October 23, 2005
Is exposing Ralph Reed as a phony and willing paid stooge of Jack
Abramoff part of McCain's revenge? Check this out from the second page of a
Time profile tonight of Ralph Reed's Abramoff connection:
...But in at least one instance, Reed acknowledges he used his White House
access for Abramoff. In December 2001 the lobbyist was eager to prevent Angela
Williams from being appointed head of the Interior Department's Office of
Insular Affairs, which oversees the government's dealings with the Northern
Mariana Islands, an important Abramoff client. Williams is married to former
Federal Trade Commissioner Orson Swindle, who was a Vietnam POW with Senator
John McCain. The subject header of Abramoff and Reed's e-mail exchange (it is
unclear who initiated it) contained a misstatement about Williams that is
practically Freudian in what it reveals about their animosity toward McCain:
"Were you able to whack McCain's wife yet?" Reed assured Abramoff he had
"weighed in heavily" with the White House personnel office to block her
appointment but had received no commitment. "Any ideas on how we can make sure
she does not get it?" Abramoff asked. "Can you ping Karl on this? I can't
believe they just don't get this done?" Reed replied, "I am seeing him
tomorrow at the WH and plan to discuss it with him as well." Baron says,
"Ralph passed the information on to the White House. He is confident the
Administration's decision was based on the merit." As for Rove, White House
spokeswoman Erin Healy tells TIME, "It is my understanding that Mr. Rove does
not recall any of these incidents."
Williams didn't get the job. She and her husband wrote it off to hard
feelings from the bruising 2000 Republican presidential primaries. "I just
assumed it was my close friendship with Senator McCain and her being married
to me," Swindle tells TIME... Now that the Roveans who tried to
destroy McCain are so under siege, what will play out between McCain and the
party that is so much a creature of them?
More on Cheney's cold war against the CIA, its long history and possible
relevance to the Plame case, from the LA Times' Tom Hamburger and Peter
Wallsten:
...Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney worked with Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to
challenge CIA findings that countered their expectations or that disagreed
with information they had received through their own intelligence
channels.
Cheney traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a
dozen times, most often to discuss Iraq's possible links to nuclear weapons
and terrorism. Agency veterans have said that Cheney's visits were more
frequent than those of any other president or vice president, including the
first president Bush, a former director of the agency.
When Cheney visited the CIA, Iraq was his main focus, particularly in the
months before the war. Unlike Libby and others working with the vice
president, Cheney was reportedly always polite. But in his quiet way, he was
insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped
the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with
the CIA.
Cheney's visits perked up agency analysts who often worked anonymously,
said one former official. Many reportedly enjoyed the challenge of a smart
questioner and appreciated his interest. But Cheney's visits and his clinging
to certain views became noticeable and drew expressions of concern, according
to the former official.
For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle
that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi
agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks.
Nonetheless, the agency continued to receive dozens of inquiries on the
topic from top officials several times from Cheney himself. Despite the
agency warnings, Cheney made reference to the Atta meeting as if it were a
sure thing.
"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet
with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia
last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on
NBC's "Meet the Press." [...] Since the CIA was pushing back so
hard on the Atta-in-Prague claim, it's worth asking, what was the source of
Cheney's conviction that it was true? And why does Pat Roberts consider it a "monumental waste" of his time to find
out? After all, he was happy to take the time to catalogue the CIA's mistakes.
Chalabi is coming to meet with Steve Hadley, Reuters reports:
...Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving the Bush
administration flawed information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, will
visit Washington in November amid speculation that U.S. officials view him as
an acceptable candidate for Iraqi prime minister...
The November visit was first reported by Time magazine, which said in its
October 31 edition that Chalabi is due to meet with national security adviser
Stephen Hadley.
Time quoted unnamed administration officials as saying Rice and Hadley both
view Chalabi as "a plausible and acceptable" candidate for prime minister in
the next round of Iraqi elections due December 15.
The longtime Iraqi exile began attracting U.S. attention as a potential
prime minister after Washington decided Iraq's current premier, Ibrahim
Jaafari, had discredited himself by seeking overly friendly relations with
Iran, Time said, quoting unnamed administration officials."... I
can see the bumper sticker now, 'Chalabi -- less Iranian backed than Jaafari!'
Update: Here's the Time piece.
Interesting WaPo piece about what the documents on Fitzgerald's website
may indicate about interference with his probe early on:
Weeks after he took over the investigation 22 months ago into the
unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, special counsel Patrick
J. Fitzgerald got authority from the Justice Department to expand his inquiry
to include any criminal attempts to interfere with his probe, according to a
letter posted Friday on Fitzgerald's new Web site...
"The fact that he [Fitzgerald] asked for authority that he probably already
had, but wanted spelled out, makes it arguable that he had run into something
rather quickly," Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris said
yesterday... And a big Post profile of Libby features comments from Wolfowitz,
Kristol, Matalin, etc. More from the Globe.
It's pretty clear that the NYT and Miller aren't much longer
for each other. Update: More such hints from MoDo.
With the Hariri report, what are these guys envisioning for Syria? A wag the dog scenario is not so easy to dismiss.
Desperate
Let me get this straight. The guys who demanded the impeachment of Clinton because he lied
during an investigation into his sex life, want Fitzgerald to have the "courage"
to not pursue obstruction of justice, perjury or criminal
conspiracy charges in a case involving a White House conspiracy to out a CIA
officer who was married to someone they wanted to shut up, endangering her past
contacts, and engaging in a post-crime cover up? The hypocrisy knows no depths.
Or is this just written as a gesture to remain a member in good standing of the
Party?
David Ignatius on the perilous disaster of intelligence 'reform' under
this administration makes for some scary reading. Update: More here on this issue from BASIC (pdf linked).
IS there any way to fire Michael Brown a second time? Anyone know if he's
still consulting for FEMA? Update: Readers WA, JL and others sent
word that Brown is indeed still on the FEMA payroll. From the Chicago Trib, "Andrews confirmed that Brown is
still on FEMA's payroll as a consultant. She said he works from home, where he
is "pulling all the documentation together" to aid in the investigations into
the government's response to Katrina. His original 30-day contract was recently
extended for another 30 days, she said."
Libby's Obsession with Wilson
Check out this LA Times front pager to discover the depths of Libby's obsession
with Joe Wilson:
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public
statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration
critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's
television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public
campaign against him, former aides say.
Those efforts by the chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began
shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they
continued into last year well after the Justice Department began an
investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had
illegally disclosed the CIA operative's identity, say former White House
aides.
While other administration officials were maintaining a careful distance
from Wilson in 2004, Libby ordered up a compendium of information that could
be used to rebut Wilson's claims that the administration had "twisted"
intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq before the U.S. invasion.
Libby pressed the administration to publicly counter Wilson, sparking a
debate with other White House officials who thought the tactic would call more
attention to the former diplomat and his criticisms. That debate ended after
an April 2004 meeting in the office of White House Communications Director
Daniel Bartlett, when staffers were told "don't engage" Wilson, according to
notes taken during the meeting by one person present.
"Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so,"
said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal
deliberations. Like other former White House staff, this person spoke on
condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation...
Libby's anger over Wilson's 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews
and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth
and duration of Libby's interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice
president's office closely monitored news coverage.
On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with
Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president's daughter said Cheney
was unhappy with that newspaper's coverage.
Libby "would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television
and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it," one former
official said.
After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004,
during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by
passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides
said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public
statements going back to early 2003.
The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and
television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into
categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."
The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by
Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student
newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a
bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television
journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic
presidential nominee.
The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White
House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its
rationale, former aides said...
What is up with these people? This sounds like truly clinical obsessive
behavior. Wouldn't time be more profitablly spent worrying about bin Laden? Or
you know Richard Clarke, who was at least inside the administration for
four years?
Yet more evidence the obsession with Wilson was because his
information threatened to collapse the Cheney-led White House propaganda to the
American people that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.
What prompted Judy Miller to suddenly find her notes from the June 23,
2003 meeting with Scooter Libby? Murray Waas reports:
When a prosecutor first questioned Miller during her initial grand jury
appearance on September 30, 2005 sources said, she did not bring up the June
23 meeting in recounting her various contacts with Libby, the chief of staff
to Vice President Cheney. Pressed by prosecutors who then brought up the
specific date of the meeting, Miller testified that she still could not recall
the June meeting with Libby, in which they discussed a controversial
CIA-sponsored mission to Africa by former Ambassador Joe Wilson, or the fact
that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.
When a prosecutor presented Miller with copies of the White House-complex
visitation logs, she said such a meeting was possible.
Shortly after her September 30 testimony, Miller discovered her notes from
the June 23 meeting, and returned on October 12 for a second round of grand
jury testimony. In this second appearance, Miller recounted details from her
June 23 meeting with Libby, with the assistance of her notes...
More on Cheney's cold war against the CIA, its long history and possible
relevance to the Plame case, from the LA Times' Tom Hamburger and Peter
Wallsten:
...Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney worked with Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to
challenge CIA findings that countered their expectations or that disagreed
with information they had received through their own intelligence
channels.
Cheney traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a
dozen times, most often to discuss Iraq's possible links to nuclear weapons
and terrorism. Agency veterans have said that Cheney's visits were more
frequent than those of any other president or vice president, including the
first president Bush, a former director of the agency.
When Cheney visited the CIA, Iraq was his main focus, particularly in the
months before the war. Unlike Libby and others working with the vice
president, Cheney was reportedly always polite. But in his quiet way, he was
insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped
the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with
the CIA.
Cheney's visits perked up agency analysts who often worked anonymously,
said one former official. Many reportedly enjoyed the challenge of a smart
questioner and appreciated his interest. But Cheney's visits and his clinging
to certain views became noticeable and drew expressions of concern, according
to the former official.
For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle
that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi
agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks.
Nonetheless, the agency continued to receive dozens of inquiries on the
topic from top officials several times from Cheney himself. Despite the
agency warnings, Cheney made reference to the Atta meeting as if it were a
sure thing.
"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet
with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia
last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on
NBC's "Meet the Press." [...] Since the CIA was pushing back so
hard on the Atta-in-Prague claim, it's worth asking, what was the source of
Cheney's conviction that it was true? And why does Pat Roberts consider it a "monumental waste" of his time to find
out? After all, he was happy to take the time to catalogue the CIA's mistakes.
http://warandpiece.com/
Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
OM
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