It's all about Cheney, Index of posts

Updated 12-24-05

Alito and the Imperial Presidency
The evil that is Dick Cheney
It's all about Cheney part XXIV
The Vice President
The dishonest and reprehensible Vice President calls critics dishonest and reprehensible
And it' STILL All About Cheney
Cheney may need to hide in his undisclosed location for a while longer
It's all about Cheney, War Stories Edition
It's all about Cheney, Joe Gandelman edition
Still more on the world of Dick Cheney from Maureen Dowd
Nicholas D. Kristof's lame condemnation
Cheney to Fitzgeral....F*ck You
It's all about Cheney, continued
Lies and cover ups of cover ups
The office of Darth Cheney.............
It's all about Cheney, indictment edition!
It's all about Cheney, the saga continues
Maureen Dowd on the lord of darkness
It's all about Cheney, I told you edition!
Andrew Sullivan agrees, It's all about Cheney
Newsweek agrees, It's all about Cheney
It's all about Cheney

It's all about Cheney, I told you edition!

Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report
So Libby's source was Cheney and Cheney's Source was George J. Tenet.

Mr. Libby's notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson's undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent's identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent's undercover status.

Now my question is: how likely is it that Tenet told Cheney about Wilson's wife without telling him she was a NOC? Also keep in mind that Tenet was the one who requested the investigation of Plame's outing. What if anything does this tell us? I don't know, do you have any ideas?

Also see
It's all about Cheney
Newsweek agrees, It's all about Cheney
Andrew Sullivan agrees, It's all about Cheney

It's all about Cheney, War Stories Edition

Ronald [Nancy] Reagan knew Dick Cheney was a nut case, Bush 41 knew Cheney was a nut case but Bush 43 let him take charge of foreign and defense policy. Over at Slate Daniel Benjamin tells us that when it came to foreign policy he was President Cheney.

With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney's office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department's top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney's office. According to David L. Phillips' Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a former Cheney aide who has since left the government. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

[.....]

Cheney's connection with intelligence and, particularly, Pentagon intelligence is not exactly new. The transmission lines for many of the bogus claims in 2002 and 2003 about the purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida ran from the civilian Office of the Secretary of Defense through Cheney's office. Although the Libby indictment might lead some to believe that OVP was running an apolitical enforcement operation, it was doing much more than that. Cheney's team was producing the basic justification for going to war.

News accounts have placed the origin of much of the bad intelligence in the Office of Special Plans, which was run by Abram Shulsky, a graduate-school pal of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In fact, the bad intel came largely out of something called the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This group consisted of just two people: Michael Maloof, a controversial former aide to Richard Perle whose security clearances were eventually suspended, and David Wurmser, a longtime neoconservative advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein. (Since late 2003, Wurmser has worked in OVP.)

And it was Cheney's "intelligence" not intelligence from the CIA or the State Department that was used to brief the President and the Congress. It was Cheney's "intelligence" that was the basis for Powell's speech to the United Nations. The CIA knew the intelligence was faulty.

The wide airing of CTEG material clearly irked George Tenet, who declared at one point when pressed by congressmen in 2003 that he would "talk to" Cheney about some of the claims he was making. Whatever passed between them, Cheney was not deterred. In January 2004, he told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News that the Standard article was the "best source of information" on Saddam's ties to al-Qaida. In June 2004, Cheney was still claiming that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi agent in Prague.

The war within a war was Cheney's war against the "realists" in the CIA and at the State Department.

Much is still to be learned about how intelligence was used and abused in CTEG and OVP. But one story gives a hint of what the historians may find: When I interviewed him several months ago, Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson recounted the story of a meeting in the White House situation room during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when policymakers met with top intelligence officials from a number of agencies. After the intelligence officials made their presentations, Douglas Feith "leapt to his feet, pointed to a certain National Intelligence Officer and declared 'You people don't know what you're talking about.' "

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Surprise Surprise!

Yes those are the words of the lovable Gomer Pyle but they also could have been the by line of David Broder's commentary on Cheney that I simply dismissed yesterday as a bad 8th grade civics paper. Well Josh Marshall asks, where has Mr Broder and the rest of the DC punditry been that last few years?

Yesterday David Broder wrote a column which one TPM Reader, more or less fairly, described as Broder's expression of shock, shock at just what Dick Cheney has been up to over the last six-plus years. And this is a good opportunity to say that the Post's 'Angler' series seems to be becoming the trigger for that transition moment where consensus establishment opinion goes from seeing the vice president as the powerful administration heavy with a sometimes creepy but largely comic penchant for secrecy to an altogether more nefarious force who has used his unprecedented power as vice president to advance an agenda of official secrecy, non-accountability, untrammeled executive power, legitmized torture and general degradation of the rule of law.

But this is far too easy. Because the simple fact is that we've known almost all of this for years.

I started writing about Cheney about the same day I started this blog. The earliest post I can find is from October, 2005 - It's All About Cheney

While the news and rumors surrounding the Plame case may be focusing on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby it is also bringing to light what many of us have suspected all along, it's all about Vice President Dick Cheney.

Lawrence Wilkerson, last week who said:

....that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

I list of other posts from 2005 can be found here and it's all the same - the source of all evil is the office of the Vice President. In addition to the DC punditry we also have some Republicans now questioning the activities of Mr Cheney. The same question applies to them. What bunker have you been hiding in the last six years. As Digby explains

But I have to say that nobody should be surprised by this when you consider how this lawless cabal took power in the first place. They showed very early on that they would let nothing stand in their way and from their first moments in office they governed as if their institutional power meant they had a mandate to enact their entire agenda by any means necessary. (Bush like to call it "political capital" --- I suspect Cheney just called it raw power.)

I think the most amazing thing about all that is that 9/11 was just frosting on the cake for these guys --- they were prepared to do all this stuff anyway. Cheney said he'd taken office with the intention of "restoring" presidential power. The GWOT made it easier to do the national security stuff, but he would have done it anyway.

It's all about Cheney

While the news and rumors surrounding the Plame case may be focusing on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby it is also bringing to light what many of us have suspected all along, it's all about Vice President Dick Cheney. We heard that from Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, last week who said:

....that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

We are apparently going to hear more of the same from Brent Scowcroft in a New Yorker magazine commentary tomorrow. At The New York Times today Richard W. Stephvenson and Douglas Jehl have a nice summary of the case against Cheney in Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - The legal and political stakes are of the highest order, but the investigation into the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.

That fight has preoccupied the White House for more than three years, repeatedly threatening President Bush's credibility and political standing, and has again put the spotlight on Vice President Dick Cheney, who assumed a critical role in assembling and analyzing the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs.

While Wilkerson's critic was big Scowcroft's commentary on Monday may prove to be "shock and awe" to Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon cultists.

Mr. Scowcroft, a self-described realist who prides himself on seeing what could go wrong in any course of action, argues against what he characterizes as the utopian view of neoconservatives within the administration that toppling Saddam Hussein would open the door to democracy throughout the Middle East. He also suggests that Mr. Cheney is a man much changed, and not for the better, from the policy maker he worked with closely during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Mr. Scowcroft has long expressed reservations about the current White House's foreign policy approach and about the Iraq war in particular, but his comments could further exacerbate divisions among Republicans, especially to the degree that they are seen as reflecting the views of his close friend, the first President Bush.

"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. "I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

The Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal was not only wrong about invading Iraq but were wrong about how to fight the war and what to do after the initial invasion. If the war had gone well there wouldn't be as much controversy now.

There's a daisy chain that stems from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Iraq was at core a war of choice, and extraordinarily expensive by every measure - human life, impact on our military, dollars, diplomatically," said Mr. Haass, a former senior State Department official under President Bush. "If this war was widely judged to have been necessary along the lines of Afghanistan after 9/11, I don't believe you would have this controversy. If the war had gone extremely well, you wouldn't have this controversy."

Even if no indictments result from Fitzgerald's investigation it has been a win for those who opposed the war and a loss for the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal because it has shown that either the office of the Vice President manufactured false intelligence to justify the war or they were totally incompetent and out of touch with reality.

Mr. Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Mr. Libby was painting a dark picture of Iraq's capabilities and alleged that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda.

In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Mr. Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council. But in meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early February, Secretary Powell and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Mr. Libby's draft as exaggerated.

John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy C.I.A. director, referred to this period in a statement issued in April 2005. "Much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material, including much that had been added by the policy community after the draft left the agency, that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable," Mr. McLaughlin said.

In his 2004 book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward of The Washington Post wrote that Mr. Powell had rejected Mr. Libby's draft as "worse than ridiculous," which Mr. Wilkerson alluded to in his recent speech.

That episode added to tensions between Mr. Cheney's office and senior officials at the C.I.A., which had also dismissed as unwarranted claims by Mr. Cheney and others about close links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

We have seen a move by Republicans to distance themselves from the administration of George W. Bush in recent weeks and facts getting a public airing as the result of the Plame investigation will only increase this. Don't be too surprised if Mr. Cheney doesn't finish out his term as VP.

Andrew Sullivan agrees, It's all about Cheney

In The Times UK Andrew Sullivan writes The ‘background noise’ sounds bad for Bush but after reading his commentary you realize he thinks it looks bad for Bush because it looks really really bad for Cheney. Not really anything new but worth a read. He does have a quotable line I'll give you though:

Was the investigation, which could lead to indictments of some very senior Bush officials, a distraction? Could he focus on his job? The president replied with a smile: “There’s some background noise here . . .”
That’s one way of putting it. It is the kind of background noise you hear when you are tied to a railway track and hear a goods train thundering towards you.

Although we might all like to see some indictments to fulfill our personnel requirements for vindictive revenge I'm not sure that they are even required now. The damage has been done. Rove was just an attack dog and Libby a dedicated true believer but Cheney is the one who has been exposed here. Add the Lawrence Wilkerson talk last week and the much anticipated Brent Scowcroft, with a cameo by Bush 41, article in The New Yorker to the mix and it looks like Cheney is in a lot of trouble. I really find it hard to believe there won't be some indictments but they will just be the icing on the cake. The cake will taste pretty good even without the icing I think.

Also see
It's all about Cheney
Newsweek agrees, It's all about Cheney

Dick Cheney and the Dirty Dozen

As I have repeated here often, we are wasting our time going after George W. Bush because it's all about Cheney. The shrill libertarian, Paul Craig Roberts, explains that the Americans Have Lost Their Country to the first neocon administration, to Dick Cheney and the rest of the "dirty dozen.

The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues – principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by "scholars" in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Roberts asks this question; "Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?" Here is his answer.

There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the Middle East. The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.

Yes it's all about oil and gas but there is also the Israeli connection.

The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel’s enemies" consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s theft of Palestine.

The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor," and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.

Yes Dick Cheney is the leader of the dirty dozen and the source of all evil. He has always been a little insane and has always held Democracy and the American people in the utmost contempt. But it's getting worse. Joe Conason writes about Last Throes of Cheney’s Credibility. Glenn Greenwald details how Cheney has become even more combative and more secretive since the November elections.

Since the smashing repudiation his party suffered at the hands of the American voter in the 2006 midterm elections, Dick Cheney's behavior has become palpably more secretive, combative, and scornful. The embittered interview he gave to Wolf Blitzer was the most vivid, but far from the only, instance. He seems to harbor such scorn for the democratic process that he literally no longer cares whether the answers he gives to reporters' questions even make any sense.

The interview Cheney gave to pool reporters on his plane yesterday as it returned home from Afghanistan is striking in several respects. Initially, as Dan Froomkin notes, Cheney demanded that journalists not identify him by name when reporting on the interview (but instead refer to him only as a "senior administration official"), even though Cheney himself makes unmistakably clear in the transcript that it is him.

In fact, the very first words out of his mouth were: "The reason the President wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world." He discussed at length the comments he made recently about Nancy Pelosi wanting to "validate Al Qaeda's strategy. So even though there was not a single security reason for the anonymity, Cheney insisted upon it anyway. The official White House transcript (linked above) refers to him only as a "senior administration official," and reporters were required to identify him only as such.

Now dynamite is always explosive but when you see small drops of nitroglycerin on it you know it's unstable and even more dangerous. Now we have known for some time that Cheney is dangerously insane but does his recent behavior indicate increased instability as well. Is a dangerous man becoming even more dangerous.

Newsweek agrees, It's all about Cheney

This morning I suggested the Plamegate was all about Dick Cheney. Well Michael Isikoff and Newsweek agree.

Prelude to a Leak

Gang fight: How Cheney and his tight-knit team launched the Iraq war, chased their critics—and set the stage for a special prosecutor's dramatic probe.

They give us a good look of the mindset and workings of Dick Cheney and the gang around him, especially one Scooter Libby.
The Gang

Cheney had long distrusted the apparatchiks who sat in offices at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. He regarded them as dim, timid timeservers who would always choose inaction over action. Instead, the vice president relied on the counsel of a small number of advisers. The group included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and two Wolfowitz proteges: I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped to advance their case for war.

As Rumsfeld would say, sometimes you have to start a war based on the intelligence you want not the intelligence you have.
Enter Joe Wilson
Cheney told the CIA he wanted evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger. The CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. Joe Wilson returned and told the CIA the story was false. Newsweek doubts that Wilson's report ever made it to Cheney but believes he would have ignored it even if it had; not the intelligence we want. And then:

Joseph Wilson grew increasingly agitated that the White House had not come clean about how the African-uranium claim made it into George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. In June, Condoleezza Rice went on TV and denied she knew that documents underlying the uranium story were, in fact, crude forgeries: "Maybe somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this," she said, "but nobody in my circles." For Wilson, that was it. "That was a slap in the face," he told NEWSWEEK. "She was saying 'F--- you, Washington, we don't care.' Or rather 'F--- you, America'." On July 6, Wilson went public about his Niger trip in his landmark New York Times op-ed piece.

From there, as we now know, things got a bit out of hand. Within the White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws protecting classified information.

There is more in the article that's worth reading but the above is the meat of it. An attack on the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal was a crime to be punished.

One thing that is becoming clear is that Karl Rove was little more than a trained attack dog but I guess that's really all he's ever been.

It will be curious to see what General Scowcroft has to say tomorrow.

Iran - the next frontier

Some interesting news on Iran today.
The report on Iran's involvement in Iraq has been delayed.

But some officials in Washington are concerned that some of the material may be inconclusive and that other data cannot be released without jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods. They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect, said the officials, who described the internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

Perhaps that it's because it turned out those responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Karbala turned out to be Iraqi Generals not Iranians.
Of special interest is this from OpEdNews.com.
CHENEY BEING TARGETED FOR IMPEACHMENT
So, is the only way to stop another middle east debacle is get rid of Cheney? There may be some Republicans who think so.
A 'PERFECT STORM' IS RISING TO OUST DICK CHENEY

Pundits-especially those favorable to Cheney's chickenhawk policies-have said that impeachment is unlikely because the Vice President is a "constitutionally elected official" who can only be removed under charges of criminality, or by voluntarily resigning. But, with the opening statement by Special Counsel Fitzgerald in the Libby trial, on Jan. 23, in which he alleged that Cheney issued a hand-written memo to Libby on discrediting Wilson, the situation changed. Not only did Fitzgerald disclose the existence of the memo, but he charged that Libby had "wiped out" that incriminating piece of evidence.

However, reportedly through the combination of computer memory recovery methods, and the testimony of witnesses who also knew about Cheney's memo, Fitzgerald was able to introduce the matter in his opening remarks.

Now, to all those who say "impeachment is off the table," one must ask-what would the trial of Richard Nixon's aides Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et al., have looked like, if a hand-written note from Nixon, directing them to break into the offices of Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel, had been disclosed?

Washington insiders report that the Bush family may be the critical factor in getting rid of Cheney, a scenario which is being mooted in the media.

As we have been saying here all along "It's all about Cheney", the source of all evil - the dark lord - Darth Vader. Is their a movement in the Republican aristocracy that realizes this and that his madness is not in their best interest? More important, can they do something about Cheney before he does the next insanely stupid thing?

Lies and cover ups of cover ups

This morning in The New York Times Frank Rich goes beyond Plame and discusses the lies that sent us off to war, the cover up of those lies and the complicity of the investigations in covering up the cover ups. (Available at Truthout.)

In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.

After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big enchilada."

The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of war.

Yes, once again we see that it's all about Cheney. Fitzgerald may have said his investigation was not about the war but the results certainly are all about the deceptions that led up to the war. And it's not just about Mr Cheney's office, as we have seen it's as much about a press that willingly published the lies and deceptions that were concocted by the Vice Presidents office without question. And as Rich tells us it also exposes the previous "investigations" were themselves little more than cover ups.

And it's not over, there are a great many mysteries yet to be uncovered.

There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?

These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.

Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.

Friday was not the end but only the beginning. The genie is out of the bottle and Mr Fitzgerald is the one who removed the stopper.

Note
I'll put a link to Rich's commentary here as soon as it becomes available or you can check with Truthout yourself.
Here is the Truthout link.

We can't afford to be without the truth!

....for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

A couple of days ago Sidney Blumenthal told us about The long march of Dick Cheney.

For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him -- and he's not about to give it up.

Well today Frank Rich reminds us just how dishonest, reprehensible and corrupt Dick Cheney and the rest of the administration has been.(available at Truthout).

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Cheney see's the lies catching up with him and he's not about to give up the power he has worked so long to get.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

Rich has more examples of the lies but nothing we don't already know about.

Rich reminds us why the past is important.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Americans now seek the truth and the truth is poison to Dick Cheney's lust for power. That's why they are fighting back. But as Frank Rich says, it's not working.

Sidney Blumenthal's article probably does more to clarify what's going on than anything else I have read. Dick Cheney's plans for power began with Richard Nixon. His attempts to hijack the government have all been stopped until Bush 43. He was almost there with Ronald Reagan but Nancy recognized him as the dangerous nut case he is. Scowcroft interrupted his plans during the Bush 41 administration. Bush 43 is his last chance. That's why we are seeing the vicious cornered rat behavior of the Bush administration now. Once again, it's all about Cheney. Frank Rich didn't emphasize that enough in his otherwise excellent piece.

Technorati Tags

Frank Rich, Cheney, Sidney Blumenthal

Dionne asks the right question

In Tests of a Smear Campaign E.J. Dionne asks the question many of us have been asking for some time:
If what Kerry did during Vietnam is so important why doesn't the press look at what Bush and Cheney did during the war?

You would have thought that if the issue of who served under fire during the Vietnam War became a big deal at this point in the presidential campaign, it would be a major advantage to John Kerry.

After all, there is no dispute that Kerry served in Vietnam's combat zones while both President Bush and Vice President Cheney avoided the war. Bush served stateside in the National Guard (it's still not clear how much of his duty time he missed) and Cheney avoided the military altogether. The hawkish veep has explained blithely, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

OK you "journalists", lets tell everyone about Cheney's activities during Vietnam and for once talk about all the questions about Bush's National Guard Service. You too Fox, that's what "Fair And Balanced" is all about. So you won't have to work too hard here is Cheney's record:

Dick Cheney is another who, on paper at least, supported the war. But we know Cheney's story: A series of deferments going back to 1963, when he was a student at Casper College in Wyoming. As Tim Noah reported in Slate, Cheney went on to marry -- as fate would have it, right after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when it was clear that young single men would be called up in larger numbers than before. And then he went on to have a child, Elizabeth, born precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service ended the proscription on the drafting of married but childless men. What a happily timed burst of passion he and Lynn were consumed by! So, while Kerry was plying the Mekong Delta, Cheney was safe and dry stateside, dropping out of Yale because his grades weren't sufficient to maintain the scholarship the school had offered him.

From Michael Tomasky's Cowards All Around in the American Prospect.

Update
Before the virtual HTML ink was even dry on this post I discovered that USA Today has an article on Bush's National Guard Record.

• Why did Bush, described by some of his fellow officers as a talented and enthusiastic pilot, stop flying fighter jets in the spring of 1972 and fail to take an annual physical exam required of all pilots?

• What explains the apparent gap in the president's Guard service in 1972-73, a period when commanders in Texas and Alabama say they never saw him report for duty and records show no pay to Bush when he was supposed to be on duty in Alabama?

Good for you USA Today, keep it up.

Like I've been saying

It's all about Cheney. Well someone in the corporate media has finally noticed. (Hat tip to Mary at The Left Coaster).

The Cheney presidency

GEORGE W. BUSH has been faulted in some quarters for taking an extended vacation while the Middle East festers. It doesn't much matter; the man running the country is Vice President Dick Cheney.

When historians look back on the multiple assaults on our constitutional system of government in this era, Cheney's unprecedented role will come in for overdue notice. Cheney's shotgun mishap, when he accidentally sprayed his host with birdshot, has gotten more media attention than has his control of the government.

The stealth President:

Cheney is in a class by himself. The administration's grand strategy and its implementation are the work of Cheney-- sometimes Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sometimes Cheney and political director Karl Rove.

Cheney has planted aides in major Cabinet departments, often over the objection of a Cabinet secretary, to make sure his policies are carried out. He sits in on the Senate Republican caucus, to stamp out any rebellions. Cheney loyalists from the Office of the Vice President dominate interagency planning meetings.

The Iraq war is the work of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The capture of the career civil service is pure Cheney. The disciplining of Congress is the work of Cheney and Rove. The turning over of energy policy to the oil companies is Cheney. The extreme secrecy is Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

But little of this is noticed because Cheney is usually below the radar screen. As a result there is virtually no accountability.

Why does this matter? Because if the man actually running the government is out of the spotlight, the administration and its policies are far less accountable.

In other words Cheney is largely ignored even though he is the one calling the shots and keeping his puppet President secure in his bubble.

If Cheney were the actual president, not just the de facto one, he simply could not govern with the same set of policies and approval ratings of 20 percent. The media focuses relentless attention on the president, on the premise that he is actually the chief executive. But for all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in the ceremonial role of the queen of England.

Yet the press buys the pretense of Bush being ``the decider," and relentlessly covers Bush -- meeting with world leaders, cutting brush, holding press conferences, while Cheney works in secret, largely undisturbed. So let's take half the members of the overblown White House press corps, which has almost nothing to do anyway, and send them over to Cheney Boot Camp for Reporters. They might learn how to be journalists again, and we might learn who is running the government.

Just what many of us have been saying for over five years. As Mary says, "Hey, press. It's time to do your job and look at what's actually happening with our government." I'm not holding my breath.

It's All About Cheney

I have been saying since I first started MEJ that the source of all evil was Dick Cheney. An Index of early posts can be found here and more recent ones can be found here and here. With Cheney's recent declaration that he is accountable to no one and the four part series in the Washington Post I feel vindicated.

David Broder has attempted to jump on the anti-Cheney bandwagon with a commentary that reads like something written by an 8th grade civics student after reading the Cliff Notes of the WAPO series. Fortunately we don't have to depend on the brain dead DC punditry. Sidney Blumenthal comes to the rescue.

The imperial vice presidency

Two months after 9/11, on the day of the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 13, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared in the Oval Office with a four-page executive order designating terrorism suspects as enemy combatants to be held indefinitely, with no right to have their detention reviewed by any court except newly created military commissions, where they would not be permitted to learn the accusations or evidence against them, or be represented by counsel, or even know that their case had been heard and decided.

The secretary of state and the national security advisor were deliberately kept uninformed as the White House staff secretary prepared the order for signature. According to a four-part series published this week in the Washington Post on the extraordinary power of the vice president, "When it [the order] returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text." Colin Powell was stunned when he learned of the fait accompli. "What the hell just happened?" he asked. Condoleezza Rice was described as "incensed." But neither of them, then or later, effectively challenged Cheney's usurpation of executive authority. And, as can be gathered inferentially, Bush never bothered to ask Cheney about their opinions on the executive order or to call them; nor did he seem to care.

That pretty well sums up the entire Cheney Vice Presidency. One of taking advantage of a none to bright President to take on imperial powers of his own.

Cheney has crushed the normal interagency process that permitted communication, cross-fertilization and cooperation at the sub-Cabinet level through all previous modern administrations. At the same time, he has isolated Cabinet secretaries, causing them to be fired when they contradicted him, as he did with Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.

Cheney thrives in darkness, operating by stealth within the government, and makes a cult of secrecy. None of these insights are new, except for additional telling details. Reports the Post: "Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped 'Treated As: Top Secret/SCI.'"

Blumenthal has many more examples and you should read the entire piece.

As I have said before Cheney is dangerous because he is both evil and insane. The United States has drifted far from it's roots and the world is a more dangerous place because of Dick Cheney. So what to do now? Can the US and the world survive another 18 months of Cheney? Bruce Fein says no and that we must
Impeach Cheney
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

[......]

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

It should be noted that Bruce Fein is no liberal head hunter. He was the Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, and is a card carrying member of the American Enterprise Institute.

Note
Updated above

Many more reactions can be found at memeorandum.

Cenk Uygur, "It's all about Cheney"

The Young Turk, Cenk Uygur, has a must read piece over at the Huffington Post, America Strikes Back. Like I've been saying for years, it's all about Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney has been waging a quiet war against the United States of America for quite some time now. For several decades, although he moved in and out of positions of power, he could never really make a dent in the constitutional checks and balances inherent in our government. But over the last six years, he has won many battles and set back the Americans system of government significantly.

Yes, that's right, Dick Cheney hates America and all it stands for.

You see, Dick Cheney has never believed in the American system. He believes democracies are too soft. He has lobbied for a strong executive to take nearly complete power. Some call it the "unitary executive authority." Some call it an authoritarian form of government.

The cult of authority

Either way, the cult of authority has never trusted the American form of government.

Judges and juries can't be trusted. We must have secret detentions and secret trials.

We can't follow rules of evidence. We must allow hearsay and evidence obtained through coercion.

American interrogation procedures don't work. We must use torture.

American Congress can't be trusted to pass wise laws. We must use signing statements to say the president is above the law.

The American justice system doesn't work. We must declare US citizens, residents and anyone else we deem necessary "enemy combatants" and take them outside of the system, so that we can detain them indefinitely without trial or evidence or justice.

Justice is too important to be left to the American justice system.

The people who believe these things - Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, David Addington, John Bolton, etc. - are profoundly un-American. I don't include George W. Bush here because he is an irrelevant member of his own administration in this regard. His mind is so pitifully under-equipped for this ideological debate that it would be unfair to charge him with having knowledge of something he can hardly comprehend.

I think it's fair to say these ideologues hate the idea of America. They are not for an open society with fair rules that trusts its citizens to be fair and to police themselves. They have never believed in the American experiment.

In Cheney's mind the only thing wrong with Saddam was he turned on America. If he hadn't done that he would still be Cheney's best friend not dead. Yes, in Cheney's mind Saddam understood what government should be.

But Uygur thinks that the US is fighting back against the tyranny of Dick Cheney.

So, it appears now that the great American system is beginning to strike back. We have arisen from our slumber and find rascals in our midst. They have awoken a sleeping giant. The giant does not move quickly and it's sometimes slow to react, but once it moves it take giant leaps for mankind.

And when we move this country back into the light, we will show again that we are not so small that we can be taken down by petty men with old, antiquated ideas. The American system will win. And we will once again become a nation of laws, and not men.

We will show the world that we are bigger and better than the small men that lead us now. Their reign is temporary. The American system is for good. This is not a country that can be taken over by the authoritarians. We will not go the way of the tin-pot dictators. We will prevail. We will drag Dick Cheney out of the shadows and bring him into the light. The idea of America is too strong to be taken down by men of little faith.

We can only hope that it's not too late. With three members if the cult of authority now on the Supreme Court, Scalia, Alito and Roberts, taking the country back will not be easy.

Cheney Concedes Lack of Perfection at Commencement Address

Regular MEJ readers are already accustomed to the theory that, at least in terms of political intrigue and government malfeasance, it's all about Cheney, but this week the Veep took to the stage of academia and admitted that his past held a few steps off the beam. Addressing the grads at Louisiana State University, Dick took a moment to try to appear a bit more "folksy" by recounting some of his own slipups in a misspent youth.

Vice President Dick Cheney, his favorability ratings even lower than President Bush's, gave college graduates a good-natured tour Friday of some of the detours in his life as he counseled them to be ready to roll with life's punches.

Life rarely turns out as planned, he said. Cheney said that when he graduated from the University of Wyoming, he expected to go on to graduate school, a doctorate and a life in academia.

The vice president, 65, cited his first disastrous meeting with now-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld back in the 1960s, when Rumsfeld was a congressman and Cheney was interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill.

"Things didn't go all that well," Cheney recounted. "In fact, he pretty much threw me out of his office."

Cheney also poked fun at himself for never quite getting around to writing the dissertation to complete his doctorate work.

"I'll get started as soon as I think of a topic to write about," he promised.

He confessed that he had started his college years at Yale, but dropped out after a few semesters.

"Actually, dropped out isn't quite accurate," he added. "'Asked to leave' would be more like it. Twice. The second time around, they said, don't bother coming back."

As you would expect, having Darth Cheney show up in front of a bunch of college students, even in the very red state of Louisiana, drew some objections. The most curious one, however, came from one of the students with a rather... "unique" academic background.

Not all students were happy with the choice of Cheney as commencement speaker. Some complained about Bush administration policies on the war in Iraq and other topics, and others said selecting Cheney was inappropriate given displeasure with the administration's Katrina response.

"Graduates need better inspiration," said Jessica Ketcham, a graduate student in rhetoric.

I'm sorry... did you just say a "graduate student in rhetoric"???? Sounds more like she's studying to work in the Cheney administration than to criticize it.

It's all about Cheney, continued

Reading between the lines one thing is becoming clear, the Fitzgerald investigation isn't about Rove or Libby, it's about Dick Cheney. Reuters reports today that Democrats, but more importantly Republicans, are telling George W. Bush that it's time to clean house and bring in some new blood.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush, whose top adviser Karl Rove remains in jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, needs to shake up his White House staff if he hopes to revive a presidency reeling from multiple setbacks, Republican and Democratic lawmakers said on Sunday.

The lawmakers also urged Bush to investigate the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose chief of staff, Lewis Libby, resigned on Friday and was indicted on perjury and other charges in connection with the probe. Bush should take Cheney "to the woodshed" if necessary, one lawmaker said.

The talk of house cleaning mostly revolve around Karl Rove but Cheney is also mentioned. I see the republicans coming to the conclusion that if Cheney isn't already radio active he will be very soon.

Over at the Sunday Times on Line Andrew Sullivan writes 'If I were Cheney I'd be sweating a little'. Sully gives a pretty good summary of the trials facing the Bush administration with a minimal amount of right wing hackery. Although he too spends most of his time on Karl Rove and problems with the radical Christians he does indicate that he thinks Cheney could well be in deep shit.

Libby will face a trial in which the vice-president may have to testify under oath. Political questions remain. The obvious question that still lingers is a simple one. Why did Libby lie? Why did such a smart and meticulous man put himself at risk of 30 years in jail if he had done nothing wrong in the first place?

We know from the indictment text that Libby got the classified information about Valerie Plame from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who got it from that part of the CIA that employs undercover agents. But Libby told the FBI and the grand jury that he got the information first from reporters. Why the discrepancy? If Libby had done nothing illegal why didn’t he just tell the truth?

It’s clear to me that Fitzgerald believes that there was a bigger reason for those little lies, a rationale for the coverup, a larger premise that makes sense of all of this.

Part of that premise has to involve the actions and motivations of Cheney. Fitzgerald and his team know this. They have not finished their inquiry and have an important potential source of new information facing a trial under a judge known for hefty sentences. Some kind of plea deal by Libby — a shorter sentence in return for naming names in the underlying case? — is not inconceivable.

If I were Cheney, I’d be sweating a little.

Will the Republicans be willing to sacrifice the Lord of Darkness himself to save George W. Bush and their own hides. It certainly looks like a possibility. I would guess that Rumsfeld is probably looking a retirement himself sooner than latter.

The Vice Presidents Shadow

I have been saying for several years that "it's all about Cheney". George W. Bush is simply Cheney's front man - his puppet. David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo discusses the WAPO article on Cheney and the Libby Trial, Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over Trial and has some interesting observations.

I will confess to having been extremely skeptical in the early years of the Bush Presidency that Cheney was really running the show. It seemed too facile an explanation for what I was convinced was a far more complicated situation. Until the 9/11 Commission report came out.

Even the watered-down version of events in the Commission's report made it absolutely clear that Cheney, ensconced in the White House bunker on the morning of the attacks, had issued shootdown orders outside of the chain of command and then conspired with the President to conceal this fact from the Commission.

Since then, I've gone from being open to the idea of an Imperial Vice Presidency to being convinced that historians will debate whether something approaching a Cheney-led coup d'etat has occurred, in which some of the powers of the Executive were extra-constitutionally usurped by the Office of the Vice President.

He goes on to remind us that historically the office of the VP has been powerless but all that changed with Cheney. He then makes this interesting observation.

Still, I can't help but be fascinated by the more pedestrian issue of how Cheney continues to assert himself so vigorously without running up against the ego of a cocksure President. How is it that Bush, who is so caught up in macho public demonstrations of his own personal strength and courage, can tolerate a shadow presidency within his own White House? What kind of spell has Cheney cast that allows Bush to continue to believe he is the decider? You can imagine all sorts of dysfunctional psychological dramas playing out behind the scenes.

But whether it's the legal or political aspect of Cheney's role, it all comes down to the same thing: we just don't know.

It's about time we find out.

Indeed.
Update
Digby chimes in on this and as usual is much more articulate than I.

And it' STILL All About Cheney

A blast from the past. You may recall that Cheney went all the way to the Supreme Court to stop anyone from finding out about his top secret meetings when crafting United States energy policy shortly after taking office. From then right up until a few weeks ago, Darth Cheney and his aides have been denying that he met with oil company executives to draft that policy.

Ooops.

Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

Lies about Iraq... lies about Plame ... lies about the energy policy task force. Cheney's popularity in this country is already well below the sinking numbers of his boss. (The last poll I saw had him at an 18% approval rating.) Do you suppose continued news like this will finally push him over the edge and we'll see him retire "for health reasons" soon?

In a way, I hope not. He's doing more to help progressive causes by staying right where he is than an army of Democratic activists ever could. He's been unmasked as the poster boy for evil in the Bush dynasty, and will only help drag down his party's chances next year. Plus, an opening at VP would give Bush the chance to name a new VP (who would become the defacto nominee for President in '08) and give them a three year head start on the election. No... I think I'm liking Cheney right where he is for the time being.

Cheney and the Libby Trial

My biggest question about the trial of Scooter Libby was why is it taking place. Of course pardoning Libby would have resulted in some bad PR and talk of cover up but the administration had to know that the information that would come out would be even more damaging. In his column today Frank Rich talks about what the Cheney trial means for Dick Cheney. Rich notes that the totally mad and irrational Vice President has become even more so as the Libby trial moves forward. Cheney understands what skeletons are likely to be unearthed.

He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.

Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.

In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring. It’s entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.) The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.)

But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else. According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn’t find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.

Cheney and the rest of the administration knew that outing a CIA agent was the least of their problems.

The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.

Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president’s State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless. Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful “uranium from Africa” in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.

Rich points out that if the war had been the "cakewalk" they predicted few would even care if they had lied to get us into it. But the "cakewalk' rapidly became a debacle - a quagmire in the desert and the administration's incompetence was the reason. So now they not only lied to get us into the war they thoroughly botched it once we were there. Mr Wilson's accusations came at a time that Iraq was not a cakewalk and that the mission was anything but accomplished.

But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture. More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of “major combat operations” by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren’t even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was “unacceptable.”

It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson’s revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife. The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech.

What we are learning from Mr. Libby’s trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby’s lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was — and still is — a stooge for the vice president.

This is all happening at a time when an administration that has little credibility left is pushing a surge that has little chance of success.

In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge. Even the declassified passages released on Friday — the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence — foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”)

A Pentagon inspector general’s report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to “effectively complete their missions.” Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that “five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky.”

But the one question that remains unanswered is why did the administration allow this trial to proceed - why didn't Bush simply pardon Libby? I don't know the answer.

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