posted 06-12-2004 08:07 PM            

Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming

by
Michael C. Ruppert

additional reporting by
Wayne Madsen from Washington

© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

JUNE 8, 2004 1600 PDT (FTW) - Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?

The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence "failures" before the upcoming presidential election.

Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.

Based upon recent developments, it appears that long-standing plans and preparations leading to indictments and impeachment of Bush, Cheney and even some senior cabinet members have been accelerated, possibly with the intent of removing or replacing the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August.

FTW has been documenting this Watergate-like coup for more than fifteen months and almost everything we will discuss about recent events was predicted by us in the following pages: Please see our stories "The Perfect Storm - Part I" (March 2003); "Blood in the Water" (July 2003); "Beyond Bush - Part I" (July 2003); "Waxman Ties Evidentiary Noose Around Rice and Cheney" (July 2003); and "Beyond Bush - Part II" (October 2003).

There were two things we didn't get right. One was the timing. We predicted the developments taking place now as likely to happen after the November election, not before. Secondly, we did not foresee the sudden resignations of Tenet and Pavitt. Understanding the resignations is the key to understanding a deteriorating world scene and that America is on the precipice of a presidential and constitutional crisis that will ultimately dwarf the removal of Richard Nixon in 1974.

So why did Tenet and Pavitt resign? We'll explain why and we will provide many clues along the way as we make our case.

HIGH CRIMES AND REALLY STUPID MOVES

Shortly after the "surprise" Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer. What received less attention was that the leak also destroyed a long-term CIA proprietary intelligence gathering operation which, as we will see, was of immense importance to US strategic interests at a critical moment.

The leak was a vindictive retaliation for statements, reports and actions taken by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, which had deeply embarrassed the Bush administration and exposed it to possible charges for impeachable offenses, including lying to the American people about an alleged (and totally unfounded) nuclear threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Conservative columnist Robert Novak, the beneficiary of the leak, immediately published it on July 14, 2003 and Valerie Plame's career (at least the covert part) instantly ended. The actual damage caused by that leak has never been fully appreciated.

Wilson deeply embarrassed almost every senior member of the Bush junta by proving to the world that they were consciously lying about one of their most important justifications for invading Iraq: namely, their claim to have had certain knowledge, based on "good and reliable" intelligence, that Hussein was on the brink of deploying a nuclear weapon, possibly inside the United States. It was eventually disclosed that the "intelligence" possessed by the administration was a set of poorly forged documents on letterhead from the government of Niger, which described attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapons program.

It has since been established by Scott Ritter and others that Iraq's nuclear weapons program had been dead in the water and non-functioning since the first Iraq war.

Wilson was secretly dispatched in February 2002, on instructions from Dick Cheney to the CIA, to go to Niger and look for anything that might support the material in the documents. They had already been dismissed as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and apparently everyone else who had seen them. The CIA cautioned the administration, more than once, against using them. Shortly thereafter, Wilson returned and gave his report stating clearly that the allegations were pure bunk and unsupportable.

In spite of this, unaware of the booby traps laid all around them, the entire power core of the Bush administration jumped on the Niger documents as on a battle horse and charged off into in a massive public relations blitz. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and others - to varying degrees - insisted, testified, and swore that they knew, and had reliable, credible and verified intelligence that Saddam was about to deploy an actual nuclear device built from the Niger yellowcake.

It was full court media press and they successfully scared the pants off of most Americans who believed that Saddam was going to nuke them any second.

George Bush made the charge and actually cited the documents in his 2003 State-of-the-Union address, even after he had been cautioned by George Tenet not to rely on them. In a major speech at the United Nations, Colin Powell charged that Iraq was on the verge of deploying a nuke and had been trying to acquire uranium. Dick Cheney charged in several speeches that Saddam was capable of nuclear terror. And shortly before the invasion, when asked in a television interview whether there was sufficient proof and advance warning of the Iraqi nuclear threat, a smug and confident Condoleezza Rice quipped, "If we wait for a smoking gun, that smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud over an American city." Rice was lying through her teeth.

By July of 2003, as the Iraqi invasion was proving to be a protracted and ill-conceived debacle, executed in spite of massive resistance from within military, political, diplomatic and economic cadres, there was growing disgust within many government circles about the way the Bush administration was running things. The mention of Wilson's report came in July though his name was not disclosed. It suggested corroborative evidence of criminal, rather than stupid, behavior by the administration. The San Francisco Chronicle reported:

A senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger could not confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.

Note the reference to an Agency source.

It was inevitable that Wilson would move from no comment, to statements given on condition of anonymity, and finally into the public spotlight. That he did, in a July 6th New York Times Editorial titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Soon he was giving interviews everywhere.

On July 14th Novak published the column outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. As a result, any criminal investigation of the Plame leak will also go into the Niger documents and any crimes committed which are materially related to Plame's exposure.

Instead of retreating, Wilson advanced. In Septmeber he went public, writing editorials and granting interviews which thoroughly exposed the Bush administration's criminal use of the documents, Cheney's lies about the mission, and all the other lies used to deceive the American people into war.

At the moment he went on the record, Wilson became another legally admissible, corroborative evidentiary source; a witness available for subpoena and deposition, ready to give testimony to the high crimes and misdemeanors he has witnessed.

First Clue: James Pavitt was Valerie Plame's boss. So was George Tenet.

HOW THE TRAP WAS SET

Conflicting news reports suggest that perhaps several sets of the documents were delivered simultaneously to several recipients. I could find only one news story (out of almost 60 I have reviewed) which indicated just when the Niger papers were first put into play. One of the most fundamental questions in journalism, "when?" was omitted from every major press organization's coverage except for a single story from the Associated Press on July 13th.

… [T]he forged Niger government documents, showing attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake, were delivered by unknown sources to a journalist working for Italy's Corriere della Sera which then gave them to the Italian intelligence service. She then reportedly gave them to Italian intelligence agents who gave them to the US embassy. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker also offered this version indicating that the documents had surfaced in Italy in the fall of 2001.

The fall of 2001. That means that the documents were created no more than three and a half months after September 11th.

The earliest press report mentioning the documents was a March 7, 2003 story in The Financial Times. On that day, Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to the UN Security Council that the documents were forgeries. The story contained a revealing paragraph.

"The allegation about the uranium purchase first surfaced in a UK government dossier published on September 24 last year about Iraq's alleged weapons programmes, though it did not name Niger. Niger was first named when the US State Department elaborated on the allegations on December 19 [2002]…

Canada's Globe and Mail reported on March 8, 2003:

…[T]he forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man some time ago and passed on to French authorities, but the scam was uncovered by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] only recently, according to United Nations sources familiar with the investigation. The documents were turned over to the IAEA several weeks ago.

"In fact, the IAEA says, there is no credible evidence that Iraq tried to import uranium ore from the Central African country in violation of UN resolutions.

"Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger, are, in fact, not authentic," Mr. El Baradei told the UN Security Council Friday….

The Chicago Tribune reported on March 13, 2003, "Forged documents that the United States used to build its case against Iraq were likely written by someone in Niger's embassy in Rome who hoped to make quick money, a source close to the United Nations investigation said.

The Washington Post gave yet a different story, also on March 8, 2003:

…Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away - including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said…"

…The CIA, which had also obtained the documents, had questions about "whether they were accurate," said one intelligence official, and it decided not to include them in its file on Iraq's program to procure weapons of mass destruction.

In a follow-up story on March 13th the Post reported:

It's something we're just beginning to look at," a senior law enforcement official said yesterday. Officials are trying to determine whether the documents were forged to try to influence U.S. policy, or whether they may have been created as part of a disinformation campaign directed by a foreign intelligence service...

…The phony documents - a series of letters between Iraqi and Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons - came to British and U.S. intelligence officials from a third country. The identity of the third country could not be learned yesterday.

What if it wasn't a foreign intelligence service? I had been suspicious that a Watergate-like coup was forming immediately after reading the first few stories about the documents. I was convinced when the AP reported on March 14, 2003 (just days before the Iraqi invasion) that the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee had called for an FBI investigation of the documents' origins. The Boston Globe reported two days later that the Senator was specifically seeking to determine whether administration officials had forged the documents themselves to marshal support for the invasion.

The request was not nearly as significant to me as who it had come from - Jay Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Rockefellers. An oil dynasty was calling for an investigation of a bunch of oil men. Somebody was screwing up big time.

Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled "The Stovepipe."

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

"Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.' He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves. [emphasis added]

Hersh's revelation provided corroboration for something I and others, like the renowned political historian Peter Dale Scott, had been suspecting for a long time. The CIA was fighting back. This was a well orchestrated, long-term covert operation - exactly what the CIA does all over the world.

POINT OF NO RETURN

Willing disclosure of the identity of a covert operative is a serious felony under Federal law, punishable by fine and/or imprisonment. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 makes it a crime for anyone with access to classified information to intentionally disclose information identifying a covert operative. The penalties get worse for doing it to a deep cover Direcorate of Operations (DO) case officer (as opposed to an undercover DEA Agent).

After John Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself from the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, was transferred to Washington and appointed special prosecutor in the Plame case.

Robert Novak, rightly standing by the journalistic code of ethics, has steadfastly refused to identify his White House source. We would do the same thing in his shoes. The investigation is nearing a climax with pending issuance of criminal indictments. Press reports citing sources close to the investigation have directly and indirectly pointed fingers at Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as suspects.

Second clue: The criminal investigation of the Plame leak was investigated after a September 2003 formal request from the CIA, approved by George Tenet.

Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company, Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame, intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of mass destruction.

However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal founders.

According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed.

It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.

By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of the United States.

Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO

According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into irreversible decline.

ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco’s partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of ARAMCO’s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields – 25% of all the oil on the planet.

It gets better.

According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.

Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.

The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.

So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by a whole lot of countries.

As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges, were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump scheme and made a whole lot of money.

Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.

From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.

Third clue: Tenet's resignation, which occurred at night, was the first "evening resignation" of a Cabinet-level official since October 1973 when Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest of Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Many regard this as the watershed moment when the Nixon administration was doomed.

SAUDI ARABIA

Given that energy is becoming the most important issue on the planet today, if you were the CIA, you might be a little pissed off at the Plame leak. But there may be justification to do more than be angry. Anger happens all the time in Washington. This is something else.

One of the most important intelligence prizes today - especially after recent stories in major outlets like the New York Times reporting that Saudi oil production has peaked and gone into irreversible decline - would be to know of a certainty whether those reports are correct. The Saudis are denying it vehemently but they are being strongly refuted by an increasing amount of hard data. The truth remains unproven. But the mere possibility has set the world's financial markets on edge. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi came to Washington on April 27th to put out the fires. It was imperative that he calm everybody's nerves as the markets were screaming, "Say it ain't so!"

Naimi said emphatically that there was nothing to worry about concerning either Saudi reserves or ARAMCO's ability to increase production. There was plenty of oil and no need for concern.

FTW covered and reported on that event. Writer and energy expert Julian Darley noted that there were some very important ears in the room, listening very closely. He also noted that Naimi's "scientific" data and promises of large future discoveries did not sit well many who are well versed in oil production and delivery.

[See FTW's June 2nd story, "Saudi's Missing Barrels" and our May 2003 story, "Paris Peak Oil Conference Reveals Deepening Crisis." In that story FTW editor Mike Ruppert was the first to report on credible new information that Saudi Arabia had possibly peaked.]

If anybody has the real data on Saudi fields it is either ARAMCO or the highest levels of the Saudi royal family.

The answer to the Saudi peak question will determine whether Saudi Arabia really can increase production quickly, as promised. If they can't, then the US economy is going to suffer bitterly, and it is certain that the Saudi monarchy will collapse into chaos. Then the nearby US military will occupy the oilfields and the U.S. will ultimately Balkanize the country by carving off the oil fields - which occupy only a small area near the East coast. That U.S. enclave would then provide sanctuary to the leading members of the royal family who will have agreed to keep their trillions invested in Wall Street so the US economy doesn't collapse.

So far the Saudis haven't had to prove that they could increase production due to convenient terror attacks at oil fields, and more "debates" within OPEC.

Fourth clue: Bush and Cheney have both hired or consulted private criminal defense attorneys in anticipation of possible indictments of them and/or their top assistants in the Plame investigation. On June 3, just hours before Tenet suddenly resigned, President Bush consulted with and may have retained a criminal defense attorney to represent him in the Plame case.

According to various press reports Bush has either retained or consulted with powerhouse attorney Jim Sharp, who represented Iran-contra figure retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord; Enron's Ken Lay; and Watergate co-conspirator Jeb Stuart Magruder. All three were facing criminal rather than civil charges. Either way, a clear signal has been sent that Bush expects to be either called to testify (which was a precursor in Watergate to a criminal indictment of Richard Nixon) or be named as a defendant. Either way, the President's men are falling faster than their counterparts fell in Watergate, and the initial targets are much higher up the food chain.

Cheney's attorney is Terrence O'Donnell, a partner of the Williams and Connolly law firm. O'Donnell worked for then White House chief of staff Cheney in the Ford administration and as General Counsel for the Pentagon when Cheney was Defense Secretary under the first President Bush. He has been representing the Vice President in criminal and civil cases involving Cheney's chairmanship of Halliburton. These include a Justice Department investigation of Halliburton for alleged payment of bribes to Nigerian political leaders and a stockholders' fraud law suit against Halliburton. O'Donnell also represented former CIA director John Deutch when he was accused of violating national security by taking his CIA computer home and surfing the Internet while it contained hundreds of highly-classified intelligence documents.

SPRINGING THE TRAP

Now, seemingly all of a sudden, Bush and Cheney are in the crosshairs. Cheney has been questioned by Fitzgerald within the last week.

The CIA Director's job by definition, whether others like it or not, is to be able to go to his President and advise him of the real scientific data on foreign resources (especially oil); to warn him of pending instability in a country closely linked to the US economy; and to tell him what to plan for and what to promise politically in his foreign policy. In light of her position in the CIA's relationship with Saudi Aramco, the outing of Valerie Plame made much of this impossible. In short, the Bush leak threatened National Security.

Former White House Counsel and Watergate figure John Dean, writing for the prestigious legal website findlaw.com on June 4th made some very ominous observations that appear to have gone unnoticed by most.

This action by Bush is a rather stunning and extraordinary development. The President of the United States is potentially hiring a private criminal defense lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the White House is doing all it can to bury the story, providing precious little detail or context for the President's action…

…But from what I have learned from those who have been quizzed by the Fitzgerald investigators it seems unlikely that they are interviewing the President merely as a matter of completeness, or in order to be able to defend their actions in front of the public. Asking a President to testify - or even be interviewed - remains a serious, sensitive and rare occasion. It is not done lightly. Doing so raises separation of powers concerns that continue to worry many…

…If so - and if the person revealed the leaker's identity to the President, or if the President decided he preferred not to know the leaker's identity. - Then this fact could conflict with Bush's remarkably broad public statements on the issue. He has said that he did not know of "anybody in [his] administration who leaked classified information." He has also said that he wanted "to know the truth" about this leak.

If Bush is called before the grand jury, it is likely because Fitzgerald believes that he knows much more about this leak than he has stated publicly.

Perhaps Bush may have knowledge not only of the leaker, but also of efforts to make this issue go away - if indeed there have been any. It is remarkably easy to obstruct justice, and this matter has been under various phases of an investigation by the Justice Department since it was referred by the CIA last summer…

…On this subject, I spoke with an experienced former federal prosecutor who works in Washington, specializing in white collar criminal defense (but who does not know Sharp). That attorney told me that he is baffled by Bush's move - unless Bush has knowledge of the leak. "It would not seem that the President needs to consult personal counsel, thereby preserving the attorney-client privilege, if he has no knowledge about the leak," he told me.

What advice might Bush get from a private defense counsel? The lawyer I consulted opined that, "If he does have knowledge about the leak and does not plan to disclose it, the only good legal advice would be to take the Fifth, rather than lie. The political fallout is a separate issue."

I raised the issue of whether the President might be able to invoke executive privilege as to this information. But the attorney I consulted - who is well versed in this area of law - opined that "Neither 'outing' Plame, nor covering for the perpetrators would seem to fall within the scope of any executive privilege that I am aware of."

That may not stop Bush from trying to invoke executive privilege, however - or at least from talking to his attorney about the option. As I have discussed in one of my prior columns, Vice President Dick Cheney has tried to avoid invoking it in implausible circumstances - in the case that is now before the U.S .Supreme Court. Rather he claims he is beyond the need for the privilege, and simply cannot be sued. [Emphasis added]

Suffice it to say that whatever the meaning of Bush's decision to talk with private counsel about the Valerie Plame leak, the matter has taken a more ominous turn with Bush's action. It has only become more portentous because now Dick Cheney has also hired a lawyer for himself, suggesting both men may have known more than they let on. Clearly, the investigation is heading toward a culmination of some sort. And it should be interesting.

Last and final clue: Under Executive Privilege, a principle intended to protect the constitutional separation of powers, officials in the Executive Branch cannot give testimony in a legal case against a sitting President. The Bush administration has invoked or threatened to invoke the privilege several times. Dick did it over the secret records of his energy task force and George Bush tried to use it to prevent Condoleezza Rice from testifying before the "Independent" Commission investigating September 11th.

Former officials of the Executive Branch are, however, free to testify if they are no longer holding a government office when subpoenaed or when the charges are brought.

[To learn more about Executive Privilege visit www.findlaw.com]

The Bush administration has proved itself to be an insular group of inept, dishonest and dangerous CEO's of the corporation known as America. They have become very bad for business and the Board of Directors is now taking action. Make no mistake, the CIA works for "The Board" - Wall Street and big money. The long-term (very corrupt and unethical) agenda of the Board, in the face of multiple worsening global crises, was intended to proceed far beyond the initially destructive war in Iraq, toward an effective reconstruction and a strategic response to Peak Oil. But the neocons have stalled at the ugly stage: killing hundreds of thousands of people; destroying Iraq's industrial and cultural infrastructure as their own bombs and other people's RPGs blow everything up; getting caught running torture camps; and making the whole world intensely dislike America.

These jerks are doing real damage to their masters' interests.

But (not surprisingly) Tenet and the CIA were and remain much better at covert operations and planning ahead than the Bush administration ever was. Tenet and Pavitt actually prepared and left a clear, irrefutable and incriminating paper trail which not only proves that they had shunned and refused to endorse the documents, the CIA also did not support the nuke charges and warned Bush not to use them.

Where are those documents now? They're part of the Justice Department Plame investigation - and they're also in the hands of the Congressman who will most likely introduce and manage the articles of impeachment, if that becomes necessary: Henry Waxman (D), of California. If you would like to see how tightly the legal trap has been prepared, and how carefully the evidence has been laid out, I suggest taking a look around Waxman's web site at: http://www.house.gov/waxman/.

THE SWARM

There are a multitude of signs that the Bush administration is being "swarmed" in what is becoming a feeding frenzy as opposition is surfacing from many places inside the government, including the military. The signs are not hard to find.

The June 3rd issue of Capitol Hill Blue, the newspaper published for members of Congress, bore the headline "Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name". That article virtually guaranteed that the Plame investigation had enough to pursue Bush criminally. The story's lead sentence described a criminal, prosecutable offense: "Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq."

A day later, on June 4th Capitol Hill Blue took another hard shot at the administration. Titled "Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides", the story's first four paragraphs say everything.

President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

The attacks have not stopped. On June 8th, the same paper followed with another story headlined, "Lawyers Told Bush He Could Order Suspects Tortured".

Journalist Wayne Madsen, a Washington veteran with excellent access to many sources has indicated for this story that the Neocons have few remaining friends anywhere. All of this is consistent with a CIA-led coup.

Ahmed Chalabi

Madsen reported that the Plame probe comes amid another high-level probe of Pentagon officials for leaking classified National Security Agency cryptologic information to Iran via Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi. FBI agents have polygraphed and interviewed a number of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon in relation to the intelligence leak, said to have severely disrupted the National Security Agency's ability to listen in on encrypted Iranian diplomatic and intelligence communications.

Chalabi's leak has once again forced Iran to change equipment, resulting in impaired U.S. intelligence gathering of Iran's sensitive communications. The probe into the Chalabi leak is centering on Pentagon officials who have been close to Chalabi, including Office of Net Assessment official Harold Rhode, Director of Policy and Plans officials Douglas Feith and William Luti, Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In addition, some former Pentagon advisers are also targeted in the probe.

Many press reports throughout 2003 indicated that Chalabi, distrusted and virtually discarded by the CIA, had been resurrected and inserted into the Iraqi political mix on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other Neocons listed above.

Abu Ghraib and Torture

A former CIA official told Madsen that between the Plame leak and the Abu Ghraib torture affair, the Bush administration is facing something that will be "worse than Watergate."

PLANNING FOR SUCCESSION

If both Bush and Cheney are removed or resign, what happens? Madsen reported that lobbyists and political consultants in Washington are dusting off their copies of the Constitution and checking the line of presidential succession.

One lobbyist said he will soon pay a call on Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who, as President pro tem of the Senate, is second in line to House Speaker Dennis Hastert to become President in the event Bush and Cheney both go.

It is one of the greatest ironies of the Plame affair that the Bush administration, spawned and nurtured by oil, might have committed suicide by vindictively, cruelly and unthinkingly exacting personal retribution on an intelligence officer who had committed no offense, and who was, quite possibly, providing the administration with critical oil-related intelligence which the President needed to manage our shaky economy and affairs of state for a while longer to squeak through to re-election. In our opinion, nothing better epitomizes the true nature of the Neocons.

That being said, they have to go. FTW wishes that it was as certain that what will come after them will be better.

posted 06-12-2004 08:09 PM            

LINK:

http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/002098.html

SNIPPET:

DGP: Perhaps but these guys can only understand one ingredient and that is force. And that's why it has to emanate from the military. And military force in the persona of military tribunals will takeover. And Cheney, as I reiterate, is toast.

AJ: But they are the ones who are creating the tribunals. I will say this. Gen. Rick Bacchus, over a year ago, Rhode Island native, the head of Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, he resigned and said, "I'm not going to torture innocent people." Now that hardly got any press. We have two-star generals quitting. We have a lot of people not going along with this already.

DGP: And there will be a lot more, Alex.

AJ: Pardon me?

posted 06-13-2004 07:19 PM            

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936.story

THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Retired Officials Say Bush Must Go

- The 26 ex-diplomats and military leaders say his foreign policy has harmed national security. Several served under Republicans.

By Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.

"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and one of the group's principal organizers.

Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the war in Iraq.

Some of those signing the document — such as Hoar and former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak — have identified themselves as supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But most have not endorsed any candidate, members of the group said.

It is unusual for so many former high-level military officials and career diplomats to issue such an overtly political message during a presidential campaign.

A senior official at the Bush reelection campaign said he did not wish to comment on the statement until it was released.

But in the past, administration officials have rejected charges that Bush has isolated America in the world, pointing to countries contributing troops to the coalition in Iraq and the unanimous passage last week of the U.N. resolution authorizing the interim Iraqi government.

One senior Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking said he did not think the group was sufficiently well-known to create significant political problems for the president.

The strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also said the signatories were making an argument growing increasingly obsolete as Bush leans more on the international community for help in Iraq.

"Their timing is a little off, particularly in the aftermath of the most recent U.N. resolution," the strategist said. "It seems to me this is a collection of resentments that have built up, but it would have been much more powerful months ago than now when even the president's most disinterested critics would say we have taken a much more multilateral approach" in Iraq.

But those signing the document say the recent signs of cooperation do not reverse a basic trend toward increasing isolation for the U.S.

"We just felt things were so serious, that America's leadership role in the world has been attenuated to such a terrible degree by both the style and the substance of the administration's approach," said Harrop, who served as ambassador to four African countries under Carter and Reagan.

"A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration — by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," Harrop said.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was appointed by Reagan as ambassador to the Soviet Union and retained in the post by President Bush's father during the final years of the Cold War, expressed similar views.

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power," he said. "But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."

The GOP strategist noted that many of those involved in the document claimed their primary expertise in the Middle East and suggested a principal motivation for the statement might be frustration over Bush's effort to fundamentally reorient policy toward the region.

"For 60 years we believed in quote-unquote stability at the price of liberty, and what we got is neither liberty nor stability," the strategist said. "So we are taking a fundamentally different approach toward the Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and the people who have given their lives, careers to building the previous foreign policy consensus, see this as a direct intellectual assault on what they have devoted their lives to. And it is. We think what a lot of people came up with was a failure — or at least, in the present world in which we live, it is no longer sustainable."

Sponsors of the effort counter that several in the group have been involved in developing policy affecting almost all regions of the globe.

The document will echo a statement released in April by a group of high-level former British diplomats condemning Prime Minister Tony Blair for being too closely aligned to U.S. policy in Iraq and Israel. Those involved with the new group said their effort was already underway when the British statement was released.

The signatories said Kerry's campaign played no role in the formation of their group. Phyllis E. Oakley, the deputy State Department spokesman during Reagan's second term and an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, said she suspected "some of them [in the Kerry campaign] may have been aware of it," but that "the campaign had no role" in organizing the group.

Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications director, also said that the Kerry campaign had not been involved in devising the group's statement.

The document does not explicitly endorse Kerry, according to those familiar with it. But some individual signers plan to back the Democrat, and others acknowledge that by calling for Bush's removal, the group effectively is urging Americans to elect Kerry.

"The core of the message is that we are so deeply concerned about the current direction of American foreign policy … that we think it is essential for the future security of the United States that a new foreign policy team come in," said Oakley.

Much of the debate over the document in the days ahead may pivot on the extent to which it is seen as a partisan document.

A Bush administration ally said that the group failed to recognize how the Sept. 11 attacks required significant changes in American foreign policy. "There's no question those who were responsible for policies pre-9/11 are denying what seems as the obvious — that those policies were inadequate," said Cliff May, president of the conservative advocacy group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people [who don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the way that should have changed our thinking."

Along with Hoar and McPeak, others who have signed it are identified with the Democratic Party.

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., though named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, supported Clinton in 1992. Crowe has endorsed Kerry. Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner served as Carter's director of central intelligence and has also endorsed Kerry. Matlock said he was a registered Democrat during most of his foreign service career, though he voted for Reagan in 1984 and the elder Bush twice and now is registered as an independent.

Several on the group's list were appointed to their most important posts under Reagan and the elder Bush. These include Matlock and Harrop, as well as Arthur A. Hartman, who served as Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1981 through 1987; H. Allen Holmes, an assistant secretary of state under Reagan; and Charles Freeman, ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the elder Bush.

Many on the list have not been previously identified with any political cause or party. Several "are the kind who have never spoken out before," said James Daniel Phillips, former ambassador to Burundi and the Congo.

Oakley, Harrop and Matlock said the effort began this year. Matlock said it was sparked by conversations among "colleagues who had served in senior positions around the same time, most of them for the Reagan administration and for the first Bush administration."

Oakley said frustration over the Iraq war was "a large part" of the impetus for the statement, but the criticism of President Bush "goes much deeper."

The group's complaint about Bush's approach largely tracks Kerry's contention that the administration has weakened American security by straining traditional alliances and shifting resources from the war against Al Qaeda to the invasion of Iraq.

Oakley said the statement would argue that, "Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken have made us less secure. He has neglected the war on terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while we agree that we are in unprecedented times and we face challenges we didn't even know about before, these challenges require the cooperation of other countries. We cannot do it by ourselves."

posted 06-21-2004 03:21 PM            

From: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?noframes;read=50436

12 June 2004,

The Super-Watergate noose is tightening around the neck of the Cheney-Bush Administration, showing that Cheney & Co. are guilty of crimes far worse than Richard Nixon ever dreamed of.

Look at some of the developments of the past 48 hours:

* The House Armed Services Committee has scheduled a full hearing on Monday, on a Resolution of Inquiry sponsored by 40 Democrats, which asks the Secretary of Defense to provide to the House materials relating to Abu Ghraib and the Taguba Report, including information relating to civilian contractors. This is an obvious follow-up to the initiative taken by the six (now eight) senior Democrats on the key House oversight committees.

* A civil RICO suit has been filed against the civilian contractors for conspiring in the torture, rape, and murder of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghrabi.

* Donald Gregg, a retired CIA station chief who was the national security advisor to Vice-President George H.W. Bush during Reagan Administration, published an op-ed in the New York Times, ripping open the administration's coverup of the torture crimes, and laying the responsibility for the horrors in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo squarely on the shoulders of the Bush Administration itself. The memos written by Administration lawyers "cleared the way" for the tortures, Gregg wrote, "and make a mockery of administration assertions that a few misguided enlisted personnel perpetrated the vile abuse of prisoners."

* A second New York Times op-ed by a senior editor of {Foreign Affairs} journal, notes that Bush Administration officials could find themselves on trial for war crimes in The Hague, under the same legal standards that the U.S. has promoted against Nazi leaders, and in war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. "Under the doctrine of command responsibility," the author states, "officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals."

* The same issue of the New York Times published another op-ed exposing the fact that military doctors and nurses treated the victims of torture at Abu Ghraib, and then returned them to their victimizers for more torture. But under international law, and standards of common decency, these medical professionals had a duty to say what they saw. They still should come forward with the evidence they have.

Finally, we have been reviewing the new book, "Worse than Watergate," by former White House Counsel John Dean, which is very focussed on the key role of Dick Cheney in the crimes of this Administration. Dean notes, among other things, that Cheney, when he was the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Iran-Contra, protected George Bush, Sr.

Which raises the question, as to whether Dick Cheney was the conduit of the threat to then-Senator John Kerry that caused Kerry to back off his investigation into the Iran-Contra drug-trafficking?

Is John Kerry capitulating now, because of his fear of Dick Cheney?

source: New York Times, op-eds, June 10, 2004]

IN A CAREFULLY DESIGNED FULL PAGE OF OP-EDS, THE NEW YORK TIMES INDICTS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ON WAR CRIMES in three articles under the heading ``After Abu Ghraib.''

First, an article by Donald P. Gregg, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, who was the national security advisor to George H.W. Bush when he was Vice President, blasted the top levels of the Bush administration for pushing ``sanctioned abuses.'' He writes that the memos of 2003 by ``Bush administration lawyers'' were ``pushing aside longstanding prohibitions on the use of torture by Americans. These memos clear the way for the horros that have been revealed in Iraq, Afgyhanistan and Guantanamo {and make a mockery of administration assertions that a few misguided enlisted personnel perpetrated the vile abuse of prisoners.''

He says that there is ``nothing that can more devastatingly undercut America's standing in the world or, more important, our view of ourselves, than these decisions. Sanctioned abuse is deeply corrosive -- just ask the French, who are still seeking to eradicate the stain on their honor that resulted from the deliberate use of torture in America.'' Gregg uncharacteristically does a little gut-spilling about Vietnam, where torture was not sanctioned, and about his stint in South Korea, where he defied his now-deceased boss at the CIA, when he reported that South Korean intelligence had killed a university professor under torture. Gregg's boss told him to shut up, but Gregg said for the only time in his CIA carreer, ``I disobeyed orders .... [it] is one of the things I am proudest of in my agency career. I also urge my listeners to do likewise if they find themselves in a similar position.''

Gregg writes that he tells this Korea story whenever he lectures to classes of CIA recruits, and that he received a thank-you letter for saying this just two months ago, at a CIA seminar -- the thank-you was from George Tenet.

Article Two, called ``An American In the Hague,'' is by a senior editor of the CFR's Foreign Affairs Magazine, Jonathan D. Tepperman, who takes apart the fact that ``so far'' the responsibility for the torture has fallen on ``the seven court-martialed soldiers who were directly involved.''

Quoting the Administration's mantra that it was only a ``bad few'' and the top guys are not liable, Tepperman says, oh, yes you are, and you might end up in the Hague.

``Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them -- so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals....''

This was the standard of the Allied forces at Nuremburg, against Nazis who often ``did not leave a paper trail;'' this is the standard that the U.S. is insisting on in trials of the Serbian leaders in the International Court; and this is even the standard established by a U.S. Federal court in Miami, Florida in 2002, when two El Salvadoran generals were found guilty of torture, which they did not commit and did not order. These generals were the head of the National Guard and the Defense Minister of the country. He says that this is not a legal decision, it is a political one, whether to prosecute these responsible higher ups, which he suggests would be ``top members of the current administration.''

The third piece, "Physician, Turn Thyself In, by M. Gregg Bloche, who teaches at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University, says, "investigate U.S. doctors who treated Abu Ghraib victims;" the author cites press reports about how military doctors and nurses "examined prisoners at Abu Ghraib, treated swollen genitals, prescribed painkillers, stitched wounds, and recorded evidence of the abuses...."

Instead of reporting these abuses, which they are required to do under international law, "too often they returned the victims of torture to the custody of their victimizers...."

The article tells Congress to act "quickly" to obtain the medical records of these prisoners, and put the doctors and nurses on the spot -- they know a great deal about what happened

posted 06-22-2004 05:06 PM            

"On the geopolitical front, the strange year is now unfolding at such a rapid rate into deepening strangeness that the transformation of American politics into a parody of its worst nightmares has become a virtual blur. The stalemate of all factors broadens and the American government is collapsing into paralysis. National Security experts and media professionals are predicting “BOMBS” of extreme political controversy will drop in Washington DC . this week or next, showing the American People to be a nation which even tortures children as their mothers look on…

Very shortly, the world will be shocked and profoundly revolted to learn that the U.S. intelligence agents in Iraq have sponsored U.S. soldiers to torture Iraqi children in front of their mothers. In the words of an article by TomDispatch.Com, the greatest controversy over Iraq is yet to come but it will to take off this week or next when a major U.S. mass media organization breaks the silence. It will show pictures it has which depicts the hardest truth which Americans have yet to face about their government. They will shortly see that a legion of Dr Strangelove’s in U.S. government REALLY will stop at nothing in leveling the world into the category of chattel which can be manipulated and disposed of at will.

The world will also learn that the American government is rapidly disintegrating into impotence from the in-fighting which is now engulfing the Imperial Faction and the Republicrats which dominate both of the major parties. The professional journalists in Washington DC who are contributing to TomDispatch are pointing to what is beginning to be described as a “civil war” among the apparatchiks of the Military Industrial and Academic CIA complex. The complex, for the first time since the Vietnam War, is splitting into hostile camps As a result of this fractionation, government “secrets” are being outed in large quantities on the street. Pentagon, Military, CIA, and State Department memos, reports, eye witness accounts, secret policy statements, pictures, and intelligence assessments are being made available to journalists and investigators seeking them.

posted 06-24-2004 12:26 PM            

President joined by Jim Sharp, his personal attorney

From Dana Bash
CNN Washington Bureau
Thursday, June 24, 2004 Posted: 3:25 PM EDT (1925 GMT)


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush was interviewed Thursday morning by a special prosecutor investigating whether anyone in the administration disclosed the classified identity of a CIA officer, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters...

posted 06-24-2004 03:50 PM            

F**k You

posted 06-26-2004 09:18 PM            

See...Cheney is LOSING HIS COOL...just like JUNIOR Bush is at the moment.

LINK:

http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/002341.html