Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy

Cheney's Faulty Memory
Cheney wasn't under oath when he lied to the Media. Lying to the public is OK as long as one is not under oath? ---BBB

Cheney's Faulty Memory
By Eric Boehlert
10.25.2005

Today's New York Times exclusive, which reports that Vice President Dick Cheney was the one who first told his chief of staff Scooter Libber that Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked at the CIA, contains this passage about a June 12, 2003, meeting between the two men:

"The notes do not show that Mr. Cheney knew the name of Mr. Wilson's wife. But they do show that Mr. Cheney did know and told Mr. Libby that Ms. Wilson was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and that she may have helped arrange her husband's trip [to Niger]."

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, 2003, and asked about Wilson's fact-finding trip to check out the White House's pre-war suggestion that Saddam purchased uranium from Niger for his alleged nuclear weapons program, Cheney told a much different tale. He insisted, "I don't know Joe Wilson… I don't [know] who sent Joe Wilson." Asked again, Cheney emphasized, "Who in the CIA [sent him], I don't know."

So, in June 2003, Cheney told Libby that Plame, working inside the CIA, may have sent Wilson to Niger. But in Sept. 2003, Cheney told Russert he had no idea who inside the CIA sent Wilson to Niger.

BBB, That only shows he tried to hide his tracks - after the fact. If other testimony shows he lied, I see an indictment on his desk.

I would still like to see the minutes of the Energy meeting Cheney held with oil executives which may include securing Iraq's oil by means both legal and illegal. It was kept secret. This could very well be the genesis of the Iraq invasion.

Talk


Interesting observation. We may never know what went on it that meeting.

Welcome to A2K, BTW, glad to have you here.

BBB

With all those secret deals with the oil companies and those huge contracts for Halliburton, it's a wonder more people aren't up in arms about this administration.

The Strange Saga of Cheney and the "Nuclear Threat&quot
The Strange Saga of Cheney and the "Nuclear Threat"
By Jim Lobe
Salon.com
Wednesday 26 October 2005

Why did the veep suddenly lose interest in the evidence?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102605C.shtml

EXCERPT:

That Cheney did indeed make the initial request to follow up on the Niger yellowcake report appears now to be beyond dispute, and it also draws attention to another little-noted curiosity of the Plame case - the knowledge and role of Clifford May, ex-New York Timesman, recent head of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001), and president of the ultra-neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In an article at National Review Online (NRO) on September 29, 2003 (as pressure was building on John Ashcroft to appoint a special prosecutor in the case), he boasted that he had been informed by an unnamed former government official of Wilson's wife's identity long before her outing as a CIA operative by Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, and so had assumed that her identity (and relationship to Wilson) had been an "open secret" among the Washington cognoscenti. He has subsequently told the Nation magazine's David Corn among others that he was interviewed by the FBI but has never been asked to testify on the subject before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury.

In that NRO article, he also noted that he "was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson" following the ambassador's Times op-ed. Indeed, only five days after that op-ed appeared, on July 11, 2003, NRO published May's first attack on Wilson - many more would follow right up to the present - depicting the ambassador as a "pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an axe to grind." The article - and this is the curious part - included the following passage: "Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify a U.S. intelligence report about the sale of yellowcake - because Vice President Dick Cheney requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the validity of the intelligence report." This phrasing is fascinating because it purports to know Cheney's subjective motivation, and the motivation ascribed to him - that he had "doubts" about the Niger story - conflicts with everything we've otherwise come to understand about why he asked for the Niger story to be investigated. It hints, certainly, at how consciously Cheney would indeed fix the facts when it came to Saddam's nuclear doings.

Given this tidbit of curious information hidden in May's piece, it's important to know what former government officials might not only have told May about Plame's identity but possibly about Cheney's real thoughts on the subject of Saddam's nuclear program - presuming, that is, that Cheney himself or Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, was not the source. Among May's board of advisers at FDD were several former government officials, a number of whom were known to be very close to Cheney and Libby as well as to Pentagon hawks like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. They included Richard Perle, head of the Center for Security Policy Frank Gaffney, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. All of them played starring roles in efforts to tie Saddam's Iraq to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks as well as in raising the nuclear bogeyman well before Cheney did so on March 24, 2002.

In fact, a close examination of how the pre-war propaganda machine worked shows that it was led by the neocons and their associates outside the administration, particularly those on the Defense Policy Board (DPB) like Perle, Woolsey, and Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman (and Judith Miller of the Times) who had long championed the cause of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi exile organization, the INC, and were also close to the Office of Special Plans that Douglas Feith had set up in the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence. They would invariably be the first to float new "evidence" against Hussein (such as the infamous supposed Prague meeting of 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer). They would then tie this "evidence" into ongoing arguments for "regime change" in Iraq that would often appear in the Times or elsewhere as news and subsequently be picked up by senior administration officials and fed into the drumbeat of war commentary pouring out of official Washington.

It is by now perfectly clear that the neo-conservatives on the outside were aided by like-minded journalists, particularly the Times' Miller - then the only "straight" reporter on the client list of neoconservative heavyweights and columnists represented by Benador Associates - and media outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and Fox News. Working hand-in-glove with the war hawks on the inside, they created a powerful and persuasive machine to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's Iraq represented an imminent and potentially cataclysmic threat to the United States that had to be eliminated once and for all. The failure to investigate and demonstrate precisely how seamlessly this web of intra- and extra-administration connections worked in the run-up to the war - including perhaps in the concoction of the Niger yellowcake documents, as some former intelligence officials have recently suggested - has been perhaps the most shocking example of the mainstream media's failure to connect the dots (the reporters from Knight-Ridder excepted.)

In that context, it is worth noting the first moment that the specter of an advanced Iraqi nuclear-weapons program was propelled into post-9/11 public consciousness. On December 20, 2001, the New York Times published Judith Miller's version of the sensational charges made by Chalabi-aided defector al-Haideri. Her report was immediately seized on by former CIA Director and DPB member Woolsey (who had just spent many weeks trying desperately but unsuccessfully to confirm the alleged Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that would have linked Saddam to the 9/11 attackers). Appearing that same evening on CNBC's "Hard Ball," he breathlessly told Chris Matthews, "I think this is a very important story. I give Judy Miller a lot of credit for getting it. This defector sounds quite credible." Within a week, he was telling the Washington Post that the case that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons was a "slam dunk." (Now, there's a familiar expression!) He continued confidently, "There is so much evidence with respect to his development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles… that I consider this point beyond dispute."

One week later, Perle weighed in with an op-ed in the New York Times in which he also referred to Miller's work, albeit without naming her. "With each passing day, [Saddam] comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal," he wrote.

"We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich Iraqi natural uranium [Nigerian yellowcake perhaps?] to weapons grade. We know he has the designs and the technical staff to fabricate nuclear weapons once he obtains the material. And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even? We simply do not know, and any intelligence estimate that would cause us to relax would be about as useful as the ones that missed his nuclear program in the early 1990's or failed to predict the Indian nuclear test in 1998 or to gain even a hint of the Sept. 11 attack."

It was a new argument being taken out for a test run, one that would become painfully familiar in the months that followed. At about that time, or shortly thereafter, a report about the mysterious Niger documents landed on Cheney's desk and the rest would be history.

Media people can be easily duped when they get info from the high ups in this administration. The major newspapers and tv were full of this misinformation during this administration's push to go to war. The source for all this misinformation is obvious, isn't it?

BBB:

Thanks. I was originally with Abuzz then I migrated to Buzzrds' Roost and now here at A2K.

talk, I've also been an active member of Abuzz, but don't remember you. However, that's not surprising, since I'm and old geezer with failing memory.

c.i.


Yeah! You're fading fast.

BBB :wink:

I only joined Abuzz in 2000 then after the election I stopped posting. Then 2004 came and I started posting again. That long absence may have made me a ghost.

Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers to Senate Intelligence Panel
Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers to Senate Intelligence Panel
By Murray Waas
The National Journal
Thursday 27 October 2005

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office - and Libby in particular - pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.

The disclosures also come as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the nearly two-year-old CIA leak investigation that has focused heavily on Libby's role in discussing covert intelligence operative Valerie Plame with reporters. Fitzgerald could announce as soon as tomorrow whether a federal grand jury is handing up indictments in the case.

Central to Fitzgerald's investigation is whether administration officials disclosed Plame's identity and CIA status in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador and vocal Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who wrote newspaper op-ed columns and made other public charges beginning in 2003 that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq that he gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa.

In recent weeks Fitzgerald's investigation has zeroed in on the activities of Libby, who is Cheney's top national security and foreign policy advisor, as well as the conflict between the vice president's office on one side and the CIA and State Department on the other over the use of intelligence on Iraq. The New York Times reported this week, for example, that Libby first learned about Plame and her covert CIA status from Cheney in a conversation with the vice president weeks before Plame's cover was blown in a July 2003 newspaper column by Robert Novak.

The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

In April 2004, the Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded that "much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's [United Nation's] speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee say that their investigation was hampered by the refusal of the White House to turn over key documents, although Republicans said the documents were not as central to the investigation.

In addition to withholding drafts of Powell's speech - which included passages written by Libby - the administration also refused to turn over to the committee contents of the president's morning intelligence briefings on Iraq, sources say. These documents, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, are a written summary of intelligence information and analysis provided by the CIA to the president.

One congressional source said, for example, that senators wanted to review the PDBs to determine whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were being presented to the president.

An administration spokesperson said that the White House was justified in turning down the document demand from the Senate, saying that the papers reflected "deliberative discussions" among "executive branch principals" and were thus covered under longstanding precedent and executive privilege rules. Throughout the president's five years in office, the Bush administration has been consistently adamant about not turning internal documents over to Congress and other outside bodies.

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Administration sources also said that Cheney's general counsel, David Addington, played a central role in the White House decision not to turn over the documents. Addington did not return phone calls seeking comment. Cheney's office declined to comment after requesting that any questions for this article be submitted in writing.

A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said.

But the same former official also said that Libby felt passionate that the CIA and other agencies were not doing a good job at intelligence gathering, that the Iraqi war was a noble cause, and that he and the vice president were only making their case in good faith. According to the former official, Libby cited those reasons in fighting for the inclusion in Powell's U.N. speech of intelligence information that others mistrusted, in opposing the release of documents to the Intelligence Committee, and in moving aggressively to counter Wilson's allegations that the Bush administration distorted intelligence findings.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee backed the document request to the White House regarding Libby's drafts of the Powell speech, communications between Libby and other administration officials on intelligence information that might be included in the speech, and Libby's contacts with officials in the intelligence community relating to Iraq.

In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Powell argued that intelligence information showed that Saddam Hussein's regime was aggressively pursuing programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons

Only after the war did U.N. inspectors and the public at large learn that the intelligence data had been incorrect and that Iraq had been so crippled by international sanctions that it could not sustain such a program.

The April 2004 Senate report blasted what it referred to as an insular and risk- averse culture of bureaucratic "group think" in which officials were reluctant to challenge their own longstanding notions about Iraq and its weapons programs. All nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed onto this document without a single dissent, a rarity for any such report in Washington, especially during an election year.

After the release of the report, Intelligence Committee, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said they doubted that the Senate would have authorized the president to go to war if senators had been given accurate information regarding Iraq's programs on weapons of mass destruction.

"I doubt if the votes would have been there," Roberts said. Rockefeller asserted, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war, in 75 votes, if we knew what we know now."

Roberts' spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the second phase of the committee's investigation would also examine how pre-war intelligence focused on the fact that intelligence analysts - while sounding alarms that a humanitarian crisis that might follow the war - failed to predict the insurgency that would arise after the war.

Little says that it was undecided whether the committee would produce a classified report, a declassified one that could ultimately be made public, or hold hearings.

When the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee was made public, Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials cited it as proof that the administration acted in good faith on Iraq and relied on intelligence from the CIA and others that it did not know was flawed.

But some congressional sources say that had the committee received all the documents it requested from the White House the spotlight could have shifted to the heavy advocacy by Cheney's office to go to war. Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

In advocating war with Iraq, Libby was known for dismissing those within the bureaucracy who opposed him, whether at the CIA, State Department, or other agencies. Supporters say that even if Libby is charged by the grand jury in the CIA leak case, he waged less a personal campaign against Wilson and Plame than one that reflected a personal antipathy toward critics in general.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Powell as Secretary of State, charged in a recent speech that there was a "cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense [Donald L.] Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made."

In interagency meetings in preparation for Powell's U.N. address, Wilkerson, Powell, and senior CIA officials argued that evidence Libby wanted to include as part of Powell's presentation was exaggerated or unreliable. Cheney, too, became involved in those discussions, sources said, when he believed that Powell and others were not taking Libby's suggestions seriously.

Wilkerson has said that he ordered "whole reams of paper" of intelligence information excluded from Libby's draft of Powell's speech. Another official recalled that Libby was pushing so hard to include certain intelligence information in the speech that Libby lobbied Powell for last minute changes in a phone call to Powell's suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the speech. Libby's suggestions were dismissed by Powell and his staff.

John E. McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, has testified to Congress that "much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material... that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable."

The passion that Libby brought to his cause is perhaps further illustrated by a recent Los Angeles Times report that in April 2004, months after Fitzgerald's leak investigation was underway, Libby ordered "a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003" because Libby was "consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair" to him.

The newspaper reported that the "intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan, or its rationale."

A former administration official said that "this might have been about politics on some level, but it is also personal. [Libby] feels that his honor has been questioned, and his instinct is to strike back."

Now, as Libby battles back against possible charges by a special prosecutor, he might be seeking vindication on an entirely new level.
--------------------------------

Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist. His previous articles, focusing on Rove's role in the case, Libby's grand jury testimony, the apparent direction of Fitzgerald's investigation, and the Secret Service records that prompted Miller's key testimony also appeared on NationalJournal.com.

Fitzgerald's Libby High Five Puts the Focus on Iraq
Fitzgerald's Libby High Five Puts the Focus on Iraq
By Arianna Huffington
10.28.2005

The five counts against Scooter Libby is a high five for those of us who have been saying (ad nauseum, ad infinitum) that the heart of Plamegate has always been the way this administration did everything in its power to cover up the lies and deceptions it used to lead us into a reckless and unnecessary war.

2 counts of perjury. 2 counts of making false statements. 1 count of obstruction of justice. These charges will keep the focus squarely on the cover up and will allow the American people to finally get a look into the nuts and bolts of how the White House Iraq Group marketed the war.

The lies that led us to war -- and the lies used to cover up those lies -- are about to go prime time. Stockpiles of WMD, Niger yellowcake, aluminum tubes, smoking guns that are mushroom clouds, unmanned drones, chemical weapons ready to launch in 45 minutes, "slam dunk" intel. These will all at long last get the through public going-over they never got.

As David Gergen -- as reliable a source of the convention wisdom as you can find -- put it last night: "If there are indictments, it will not only be people close to the president, the vice president of the United States, but they will raise questions about whether criminal acts were perpetrated to help get the country into war."

Libby's indictment, far from the culmination of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, is just the beginning.

Stay tuned...

The Strange Saga of Cheney and the "Nuclear Threat&quot
The Strange Saga of Cheney and the "Nuclear Threat"
By Jim Lobe
Salon.com
Wednesday 26 October 2005

Why did the veep suddenly lose interest in the evidence?

In the wake of the release of the Downing Street Memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush administration "fixed" its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration's war effort - in particular, the overlapping networks of relationships that tied together so many key figures in the administration, the neoconservatives and their allies on the outside, and parts of the media in what became a seamless, boundary-less operation to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an intolerable threat to their national security.

Vice President Cheney, for instance, is widely credited with having launched the administration's nuclear drumbeat to war in Iraq via a series of speeches he gave, beginning in August 2002, vividly accusing Saddam of having an active nuclear weapons program. As it happens, though, he started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.

Cheney's initial public attempts to raise the nuclear nightmare did not in fact begin with his August 2002 barrage of nuclear speeches, but rather five months before that, just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs television programs bearing similar messages on each. On CNN's "Late Edition," he offered the following comment on Saddam:

"This is a man of great evil, as the President said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."

On NBC's "Meet the Press," he said:

"[T]here's good reason to believe that he continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. Now will he have one in a year, five years? I can't be that precise."
And on CBS's "Face the Nation":

"The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons, that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it. And part of my task out there was to go out and begin the dialogue with our friends to make sure they were thinking about it."
Why do I think that Cheney moment, that particular barrage of statements about Saddam's supposed nuclear program, remains so significant today, in light of the Plame affair?

For one thing, that Sunday's drum roll of nuclear claims indicated that the "intelligence and facts" were already being "fixed around the policy" four months before Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6, reached that conclusion, as recorded in the Downing Street Memo. It's worth asking, then: On what basis could Cheney make such assertions with such evident certainty, nearly six months before, on September 7, 2002, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New York Times first broke a story about how Iraq had ordered "specially designed aluminum tubes," supposedly intended as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium for Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Even five months later, after all, those tubes would still be the only real piece of evidence for the existence of an Iraqi nuclear program offered by Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council.

Indeed, on March 24 when Cheney made his initial allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program, we know of only two pieces of "evidence" available to him that might conceivably have supported his charges:

1) Testimony from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a "defector" delivered up by Ahmad Chalabi's exile organization the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and enthusiastically recounted by the Times' Miller on December 20, 2001 (although rejected as a fabrication by both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency). Al-Haideri claimed to have personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas, and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as 2000.

2) The infamous forged Niger yellowcake documents that, at some point in December, 2001 or January, 2002 somehow appeared on Cheney's desk, supposedly through the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA, though accounts differ on the precise route it took from Italian military intelligence (SISMI) to the Vice President's office. It was these and related documents that spurred Cheney to ask for additional information, a request that would eventually result in Wilson's trip to Niger in late February, which, of course, set the Plame case in motion. Wilson's conclusion - that there was nothing to the story - would echo the conclusions of both U.S. ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., then-deputy commander of the U.S. European Command who was also sent to Niger in February. A couple of days after his return to Washington, Wilson would be debriefed by the CIA.

How far up their respective chains of command Wilson's and Fulford's reports made it remains a significant mystery to this day. Cheney's office, which reportedly had reminded the CIA of the Vice President's interest in the agency's follow-up efforts even while Wilson was in Niger, claims never to have heard about either report. We do know that Fulford's report made it up to Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers whose spokesman, however, told the Washington Post in July 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page, that the general had "no recollection" of it and so no idea whether it continued on to the White House or Cheney's office.

Meanwhile, Cheney, whose initial curiosity set off this flurry of travel and reporting, appeared to have lost interest in the results by the time he left on a Middle Eastern trip in mid-March; at least, no information has come to light so far indicating that he ever got back to the CIA or anyone else with further questions or requests on the matter of whether Saddam had actually been in the market for Niger yellowcake uranium ore. Yet, within four days of his return to Washington, there he was on the Sunday TV shows assuring the nation's viewers that Iraq was indeed "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."

Did he then acquire new information, perhaps from Iraq's neighbors, during his trip to the Middle East, or had he simply decided by then that the "facts" really had to be "fixed" - or more precisely in Wilson's case, ignored altogether - if the American people were to be persuaded that war was the only solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein? In any event, one can only describe his sudden lack of curiosity combined with his public certainty on the subject as, well ... curious.

That Cheney did indeed make the initial request to follow up on the Niger yellowcake report appears now to be beyond dispute, and it also draws attention to another little-noted curiosity of the Plame case - the knowledge and role of Clifford May, ex-New York Timesman, recent head of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001), and president of the ultra-neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In an article at National Review Online (NRO) on September 29, 2003 (as pressure was building on John Ashcroft to appoint a special prosecutor in the case), he boasted that he had been informed by an unnamed former government official of Wilson's wife's identity long before her outing as a CIA operative by Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, and so had assumed that her identity (and relationship to Wilson) had been an "open secret" among the Washington cognoscenti. He has subsequently told the Nation magazine's David Corn among others that he was interviewed by the FBI but has never been asked to testify on the subject before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury.

In that NRO article, he also noted that he "was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson" following the ambassador's Times op-ed. Indeed, only five days after that op-ed appeared, on July 11, 2003, NRO published May's first attack on Wilson - many more would follow right up to the present - depicting the ambassador as a "pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an axe to grind." The article - and this is the curious part - included the following passage: "Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify a U.S. intelligence report about the sale of yellowcake - because Vice President Dick Cheney requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the validity of the intelligence report." This phrasing is fascinating because it purports to know Cheney's subjective motivation, and the motivation ascribed to him - that he had "doubts" about the Niger story - conflicts with everything we've otherwise come to understand about why he asked for the Niger story to be investigated. It hints, certainly, at how consciously Cheney would indeed fix the facts when it came to Saddam's nuclear doings.

Given this tidbit of curious information hidden in May's piece, it's important to know what former government officials might not only have told May about Plame's identity but possibly about Cheney's real thoughts on the subject of Saddam's nuclear program - presuming, that is, that Cheney himself or Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, was not the source. Among May's board of advisers at FDD were several former government officials, a number of whom were known to be very close to Cheney and Libby as well as to Pentagon hawks like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. They included Richard Perle, head of the Center for Security Policy Frank Gaffney, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. All of them played starring roles in efforts to tie Saddam's Iraq to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks as well as in raising the nuclear bogeyman well before Cheney did so on March 24, 2002.

In fact, a close examination of how the pre-war propaganda machine worked shows that it was led by the neocons and their associates outside the administration, particularly those on the Defense Policy Board (DPB) like Perle, Woolsey, and Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman (and Judith Miller of the Times) who had long championed the cause of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi exile organization, the INC, and were also close to the Office of Special Plans that Douglas Feith had set up in the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence. They would invariably be the first to float new "evidence" against Hussein (such as the infamous supposed Prague meeting of 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer). They would then tie this "evidence" into ongoing arguments for "regime change" in Iraq that would often appear in the Times or elsewhere as news and subsequently be picked up by senior administration officials and fed into the drumbeat of war commentary pouring out of official Washington.

It is by now perfectly clear that the neo-conservatives on the outside were aided by like-minded journalists, particularly the Times' Miller - then the only "straight" reporter on the client list of neoconservative heavyweights and columnists represented by Benador Associates - and media outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and Fox News. Working hand-in-glove with the war hawks on the inside, they created a powerful and persuasive machine to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's Iraq represented an imminent and potentially cataclysmic threat to the United States that had to be eliminated once and for all. The failure to investigate and demonstrate precisely how seamlessly this web of intra- and extra-administration connections worked in the run-up to the war - including perhaps in the concoction of the Niger yellowcake documents, as some former intelligence officials have recently suggested - has been perhaps the most shocking example of the mainstream media's failure to connect the dots (the reporters from Knight-Ridder excepted.)

In that context, it is worth noting the first moment that the specter of an advanced Iraqi nuclear-weapons program was propelled into post-9/11 public consciousness. On December 20, 2001, the New York Times published Judith Miller's version of the sensational charges made by Chalabi-aided defector al-Haideri. Her report was immediately seized on by former CIA Director and DPB member Woolsey (who had just spent many weeks trying desperately but unsuccessfully to confirm the alleged Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that would have linked Saddam to the 9/11 attackers). Appearing that same evening on CNBC's "Hard Ball," he breathlessly told Chris Matthews, "I think this is a very important story. I give Judy Miller a lot of credit for getting it. This defector sounds quite credible." Within a week, he was telling the Washington Post that the case that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons was a "slam dunk." (Now, there's a familiar expression!) He continued confidently, "There is so much evidence with respect to his development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles… that I consider this point beyond dispute."

One week later, Perle weighed in with an op-ed in the New York Times in which he also referred to Miller's work, albeit without naming her. "With each passing day, [Saddam] comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal," he wrote.

"We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich Iraqi natural uranium [Nigerian yellowcake perhaps?] to weapons grade. We know he has the designs and the technical staff to fabricate nuclear weapons once he obtains the material. And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even? We simply do not know, and any intelligence estimate that would cause us to relax would be about as useful as the ones that missed his nuclear program in the early 1990's or failed to predict the Indian nuclear test in 1998 or to gain even a hint of the Sept. 11 attack."

It was a new argument being taken out for a test run, one that would become painfully familiar in the months that followed. At about that time, or shortly thereafter, a report about the mysterious Niger documents landed on Cheney's desk and the rest would be history.