| This article
appears in the November 28,
2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
'Plumbers' Are
Under Investigation in
Cheney-Gateby Jeffrey
Steinberg
The
triumphant neo-conservative claim trumpeted throughout U.S. media on Nov.
14—that links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had been "conclusively
proven" by a memo from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the
Senate Intelligence Committee—rapidly went the way of all previous such
cooked claims from Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington. But
more, this claim had, by Nov. 17-18, boomeranged into its opposite: a
Defense Department denial of the claim itself; an eruption of official
demands to investigate who passed this classified document to the waiting
neo-con press; the likely revival of the Intelligence Committee probe
which had been shut down on Nov. 7 "to save Cheney's neck"; and the
escalation of "Cheney-gate" itself, by the exposure of what appear to be
"plumbers' " operations to steal sensitive documents from the Cheney
faction's opponents.
The
boomerang was part of what Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon
LaRouche called "the start of the hot phase" of his Presidential
campaign—focussing on the Jan. 13 Washington, D.C. Democratic primary and
other events in the nation's capital—and of his drive to force Cheney out
of office. LaRouche told National Public Radio in St. Louis in a Nov. 18
interview, "Cheney is the guy we've got to be rid of, because we can not
be going into this policy of nuclear preventive war, which is the policy
the United States will be dragged into, if we don't get him out before the
next election."
On Nov.
17, the Central Intelligence Agency formally requested a Department of
Justice (DOJ) probe into the leak to the neo-con press of the classified
memo from Feith; it was expected that both the National Security Agency
and the Defense Intelligence Agency would file similar requests within
days. The Feith document, dated Oct. 27, had been passed on to the neo-con
Weekly Standard, and widely published and reported on Nov. 14, with
great fanfare from Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV and New York Post. The
Weekly Standard, too, is a Murdoch-owned propaganda sheet, edited
by one of Washington's leading Leo Strauss cultists, William
Kristol.
At the
same time that the CIA was demanding a full probe of the leak, the leaders
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and
vice-chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), were also calling on the
DOJ to probe the Feith leak—and to investigate, as well, the theft of a
Democratic staff memo from the panel's highly secure offices. The theft
and leaking of that staff memo had been used by Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) as the pretext for his Nov. 7 order to shut down the
panel's probe of intelligence abuses by senior Bush Administration
policymakers in the run-up to the Iraq war. It had been surfaced by radio
host Sean Hannity and promoted by Fox TV as "proof" that the Democrats
were playing "partisan politics" with a probe that has increasingly
centered on Vice President Cheney, the leading war-hawk in the Bush White
House.
Cheney Has
Most To Lose
Behind
the Frist shutdown of the Senate intelligence panel stood Vice President
Cheney, the man who stands to lose the most if the probe goes forward; and
the man designated by President George W. Bush as the White House
point-man for relations with the Congress. In an unprecedented show of
legislative clout, Cheney maintains offices at both the House of
Representatives and the Senate, and is a regular participant in the weekly
Senate Republican policy caucus sessions.
Congressional sources say that Frist would never have moved to
shut down the intelligence panel unless he had been given explicit orders
from Cheney.
In a
Washington Post op-ed on Nov. 18, Senator Rockefeller sharply
rebutted the charges of partisan politics, and accused the Republicans of
attempting to shut down a legitimate and vital probe into how the
Executive Branch abused the intelligence system, by "pilfering" a
confidential staff memo meant for his eyes only. Rockefeller wrote, "There
is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is
driving the intelligence, rather than the other way around. This has added
to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and
it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying
facts."
Rockefeller next tackled the issue of the staff memo and the leak:
"Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete
investigation into these matters, my staff recently drafted an options
memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended
only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate Intelligence
Committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse
for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the
investigation."
Looks Like
Watergate
At the
same time, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), another member of the Senate
intelligence panel, was ordering yet another DOJ probe—this time, focussed
on the theft of a series of Democratic Party staff memos from the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Those documents concerned the confirmation of several
Bush judicial nominees, and they surfaced in the pages of the Wall
Street Journal the week of Nov. 17.
In
short, "plumbers" are out in force—on behalf of Dick Cheney—to stymie a
series of Senate investigations that would prove, beyond a doubt, that the
Vice President deceived President Bush, the Congress, the American people,
and the world community, in order to get the neo-cons the Iraq war they,
and Cheney, had desired for a decade.
Many
other neo-cons, radio talk-jockeys, Congressional war-hawks, and Southern
fundies all played their part in drawing the United States into a no-exit
war, which has now claimed more than 400 American lives. But the
quarterback of the disinformation drive, the illegal covert operations,
and, now, a string of White House plumber-style break-ins and thefts, is,
without a doubt, Vice President Cheney.
Just as
Watergate started with a bungled break-in to the Democratic National
Committee headquarters in 1972, it now appears that Cheney-gate has begun
with break-ins to two highly-secured Senate offices, and leaks of
classified documents and the identity of at least one covert CIA
operative.
Washington intelligence community sources continue to insist that
the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joe
Wilson and a career "non-official cover" CIA officer, came out of Cheney's
office, and was part of an effort to silence Wilson, the intelligence
community, and military and diplomatic critics of the Iraq war
intelligence hoaxes.
In his
Washington Post op-ed, Senator Rockefeller made it clear that one
priority focus of the panel probe was the "highly unusual role of Defense
Department officials in preparing and collecting information outside the
normal intelligence channels." This was a direct reference to the
Pentagon's super-secret Office of Special Plans (OSP) and "Team B" spook
units, initially established under Feith after the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001 (OSP was formally created in August 2002).
"Team
B" was a two-man analysis cell, which "cherry-picked" raw data from the
entire data base of the CIA, NSA, and DIA, seeking "proof" of Saddam
Hussein links to Al-Qaeda, and evidence of Saddam's secret weapons
programs. The first members of "Team B" were David Wurmser—now a top aide
to Vice President Cheney—and Michael Maloof, who was later in the OSP, but
is now on administrative leave with pay from the Pentagon. Intelligence
community sources have reported to this news service that Maloof is being
probed for his possible role in the leaking of U.S. Iraq war plans to
Israel. Maloof has also been linked to Lebanese "businessman" Emad El
Hage, who is being promoted by Washington neo-cons as a future "Ahmed
Chalabi of Lebanon"—i.e., an American-Israeli frontman for a future "Iraq
treatment" for Syria and Lebanon.
Cheney in the
Spotlight
The
revived combativity by some leading Senate Democrats, in the face of the
Cheney plumbers operations, intersected fresh media exposés of Cheney as
"the Prime Minister of the United States," a term used by Nightline TV
host Ted Koppel in the Nov. 13 segment profiling Cheney's actual control
over the Bush Administration.
The
Nightline trashing of Cheney came at the end of a solid week of exposés of
the Veep—in Newsweek, Time, and the New York
Times—revealing a new level of vulnerability that has been driven by
the year-long campaign for Cheney's ouster by Lyndon LaRouche.
Texas
sources close to the Bush family have a similar view of Cheney's growing
liability to the Bush re-election. "The policy fiascos all trace to the
nexus of Lewis Libby and Doug Feith," one source commented. White House
political advisor "Karl Rove knows this problem very well."
Libby
is Cheney's chief of staff and top national security aide, who runs a
shadow national security council of more than 60 people. Libby is the
leading protégé of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and GOP
lawyer-fixer Leonard Garment. As Garment's law partner, Libby was the
attorney for Russian/Israeli Mafiya swindler Marc Rich.
Richard
Whalen, a well-known GOP strategist, warned in his Nov. 17 newsletter,
The Big Picture, that some of President Bush's most intimate Texas
allies are fed up with Cheney and want him out.
Under
the headline "Bush's Re-Election Politics: Cheney's Texas Opponents,"
Whalen described a recent Austin, Texas encounter between "Bush 43" pal,
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Col. J. Patrick Lang (USA-ret.), one of the
most respected military intelligence Mideast specialists and a sharp
critic of the neo-con-led Iraq war. Perry heaped praise on
Lang.
Whalen
wrote, "Now the second-term Governor, a boyish 43 and extremely popular,
exemplifies the young, powerful, and well-connected core of Texas-based
allies who are leading Bush's 2004 re-election drive. Just as important,
these are the Bush intimates whose loyal personal support for him carries
special weight at the White House when expressed as opposition to the war
in Iraq and to Vice President Dick Cheney, the Administration's most
influential war-hawk. As the divided Bush war cabinet struggles to devise
a hurry-up exit strategy, abruptly reversing its own earlier deliberate
plans, a stark political choice is taking shape in the background: would
Bush rather lose the election or the war—and is he taking the chance of
losing both?" He concluded, "The Iraq war that is destroying Vice
President Cheney's political acceptability within the GOP, cannot
rationally be escalated and made more destructive in order to 'save' his
candidacy and the prospects for 'democracy' in Iraq. Bush's Texans see the
contradiction. Any Vice President, even the formidable Cheney, ultimately
has a constituency of only one—or, in his case, perhaps two, Bush I and
Bush II."
Two-Edged
Sword
"Bush
I," the elder President George H.W. Bush, had on Nov. 7 demonstratively
presented his namesake Public Service Award to Sen. Edward Kennedy
(D-Mass.), only weeks after Kennedy had savaged Cheney's Iraq war as "a
fraud." The upset with Cheney on the part of some key "Bush 41" people was
demonstrated most graphically, by an interview in the German-language
edition of the Financial Times on Nov. 17 with Brent Scowcroft, the
former President Bush's National Security Advisor and alter ego, and still
today the head of "Bush 43's" President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board (PFIAB). Scowcroft minced no words in criticizing the present Bush
Administration's Iraq strategy, denouncing the "missionary zeal" with
which some Administration ideologues promote "democracy in Iraq" as the
cure-all for the region. He suggested, alternatively, that democracy would
stand a better chance of taking root in Palestine, or even in Iran, which
has held free elections, than in Baghdad.
This
was a direct slap at Cheney and the neo-conservatives. They have blocked
every effort to move the Middle East Road Map forward; they promote a
military attack on the Iranian nuclear reactor; and they have been running
unauthorized covert operations in league with the likes of the Mujahideen
e-Khalq—a group on the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organizations
list—and Iran-Contra swindler M. Ghorbanifar.
The
"second Watergate" character of the Cheney-gate scandals was identified by
LaRouche on Nov. 7, hours after Senator Frist's shocking shut-down of the
Intelligence Committee. A number of the "leak" actions involve Federal
felony crimes, so the investigations are serious criminal matters. And the
scandal is a two-edged sword: If it is not pursued ruthlessly to bring
down Cheney, it will bring down Bush instead; just as Watergate bypassed
the instigator of the Plumbers Unit, Henry Kissinger, and so destroyed
President Richard Nixon. |
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