel for the fire: (Reported by boston globe.com
RALPH NADER AND KEVIN ZEESE
The 'I' word
By Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese | May 31, 2005
THE IMPEACHMENT of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should be part of mainstream political discourse.
ADVERTISEMENT
Minutes from a summer 2002 meeting involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveal that the Bush administration was ''fixing" the intelligence to justify invading Iraq. US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes -- evidence was thin and needed fixing.
President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton's misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution.
Eighty-nine members of Congress have asked the president whether intelligence was manipulated to lead the United States to war. The letter points to British meeting minutes that raise ''troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war." Those minutes describe the case for war as ''thin" and Saddam as ''nonthreatening to his neighbors," and ''Britain and America had to create conditions to justify a war." Finally, military action was ''seen as inevitable . . . But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Indeed, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor any imminent threat to the United States:
The International Atomic Energy Agency Iraq inspection team reported in 1998, ''there were no indications of Iraq having achieved its program goals of producing a nuclear weapon; nor were there any indications that there remained in Iraq any physical capability for production of amounts of weapon-usable material." A 2003 update by the IAEA reached the same conclusions.
The CIA told the White House in February 2001: ''We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has . . . reconstitute[d] its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Colin Powell said in February 2001 that Saddam Hussein ''has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."
The CIA told the White House in two Fall 2002 memos not to make claims of Iraq uranium purchases. CIA Director George Tenet personally called top national security officials imploring them not to use that claim as proof of an Iraq nuclear threat.
Regarding unmanned bombers highlighted by Bush, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center concluded they could not carry weapons spray devices. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the president in June 2002 that the unmanned aerial bombers were unproven. Further, there was no reliable information showing Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether it had established chemical agent production facilities.
When discussing WMD the CIA used words like ''might" and ''could." The case was always circumstantial with equivocations, unlike the president and vice president, e.g., Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002: ''Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
The State Department in 2003 said: ''The activities we have detected do not . . . add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing . . . an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
The National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002 said ''We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against US territory."
The UN, IAEA, the State and Energy departments, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center, US inspectors, and even the CIA concluded there was no basis for the Bush-Cheney public assertions. Yet, President Bush told the public in September 2002 that Iraq ''could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given." And, just before the invasion, President Bush said: ''Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: ''Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?"
If this is answered affirmatively Bush and Cheney have committed ''high crimes and misdemeanors." It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the ''I" word.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. Kevin Zeese is director of DemocracyRising.US.
Wow! This is turning out to be a very interesting thread for me, as living in the UK, it is hard to pick up on all the nuances and between the lines bits and pieces regarding this whole thing.
IMO, there is no doubt that George rubber stamped this whole affair, but that their strategy was all wrong. By "outing" a CIA agent, they have effectively turned the "core" of both the CIA and the FBI against them (after all, what can happen to the CIA, can also happen to the FBI).
Nobody knows the damage that this "outing" has caused, but one thing is for certain, the CIA will do their absolute utmost to get to the bottom of this matter, and will probably be on the hunt for evidence of other things in the process. Fitzgerald seems a cold, clinical operator who is very thorough and has oodles of patience.
If I were GWB, Cheney or Rove, I would be having sleepless nights at the moment.
I never heard of a poll organization called After Downing street. Is that like the Gallup Poll?
Mortkat wrote:I never heard of a poll organization called After Downing street. Is that like the Gallup Poll?
No, it is probably a lot more accurate. Their finding in this matter have been confirmed by other polling. Nice try though.
Are you able to show why it is a lot more accurate? I was under the impression that the Gallup Poll was the gold standard.
"The poll margin was 50 percent to 44 percent in favor of impeachment. Ipsos Public Affairs, a non-partisan polling company, sampled the opinions of 1,001 U.S. adults between Oct. 6-9 to reach its results." A very reputable outfit.
http://www.ipsos-na.com/pa/us/
"Other polls reveal a majority of Americans believe Bush lied about his reasons for the Iraq war. Last June, an ABC/Washington Post poll showed 52 percent of Americans believe Bush and his colleagues "deliberately misled the public before the war," and 57 percent said the administration "intentionally exaggerated its evidence that pre-war Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons." Of course this was all before Libby got indicted.
Polls don't impeach presidents. The House of Representatives does. It is unlikely that the Democrats will take the House even if they do take the Senate in 2006.
Unless something drastic comes out to implicate Bush in some crime or another impeachment is not going to happen.
Things with polls though, and this goes for both sides, is the questions they ask.
Question: If evidence is discovered proving George Bush helped Bin Laden attack the WTC on 9/11, should he be impeached?
Question: If evidence of WMD's is found in Iraq, do you believe George Bush should be impeached?
Looking for a yes/no answer, then they can report the results...
But, if it is proven Bush lied, for instance, or if there is at least good cause to believe it....surely there is SOME way of holding him to account?
Did not a number of Repubs not fellow travel with the sickening Clinton witch hunt, when it came to impeachment....might they not act with conscience and regard for good government again?
Or at least act with an eye to their own re election...
How do you prove a person lied?
It was obvious that Bill Clinton lied to the grand jury repeatedly since he gave answers which could be shown to be lies.
Now, what is a lie!
A good Law Dictionary will tell you that a lie is "An INTENTIONAL statement of an UNTRUTH designed to mislead another"
Even if Nancy Pelosi could work some witchcraft and persuade the Republican Controlled House to "impeach" President Bush, the onus would be on the "prosecutor" to show that the alleged lie or lies were "intentional" and that the person making the statement knew they were "untrue" and that the statement or statements were designed to mislead others.
As Parados pointed out-Polls don't impeach presidents.
In the meanwhile, President Bush will cement his legacy in the presidential annals by seeing his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Alito, nominated to the Supreme Court. This, of course, is far far more important than a 'maybe" prosecution of a Vice President's Chief of Staff.
Bush has nominated and the Senate has appointed a large number of Appelate Court Judges who are second in importance only to the nine on the USSC.
Questionable Polls mean nothing in the face of those events.
dlowan wrote:But, if it is proven Bush lied, for instance, or if there is at least good cause to believe it....surely there is SOME way of holding him to account? .
At the moment because the Republicans control both houses of congress, and the right wing of the party controls all the leadership positions the only certain way of bringing Bush to account is at the polls. However the election to do that is a year away so there is a lot of water yet to pass under that bridge. One bright spot is that two of the senior Republican congressional leaders, Delay and Frist are in legal trouble, so the situation might change rather suddenly.
Yes, here, if the parliamentary rank and file get scared about their re election, rotten leaders fall.
I know it is much harder in the US...what I am wondering, though, is if more Bush implicating material arises, if either decency and regard for proper governance in the US, or simple wish to preserve their own hides in the upcoming elections, might mean a number of repubs voted to hold Bush accountable?
Impeachable Bush (sung to the tune of "Embraceable You")
Impeach him, that weak impeachable Bush.
Impeach him, that dumb unteachable Bush.
Now the whiff of scandal's getting funky for him
It's the kind of thing that makes a monkey of him.
So it's off to Texas, impeachable Bush
You might be all right if you're unreachable, Bush.
Don't admit to anything when shove comes to push,
You meek impeachable Bush.
This is particularly tough case because it seems as if both the President and Vice President are involved. To remove one you will have to remove the other which means in effect decapitating the government. That would make the speaker of the house, a conservative republican of modest accomplishments the president. I'm not certain that even a newly "moral" congress would have the stomach for that.
Mortkat asks:
Quote:How do you prove a person lied?
With evidence. That's not supposed to sound like a smartie answer but it's the best one I can think of right now.
You get choices:
1. You tell what you know to be the truth
or
2. You tell what you believe to be the truth
then
3. No problem
or
a. You tell what you know is not the truth - aka a lie
and
b. You deny that you lied thus compounding the original lie
then
c. You are shown evidence of your lies
then
d. Bingo - you're in it up to your eyebrows.
Hmmmmm....on another thread Finn has been crowing that the USA has government checks and balances that are better than any seen ever, anywhere.
This would seem a perfect counter example.
Most countries whose governments I am familiar with could handle such a thing with ease.
It would rock the country, for sure, but it would not leave the kind of drama that this would, and new elections could also happen easily, within a couple of months,
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace