Sunday, October 23, 2005

NEWSWEEK: Cheney and Advisers Aggressively Advanced Case for Iraq War

DRAMA BOMB. It's looking more and more like Cheney is right in the thick of this Plame case. I can't wait to see how this plays out.

NEWSWEEK: Vice President Cheney and Close-Knit Group of Advisers Aggressively Advanced Case for Iraq War, Chasing Down Critics and Setting the Stage for the CIA Leak Case

After 9/11, Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby Would 'Pump' Intelligence Officials for Raw Information on Iraq

Cheney Aide John Hannah, Speculated to Be Key Figure In Leak Investigation, Is Not a Target, Says Lawyer: Hannah 'Knew Nothing...This Is Craziness'

Soon after 9/11, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, began routinely calling intelligence officials, high and low, to pump them for any scraps of information on Iraq. He would read obscure, unvetted intelligence reports and grill their authors, but always in a courtly manner, report Newsweek's National Security Correspondent John Barry and Investigative Correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball in the October 31 issue (on newsstands Monday, October 24). The intel officials were often more than a little surprised. It was extraordinarily unusual for the vice president's office to step so far outside of channels and make personal appeals to mere analysts.

"He was deep into the raw intel," one government official tells Newsweek.

Libby was the most relentless digger in Cheney's close-knit group of advisers, which also included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped advance their case for war, Newsweek reports. Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to get nukes -- a claim helped by a report that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, which the White House doggedly pushed. Ambassador Joseph Wilson damaged that claim with his landmark New York Times op-ed piece, printed on July 6, 2003, about his trip to Niger to investigate the story, during which he concluded it was not credible. Within the White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against President Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws protecting classified information. This week the two-year-long investigation of that leak could finally end. It is widely expected that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed in the case, may issue indictments for one or more top administration officials, possibly including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

Posted by crimnos @ 6:52 PM

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I am about to pee my pants about all of this!! Let's see his cards (Fitz) on all of this. I would LOVE to see Cheney be indicted!!!!

Posted by Blogger Handsome B. Wonderful @ 7:06 PM #
 

Oh man, I can't even imagine...

Posted by Blogger crimnos @ 10:53 AM #
 
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