Reply #14: Follow Up: Could Cheney Be Next? [View All]

[kerrygoddess]

Could Cheney Be Next?
May 13th, 2006 @ 4:55 pm

TruthOut has reported that Rove has been indicted and has been given 24 hours to get his affairs in order (see earlier post). Now handwritten notes by Dick Cheney on the “margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson,” have been included as part of the latest “filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.”

The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were “acutely focused” on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House’s handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. In the column, which created a firestorm after its publication, Wilson wrote that he had been dispatched by the CIA without pay to Niger in February, 2002 to investigate an intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country for a nuclear bomb. Wilson said he was told Cheney had asked about the intelligence,but the White House subsequently ignored his findings debunking the Niger claims.

In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson’s assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA sponsored trip to Africa: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

MORE & LINKS - http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=2978