Cheney, Bush and Plamegate

It had been rumored for some time but Judith Miller confirmed yesterday that CIA leak prosecutor asked about any Cheney role.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal prosecutor questioned New York Times reporter Judith Miller about whether Vice President Dick Cheney himself was aware or authorized her discussions with his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, about a covert CIA operative, Miller said on Saturday.

In his behind "the wall" commentary in The New York Times today Frank Rich speculates that It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby. [Note: the entire Rich commentary is now available at Truthout ]

THERE hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

The White House Iraq Group, marketing the war
Rich continues:

Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

They didn't anticipate a Mr Fitzgerald:

It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

Rich concludes with this:

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

Like the privates and sergeants that were served up the justice system over the Abu Gairab torture scandal, Mr Rove and Mr Libby will be sacrificed to protect others at the top, the very top.

Update
MEJ Reader Jeff, sends us this to ponder.

1) She refused to contact Libby for one year because "she did not
want to pressure a source into waiving his confidentiality." This
seems suspicious. If I were going to jail, I would make more than one
effort during a year to contact my source. How is communication a sign
of pressure? It was only after two months in jail that she finally had
her lawyer contact Libby, who immediately gave her permission to
testify. Why two months? Why not call him the first day? Perhaps two
months in jail is just the right amount of time for a $1.2 million
book deal.

(2) She does not remember what source gave her the name "Valerie
Flame". It could have been Libby, but she does not think so. She
thinks it might have been another source, but she is not sure.
Nevertheless, she distinctly remembers a incident in 2003 when she ran
into Libby on vacation in Wyoming, and she remembers the exact details
of her testimony to the grand jury (even without taking notes). It
does not appear that her memory is deficient. So how come she cannot
recall which source gave her the name "Valerie Flame"? Shouldn't a
reporter always know which source gave what information?

(3) Why did Libby end his letter to Miller with these lines: "Out
West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They
turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."? Miller says that
they refer to a chance meeting between her and Libby in Jackson Hole,
Wyoming. She had just been to a security conference in Aspen,
Colorado, and she decided to go to a rodeo in Jackson Hole, where
Libby just "happened" to be. Could those last lines be a secret code?
The letter that contained the lines was sent by Libby to Miller while
she was still in jail. Could he have been secretly telling her
something? Or is he just a bad poet?

Jeff doesn't want to become a "conspiracy nut" and neither do I but he raises some good questions.