Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy

Not playing anything.
Just responding to the title of this thread about anyone "hijacking" foreign policy.

I never said I agree with the policies.

"I never said I agree with the policies. " hahaha. Sure, sure. Backing down. Bushie made me do it.

It's their job alright; and a very lousy one.

MM

Re-read Wilkerson's speech. It's a bit of a slog because he's clearly talking to an audience for which he can shorthand a lot of history and terminology with which they are all familiar, but us, much less so.

This fellow was Powell's chief of staff and he has a resume within the military and within government Bio Here
which really ought to suggest you attend rather closely to what he's saying. If you are interesting in learning, that is.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/201005perspective.htm

I dont deny his credentials and I dont deny everything he is saying.
Its the idea that the executive branch "hijacked" foreign policy that I disagree with.
Foreign policy falls square into the realm of presidential responsibility,that is what I am saying.

You cant hijack whats yours to begin with.

This is worth repeating from BBBs first posts:

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.) worked for the Pentagon, in the office of the Secretary of Defense, Near East South Asia (NESA) directorate. She began working there in May of 2002, for Bill Luti and Doug Feith and also worked in conjunction with Abe Schulsky's, Office of Special Plans (OSP) (which Donald Rumsfeld set up in September 2003, and was renamed Northern Gulf Affairs Office (NGAO) in July of 2003). [/B]In a January 6, 2004 video interview included in MEF's documentary film Hijacking Catastrophe (available at hijackingcatastrope.org), Kwiatkowski spoke about her experience with witnessing firsthand how the US govt. had a secret foreign policy agenda (especially with regard to Iraq) and how they cooked the intelligence books in order to "justify" a "legal" war.

MM

What word would you prefer if, say, the Secretary of Agriculture and the Vice President, working in tandem with a shared ideology while in the adminstration of a weak/disinterested President, froze out the Secretary of Education and her administration, taking effective control over many of its prime functions and disregarding much of the expertise relevant to Education? State is a cabinet position just as is Defense.

A bit more...the comment in blue is relevant to the 'hijack' question. It's also relevant to Wilkerson's concerns regarding balancing powers. The comment in red concerns something else...the real damage done to America's reputation abroad and the degredation of its ability to act internationally through loss of goodwill and through creating an environment where unilateralism is granted credence. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101902246.html

"Hijack" is the correct wording for this administration; they falsified intelligence to justify this "illegal" war in Iraq.

LA Times: Libby Monitored Newspapers For Info On Wilson
'LA Times': Libby Monitored Newspapers For Info On Wilson
By E&P Staff
Published: October 21, 2005 5:55 PM ET
NEW YORK

While President Bush is famous for not reading newspapers, a story in Friday's Los Angeles Times reveals that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, keeps a close eye on all forms of media.

The revelations, coming in a story written by staff writers Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, show that Libby went to great lengths to monitor news accounts of Joseph Wilson, one of the Bush administration's fiercest critics.

Libby, along with White House special advisor Karl Rove, is currently at the center of a federal investigation into whether Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative, to newspaper columnist Bob Novak.

Wallsten and Hamburger write, "new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby's interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice president's office closely monitored news coverage.

"On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president's daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper's coverage.

"Libby 'would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it,' one former official said."

Wallsten and Hamburger write that Libby became consumed with what he felt were Wilson's distortions and unfair attacks on Cheney.

After Wilson published a book critical of the administration and its case for war in Iraq, Libby put together a packet of press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements.

The reporters say that "when it came to monitoring media coverage of Wilson and other issues affecting the vice president's reputation, Libby was meticulous. Staffers were instructed to use Nexis and Google to watch even the most obscure publications."

They note that one of the paper's cited in Libby's notes is the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, which quoted Wilson as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch."

The report in the Los Angeles Times concludes with an exchange between Liz Cheney, the vice president's daughter and an advisor to the Bush/Cheney reelection campaign, and a reporter from The New York Times.

"During a time of tension between the New York Times and the campaign over coverage, aides recommended that a reporter from the paper be allowed to fly aboard Cheney's plane with others in the press corps," Wallsten and Hamburger write. "Liz Cheney had a different idea.

"Writing from her Blackberry, a mobile e-mail device, she noted that her father was upset with a story that appeared in that morning's newspaper, saying: 'vp has totally had it with nytimes. This is really not the right time to ask him to charm a reporter from that paper.'

"The reporter was excluded from the vice president's plane," they note.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff ([email protected])

Links referenced within this article

a story written by staff writers Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-libby21oct21,0,6448189,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
[email protected]
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/mailto:[email protected]

Find this article at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001349896

This is what will come back to haunt us. Forming allegiances and making deals around the world is getting harder because of resistance to our Master of the Universe policies. We changed the balance of power in the Middle East when we invaded Iraq, and we do not yet understand the concentric circles that are spreading out from there.

I think Wilkinson is spot-on. He may struggle for words at times but he puts his finger on the problems: concentration of power in

This is what will come back to haunt us. Forming allegiances and making deals around the world is getting harder because of resistance to our Master of the Universe policies. We changed the balance of power in the Middle East when we invaded Iraq, and we do not yet understand the concentric circles that are spreading out from there.

I think Wilkinson is spot-on. He may struggle for words at times but he puts his finger on the problems: concentration of power in the cabal of Cheney-Rumsfeld, compounded by the President's willingness to be led, and, most notably, the lack of open discussion and public debate about important issues that are too big to talk about, such as going to war and civil rights in a "war on terror," as well as issues that have become untouchable such as money in politics, and interestingly, historically, the reminder of the military-industrial complex that must be fed if our economy is to keep ticking over.

The most terrifying thing is the fright that keeps dissenters from speaking out. We are in a war created from deception, but the administration and all who are allied in group-think and group-speak tell us that we are hurting the troops in Iraq if we question the motivation for this war. This is a terrible fear-mongering, and it is utterly wrong. I can be against this war and yet live in trembling hope and love for the soldiers who are fighting in Iraq. Propagandists who deny me that split mind are tyrannical.

I have wondered often about Kerry's pitiful response to that question: Would you vote differently on the war if you knew then what you know now? He answered No and lost me and thousands (millions?) of people who had some hope of his integrity as a candidate and a person. Did he answer in confusion or in fear and trembling about being Against the Troops.

Trusting Scooter
Scooter Libby never acted without the approval of Vice President Cheney. Did they create a wall of non-involvement between Cheney and Libby?---BBB

Trusting Scooter
By Michael Isikoff (Newsweek Magazine)
10.21.2005

Forget the aspens turning in clusters -- or, for at least the next couple of days, the prospect of indictments. (Nothing, it now seems, until next week.) The real story of last weekend's Judy Miller revelations is not what Scooter Libby may have told her about Joe Wilson's wife. It is how Libby clearly, and unequivocally, misrepresented the contents of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about Iraqi WMD.

Save for the estimable David Corn of the Nation, nobody has picked up on this. But it's huge. At a time when questions about the Bush administration's case for war were beginning to mount, Libby assured Miller: Don't worry, there's still secret stuff out there that will prove we were right all along. As a Washington reporter who frequently writes about intelligence matters, I can assure you, this is the way it always works: "Trust me," the high level government official will tell you, "if you knew what I knew-- if you could read the top secret reports I've read-- you'd know why we're doing this." Only in this case, we know what Libby told Miller at their two hour breakfast at the Ritz Carleton Hotel on July 8, 2003, wasn't true: "Mr. Libby," Miller wrote in last Sunday's New York Times account, "said little more than that the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version."

Unfortunately for Libby, and perhaps for Miller, excerpts of the classified NIE were released just ten days later. It didn't show that the pre-war intelligence was "stronger" than had been publicly released to date. It showed that the intelligence community was riddled with doubts -- especially about the claims (primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney) that Iraq was close to getting a nuclear bomb.

Along with my colleague Mark Hosenball, I chronicle the whole story in this week's installment of Terror Watch (in Newsweek.)

Take a look.

What is that sweet taste in my mouth? It's prolly that the vice president of the US will be indicted and sent to prison for lying to the American People, and getting us involved in a unnecessary war that has cost us almost 2,000 of our military and $5 billion every month - with no end in sight.

Cheney's imprisonment won't rectify all they've been responsible for, but the history books will remain their achillis' heel forever.

Wanna Bet?

I don't bet with fruitcakes.

Niger forged documents & Stephen Hadley plot confirmed
La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed
By Laura Rozen
The American Prospect
Tuesday 25 October 2005

Italy's intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced.

With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leak investigation, questions are again being raised about the intelligence scandal that led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House obtained false Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.

The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt later turned out to be crude forgeries, created on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents - and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then - Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the US administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proffered less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.)

The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the US government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries.

The forged documents were cabled from the US embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the US embassy.

Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to US and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion.

What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.

Was the White House convinced that the Niger yellowcake report was nevertheless true because the National Security Council was getting its information directly from the Italian source?

Following the exposure of the discredited Niger allegations in the summer of 2003 by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, White House officials at first sought to blame the CIA for the inclusion of the controversial "16 words" in the president's speech. Although then - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Hadley eventually accepted some responsibility for the mistake, the White House undertook a covert campaign to discredit Wilson and exposed the CIA affiliation of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Yet if anyone knew who was actually responsible for the White House's trumpeting of the Niger claims, it would seem from the Repubblica report that Hadley did. He also knew that the CIA, which had initially rejected the Italian claims, was not to blame. Hadley's meeting with Pollari, at precisely the time when the Niger forgeries came into the possession of the US government, may explain the seemingly hysterical White House overreaction to Wilson's article almost a year later.

While the Niger yellowcake claims have provoked much drama in American politics, their provenance is decidedly Italian. The Repubblica investigation offers new insights into what motivated the Berlusconi government and its intelligence chief Pollari to go to so much trouble to bring those claims to the attention of their allies in Washington.

For Berlusconi and Pollari, according to La Repubblica, the overriding motive was a desire to win more appreciation and prestige from the Americans, who were seen as eager for help in making their sales pitch for war. On Monday, the newspaper described the atmosphere in 2002: "Berlusconi wants Sismi to be big players on the international security scene, to prove themselves to their ally, the United States, and the world. Washington is looking for proof of Saddam's involvement ... and wants info immediately."

For the Italian middleman Rocco Martino, who acquired the documents from a Sismi mole at the Niger embassy in Rome, the motive described by La Repubblica is primarily mercenary. He wanted to be paid for the forgeries.

According to the Repubblica account, Martino was a former carabinieri officer and later a Sismi operative who by 1999 was making his living based in Luxembourg, selling information to the French intelligence services for a monthly stipend. The story goes on to explain how Martino renewed his contacts with Sismi officer Antonio Nucera, an old friend and former colleague, who was a Sismi vice-captain working in the intelligence agency's eighth directorate, with responsibilities involving weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation.

Precisely how Nucera, Martino, and two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome came together sometime between 1999 and 2000 to hatch the Niger forgeries plan is still somewhat mysterious. The newspaper's reports that Nucera introduced Martino to a longtime Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome, a 60 year-old Italian woman described in La Repubblica only as "La Signora." Sismi chief Pollari, who granted the newspaper an interview (as he tends to do when he fears that breaking news could taint his agency), suggests that Nucera simply wanted to help out Martino, his old friend and colleague.

But as the Italian reporters suggest, that sounds like a very convenient excuse for the chief of an agency that was engaged in promoting the bogus Niger claims from their inception, all the way to the White House. The picture that emerges of Sismi's relationship with Martino is that the agency used him as a "postman" - a cut-out to sell the bogus intelligence to allied intelligence services. At the same time, Sismi possessed enough information about Martino to claim that he was simply a rogue agent on the French payroll.

La Repubblica's noirish portrait of Martino as a convenient vehicle for plausible deniability is given further resonance by the recent news that a Roman prosecutor has ended his investigation into Martino's role in the Niger hoax without filing any charges or issuing any report.

Although Berlusconi's government clearly sought deniability while pushing the Niger uranium claims, the Bush White House went still further by trying to blame its citation of exaggerated and discredited Iraq WMD claims on the CIA, the very same agency that consistently discounted the Niger claims. The White House's war on the CIA and on the Wilsons - the extent of which has been revealed in recent news reports emerging from the Fitzgerald investigation - has always had an excessive and almost hysterical quality. Why was the White House so worked up over Wilson and the Niger hoax, when there was so much evidence that the administration had based its drive for war on claims that were so thoroughly discredited from top to bottom? Why did Wilson and his CIA wife become the primary targets, when Wilson was hardly alone in pointing out that the White House should have known better about the Niger claims?

News of the secret meeting between the Italian Sismi chief and the White House deputy national security adviser - during the period when the White House was assembling its flawed case for war - provides an important new piece of that puzzle.
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Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, DC, as a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributor to The Nation and other publications, and for her blog, War and Piece.

Many of the tv pundits are saying only Libby will be indicted with a minor crime. I think they are all wrong.

All the misinformation this administration spread throughout the congress and the world that resulted in the current war in Iraq is no minor matter.

I believe some big heads are gonna roll on this one.

c.i., I don't think that's going to happen.

There might be adjustments, changes in personnel.

The mistakes, the enormity of error in our war against Iraq, other changes in our foreign policy that isolate us, these will be absorbed, forgotten, recalculated, when the ball rolls slightly back the other way.

I am curious about what will happen with Harriet Miers. People I talk to say she's toast. I'm not sure I agree. He is too stubborn to withdraw her, and it would be in appropriate for him to do so. She would have to withdraw herself. I wonder if she is sensitive enough to history to do that.

We're supposed to be hearing about her resignation from the nomination soon.