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member, Council on
Foreign Relations; Trilateral Commission
3.7.01 Arianna Huffington OverThrowTheGov.com |
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Time has come for the nation to stage an intervention. We need to come together and convince
the vice president he needs to step down. Not just to save his life, but potentially to save the lives of millions of
Americans. More important than presiding over creation of the new budget or chairing the administration's energy task force, this responsible act could be his greatest contribution to the country. It would be compassionate; it would be conservative. Coronary heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in America today. Roughly 1.1 million Americans will have a heart attack this year with around 400,000 of them dying as a result. About 12.2 million people have a history of heart attack, chest pains or both, with many of them, like Cheney, proudly, but irresponsibly & unwisely, soldiering on, denying the significance of the warning signs. While the whole world watches, the message the vice president sends is that power & position are more important than life itself.
In fact, in so many cases, such pursuits become just another addiction. And like any addiction, this one is rife with denial & self-delusion. The vice president began experiencing chest pains on Saturday. You'd think after suffering four heart attacks, the last 3 months ago, this might set off alarms. But not for Cheney, who not only kept to his arduous work schedule but his arduous social schedule as well, partying with Washington lawyer Roderick Hills on Saturday night and Alan Greenspan on Sunday. In the midst of all this, he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "I feel great." He exhibited the same bonhomie when leaving the hospital Tuesday morning, telling reporters he felt "good." when he just had a catheter tube inserted into his leg and run up to the heart to reopen the same clogged artery propped open by a metal stent in November.
People who love him the most, his wife, his daughters, his close friends, should have intervened by now. But they haven't and, clearly, the enablers he works with are not likely to. President Bush called this week's cardiac catheterization, which Cheney's cardiologist termed "urgent" and "significant," a "precautionary measure." To me "precautionary" suggests adding some extra fruit and vegetables to your diet, not having a balloon inflated inside your heart. Of course, this is not the first time the
seriousness of the vice president's condition has been obscured in a cloud of euphemistic understatement & out-and-out lying. "Dick Cheney is healthy. He did not have a heart attack," Bush told reporters last November when Cheney was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack. Obfuscation goes on. On Monday, Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin assured us that the vice president had checked himself in to the hospital for "a non-emergency precautionary procedure" after experiencing "two brief, mild episodes of chest discomfort" over the weekend.
Cheney 'doing great,' to work Monday
Wash.D.C. VP Cheney was feeling well on Sunday and planned to return to work on Monday
after having a device implanted in his chest over the weekend to guard against episodes of a rapid heartbeat, his
spokeswoman said. "He's doing great and he's relaxing in his house and he's looking forward to going back to work tomorrow," spokeswoman Juleanna Glover Weiss said. Doctors placed a pager-sized device in the vice president's chest on Saturday after finding him susceptible to rapid heartbeats. The implantable cardioverter defibrillator weighs less than 3 ounces and functions as a pacemaker to speed the heart rate, and as a defibrillator to slow it down. About 150,000 Americans have one.
The procedure reignited questions about Cheney's ability to serve in the No. 2 job in the country. But the vice
president said on Friday doctors told him there was no reason he could not continue to function normally as vice
president. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Sunday said he was not concerned about the possibility that
Cheney's health could force him to leave the White House before completing his 4 year term. "Obviously this has been a matter that the vice president's had to contend with for many years," Daschle said on ABC's "This Week." "He's done it successfully, and I have every expectation he'll continue to do so."
Cheney returns to work with pacemaker
Wash.D.C. VP Dick Cheney is returning to work with a new heart pacemaker in his chest,
promoting the energy strategy he assembled for the administration and attending his usual series of White House meetings. After meeting with President Bush on Monday morning, Cheney was fielding energy questions from reporters in at least three radio interviews and sitting down with staff members to discuss a range of policy issues, said spokeswoman Juleanna Glover Weiss. "It's a typical day,'' she said. Cheney planned no public appearances, and was not headed to Capitol Hill, she said. Cheney is a key contact between the administration and lawmakers, but Congress is in recess this week.
That jolt could be jarring for Cheney, said American College of Cardiology pres. Dr. Douglas Zipes , authority on
irregular heart rhythms who has consulted with the vice president's doctors. "That is something he will feel, and
patients describe it anywhere from a giant hiccup to a mule kick in the chest,'' Zipes said on "Fox News Sunday.''
Cheney's turning point
It is said that behind every successful man, there´s a woman. VP Richard B. Cheney is married to Lynne Cheney, successful person in her own right. Cheney´s debt to his wife is expressed in his own words in 5.7.01 issue of the New Yorker.
Bush style gives WHouse corporate feel
Wash.D.C. … include the time he devotes to his job : far less than
Clinton; the authority given to his vice president : Dick Cheney acts as chief operating
officer; the interplay among staff members : they must follow a dress code and rules on
cordiality; and the use of pollsters : they have been kept out of the Oval Office. … "This is the
only bureaucracy in Washington that can change to fit the personality of the president," said
Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, who served in the White House under Pres. Reagan
& Bush pere, "This president is the first ever to have an MBA."
The recent release of Bush's budget blueprint underscores a telling difference between Bush and
Clinton. By Card's estimation, Bush devoted "in the neighborhood of 5 hours" to meetings to
discuss his budget proposal. By contrast, Gene Sperling, who for years was a top economic
adviser to Clinton, said the former president spent at least 25 hours in official meetings
assembling the budget in his first weeks in office, and 50 hours more in more casual
settings. Bush left it to Cheney to preside over a small group of aides to actually draft the
proposal. "There has been a sea change," said Kenneth Duberstein, who was a chief of staff
for Reagan. "This is the first time in American history we've had a president and a prime
minister." … An important reason for what has been widely regarded as a smooth takeover of the govt is that Bush has surrounded himself with veterans such as Cheney & Card. Staff members are also older than those of past administrations, which is another reason for the more subdued White House.…"It's going back to a Cabinet govt," said former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. … |
a Hamlet (2.2.206)
Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. Will you walk out of the air, my lord? H. Into my grave.
H. 'Tis well:
(2.2.517)
Polonius
H. God's bodykins, man, much better: |
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The Trojan course
¹
² Cheney laying in wait for power? 2.11.02 Jas. Ridgeway "Mondo Wash." Village Voice
Acting outside the Constitution in the early 1980s, a secret federal agency established a line of succession to the presidency to assure continued govt in the event of a devastating nuclear attack, current and former U.S.
officials said today," NYTimes reported 11.18.91 CNN reported the list grew to 17 names and incl Richard Helms, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Thornberg, Edwin Meese, Tip O'Neill, and Dick Cheney, who was a GOP congressman during the 1980s.
World domination with a plastic-metal ticker
Cheney confirmed … stands for re-election next year, … Halliburton's prominent role in
rebuilding Iraq's oil industry has become an embarrassment for an administration trying to project an
image of MidEast altruism. Moreover, Mr Cheney is no natural politician. When he joined the Bush
campaign, its organisers had planned some traditional meet & greet events, only to be told by his
minders that "Mr Cheney does not like to shake hands".
As a rule, the White House lets him loose in the media when it wants to bare its teeth. The rest of the time it keeps him out of sight. Mr Cheney more or less conceded as much when he said: "From time to time, they trot me out when it makes sense to do so. I'm sure as we get closer to the campaign, I'll be more visible."
Bush delegated much day-to-day running of govt to the VP. He was put in charge of the incoming administration's transition team, which allowed him to pick a lot of the new White House staff. In govt, he was given the job of running a taskforce to put together a long-term energy plan, a flagship program. … His
chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby attends deputy-level meetings with the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and State Dept's Richard Armitage.
In 1992, when Cheney was defence secretary, he asked his 2 hawkish policy aides, Wolfowitz & Libby, to
draw up long-term vision for national security, known as a defence planning guidance document, which proclaimed that the world's only superpower should not be cautious about asserting its power. "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," it said, and played down the UN role in global management. "The world order is ultimately backed by the US."
An additional quality endears him to the President. He does not covet his job. That partly explains why he is so
seldom seen. Vice-presidents are usually keen to be on TV because they plan a run at the top job. …
The resolute wrongness of Cheney
The tapes released this week, with language that could melt the plastic, could actually remind you of the Nixon
tapes, or music to write utility checks by. The tapes are of PGE/Enron power traders, in 2000-2001, laughing with each other about how they're manipulating supply, shutting down power plants to raise prices and generally
gouging "Grandma Millie." It's a real-time account of what we've since learned to be true, that the great West Coast energy crisis of 2001 was a corporate connivance, which has now brought Enron into both bankruptcy & and criminal court.
At the time, Cheney knew that it couldn't be the fault of the energy companies because he'd spent the entire spring meeting with them in planning the new Bush admin energy strategy, incl 6 meetings with Enron head Ken Lay. So California was just going to have to take what was coming to it, meaning a summer of blackouts, and nobody should think there would be much to gain from conservation, which Cheney sneered at as a "private virtue" that would have no effect on California's problems.
In a few weeks, Cheney went directly from endorsement of Ken Lay to alliance with Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi is one of the few people having a worse time this week than the Enron power traders. Once Bush admin top candidate to run post-Saddam Iraq, Chalabi has now had his information discredited, his Baghdad offices raided, his name excluded from the new Iraqi govt, and this week Bush admin charged that he had given crucial U.S. secrets to Iran. On the other hand, he never manipulated the West Coast power market.
For 3 years since his private walk with Cheney, Chalabi & his organization, Iraqi National Congress, have
been on the U.S. payroll for $350,000 a month; INC forces were flown into Baghdad, on Cheney's orders, early in the war; and Cheney publicly cited intelligence provided by the INC as evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. CIA thinks information about U.S. that Chalabi supplied to Iran was more reliable.
Nobody thinks these major misjudgments will be a problem in this administration. Thursday, President Bush,
accepting the resignation of the CIA chief who had told him that evidence of Saddam's WMDs was "a slam dunk," praised the departing official as "resolute." That's the Bush standard: not whether you were right or wrong, but that you were certain. While Dick Cheney may be repeatedly wrong, you've got to say he's resolute about it.
ex-CIA brass call for Cheney's resignation
Wash.DC An American soldier has died in an explosion in Iraq, bringing the number of combat
deaths to 147, equalling the toll in the 1991 Gulf War. … Pres. GWBush faces mounting criticism over cost of the war and accusations U.S. exaggerated intelligence about Iraq's weapons to justify the conflict.
VP Cheney faced demands for his resignation on Tuesday when he was accused of using his office to insist that a false claim about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from Niger be included in Bush's state of the union address, overriding the concerns of CIA dir. Tenet. Cheney was also accused of knowingly misleading congress when the administration sought its authorisation for the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein. There is no clear evidence proving Cheney was responsible for insisting the 16 words … be in the 1.28.03 Bush speech. But there is clear evidence of Cheney's interest in claims about a Niger deal. Former US amb. Joseph Wilson said he was asked by the CIA, following a request from the vice-president's office, to go to Niger to investigate the claim. … | |
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Cheney exempts his own office from reporting on classified material ¹ ² ³ º 4.29.06 Mark Silva Chicago Tribune
Wash.D.C. As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as "top secret" or "confidential," one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. |
Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office's secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it. That is only one way the Bush administration, from its opening weeks in 2001, has asserted control over information. By keeping secret so many directives and actions, the administration has precluded the public, and often members of Congress, from knowing about some of the most significant decisions and acts of the White House.
In the 9.11.01 aftermath, the administration has based much of its need for confidentiality on the imperative of protecting national security at a time of war. Yet experts say Bush and his closest advisers demonstrated their proclivity for privacy well before Sept. 11. Starting in the early weeks of his administration with a move to protect the papers of former presidents, Bush has clamped down on the release of govt documents. That includes tougher standards for what the public can obtain under the Freedom of Information Act and the creation of a broad new category of "sensitive but unclassified information."
Not only has the administration reported a dramatic increase in the number of documents deemed "top secret," "secret" or "confidential," the president has authorized the reclassification of information that was public for years. An audit by a National Archives office recently found that the CIA acted in a "clearly inappropriate" way regarding about one-third of the documents it reclassified last year.
The White House has resisted efforts by Congress to gain information, starting with a White House energy task force headed by Cheney and continuing with the president's secret authorization of warrantless surveillance of people inside U.S. suspected of communicating with terrorists abroad. Sen. Arlen Specter R-PA recently threatened to withhold funding for the surveillance program unless the White House starts providing information.
The administration has withheld the identities of, and accusations against, detainees held in its war on terror, and it censored findings of a joint House-Senate committee that investigated events leading to 9.11.01, incl a 27-page blackout of Saudi Arabia's alleged connections to the terrorists.
While maintaining a disciplined and virtually leakproof White House, senior administration members have been accused of leaking information to punish a critic of the war in Iraq. The grand jury testimony of a former White House aide reportedly asserts that Bush himself selectively authorized release of once-classified information to counter criticism.
Tension always existed between the presidency and the public, with concerns about security and confidentiality competing with the public's right to know about its govt. But the balance seems to be tipping toward secrecy in a more pronounced way than at any time in the past 3 decades.
"Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their govt," Bush said in his executive order on classified information. "Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national defense has required certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens."
Bush and Cheney have made it clear they are intent on reclaiming presidential powers lost by Bush predecessors. That erosion of power started with Richard Nixon's losing fight over the privacy of his papers after the Watergate scandal and continued through Bill Clinton's impeachment.
"This is a presidency in which, from the start, there were important forces to accentuate the executive prerogative, and all of that became more important after 9.11.01," said Princeton University prof. emeritus of politics Fred Greenstein, author of "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino maintains that the White House has "struck the right balance" between national security and openness. "We need to ensure that national security information is properly classified and protected," Perino said. "We endeavor to make as much information available to the public as possible. … We are accountable to the American people. The president doesn't want it any other way."
But to some, the administration's penchant for secrecy has curtailed crucial public debate.
"It determines the character of our political system," said Project on Govt Secrecy dir. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists. "Is it a political process that is open to wide-ranging debate, or is it more like a closed circle of elite decision-makers? I think we've learned, often to our disappointment, that it's the latter."
To others, the insistence that information considered important be kept confidential is part of the Bush White House's insistence on discipline and order.
"I really think they think of it in terms of good governance," said conservative think tank Heritage Foundation sr fellow for national security and homeland security James Carafano. "It's a very corporate style of leadership."
Bush has a partner, some say mentor, in Cheney, who from the start resisted all efforts to disclose the inner workings of a task force devising the administration's energy policy. He defeated an unprecedented lawsuit by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to unveil that task force and carried his fight successfully to the Supreme Court.
"This matter has been carefully reviewed," said spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride. "It has been determined that the reporting requirement does not apply to the office of the vice president."
The White House, in asserting a more powerful executive office, believed "that some of its authorities and privileges had eroded through the years and wanted to redraw that line," Walker said. "We just happened to be one of many situations that they chose to try to test."
As the administration has sealed an increasing number of documents as secret or sensitive, and cut the number of documents being declassified each year, the refusal of Cheney's office to report on the number of its decisions stands out. A directive from the National Archives, acting under the authority of the executive order bolstered by Bush in March 2003, requires all agencies and executive branch units to report annually on their classification and declassification of files. Cheney's office maintains that its dual executive and legislative duties make it unique, as the vice president also serves as president of the Senate.
To many, the administration's acts are part of a broader campaign to boost the powers of the presidency.
"It's pretty clear that there were certain players in the administration, including the vice president, who felt that the executive branch had not fully exerted all of its constitutional authorities," said U.S. comptroller general David Walker.
Walker, as head of the GAO, filed that office's only lawsuit against a govt agency in April 2002 as it sought to open the records of Cheney's energy task force. A federal judge dismissed the suit as a struggle between the executive and legislative branches that courts were not empowered to adjudicate.
Organizations including the Sierra Club also carried the fight to the Supreme Court, which in 2004 voted 7-2 to uphold "a paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation" and returned the case to an appeals court, which last year ruled in favor of the White House.
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Mideast conflict dominates Cheney talks VP travels to Israel Monday; Iraq issue overshadowed 3.17.02 MSNBC
VP Cheney is due to arrive in Israel Monday, part of 11 nation MidEast tour. His agenda there will focus on the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, overshadowing his original motivation for the regional trip to drum up support for U.S.
efforts to drive Iraq's Saddam Hussein from power. Cheney is to meet with U.S. special envoy Anthony Zinni, who is trying to end 18 months of Palestinian-Israeli fighting to pave the way for the resumption of peace talks.
Speaking from Bahrain on Sunday, the vice president said he hoped for a cease-fire between Palestinians & Israelis by the time of his arrival on Monday.
"There is no question that the ongoing conflict between Israelis & Palestinians is a preoccupation for
everybody in this part of the world," the vp said Sunday before leaving Bahrain for the neighboring Gulf state of
Qatar. The notion of a possible U.S. military strike has been rejected in nearly every country Cheney has visited so far, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Oman, and now the United Arab Emerites and Saudi Arabia. One exception was
Bahrain's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, who did not oppose the concept of striking Iraq &
Saddam Hussein. Al-Khalifa urged Iraq to comply with the U.N. sanctions to avoid "potential harm" to the region.
Saudi Arabia was perhaps the most diplomatically significant and challenging stop on Cheney's tour. VP said
Sunday that his meeting with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah a day earlier was one of the warmest they
have ever had. While they discussed the war on terrorism and possible U.S. action against Iraq, the Israel-
Palestinian conflict dominated the conversation, and Cheney conveyed support for a Saudi-led peace initiative for the region. The peace proposal offers Arab normalization of relations with Israel, in return for Israeli withdrawal from lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war. "We think it's a good one," said Cheney of the proposal, which he said gave some impetus to the peace process. Abdullah has said that most Arab states agree with his initiative, which he intends to propose formally at an Arab summit this month in Beirut. Cheney invited the kingdom's de facto ruler to visit Washington, and the official Saudi Press Agency said Prince Abdullah had accepted the offer, 9 months after he snubbed a similar invitation over perceived U.S. bias towards Israel. The American public's suspicion that Saudis hadn't cracked down on fund-raising for Islamic extremists was a source of tension after 9.11.01. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudis. Abdullah reportedly told Cheney that Saudi Arabia remains opposed to attacking Iraq and would not allow the U.S. to use Saudi bases for such an operation. However, the vice president would not disclose what Abdullah said and suggested that news accounts of their meeting may have been misleading. "The only people in the meeting were the crown prince and myself and an interpreter and I have his notes," Cheney said. The vice president insisted that his meeting with the Saudi leader was "very warm and friendly." The Saudi rejection was expected and telegraphed well in advance. But the meeting was significant because of the importance U.S. places on the role of Saudi Arabia in the region. The Bush administration believes a close working relationship with the Saudis is central to anything America hopes to achieve in the troubled Islamic world. Cheney took in $178,437 from Halliburton in 2003 4.13.04 Reuters
Wash.D.C. VP Cheney received $178,437 in deferred pay last year from Texas oil-field services co.
Halliburton he once headed that received billion-dollar govt contracts in Iraq. White House 4.13.04 released 2003
income tax returns for Cheney & wife Lynne and Pres. Shrub & wife, Laura.
Shrubs reported paying a total of $227,490 in federal income taxes. They contributed $68,360 to churches & charitable organizations. Cheneys reported taxable income of $813,226 in 2003. They paid $258,779 in taxes in withholding and estimated tax payments, but only owed $253,067 and thus were eligible for a $5,712 refund but decided to apply that to their 2004 taxes. Cheney reported $198,600 in vice-presidential salary for the year.
Cheney has taken some criticism from Democrats for his connection to Halliburton, which is the U.S. military's
biggest contractor in Iraq, responsible for everything from preparing meals for U.S. troops to repairing Iraq's oil
infrastructure. The co. has been a lightning rod for criticism during this presidential election year due to allegations it received lucrative contracts because of its ties to the White House.
Halliburton's Iraq deals described as contract abuse
A top U.S. Army procurement official said on Monday Halliburton's deals in Iraq were the worst example of contract abuse she had seen as Pentagon auditors flagged over $1 billion of potential overcharges by the Texas-based firm. Bunny Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' top contracting official-turned whistle-blower, said in testimony at a hearing by Democrats on Capitol Hill that "every aspect" of Halliburton's oil contract in Iraq had been under the control of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Her blistering criticism came as Democrats released a new report including Pentagon audits that identified more than $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq. Defense Dept spokeswoman Lt. Col Rose-Ann Lynch said the Pentagon had received the report but had not had a chance yet to fully review it.
Halliburton's subsidiary KBR is the U.S. military's biggest contractor in Iraq and has been accused by Democrats of getting lucrative work there because of its ties to Vice President Dick Cheney who headed Halliburton company from 1995-2000.
Halliburton issued a statement strongly rejecting comments by Greenhouse and others at the hearing, including a former KBR employee who accused the company of overcharging for food services provided to troops under a logistics deal.
Regarding claims of political influence because of Cheney, Mann said it was easier to "assign devious motives than to take the time to learn the truth."
What concerned Greenhouse most was that the oil contract, which had a top value of $7 billion, was given to KBR without competitive bidding. She irked her bosses by writing her concerns by hand in official documents but said these were overlooked.
Greenhouse acknowledged she had become a thorn in the side of the Army Corps and said she had been advised not to attend the hearing because of its partisan nature. |
Cheney oil firm had greater Iraq dealings 6.23.01 Reuters treasonable profiteering
Wash.D.C. The oilfield services co. Dick Cheney headed before he became U.S. vice
president had far more extensive financial dealings with Iraq than Cheney has acknowledged, Wash.Post reported Saturday. Citing U.N.
records & oil industry executives, the newspaper said 2 subsidiaries of Halliburton Co. had contracts to sell
$73 million dollars in oil production equipt & spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chair & CEO of the
Dallas-based co. The newspaper said, according to U.N. records, the subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll
Dresser Pump Co., sold material to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000. Cheney resigned as Halliburton chair in August.
"Halliburton divested itself as soon as it was legally feasible," she said, adding that the contracts themselves were "perfectly legal and within the law." Mary Matalin, Cheney's counselor, was quoted by the Post as saying that if he "was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, 'No.' "
Former executives at the Halliburton subsidiaries told the Post they had never heard objections, from Cheney or
any other company official, to trading with Baghdad. "Halliburton & Ingersoll-Rand, as far as I know, had no
official policy about that, other than we would be in compliance with applicable U.S. & international laws,"
former Ingersoll executive Cleive Dumas was quoted as saying.
Dirty Dick Cheney
& Genocide Inc. We would have preferred to have
merely linked to this article but have found The Nation removes stories vital to the public interest from clear
access via the Net after some amount of time. Therefore we archive this one in full.
Tricky Dick
When Dubya picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, the little screen was awash in flatulent flatteries from the
chattering classes: "a grown-up," "presidential," "all steak and no sizzle" were some of the most-repeated
encomiums sprayed in Cheney's direction. But after Gore surrogates fanned out across the blabshows armed with talking points about Cheney's reactionary voting record in Congress: against Head Start, school lunches, the liberation from prison of Nelson Mandela, the toxic waste cleanup Superfund and the like, Jay Leno cracked to his late-night audience that Bush/Cheney was "the Wizard of Oz ticket: One has no brain, the other has no heart."
When that equal-opportunity war criminal Colin Powell ." (the man who helped cover up the My Lai massacre)
delivered his prime-time benediction of Cheney to the Philadelphia Republicans, among those chuckling at the
enormous hypocrisy of Powell's effusive blessing was Leon Sigal, a former member of the New York Times
editorial board. Sigal's forthcoming book, Hang Separately: Cooperative Security Between U.S. & Russia,
1985-1994, details how Cheney, as Defense Secretary, remained a hard-line cold warrior even after the fall of the Berlin wall and fought Powell's proposed cuts in military spending & U.S. troops abroad.
To take just one example, on pg 452 of his memoirs, Powell describes his battle against the "foolish" attempt to
produce an improved nuclear artillery shell. "I was becoming more and more convinced that tactical nuclear
weapons had no place on a battlefield," Powell writes. "At a time when we were dismantling huge intermediate-
range nuclear missiles, why should we be putting money into refining small tactical nukes of questionable value?
Says a high-ranking military officer (now retired) who has an intimate knowledge of those deals but would only
speak with a guarantee of anonymity, "These contracts were let with no normal safeguards or protections to insure that the govt got what it paid for," on Cheney's watch. "We have been paying through the nose for a long
time for those contracts," for everything from arms-control-treaty hardware and software systems to the J-
STARS system, which monitors on-the-ground movement of vehicles and personnel and was extensively used in Desert Storm & Kosovo.
Halliburton has also raked in $1.5 billion in US govt loans from the Export-Import Bank & Overseas Private Investment Corporation, up from $100 million in such loans before Cheney took over. That's a lot of "compassion" for these phony fiscal conservatives, and it explains why the Center for Public Integrity has branded Cheney's company a "corporate-welfare hog."
Cheney has made several fortunes from his helmsmanship at Halliburton: According to Reuters, he was paid nearly $2 million in compensation in 1999 (down from $4.4 million the previous year) and given stock options worth from $7.4 million to $18.8 million (depending on the stock's future performance). This is on top of the $45.5 million in stock that Cheney owns as the company's largest shareholder, plus another $12.5 million in exercisable stock options.
These tyrants include not only the Saudis and the gaudy Gulf emirs (one of Halliburton's 5 intl offices is in Dubai)
but also the sanguineous regimes in Syria, Turkmenistan, Burma and Algeria. With one notable exception, Larry
Kaplan's dissection of Halliburton's dirty dealings with Heydar Aliyev's brutal Azerbaijani dictatorship in the August 8 New Republic, the press has largely ignored the Cheney-run company's squalid relations with these
regimes, where bribery-to-do-business is the rule.
Bahrain's prince echoed a view Cheney has heard repeatedly during his tour. "We are preoccupied by it [the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict] deeply so. "Reaching a just settlement for both sides has never been more important
because it holds up and it precludes and it confuses all of the other issues ... specifically weapons of mass
destruction, which we feel as strongly as U.S. does about it," he said.
In Nigeria, environmental groups have accused Halliburton under Cheney of murder. According to Oronto Douglas, a respected leader of an indigenous minority who heads Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action, an unarmed youth named Gidikumo Sule was killed by the Mobile Police in July 1997 in the course of a protest that involved the seizure of a Halliburton barge at Opuama, a village in the Niger delta.
Says the ERA's Douglas, "The Mobile Police are paid for by the oil companies, both under the military dictatorship of General Abacha we had then and the civilian dictatorship we have now, and deploying them is always done at the oil companies' request. We call them the 'Kill and Go' squads, because they can kill and go away with no questions asked. |
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Deal delayed in Halliburton case 12.13.02 Matthew Goldstein The Street.com
There will be no deal Friday between Halliburton and the thousands of individuals who've filed asbestos-related
claims against the big oil-services co. Speculation was rife that a deal to resolve more than 300,000 pending claims would be announced at a bankruptcy court hearing. But the hearing, at Halliburton's request, was postponed to next Wednesday to give the co. & trial lawyers more time to negotiate. Shares of Halliburton were largely unchanged on the news of the delay. The stock was recently down 25 cents, or 1.25%, to $19.75. A year ago, the co. stock fell as low as $12 a share after a jury ordered the co. to pay $30 million in damages in an asbestos case.
It's not known exactly what's causing the delay, but the deal is complex and might require Halliburton putting its
engineering & construction units into a prepackaged bankruptcy proceeding. The deal, however, would enable Dallas-based Halliburton to avoid filing for bankruptcy and resolve a thorny litigation issue that has been a major drag on its stock. But lawyers who represent a smaller group of people who already have contracted mesothelioma, a particularly deadly form of asbestos-related cancer, are not happy with the direction of the negotiations. One of those lawyers, Peter Kraus, said he's pulled out of the negotiations and is considering opposing the settlement unless it provides better payment for his clients. He said the deal being discussed now is substantially different than a more generous plan that was being discussed during the summer. |
It's in Halliburton's interest to reach a deal with the plaintiffs because its insurers will be responsible for much of the cash payout. It's not known which property and casualty firms issued coverage to Halliburton. But commercial insurers such as, American Intl Group and Travelers Property & Casualty, previously have reported having potential exposure to asbestos cases against their corporate customers.
However, insurance experts say a settlement in the Halliburton cases probably will have little impact on the
earnings of the insurers that are forced to fund the trust. That's because many of the insurers have been building up their reserves to pay for the claims.
"This is not new news to any of the insurers,'' said Sanford Bernstein insurance analyst Todd Bault. "They have
been involved in the negotiations. Settlements like these are expected.''
The potential deal in the Halliburton cases, meanwhile, comes at a time that other companies are looking to settle other asbestos cases. Earlier this week, Honeywell reported it is close to deal that would resolve some 190,000 spending claims.
6.28.01 Reuters
Wash.D.C. President Bush on Thursday named Elliott Abrams, who was involved in the Iran-
contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency, to a senior position at the White House National Security
Council. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that Abrams had been appointed to the position
of senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations. The position does not require Senate
confirmation. In 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from
Congress related to the Reagan administration's secret scheme to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund
the Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's leftist govt. He received a pardon from the president's father, the then
President George Bush.
One of those was Cuban-born conservative Otto Reich, Bush's nominee to head Latin American policy at the State
Dept as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich, a controversial member of the Cuban-
American exile lobby, ran the Reagan administration's Office of Public Diplomacy from 1983 to 1986. The office
was accused of using illegal means to promote public support for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Democratic
senators have vowed to oppose the appointment of Reich, a corporate lobbyist for rum producer Bacardi who
favors tightening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Bush picked Roger Noriega, an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms R-
NC, as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, the hemispheric forum of 34 nations. Bush has
made a point of emphasizing the importance of good North-South relations. Birns said the selections represented
"a very dangerous trend for the future of U.S.-Latin American relations" at a time of rising nationalism in the region.
"It clearly is a very provocative move," he said.
GWBush reorganizes NSC
GWBush's … first National Security Presidential Directive NSPD-1 … preserves NSC Principals
Committee & NSC Deputies Committee, top-level interagency forums for deliberation on national security
policy. It abolishes Pres.Clinton's system of Interagency Working Groups. To replace them, the Directive
establishes 11 Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs) on topics incl Proliferation, Counterproliferation &
Homeland Defense; Intelligence & Counterintelligence; Counter-Terrorism & National Preparedness; and
Records Access & Information Security. … As a consequence of the new Directive, much of the
Clinton Administration's prodigious security policy apparatus will be swept away, though portions of it will be
reconstituted within the new Policy Coordination Committee framework. Thus, the functions of the Security Policy
Board will be distributed among the new PCCs. The new series of National Security Presidential Directives will
replace both presidential decision directives & presidential review directives of past Administrations. Although
NSPD-1 is unclassified, the Bush Administration has declined to release it. But a copy of the seven page directive
obtained from a public-spirited source is posted here.
Cheney's hiding in a cave, too -- in Penn. ¹
Waynesboro, PA 3 hours after Osama bin Laden turned the Pentagon into a disaster area, 5
helicopters touched down a few hundred yards from Hal Neill's house at the base of Raven Rock Mountain along
the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Within minutes, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows zoomed up
Harbaugh Valley Rd, turned left, and deposited the weight of the free world inside Site R, the inexplicably named
city-in-a-mountain from which the Pentagon has operated and, from all indications VP Cheney has directed his
office since 9.11.01. Site R, with 6 stories of underground offices, subterranean water reservoir, and banks of
antennas, dishes and massive, steel doors, has been a designated backup command center since it was hewn out
of the mountain in 1951. For decades, Site R's presence was a village secret, barely acknowledged to outsiders
and attracting little outside interest in turn. ''There are 4 entrances, but I've only ever been able to find 3 of them,'' said Neill, as he stood in his back yard, looking over at the guard station next to 2 oversize metal doors in the hillside. 6 military men in sweatsuits jogged their way down the driveway and back up again. ''They weren't doing that before the attacks,'' Neill said. ''Now they're working out.'' The tidy equilibrium of rural life has been upended. ''Day & night, you hear the airplanes,'' said Bonnie Wolfe, whose model railroad shop sits below the flight path of the military jets & helicopters that intermittently pass by, usually unseen, inevitably heard. |
Summit of the Americas4.12.01 Quebec more A20
… OAS Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM)
Bush's secret weapon
… Russia expert & former Stanford Univ. provost, went to work in the White House in
1989 as National Security Council dir. of Soviet & East European Affairs, and stayed until
March 1991. … Former Pres. Bush could not have been more flattering in introducing Rice to
Mikhail Gorbachev in Dec. 1989. "This is Condoleezza Rice," he said. "She tells me everything I
know about the Soviet Union." Rice is indeed tight with the governor. A report released last week
listing the names of overnight guests at the governor's mansion showed Rice to be one of the
most frequent visitors. In a recent phone interview, Rice recalled her rise to political renown. Born
in Birmingham AL in 1954; since both parents were teachers, education was major theme of her
youth. So was faith. Her father, John Rice, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, as well as dean
of Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, and later vice chancellor of the Univ. of Denver. He was also a
Republican who influenced the political thinking of his daughter, who calls herself an "all-over-the-
map Republican." Rice considers herself "very conservative" on foreign policy but "almost shockingly libertarian" or
"moderate" on some issues.
A gifted student who skipped 2 grades [ = unsocialized ], Rice enrolled at Univ.
of Denver when she was 15 and graduated when she was 19. She gave up on a career as a pianist midway
through, and eventually wound up under former Czech diplomat Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright's father.
… but emerged with views much more in line with Korbel's than Albright's. "I am a realist," she told National
Review. "Power matters. But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy, and,
furthermore, the American people wouldn't accept such an absence. Europeans giggle at this and say we're naive,
but we're not Europeans, we're Americans and we have different principles."
… "She doesn't seem to try to push herself forward in any particular way," former Sec.State
Geo.Shultz told Time magazine last year. "But she has such a level of capability ... that she winds
up getting asked to do all sorts of things." … (The name, by the way, came from her mother,
like Rice a pianist, who made a variation on the musical direction con dolcezza, or "with
sweetness.") … she did in naming Harry Truman her man of the century to Time. He
"somehow made sense of what America's role in the world ought to be under the most difficult of
circumstances, when it would have been easy for U.S. to withdraw," she said. "I look
to the people of that era in amazement and wonderment at what they were able to do."
She first came to Stanford in 1981 as arms control & disarmament pgm fellow after earning
master's from Notre Dame and doctorate from Univ. of Denver grad school of intl studies. Her
Stanford mentor, Coit Blacker, Stanford's Inst. for Intl Studies deputy director, described what
intrigued her academic colleagues about her. " … charm & very gracious personality,"
He said Rice possesses "intellectual agility mixed with velvet-glove forcefulness."
In 1998 she had her first serious talk with the governor while visiting the
family in Kennebunkport. The Bushes invited her to come fishing off the Maine coast. "I don't get seasick,
but I also don't like the water very much and I most certainly don't fish" she said. "I let President &
Gov. Bush fish and I sat & talked. We talked a lot about the state of the American armed forces & ballistic
missile defense." The son, she said, has an edgier style than the father. "Gov. Bush is somewhat more interactive.
He tends to press the speaker to answer questions almost in a kind of rapid-fire manner."
Rice is loyal, and has talked often of her affection for
Pres.Bush, ¹ whose role in ending the Cold War has been understated,
she insists. She and Gov. Bush by all accounts have an easy, friendly rapport, and she serves his campaign in part
because she likes the man. Predictably, she also argues there's much more substance to Bush than people think.
"He came into the discussion of foreign policy with some very strong views already, some very strong values," she
said. "Free trade is in his bones.
As Texas governor, he watched how NAFTA improved both the Texan &
Mexican economies. He believes very strongly in that. That has not changed. What has happened is, as he
has looked at more areas of the world, I think he has seen how free trade can be a valuable tool in places he had
not encountered to the degree he had Mexico. Strong national defense was a bedrock for him when we first
started, as well as a ballistic missile defense.
|
Rice gives Clinton's team credit for success in N.Ireland and (maybe) the MidEast. But
like most everyone else, Rice slams the Clinton administration for its "ad hoc" foreign policy. As a telling example,
she points to the U.S. diplomatic effort in talks between Kosovo Albanians & Yugoslavia in Rambouillet,
France, last April, a failure NYTimes dubbed a "debacle." "Diplomacy is fine, but
you shouldn't have a kind of confused diplomacy in which you're trying to broker between two parties," she said.
"You have to have some demands and follow up on them. I thought Rambouillet was flawed from the beginning."
But sometimes Rice's take on big issues does not seem much different from where the administration stands. Her
position reflects the current mood among the U.S. leadership to oppose "open-
ended deployments and unclear military missions," as Bush put it in his Sept speech at the Citadel.
Rice's brand of hard-headed moderation may come through most clearly on the topic of China. She has a habit of
balancing contradicting concerns in a way that neutralizes both, but at the same time she's not afraid to make a
point more pungently than many top-level diplomats would. "I think China essentially resents the American
presence in the Pacific," she said. "We should have every desire to try and promote
[ Notably sloppy speech patterns incl failure to recognize infinitives & copious NatSec
milcorp catchphrases beyond mere bureaucrat's pedantry imply heavily predetermined judgement
& absence of genuinely critical i.e. self-critical analysis. She is a parrot coaching a monkey.
]
and encourage and support the changes going on in China," she said. "I believe trade is one way to do that. To the
degree that you can support a burgeoning entrepreneurial class in China, to the degree that you can use the WTO
and other trade levers to open up the Chinese economy, I think you do something good not just for the world
economy but also for political change in China."
[ China has demonstrated for over 2 decades that liberalized trade can readily be decoupled from
liberalized govt & power structure, given the world's largest standing army to enforce policy. ]
Clinton, she said, was not so much wrong on China, as Clintonesque. "This is a place where the Clinton
administration has been confused," she said. "At the time the president was elected in 1992 the Chinese were the
butchers of Beijing, which is what he accused President Bush of doing, coddling the 'butchers of Beijing.' Then a
year later China was going to be our strategic partner. Then a year after that we barely made a stir when the first
stories about Chinese stealing of American nuclear secrets came out, but we brought [Chinese Prime Minister] Zhu
Rongji to the country to sign the WTO agreement and pulled the rug out from under him. "No wonder the Chinese
are confused. You need a consistent policy with China." The Clinton administration, she said, "has not acted
consistently."
Long before the war in Chechnya was making front-page news, Rice was calling the Russian campaign there a
"very brutal war" and warning that it could get even more brutal if the Russian generals push it to the limit. "I don't
think that Russia is going to succeed in simultaneously treating the Chechen people this way and subduing them in
some sense, and then govern them," she said. But she's careful not to close any doors to diplomacy. She said of
Putin's KGB background, "Let's be fair, they are all [former] apparatchiks in Russia at this point. At one time,
anyone who is getting elected at this time was an apparatchik. I think we have to wait and see if this is an
apparatchik who might be able to take the country forward." Despite this optimism, she worries that Putin came
to power "largely on the heels of a kind of a war fever in Russia about Chechnya" and that once in office, he made
a point of talking about his support for the military. "Putin owes a lot to the Russian military," she said. "He was an
unknown, unheard-of and unheralded hand-picked prime minister by Yeltsin until this war in Chechnya made him
popular." Russia, she said, clearly remains a great power in any sense of the term, even though it is obviously in
decline in power compared to the Soviet period. "But it has all the attributes of a great power, population, military
potential and strength," she said. "It even has economic resources which, while untapped, would certainly give it
economic clout to make it a great power if it were better managed." …
[ Impossible to tell from this or any other statements whether this is heartfelt assessment or platitudes
for media consumption. Regardless, she gives zero acknowledgement that all global conflict has devolved from
ideologically based post-colonial struggles for liberation to unabashed resource wars that look ahead to the coming
centuries of scarcity controlled by consolidated international military forces. She speaks in terms of diplomats
& armies with no mention of the more commonly exerted influence of intelligence agencies skewing foreign
elections & economies. Nor does she speak to the burgeoning populist campaigns against globalization
& for labor self-realization. She shows no awareness of democratic principles far beyond property rights as the
foundation of American philosophy, appearing entirely bounded by realpolitik in her vision. ]
… America adrift … U.S. national interests today
|
Richard Armitage Robert Blackwill Jeffrey Eisenach Richard Falkenrath David Gergen Bob Graham Jerrold Green Arnold Kanter Paul Krugman John McCain Sam Nunn Condoleezza Rice Pat Roberts Brent Scowcroft |
Armitage Associates JFKennedy School of Govt Progress & Freedom Fdtn Harvard U. Ctr for Science & Intl Affairs Newshour w/Jim Lehrer U.S. Senate RAND Corp Forum for Intl Policy Stanford Univ. U.S. Senate U.S. Senate Ctr for Intl Security & Arms Control U.S. House The Scowcroft Group |
|
Office of Special Plans
7.28.03 Edw.T. Pound & Bruce B. Auster U.S. News
11 days before Pres. GWBush's 1.28.03 State of the Union speech, CIA sent the White House a classified report
suggesting Iraq might be seeking uranium in Niger for a nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. intelligence
officials. At nearly the same time, however, the CIA says, it pressed the White House to drop from the speech the
reference to the Niger allegations. Senate Intelligence Committee, concerned about what appears to be conflicting
actions by the CIA, is reviewing the matter as part of its investigation into how discredited information on the Niger
attempt got into the president's address. CIA officials confirmed that the agency had sent a senior executive
intelligence brief to the White House and national security agencies 1.17.03.
SEIB, sent daily to govt sr officials, contains highly classified national security information. CIA officials say the
SEIB wasn't an endorsement of the Niger intelligence; indeed, they say, it contained the same caveats cited in a
national intelligence estimate (NIE) issued Oct. 2002 by the intelligence community. That estimate said, "We do not
know the status" of the Iraqi-Niger dealings and cited State Dept doubts about the Niger reports.
Senate Intelligence Committee wants answers, and some Democrats see political daylight. They are expected to
demand the committee explore the role played by VP Cheney, who pressed the view that Saddam was close to
acquiring nuclear weapons. The GOP led panel has said it will pursue all leads.
Libby's document was sent to SecState Powell; it was intended as the "script" for his 2.5.03 UN presentation. The
puzzler: The charge that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was not in Libby's paper. Why not? "The agency had so
discredited it," says one participant, "they didn't want to bring it up." Senate intelligence panel chair Sen. Pat
Roberts R-KS says "the process was broken" and complains of "sloppy coordination" among national security
agencies. The State of the Union speech, which went through as many as two dozen drafts, was sent only to senior
aides, leaving little opportunity for checking by experts. However, days before the speech, a CIA analyst and a
National Security Council official agreed on the now infamous 16 words, attributing the uranium charge to the
British. Tenet was grilled last week by the Senate panel. Asked about Cheney's role, he said the vice president did not have any special interest in the uranium matter. But some Bush administration officials say that Cheney wields influence at the CIA. He & Libby occasionally visited the agency's VA HQ for briefings. "Nearly every day, Cheney & Scooter hammered the agency on Iraq or terrorism," says one senior administration official. "Over time, the agency got tired of fighting." |
Wolfowitz committee instructed White House to use Iraq uranium ref. in pres speech 7.17.03 Jason Leopold Scoop
Wash.DC … At issue is a secret committee set up in 2001 by DefSec Rumsfeld called Office of
Special Plans headed by Wolfowitz, Abrum Shulsky and under secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to probe allegations of links between Iraq
& terrorist organization al-Qaeda and whether the country was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass
destruction. OSP committee disbanded March 2003 after start of war in Iraq.
… The CIA official & senators said that's when Wolfowitz & his committee instructed the White
House to have Bush use the now disputed line about Iraq's attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in
a speech the President was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed National Security
Adviser Rice's aide Stephen Hadley that the information was unreliable.
… In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, OSP co-director Douglas Feith said the committee was not an
"intelligence project," but rather an group of 18 people that looked at intelligence information from a different point
of view. Feith said when the group had new "thoughts" on intelligence information it was given; they shared it with
CIA dir. Tenet.
Spies who pushed for war shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in
Washington to second-guess CIA to justify toppling Saddam Hussein by force
7.17.03 Julian Borger London Guardian
Wash.D.C. "The OSP was an open, largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not
only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's
office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on
Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise."
This time … the White House stands accused of politicising & contaminating its own source of
intelligence. According to former Bush officials, all defence & intelligence sources, sr admin figures created a
Pentagon agency of analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA & its military
counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by
DefSec Rumsfeld to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in
the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, incl VP Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like shadow govt, much of it off official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But
it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with State Dept & CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Cheney, at network's sharp end, made several trips to the CIA in Langley VA to demand more "forward-leaning"
interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff
Lewis "Scooter" Libby ¹
was, unprecedented hands-on vice-president involvement in processing intelligence data to
put pressure on CIA officials for appropriate results.
Days after 9.11.01, Rumsfeld & deputy, Paul Wolfowitz attempted to include Iraq in war against terror. When
established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq & al-Qaida, OSP was tasked to look more.
Former navy officer & Cheney ex-aide Wm Luti runs the day- to-day operations, answering to defence
undersecretary & former Reagan official Douglas Feith.
W/ mountainous documentation to see & not much time, the administration wanted to use momentum gained
in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq. OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff; to help deal with the load, the office hired
scores of temporary "consultants", incl lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from Wash.D.C. rightwing
thinktanks, few w/ experience in intelligence.
OSP's activities were mystery to DIA & Pentagon. "The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a sr officer who
left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed
anything with them." Civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy
presence," Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to
discuss it. OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
OSP was an open & largely unfiltered conduit to White House for Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to
parallel ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide
Bush administration with reports on Saddam's Iraq Mossad was unprepared to authorise. "None of the Israelis who
came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead,
they were waved in on Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press,
suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into
Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the Israeli prime minister's office.
US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank
Iraqi military base at Taji does not look like a place of global importance. It is a desolate expanse of bunkers &
hangars surrounded by barbed wire & battered look-out posts. It is deserted apart from American sentries at
the gate. Yet Taji, north of Baghdad, is key to debate. Where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Was the
war fought on a platform of lies? Taji was only specific location singled out by Sec.State Powell in his UN
address when he argued evidence compiled by US intelligence proved existence of an illegal weapons pgm.
'This is one of 65 such facilities in Iraq,' Powell said. 'We know this one has housed chemical weapons.'
Observer learnt that Taji has drawn a blank. U.S. sources say no such weapons were found when a search party
scoured the base in late April 2003. By then it had already been looted by local villagers. If Taji ever had any
secrets, they are long gone. … Last week, U.S. flew 2,000 more experts into Iraq. Iraq Survey Team joins 600
experts already there. Organisations in Iraq hunting for weapons now incl teams from the U.S. & British
armies, CIA, FBI and Defence Threat Reduction Agency.
Setbacks ratchet up political pressure for infighting between govt depts & intelligence agencies on both sides
of the Atlantic. Having fought a war to disarm Iraq of its terrible weapons, neither the U.S. nor Britain can admit Iraq
never had them in the first place. Search for weapons of mass destruction … is especially vital for The
Cabal. … OSP reports directly to
leading admin hawk Paul Wolfowitz. … 'Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence agency because he didn't like
the intelligence he was getting,' said Council on Foreign Relations national security studies dir. Larry Korb. 'He
doesn't like Powell's approach, a typical diplomat, too cautious.'
Cannistraro is retired; his attacks will not bother The Cabal, firmly 'in the loop' of Washington's movers &
shakers. … Citing 'intelligence' sources, Tony Blair produced an official dossier that concluded Iraq could fire
chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. … cold analysis after the war tells a
different story. Iraq was abandoned by the UN weapons inspectors, then bombed, invaded and finally brought
under U.S. & British military control. During that entire time, … weapons of mass destruction (weren't
used). Now both pro-war party & anti-war lobby want to know why. …
According to al-Marashit, the main cache of weapons of mass destruction should have been found in Saddam's
home city of Tikrit. Tikrit has fallen; as yet nothing has been found, leaving U.S. officials clutching at straws. Some
have gone so far as to suggest that the weapons were hidden so well that the Iraqis themselves were unable to use
them.
Intelligence misuse aside from Downing St plagiarised dossier are allegations Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.
Documents that accusation were based on were shown to be false by Intl Atomic Energy Agency, but that did not
stopp Britain & America warning of Saddam's nuclear threat. The forgeries were obvious. One Niger Minister,
whose signature was on a document, had been out of office for a decade when the forgeries were produced. A
U.S. envoy sent to investigate the claims reported to the CIA in Feb. 2002 that they were fakes. But the OSP
& the White House ignored him.
Other defectors may have had their own agendas. Kamil described one, Dr Khidhir Hamza, as a 'professional liar',
but told U.S. intelligence what it wanted to hear and said Iraq was close to building a nuclear bomb. No one now
believes that. … Perhaps most damning is lack of intelligence emerging from captured Iraqi officials. The list
is impressive: Huda Ammash, known as 'Mrs Anthrax'; General Hossam Amin, responsi ble for talks with weapons
inspectors; General Amir Saadi, Saddam's science adviser; General. Rashid al-Ubaidi, an arms adviser; and Abdul
Hwaish, believed responsible for all Iraq's military capabilities. If anyone knows about the weapons, it is these
people. They have powerful motivation to cut a deal & tell what they know. 'Why is no one coughing?' said
Whitty.
In a quiet corner of Baghdad Intl Airport sits a truck & trailer painted military green. Its canvas sides have been
rolled up to reveal pipes & vats of some form of biological fermentation machine. It was stolen in Mosul 2
weeks ago then handed over to Kurdish militia when the thieves realised it was no ordinary truck. The Kurds
passed it on to the Americans. It is the only concrete sign that any weapons of mass destruction may have existed.
The firm which made it has said 6 others were similarly kitted out. It has a strong resemblance to the 'mobile bio-
weapons labs' described by Powell to the UN, but is it the smoking gun? Not even the most desperate Pentagon
official goes that far. No trace of biological weapons residue has been found inside. The truck was apparently
thoroughly cleaned out with bleach before it was stolen.
For the last week, media obsessed with White House admission one element of the president's case, Iraq's attempt
to buy uranium from Niger, was factually inaccurate. By focusing on those 16 words in the State of the Union
Address, they miss the big picture. It's not just the uranium claim that doesn't hold up. 10 weeks after he declared
"mission accomplished," not one of the president's 4 point war plan is supported by the evidence. His entire case
was bogus:
Cheney praises Fox News Channel
VP calls network 'more accurate' than others
VP Cheney endorsed Fox News Channel
during a conference call last night with tens of thousands of GOP who were gathered across the country to
celebrate a National Party for the President Day organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign. Fox News styles its
coverage as "fair & balanced," but it has a heavy stable of conservative commentators that makes it a favorite
around the White House. It is unusual for a president or vice president to single out a commercial enterprise for
public praise.
Cheney, who recently was chosen by Bush's aides to address the National Rifle Association's national convention,
is the leading ambassador to conservatives for the campaign & administration. Cheney spoke live shortly after
8:30 pm. Cheers could be heard erupting behind an insurance representative from Johnson County, Iowa, as she
began asking Cheney her question. She complained about "the inconsistencies that we see in the media" and
asked him to "clarify some of the things that are happening in Iraq that really are good but just never get through
the media."
Campaign manager Ken Mehlman opened the call by saying : "Our opponent, John Kerry, has a very different
approach than going after the terrorists and continuing forward on economic recovery." Mehlman said the
participants can "set up future parties for the president at any time, for any day of your choosing" and said the
campaign will organize another nationwide party in mid-July.
King George, or Richard III, W as in Watergate
… As any sane citizen of voting age should know, "W" ''is purely dumb and mean. …
In Feb. 2002 as a result of Cheney's pressure, the CIA dispatches former Amb. Joseph Wilson to Niger to check
the Iraq yellowcake story. Current U.S. Amb. tells Wilson that she already sent reports to Washington debunking
the yellowcake story. Wilson interviews numerous current & former Niger officials when he returns, he tells the
CIA the story is almost certainly bogus. CIA informs various govt agencies & offices incl Office of the VP
2.24.02 second U.S. official Gen. Carlton Fulford was sent to Niger to determine status of Niger's uranium supply.
He reported to Defense & State Departments that Niger's uranium stocks were kept under tight control by a
French consortium
Mid 2002 Italian intelligenc eagency SISMI obtains a set of documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to
purchase some tons of yellowcake from Niger. The Italian govt notifies U.S., Britain and, by some accounts,
Israel
During 2002,Cheney, Libby and NewtGingrich (of Richard Perle's Defense Policy Board) all pay numerous visits to
CIA HQ to press CIA analysts to come up with incriminating evidence against Iraq.
8.26.02 Cheney, in a speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars, declares Hussein "has resumed his efforts to acquire
nuclear weapons ,'' and he announces: "Many of us are convinced Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly
soon.'' This speech launches a campaign by Bush admin to portray Hussein as on verge of acquiring nuclear
weapons despite complete lack of any current, reliable intelligence to this effect.
9.24.02 PM Blair's govt releases a dossier stating "Iraq sought supply of significant quantities of uranium from
Africa.'' Shortly after this, CIA advises British govt of its doubts
10.7.02 Pres. GWBush delivered major speech in Cincinnati. In days preceding the speech, CIA dir. Tenet
personally intervened and persuaded deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to delete not only any claim
regarding Niger, but all references to Iraq attempting to obtain uranium from Africa.
10.11.02 Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba obtains the bogus Niger documents. She provides them to the U.S.
Embassy in Rome, which sends them to Wash.DC. State Dept intelligence (INR) provides them to other agencies
(but apparently not to the CIA), with caveat that they are "highly dubious.'' Meanwhile, CIA station in Rome,
knowing the yellowcake story has already been discredited, doesn't bother to send them to HQ
Dec. 2002 State Dept "FactSheet'' says Iraq failed to disclose attempts to purchase uranium oxide from Niger. The
Fact Sheet is not cleared by State Dept INR. CIA objects. In cabling Fact Sheet around the world, Niger reference
is dropped.
1.27.03, days preceding President's State of the Union address, CIA proliferation expert Alan Foley discovers that
the White House is attempting to revive the Niger yellowcake claim and objects. NSC aide RobertJoseph, long-time
crony of Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, insists that the claim must go in. After negotiations, a compromise is
reached by which the claim will be attributed to British govt.
1.28.03 Pres. GWBush delivers State of Union address, stating: "British govt has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. … Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained
these activities. He clearly has much to hide."
Within days of State of Union address, CIA obtains copies of original Niger documents, by some accounts, having
sent a representative to Rome to get them.
2.5.03 Sec.State Powell delivers UN Security Council presentation on Iraq's WMD programs. He omits any
reference to Niger yellowcake claim. The claim had been included in the first draft of his speech, reportedly written
by Cheney's aide Lewis Libby, but was thrown out during an intensive 4 day review at CIA HQ, during which
Powell is reported to have labelled the Libby draft as "bullshit" and discarded it.
2.5.03 State Dept gives copies of Niger documents to Intl Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with warning that the
documents are likely fraudulent. Within one to two hours, IAEA easily determines the documents are forgeries.
3.7.03 presentation to UN Security Council, IAEA dir. general Mohammed El Baradei announces to world that the
Niger documents are forgeries.
3.16.03 NBC's "Meet the Press", Cheney states, when asked about El Baradei's statement: "I disagree …
.We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in
fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think El Baradei frankly is wrong."
3.19.03 U.S. launches second war on Iraq.
Cheney had Iraq in sights 2 years ago
NYC Documents released under America's Freedom of Information Act reveal an energy task force led by vp
Cheney was examining Iraq's oil assets 2 years before the latest war began. The papers were obtained after a long
battle with the White House by conservative legal charity Judicial Watch that opposes govt secrecy and which is
suing for the dealings of the task force to be made public.
Judicial Watch requested the papers 2 years ago as part of its investigation into links between the Bush admin
& sr energy executives incl Enron's former chair Ken Lay. Cheney fought the documents' release at every
stage. A court ordered 2 weeks ago that at least some of the task force's working papers should be made
public.
Mr Fitton said: "Opponents of the war will point to the documents as evidence that the Bush administration was
after Iraqi oil. Supporters will say the energy task force would have been remiss if it did not take Iraq's oil into
account." … A court ordered the govt to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and give up these
documents more than a year ago. Judicial Watch said it could not explain why the papers were suddenly
released. A govt spokesman declined to elaborate. |
|
Selective intelligence
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable? 5.12.03 Seymour M. Hersh New Yorker
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal, small cluster of policy
advisers & analysts now based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former & present Bush admin officials, their operation, conceived by deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, brought crucial change of direction in American intelligence community. These advisers & analysts began their work days after 9.11.01 and produced intelligence reviews that shaped public opinion & American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.
Special Plans operation dir. Abram Shulsky, scholarly expert in works of political philosopher Leo Strauss, quietly
worked on intelligence & foreign-policy issues for 3 decades on early 1980s Senate Intelligence Committee
staff and in Pentagon under Asst Sec.Defense Richard Perle during Reagan Administration, after which he joined Rand Corp.
Former DIA MidEast intelligence chief W. Patrick Lang said, "The Pentagon banded together to dominate govt's
foreign policy, and they pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. DIA was intimidated & beaten to a pulp. There's
no guts at all in the C.I.A."
Pentagon adviser who worked w/ OSP dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic
whining. "Shulsky & Luti won the policy debate," the adviser said. "They beat 'em; they cleaned up against
State & C.I.A. There's no mystery why they won; they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is
smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the
President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who
won." He added, "I'd love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of 8 or 9 people made the
case & won."
According to Pentagon adviser, OSP was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz & his boss
DefSec Rumsfeld, believed to be true: Saddam Hussein had close ties to al Qaeda and Iraq had an enormous
arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and potentially U.S.
Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction had been a matter of concern to the intl community
since before first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in the past. At some point, he assembled
thousands of chemical warheads, along with biological weapons, and made a serious attempt to build a nuclear
weapons pgm.
Feb. 2003 poll showed 72% of Americans believed it likely Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9.11.01
attacks, although no definitive evidence of such a connection has been presented. Rumsfeld & colleagues
believed CIA was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. "The agency was out to disprove linkage
between Iraq & terrorism," Pentagon adviser told me. "That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with
intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at CIA that color the way it sees data."
He said OSP goal was "to put the data under microscope to reveal what intelligence community can't see.
Shulsky's carrying the heaviest part." Before 9.11.01, then Pentagon Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle
made similar argument about intelligence community knowledge of Iraq's weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations
subcommittee hearing March 2001 he said, "Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does.
We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. … How far he's gone on the
nuclear-weapons side I don't think we really know. My guess is it's further than we think. It's always further than
we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we're able to prove &
demonstrate. [ David Stockman paraphrase: 'triumph of
politics' (over logic). ]
An Oct. 2002 Times article reported Rumsfeld ordered an intelligence operation "to search for information on Iraq's
hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that CIA might have overlooked. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story
at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. "I'm told that after 9.11.01 a small group, I think 2 to start with, and
maybe 4 now … were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on
intelligence-type things." He went on to say, "You don't know what you don't know. So in comes the daily
briefer", from the CIA "and she walks through the daily brief. I ask questions. 'Gee, what about this?' or 'What about
that? Has somebody thought of this?'" At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that
there was "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members."
If OSP searched for new intelligence on Iraq, most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The
office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Umbrella INC organization for diverse groups
opposed to Saddam constantly seeks out Iraqi defectors. OSP developed a close working relationship with ICN;
this strengthened its position in disputes with CIA and gave Pentagon pro-war leadership added leverage in
constant disputes with State Dept.
Another level to Chalabi's relationship with U.S. in mid 1990s was CIA secretly funnelling millions of dollars
annually to INC. Those payments ended around 1996, a former CIA MidEast station chief told me, essentially
because the agency had doubts about Chalabi's integrity. In 1992, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud
in Jordan. He has always denied any wrongdoing. "You had to treat them with suspicion," another former MidEast
station chief said of Chalabi's people. "INC has a track record of manipulating information because it has an
agenda. It's a political unit, not an intelligence agency."
In Aug. 1995, General Hussein Kamel in charge of Iraq's weapons pgm defected to Jordan with his brother Colonel
Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to
develop weapons of mass destruction, much unknown to U.N. inspection teams on the job since 1991 and were
interviewed at length by U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of
forgiveness, then killed them. Kamels' information became a major element in Bush admin campaign to convince
public of U.N. inspections' failure.
Full record of Hussein Kamel's interview with the inspectors reveals, however, he also said that Iraq's stockpile of
chemical & biological warheads, manufactured before 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in
response to ongoing inspections. 8.22.95 interview was conducted by then U.N. inspection teams exec. chair Rolf
Ekeus and 2 sr associates Nikita Smidovich & Maurizio Zifferaro. "You have an important role in Iraq," Kamel
said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. "You should not underestimate
yourself. You are very effective in Iraq."
Kamel also cast doubt on 1994 defector Iraqi nuclear scientist Dr. Khidhir Hamza's testimony. Hamza settled in
U.S. with INC help and was highly vocal witness concerning Iraq's alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told U.N.
interviewers, however, that Hamza was "a professional liar." He went on, "He worked with us, but he was useless
and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. … He was even
interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go."
In 2000, Hamza published "Saddam's Bombmaker," vivid account claiming by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq
was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Washington journalist Jeff Stein who
collaborated on the book told me Hamza's account was "absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any
memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration."
Advantages & disadvantages of relying on defectors has been a perennial source of dispute within American
intelligence community, as Shulsky himself noted in 1991 textbook on intelligence he co-authored. Despite their
importance, he wrote, "it is difficult to be certain that they are genuine. … Conflicting information provided by
several major Soviet defectors to U.S. … has never been completely sorted out; it bedeviled U.S. intelligence
for a quarter of a century."
With Pentagon support, Chalabi's INC worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the
U.S. & Europe. Resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told
of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by CIA. Misstatements &
inconsistencies in INC defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections,
which ended a few days before the American assault.
Cambridge Univ. political science lecturer Dr. Glen Rangwala compiled & examined information made public
& concluded U.N. inspections failed to find evidence to support the defectors' claims. For example, many
newspapers published extensive interviews with civil engineer Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri who, with INC help,
fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed he visited 20 hidden facilities he believed were built for the production
of biological & chemical weapons. One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad.
Almost immediately after 9.11.01, INC began to publicize defectors' stories who claimed information connecting
Iraq to the attacks. In 10.14.01 joint Times & public TV pgm "Frontline" interview, Iraqi Army captain Sabah
Khodada said 9.11.01 "was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam," and Iraq had a program to instruct
terrorists in hijacking. Another defector, identified only as retired Iraqi intelligence service Lt general, said in 2000
he witnessed Arab students given hijacking lessons on a Boeing 707 parked at Iraqi training camp near the town of
Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain's MI6. CIA offered similar training in
counter-terrorism throughout MidEast. "We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison," the former station
chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism
training when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, 10 years before 9.11.01.
Former Bush admin intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi's group, working with Pentagon, produced
Iraq defector interviewed overseas by DIA agent. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi's people.
Last summer, the DIA report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, London Times described
how defector trained with al Qaeda terrorists in late 1990s at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received
instructions in the use of chemical & biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity
& relocated.
The former intelligence official went on, "One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the CIA
intelligence & other agencies' only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting,
and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with to
the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God." He added, "If it doesn't fit
their theory, they don't want to accept it."
Nazi Germany refugee Strauss arrived 1937 in U.S. and trained in history of political philosophy. He
became a foremost conservative émigré scholar, widely known for his argument that works of ancient
philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very
few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. Straussian movement has many adherents in & around
Bush admin. In addition to Wolfowitz, they include Weekly Standard ed. Wm Kristol, and DoD Intelligence
under-secretary Stephen Cambone who is particularly close to Rumsfeld.
How Strauss's views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. As it
happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled "Leo Strauss
and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)"; in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the
highest form of rationality. In the essay, Shulsky & Schmitt write that Strauss's "gentleness, his ability to
concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his
seeming unworldliness … may even be said to resemble, however faintly, John le Carré novels' George
Smiley".
Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky & Schmitt added, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may
be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say
nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception." Committee on Social
Thought chair Robert Pippin at Chicago, critic of Strauss, told me, "Strauss believed that good statesmen
have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is
more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable
in the same way."
When I asked staunch Strauss defender Chicago political science prof. emeritus Joseph Cropsey about use of
Strauss's views in the area of policymaking, he told me that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount
of deception is essential in govt. "That people in govt have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious, 'If I
tell you the truth I can't but help the enemy.'" But there is nothing in Strauss's work, he added, that "favors
preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence & sound judgment. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the
1930s, who's not going to be in favor of that? You don't need Strauss to reach that conclusion."
Some former intelligence officials believe Shulsky & his superiors were captives of their own
convictions merely deceiving themselves. Former CIA counter-terrorism operations & analysis chief
Vincent Cannistraro worked with Shulsky at Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, "Abe is very gentle
& slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group, the Straussian view." The
group's members, Cannistraro said, "reinforce each other because they're the only friends they have, and they
all work together since 1980s, but they've never been able to coalesce as they have now. 9.11.01 gave them
opportunity; now they're in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be
there."
Rising OSP was accompanied by decline in CIA & DIA influence. One internal Pentagon memorandum went
so far as to suggest that terrorism experts in govt & outside deliberately "downplayed or sought to disprove"
link between al Qaeda & Iraq. "For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community" against
defectors, the memorandum said. It urged 2 analysts working with Shulsky be given the authority to "investigate
linkages to Iraq" by having access to the "proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors."
In interviews, former CIA officers & analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. "George
knows he's being beaten up," one former officer said of CIA dir. George Tenet. "His analysts are terrified. George
used to protect his people, but he's been forced to do things their way." Because CIA analysts are now on
defensive, "they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what's going on. Defense Dept &
office of VP write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find
anything you want."
More than a year's worth of increasingly bitter debate over value & integrity of OSP intelligence came to a halt
in March, when Pres. GWBush authorized war against Iraq. After weeks of fighting, Saddam Hussein's regime
collapsed, leaving American forces to declare victory against backdrop of disorder & uncertainty about the
country's future. Ahmad Chalabi & INC continued to provoke fights within Bush admin. Pentagon flew Chalabi
& hundreds of his supporters, heavily armed, into Iraq, amid tight security, over angry objections from the
State Dept. Chalabi is now establishing himself in Baghdad. His advocates in the Pentagon point out that he is not
only a Shiite, like the majority of Iraqis, but also, as one scholar put it, "a completely Westernized businessman" (he
emigrated to England with his parents in 1958, when he was a boy), which is one reason the State Dept doubts
whether he can gain support among Iraqis.
Chalabi is not the only point of contention. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in places where the
Pentagon's sources confidently predicted they would be found reanimated debate on quality of OSP intelligence.
Former high-level intelligence official told me American Special Forces units sent into Iraq in mid-March before start
of air & ground war to investigate suspected sites of missile or chemical & biological weapon storage
depots "came up with nothing," the official said. "Never found a single Scud."
Pentagon adviser to OSP told me he believed that the delay "means nothing. We've got to wait to get all the
answers from Iraqi scientists who will tell us where they are." Similarly, Pentagon official who works for Luti said
last week, "I think they're hidden in the mountains or transferred to some friendly countries. Saddam had enough
time to move them." There were suggestions from the Pentagon that Saddam might be shipping weapons over the
border to Syria.
Weapons may yet be found. Iraq is a big country, as the admin repeatedly pointed out in recent weeks. In a speech
last week, Pres. GWBush said, "We've begun search for hidden chemical & biological weapons, and already
know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Meanwhile, if the American advance hasn't uncovered stashes
of weapons of mass destruction, it has turned up additional graphic evidence of the brutality of the regime. Saddam
Hussein's cruelty was documented long before 9.11.01, and was not the principal reason Bush admin gave to the
world for the necessity of war. |
Tell us another one, Mr. Vice President
Cheney is still trying to link Iraq with Al Qaeda & 9/11.
4.12.07 Sen. Carl Levin D-MI, Senate Armed Services Committee chair L.A. Times
On Rush Limbaugh's radio program last week, VP Cheney spoke about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi and stated: "He went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al Qaeda operations inside Iraq. … This is Al Qaeda operating in Iraq and, as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."
It is incredible that more than 4 years after the invasion, the vice president is still trying to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's regime was connected to Al Qaeda and that Zarqawi's presence in Iraq was evidence of a connection.
While the vice president doesn't say directly that there was a tie between the two, his clear purpose is to blur the line between Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraqi dictator in order to justify the war in Iraq.
The problem is, that's simply not supported by the facts or by our intelligence community; everyone except the vice president acknowledges it. In September, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that Hussein was "distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support."
The CIA reported a year earlier in Oct. 2005 that the Iraqi regime "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates". As the Intelligence Committee report noted, the Iraqi intelligence service was actually trying to capture Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad under an alias.
Is the vice president willfully ignoring what the rest of the government has concluded? Or does he have access to information he hasn't shared with us? If so, he should produce it.
The vice president has a clear, documented pattern of overstating and misstating information with regard to Iraq. He also, for instance, continued to claim that 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta may have met with an Iraqi agent in Prague long after the intelligence community believed otherwise.
Again, his obvious purpose is to link Hussein's regime with Sept. 11, even though the rest of the world has concluded that no such link exists.
The vice president has made so many outlandish statements that the country barely raised an eyebrow at his false statement last week. The public has stopped believing the words of a man who promised, before we invaded Iraq, that we would be "greeted as liberators" and reassured us nearly 2 years ago that the insurgency was in its "last throes."
But his comments continue to erode our credibility with the international community, which has already been severely damaged by our rush to war with Iraq with little international support.
If, in the months ahead, we face a crisis over Iran's weapons programs and need to rally the international community, we may find that the world has little interest in trusting an administration that misstates facts.
By all accounts, Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful vice presidents in our history, if you define power as influence over policy. We need to ask ourselves: What does it mean for our country when the vice president's words lack credibility, but he still wields great power?
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