The Obfuscation Report

by John Amato

Sy Hersh joined CNN’s Late Edition and discussed his new article out in the NewYorker: “Shifting Targets,” which says that the WH has a new talking point which it will sell attacking Iran and as usual, our media will lap it up. The CIA has created an Iran Study Group with dozens of new members with the goal of launching a strike against Iran, including ground forces. Bush feels that using the nuclear threat as the reason to bomb Iran has failed miserably, so they switched talking points and are going to say they are defending themselves against Iranian meddling in Iraq. We told you so….

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Hersh: You can also sell counter-terror, it’s much more logical. You can say to the American people, we’re only hitting these people that are trying to kill our boys and the coalition forces and so that seems to be more sensible, The White House think s they can actually pitch this, this would actually work…

Now you understand why the Lieberman/Kyl amendment was just put through. If BushCo. wants to heighten the sense of nationalism in Iran, just attack them and keep on this course of immorality. It’s another disaster coming from Bush/Cheney and the Neocons in a long line of them and I know Bush and Cheney thank our media for doing what they always do…Nothing, except Sy.

Thanks Sy….Here’s my Iran Action Alert post:

Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-225-3121. We need to let our representatives know that Bush cannot attack Iran.

Propaganda for Dummies continues with: Matt Yglesias:

“Last week, Daniel Drezner and I were wondering what ever happened to the PR rollout for bombing Iran. Don Van Natta reports for The New York Times on Freedom’s Watch—-its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.” Sounds fun.

And the Sock-puppets attack….(h/t SN) The New Yorker:

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants.

The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism…

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq…read on

Labels: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iran, Neocons/PNAC, War Coverage

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Stephen Cambone, War Criminals

Cheney's Not in the Executive Branch? Sounds Good to Me!
RJ Eskow Huffington Post

By now you've heard about Dick Cheney's fascinating new legal argument that he's not in the executive branch, so he doesn't have to comply with executive secrecy rules. I'm not always Rahm Emanuel's biggest fan, but his plan to cut executive-branch funding for the VP's office is a very sensible response. On the other hand, let's not be hasty about this. After all, if Cheney's not in the Executive Branch he can't claim executive privilege.

"If he believes his legal case," Mr. Emanuel wrote in an email, "his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch." But imagine how much light we can shed into the dark corners of Mr. Cheney's office if his argument holds.

Surely you remember that infamous energy task force, the one where Mr. Cheney let his oil industry pals and their lobbyists come in and literally write their own rules? Cheney argued that the public had no right to information about the workings of that task force - because of executive privilege.

How about those executive branch visitor logs we've all been dying to see? I'd love to know how much time Jack Abramoff spent in Cheney's offices, and who he visited there. And, of course, there's the matter of Scooter Libby. With executive privilege out of the way, we can finally figure out whether there was an "underlying crime" or not. (Extra! Othello exonerated for strangling Desdemona - there was "no underlying crime" of adultery.)

Mr. Emanuel, I respect your smarts and your chutzpah for coming up with this strategy. If for any reason it doesn't work out, however, here's your silver lining: A Vice President who's not in the Executive Branch can't withhold information from legislators under the separation of powers doctrine.

In fact, here's an even better idea: Since he says he's fundamentally a member of the Senate, why not bring him up on Senatorial ethics charges? Let the investigations commence!

This may have seemed like a clever move at the time. Cheney et al. may think the band's playing "Catch Us If You Can," but the tune I hear sounds more like "Let The Sun Shine In."

Labels: Crooks, Dick Cheney

No veep is an island
Cheney has been instrumental in eroding privacy rights for all Americans -- except himself. June 23, 2007

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney's refusal to comply with a presidential order regulating the handling of classified information might be scary were it not so ludicrous.

Cheney's rejection of mandatory inspections required of all federal offices to make sure they are properly protecting top secret documents defies basic standards of good government and common sense. And his argument that he needn't comply because his office isn't part of the executive branch is specious. Moreover, after clashing with the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which conducts the routine inspections, Cheney's vindictive staff reportedly tried to abolish the unit. That's like trying to disband the Internal Revenue Service for demanding a tax audit. Has the veep taken leave of his senses?

Unfortunately, Cheney's behavior is entirely in keeping with his long-standing views on executive powers, executive privilege and the divine rights of vice presidents. He also has championed policies that have shredded American privacy rights in the name of national security, with methods that have included warrantless wiretaps, e-mail and postal-mail snooping, monitoring library withdrawals, mining data on the telephone and buying habits of millions of citizens and the expanded use of national security letters. But Cheney has been vigilant in defending his own privacy rights. The vice president's office has been operating in stunning secrecy for six years.

For example, according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), Cheney refuses to follow an executive branch ethics rule requiring him and his employees to disclose travel paid for by special interests. In fact, he won't even disclose who some of his employees are — though the salaries of these political appointees are paid for by public funds. Contrary to White House practice, the vice president's residence won't release the names of those who come to visit. Cheney has even succeeded in getting President Bush to give him the power to prevent the release of vice presidential papers after Cheney leaves office.

Cheney's inventive argument is that because the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, his is "a unique office" that is not part of but rather "attached to" the legislative branch. Yet the vice president is funded and housed by the executive branch, travels on Air Force Two, enjoys Secret Service protection and seldom appears in his (mostly symbolic) Senate office. And he has never subjected his staff to the even more restrictive Senate rules on handling classified material. Apparently, Cheney sees himself as a fourth branch of government that enjoys all the authority of the presidency but is bound by none of its rules.

On Friday, the White House defended Cheney yet again, saying the president never intended the veep to have to comply with the presidential order. Bush should stop enabling his errant No. 2 and enforce the rule of law.

Labels: Dick Cheney, impeach, War Criminals

Labels: Criminals, Crooks, Dick Cheney

June 21, 2007
Shiite Rivalries Slash at a Once Calm Iraqi City
By ALISSA J. RUBIN New York Times

DIWANIYA, Iraq — The Shiite heartland of southern Iraq has generally been an oasis of calm in contrast to Baghdad and the central part of the country, but now violence is convulsing this city. Shiites are killing and kidnapping other Shiites, the police force is made up of competing militias and the inner city is a web of impoverished streets where idealized portraits of young men, killed in recent gun battles with Iraqi and American troops, hang from signposts above empty lots.

The unrest in Diwaniya, mirrored in Nasiriya to the south, reflects the emergence of a poisonous political landscape in which competing Shiite groups no longer look to the political system to allocate power. The government’s authority appears to have broken down, with the governor calling this spring for Iraqi Army units, backed by American troops, to restore order. Civilians, not sure where to look for protection, are caught in the deepening fear and uncertainty.

Even now, with a large Iraqi Army force and American troops in the area, the violence has continued. In the first 10 days of June, two police officers were shot dead, an American soldier died from a roadside bomb and the brother and nephew of a prominent militia official were killed. While still less dangerous than central Iraq, where militant Sunni Arabs and Shiites battle for control, the situation has worsened since violence first broke out here last August.

In a daylong visit to Diwaniya earlier in June, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki warned, “We cannot build a state that has another state inside it, we cannot build an army that has armies inside it,” referring to the militias within the province that answer to their leaders rather than to elected officials.

Diwaniya is the capital of the almost completely Shiite farming province of Qadisiya, known for its marshy fields where farmers grow aromatic ambar rice, similar to India’s basmati. Even in town, many people patch together a livelihood with seasonal jobs working the rice fields or tending date palms.

It is a poor province, and poorer now because of a recent decline in the farming sector, making it fertile ground for groups allied with the anti-American cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The cleric, whose legendary father was beloved here, has reached out to the poor, both in town and in the country.

“Diwaniya was never really quiet, never really peaceful, it was only sleeping,” said Abu Faris, a senior official who works with the provincial council. “There were always troubles below the surface, and now they are coming out.”

The city of about 400,000 people has a history of rebellion; it was the first city in southern Iraq to rise against Saddam Hussein in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. But when the rebellion failed, Mr. Hussein exacted a deadly retribution, arresting hundreds of men and boys and killing many of them. Underlying Diwaniya’s troubles is a fight between factions allied with rival Shiite clerics, Mr. Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

Mr. Hakim, who has close ties to the Americans, is allied with an older generation of middle-class, more educated Shiites, many of whom spent some of the Hussein era in Iran or Syria.

By contrast, Mr. Sadr blames the Americans for the havoc in Iraq and refuses to meet with any representatives of the Bush administration. Mr. Sadr is linked more closely with the young, impoverished Shiites who stayed in Iraq during the years of Mr. Hussein’s rule. Mr. Sadr’s movement has only 5 members on the 40-member provincial council but enjoys wide local popularity. Both clerics have ties to armed militias, which local residents say have infiltrated the local police and security forces.

Although Mr. Hakim’s Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council is known for its tightly run political arm, that has not always translated into grass-roots support. Diwaniya’s governor, Khalil Jalil Hamza, is from the party, but lived in Iran for many years, returning only after the American invasion, and many local people have criticized his performance. The party also holds the majority on the provincial council.

The result is a governor with little ability to control his territory.

“When problems emerged, assassinations, kidnappings, and when the Sadrists began to move on their own, the governor did not deal with it because he did not know the area, and the problems snowballed,” said Hussein Ali al-Shalaan, a Shiite sheik who represents the province in the Iraqi Parliament and comes from the more secular and moderate Iraqiya coalition.

In March more than 50 people were killed in the province. Now, hardly a day goes by when there is not an attempt to shoot some official. Roadside bombs, unseen in most of southern Iraq, have been aimed at Iraqi and American forces operating in the area.

With no sign of improvement, the governor called in Iraqi Army troops, backed by Americans. In early April the soldiers entered the impoverished warrens at the center of the city, the stronghold of the Sadr loyalists. The area is crushingly poor. The low houses, made of crumbling mud bricks, look as if they would melt in the rain; they have such small doors that men sometimes must stoop to enter them.

Heavy fighting raged for several days, as young men, hiding behind low walls, fired rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s before running away only to pop up again a few streets away, according to accounts from residents. At least 10 men were killed and 50 wounded in the fighting.

More than a month later the area still looked like a war zone with dangling electrical wires and a wary atmosphere. The neighborhood was surrounded by Iraqi Army checkpoints, the soldiers tense and unsmiling as they checked identification cards and opened car trunks to search for guns. The units were not from Diwaniya.

The head of Mr. Sadr’s Diwaniya office, Sheik Haider al-Nadir, fled to Najaf. “I was afraid of being arrested,” he said. “Sometimes they arrest people with no excuse.”

A soft-spoken cleric, Mr. Nadir said Mr. Sadr’s organization was being wrongly accused of fomenting the troubles in Diwaniya, but granted that many groups involved in “bad activities” were using Mr. Sadr’s name. Others agree that some criminal gangs are trying to burnish their image by claiming a connection to Mr. Sadr.

With provincial elections approaching, the Sadr movement believes that the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the governor want to weaken them by accusing those aligned with Mr. Sadr of causing the problems in the city. The election has been delayed, and Mr. Sadr’s supporters believe that the reason was to give the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council time to reduce his appeal.

For people here, the competing rivalries breed confusion and fear. They do not know whom to trust. “You couldn’t tell which side was responsible for kidnappings, for killings,” said Abu Faris, the senior Diwaniya official who works with the provincial council.

“And if you looked at the victims, they were all kinds of people: police, workers, professors,” he said. “They were from different groups.”

The unease was palpable on a recent visit to Diwaniya. At a checkpoint at the city’s borders, the police stopped several cars with out-of-town license plates and held the occupants, including a reporter for The New York Times, saying the city was not safe. After relenting, they begged the visitors not to tell the next checkpoint, run by the Iraqi Army, that the police had let them into the town.

“They do not like us, they will try to make trouble for us,” said a police lieutenant, Hussain Ali. He added that there were rumors that the governor was going to dismiss 350 members of the police force. “Why are they trying to do this? We will be left penniless, our families and children without a livelihood, and we are accused of nothing.”

At the next checkpoint, stony-faced Iraqi soldiers looked suspiciously at the Baghdad license plates but let the cars through. A few hundred feet farther on, however, outside the compound that housed the governor’s office, uniformed gunmen who would not say whether they were with the police or the army blocked entry even to the government parking lot. There seemed to be no communication between the various checkpoints and no agreed upon rules.

By the time the reporter left the city, the tone of the encounter with the police had changed from threatening to a plea for help. Mr. Ali and two of his police officer colleagues apologized for not having air-conditioning at the police station, but explained that their generator was broken. They were making tea on a small gas stove. But the worst came at night, Mr. Ali said.

“Please, if you speak to the governor, please ask him to fix our generator,” he said. “At night our checkpoint sinks into darkness and we cannot see if someone is about to attack us.”

Labels: Crooks, Dick Cheney, Dumber than Quayle?, liars

The vice president is still trying to convince us that Saddam Hussein conspired with Al Qaeda. By Carl Levin

CARL LEVIN, a Democratic senator from Michigan, is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

April 12, 2007

TO PARAPHRASE President Reagan, there he goes again.

On Rush Limbaugh's radio program last week, Vice President Dick 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 four 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 — the 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 — and 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." And the CIA reported a year earlier, in October 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 two 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?

Labels: Dick Cheney, Jackass, liar, turd

In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard. At the top of Howard’s agenda was a plea to release Australian Gitmo detainee David Hicks. Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment and a gag order that will not allow him to discuss the case for 12 months.

Howard lobbied Cheney during the February visit for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” The plea bargain itself was brokered by Susan Crawford, the top military commission official and a former Department of Defense inspector general under then-Secretary of Defense Cheney, without the knowledge or input of the lawyers prosecuting Hicks. The lead prosecutor expressed shock over the light sentence.

Given the nature of the deal, suspicions are being raised that the plea agreement may have been an orchestrated gesture by Cheney to benefit Howard in his re-election fight. Howard, who is lagging behind Labor Party rival Kevin Rudd in the polls, faces a tough election contest in less than nine months. Now, legal experts on both continents are sounding alarms. Some examples:

– Terry Hicks, David’s father, said in a statement that “it is clearly a political fix arranged between Mr. Howard and the Bush administration to shut up Hicks until after the election in November.”

– Bob Brown of Australia’s Green party described the deal as a political “fix” meant to benefit Howard, saying that “the message has gone very clearly from Canberra to Washington to Guantanamo Bay: don’t allow Hicks to be released until after the elections and certainly don’t allow him to speak.”

– Lex Lasry, an Australian who observed the trial, remarked, “What an amazing coincidence that, with an election in Australia by the end of the year, he gets nine months and he is gagged for 12 months from talking about it.”

– Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, said: “I’m not naive. I know that they probably worked out - I’m quite sure they worked out - a plea bargain, that would allow the United States to appear to have effected a reasonably fair proceeding, would allow David Hicks to return to Australia, and satisfy Prime Minister Howard’s needs.”

Andrew Sullivan emphatically states, “If you think this was in any way a legitimate court process, you’re smoking something even George Michael would pay a lot of money for. It was a political deal, revealing the circus that the alleged Gitmo court system really is.”

Labels: Bush Administration, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo Bay, kangaroo court, political deal

Halliburton Takes the Money and Runs Away

Charlie Cray at HuffPo

With various ongoing investigations, Halliburton's sale of KBR and announcement that it will soon move to Dubai, UAE are tantamount to fleeing the scene of a crime.

Halliburton is moving to UAE at a time when it is being investigated in the U.S. for bribery, bid rigging, defrauding the military and illegally profiting in Iran.It is currently in the process of divesting all of its ownership interest in the scandal-plagued KBR subsidiary, notorious for overcharging the military and serving contaminated food and water to the troops in Iraq.

Although Halliburton will still be incorporated inside the United States, moving its corporate headquarters to UAE will make it easier to avoid accountability from federal investigators. The company has proven adept at using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent restrictions on doing business in Iran and to elude responsibility for paying benefits to former employees.

Halliburton has also used its operational structure for contracts in Iraq and post-Katrina -- especially multiple layers of subcontractors -- to elude oversight and accountability to taxpayers.

Moving to UAE may also hinder ongoing government investigations into Halliburton's alleged bribes paid to the government of Nigeria. CEO David Lesar, a former accountant who is presumably very adept at structural finance, supervised former KBR chairman Albert "Jack" Stanley during the time when KBR is alleged to have bribed Nigerian government officials. Stanley was subsequently fired after allegedly receiving $5 million in "improper" payments related the bribery scheme. Lesar, who was president and chief operating officer at the time, reported directly to then CEO Dick Cheney. According to the Dallas Morning News, "Mr. Cheney ran Halliburton when one of four suspicious payments occurred." (Dallas Morning News, Sept. 8, 2004.) (Dallas Morning News, Sept. 8, 2004.)

The United States has no extradition treaty with the UAE.

Given the multiple ongoing investigations into Halliburton's alleged wrongdoing, policymakers should closely scrutinize Halliburton's latest move, and whether it will allow the company to further elude accountability. Moreover, this underscores the need for Congress to bar companies that have broken the law, or avoided paying taxes, from receiving federal contracts, which 18 members already suggested last year should immediately be the policy regarding Halliburton.

Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies notes that most Fortune 500 companies have global operations, so that moving an entire headquarters to another country is not necessary. "With today's technologies, there's no real reason to have to physically relocate," she said. "Those that have are trying to evade U.S. oversight and tax authorities. And Dubai is a tax-free haven - no corporate or employee taxes. Halliburton claims this is not a big deal, but I can't imagine Lesar will be working over there alone in a little cubicle. This will be a much-expanded operation in Dubai."

"Despite the billions in US government contracts Halliburton has received, it has no loyalty or sense of obligation to US troops or taxpayers," she said, adding, "I find it ironic that Lesar is going to the same place as one of the only other individuals who's received even more bad publicity in recent years -- Michael Jackson."

Martin Sullivan, contributing editor at the nonpartisan Tax Notes magazine, said relocating to the no-tax jurisdiction of Dubai would change Halliburton's tax situation "significantly" even though the company would still be registered in the US. By re-locating its CEO and other top executives to Dubai, Halliburton can argue that a portion of its profits should be attributed to the no-tax jurisdiction, he said.

Halliburton earned a record $2.3 billion in profit last year. That's almost equal to the $2.7 billion the Pentagon found in the company's overcharges in Iraq.

Members of Congress have called for an investigation. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said, "I want to know, is Halliburton trying to run away from bad publicity on their contracts? Are they trying to run away from the obligation to pay US taxes? Or are they trying to set up a corporate presence in Dubai so that they can avoid the restrictions that currently exist on doing business with prohibited countries like Iran?"

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said, "This is an insult to the US soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years."

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has promised hearings into the matter. "I want to understand the ramifications for U.S. taxpayers and national security," he said.

In addition to grilling Lesar about the regulatory and tax avoidance aspects of their announced move, the question of jurisdiction should also be raised w/relation to the company's executives' personal incomes.
Lesar has already managed to make about $50 million personally in recent years -- much of it off the war on terror, while providing shoddy service to the US military. The guy is a former partner with Enron's auditors, Arthur Andersen. So, it's hard to imagine they're really just interested in locating their executives near the action so they can deal with Sheiks and oversee all that welding and drilling. The military manages to run CENTCOM, its Middle Easter command center, out of MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Is Halliburton so special that they have to locate their top executives so near their field operations? What would an accountant know about drilling and welding anyway? Isn't it more likely to be the case that they'd rather live in a tax haven so they can set themselves up to play more of the kind of shell games that they have been playing already in Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and elsewhere?

It looks like what's really going on is that Halliburton has decided to construct a new globalized corporate crime strategy. What a fine export. And we were worried about Dubai running some ports!

Labels: Criminals, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Thieves

March 7th, 2007 8:15 pm
Prosecutor says lies shielded Cheney

By R. Jeffrey Smith / Washington Post

WASHINGTON — In late March 2004, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald asked I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby three separate times whether his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, had discussed telling reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA in an undercover role.

Fitzgerald was unconvinced by Libby's response that even though he "may have" had such a conversation with Cheney, it probably occurred after Plame's identity as a CIA employee had been published in a newspaper column.

Almost three years later, Fitzgerald told the jury at Libby's trial that Libby's lies had effectively prevented him from learning about all of Cheney's actions in the administration's campaign to undermine Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Jurors on Tuesday convicted Libby of obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI and perjury for lying under oath to a grand jury. They acquitted him on another charge of lying.

More than he had previously, Fitzgerald made clear in his summation that his search for truth about Cheney was a goal of his investigation, and that his inability to get it was a key provocation for Libby's indictment. Although Cheney was the target, Fitzgerald's inquiry could not reach him because of Libby's duplicity.

Fitzgerald's summation explained, in part, why he brought charges based on imperfect evidence against Libby, even though Libby was not a source for Robert Novak, the author of the July 14, 2003, newspaper column that outed Plame as a CIA employee.

The jury's verdict addresses Fitzgerald's first conclusion — that Libby lied deliberately and did not misspeak from faulty memory. But the trial showed that the prosecutor finished his investigation with his mind made up that Libby's account was meant to hide his own involvement as well as to conceal the potential involvement of the vice president.

At the trial's close, Fitzgerald expressed his concern in unusually blunt terms. After Libby's lawyers complained that he was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up, Fitzgerald told the jury on Feb. 20, "We'll talk straight."

There was, he said, "a cloud over what the vice president did" during the period before the publication of Novak's column, and it was created by testimony showing that Cheney directed Libby and others at the White House to give out information about Wilson and Wilson's criticisms.

"We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant obstructed justice and lied about what happened," Fitzgerald added.

The notion that Libby was merely a courtroom stand-in for Cheney infuriated Libby's lawyers, who sought in their courtroom statement to defend both men. "Nobody in the office of the vice president is concerned about" Plame, Libby attorney William Jeffress Jr. said. "She never was part of the story they were trying to put out." (Editor's Note: Anyone else find it odd that Libby's Lawyers would try to defend the VP? They're supposed to be defending Libby, not Cheney.)

Fitzgerald disagreed. Suppose, Fitzgerald said, you were probing whether a pitcher had purposely beaned a batter, and if so, why?

"As you sit back, you want to learn why was this information going out. Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters?" Fitzgerald asked at a news conference in October. "What we have when someone charges obstruction of justice is the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure out what happened, and somebody blocked their view."

Randall Eliason, a former chief prosecutor of public corruption and fraud in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said Fitzgerald "would not have been doing his job" if he had not brought the charges. If "witnesses believe they can lie to the FBI and lie in the grand jury and there will be no consequences, then it becomes impossible to investigate any criminal activity, from terrorism to shoplifting."

Labels: Dick Cheney, Fall Guy, liars, Scooter Libby

by Hunter

BarbinMD wrote about this on Wednesday, but I want to bring it up again because it represents, yet again, one of the central incompetences of the Bush administration. Dick Cheney says:

Labels: Al Qaeda, BFF, Dick Cheney

by Cenk Uygur

Labels: Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Scooter Libby, traitors