Evidence of Possible Criminal Misconduct in Plame Affair

[Sliverofhope]

UPI's Richard Sale

Federal law enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year.

The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby were the two Cheney employees.

<snip>

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time," as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law enforcement official said.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_01.html#002529

"Hannah, by the way, is a "senior national security aide" for Cheney, and was, in fact, the administration's main point of contact with Chalabi's INC."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/2/5/1922/76561

[RobertSeattle]

1. Kaching - here another URL

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml

[SpiralHawk]

4. Ba da boom, ba da bing !

Aaaaoooogaaahhhh! Red Alert !

Big Cheeses Dead Ahead.

Full Steam to catch the outlaw piRAT ship S.S. ChimPee & Cheney, now foundering badly in Mer de Malfeasance.

Be on the lookout for ratpubliCONS deserting ship.

[CPschem]

12. when's this news gonna go mainstream???? n/t

[Caution]

2. beautiful

simply beautiful. I especially like the bit about naming superiors. Please let this thing go all the way to Cheney and Rove.

[RobertSeattle]

9. Wonder if it will go over like Oliver North

Dick: "Uh, Scooter, we need to talk. We're going to need you to take one for the team here and keep your mouth shut about my or Rove's involvement. You might do a little time in a minimum security Federal prison. But when you get out I'll make sure you are taken care of - either an amazing good book deal, a talk show, or the like. "

[bahrbearian]

3. Great it's Heating Up

Cheney huh!

[aquart]

5. Now this is serious entertainment.

I'm a little bemused at the idea of the FBI actually doing its job however. Why is that?

[Wickerman]

14. one of the communtiy burned

constant accusations of providing shoddy intelligence and other failures - being assigned to prostitution busts and making criminals out of medical pot users might have worn them down.

[Stephanie]

39. Read Josh Marshall

www.talkingpointsmemo.com

from yesterday - sounds like the CIA strongarmed the FBI to conduct criminal investigation.

[markses]

6. Nail the fucking coonskin to the wall

See ya, Scooter. Bet they'll love that name in Lewisburg, you fucking shitbird.

[David Zephyr]

7. Chris Matthews Has Pretty Much Said It Was Lewis "Scooter" Libby

This really begins to now put into motion the end of Cheney as Vice President...something Poppy Bush wants anyway, but hasn't been able to figure out how to do it since Dick and Lynnn have all the goods on the Bush crimes.

[JuniorPlankton]

8. Way to go!

[Cooley Hurd]

10. Have the other 5 jounalists been named?

We know about Novakula, who are the other five?

[central scrutinizer]

16. some of them have self-identified

I don't have a link to the list, but the other five realized that it would be treason to blow Plame's cover and sat on the info.

[UpInArms]

11. more background info

here:

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/libby.html

Oct. 3, 2003

And there are other small clues. According to a Wednesday USA Today article, "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, met with officials at the Non-Proliferation Center before the invasion of Iraq to discuss reports that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa."

Plame works at the Non-Proliferation Center. The paper noted that she did not attend the meetings with Libby, but it's plausible that he found out about her employment while he was there.

Libby and Cheney, in highly unusual moves, visited the CIA several times before the war, in what many observers saw as an attempt to pressure analysts to produce more damaging assessments about Saddam Hussein's arsenal or any connection with al- Qaida.

[nixonwasbetterthanW]

13. TPM/JMM also "sitting on key developments" till late p.m.

I don't know whether I can wait that long, Josh ... please, PLEASE shine the spotlight for us woebegone blogwatchers!

[Beetwasher]

15. The Hammer is Coming Down and Soon!

Yeehaw!

[WarNoMore]

17. Kick! eom

[xxqqqzme]

18. as we have all KNOWN since

squatter & the puppet masters seized power - this mis-administration is thoroughly and completely, stinkin' up the house rotten. The wind shifted so whorporate media can no longer ignore the stench surrounding them.

If it was not for the internet - this would not B Xposed. The next time these crooks seize power, the internet will either B controlled or they will have factored it in 2 their advantage.

[jackstraw45]

19. Time to "smoke them out" of their (executive branch) caves

And send these crooks to prison.

[Elidor]

20. Some background on Hannah

I'd never heard of Hannah, so I looked him up:

John Hannah
Deputy Assistant to the Vice President
for National Security Affairs: 202-456-9501 (this number has surely been disconnected now that it's available on the web)

Supposedly, Hannah's field of expertise is the Middle East., In fact, Hannah was allegedly the contact man on Cheney's staff to whom the Iraqi National Congress passed on their bogus "intelligence" on all things Iraq.

"But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program..."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/

In it up to his eyeballs, he is.

[lovedems]

21. Is anybody keeping a tally of how many days in a row Cheney

or Halliburton have been in the news? This is a daily occurance and what Halliburton has been in the news for is down right fraud! Hmmm....Cheney taught them well. The only thing The Dick forgot was "how not to get busted".

[KansDem]

22. "The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments"

"Bring it on!!!"
}( }( }( }( }( }( }( }( }( }( }(

Janet Who???

[TacticalPeek]

23. John Hanna has caught it! He's caught the WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH!

WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected affliction that strikes hard.

Should you ask me whence this laughter,
Whence this audible big-smiling,
With its labial extension,
With its maxillar distortion
And its diaphragmic rhythmus
Like the billowing of an ocean,
Like the shaking of a carpet,
I should answer, I should tell you:
From the great deeps of the spirit,
From the unplummeted abysmus
Of the soul this laughter welleth
As the fountain, the gug-guggle,
Like the river from the cannon,
To entoken and give warning
That my present mood is sunny.
Should you ask me further question --
Why the great deeps of the spirit,
Why the unplummeted abysmus
Of the soule extrudes this laughter,
This all audible big-smiling,
I should answer, I should tell you
With a white heart, tumpitumpy,
With a true tongue, honest Injun:
John Hanna, he has Caught It,
Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

Is't the sandhill crane, the shankank,
Standing in the marsh, the kneedeep,
Standing silent in the kneedeep
With his wing-tips crossed behind him
And his neck close-reefed before him,
With his bill, his william, buried
In the down upon his bosom,
With his head retracted inly,
While his shoulders overlook it?
Does the sandhill crane, the shankank,
Shiver grayly in the north wind,
Wishing he had died when little,
As the sparrow, the chipchip, does?
No 'tis not the Shankank standing,
Standing in the gray and dismal
Marsh, the gray and dismal kneedeep.
No, 'tis peerless John Hanna,
Realizing that he's Caught It,
Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

(apologies to Ambrose Bierce)


Bwaaahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
:evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin::evilgrin:



(Lewis and Cheney, beat your breasts and rend your tunics! Coming for ya.)

[SpiralHawk]

27. Meegwich !

As they say around the 8th Fire. Meegwich.

[jpak]

24. Sorry folks - Bush will pardon ALL his buddies

but let the "journalists" spend time in the cooler.

You just wait and see...

[joeunderdog]

28. But will the voters pardon Bush?

The outing is a serious corruption within The Bush Adminstration and will reflect poorly on him even if he ousts Cheney. The Dirty Politics card will get press--if not directly--then via Dem candidates. Hacking, redistricting, outing, lying...attacks on the Democratic process--this scares even some conservatives.

I say Bush ousts Cheney and tries to convince voters he runs a clean house. He'll hang him out until after he is re-elected. Then comes the pardon. But if/when Kerry gets in, all bets are off.

[maryallen]

30. Wonder if Junior will pull an LBJ:

"I will not run, nor will I serve if elected."

Hey, Dubya:

The perfect venue for a little speech like LBJ's would be on Russert's Sunday morning talkfest.

[damnyankee2601]

31. No Way.

Bush isn't that honorable. After all, he's not really a Texan, so he only adopted the swagger and not the ethic.

[central scrutinizer]

32. It's not just corruption

but is defined as TREASON, thanks to Poppy being outraged by Agee's book on the CIA. Not just criminals, but TRAITORS.

[Zhade]

36. Indeed. And they must be held to account.

NT!

[chiburb]

25. Why does Rev. Moon want to take down Cheney/Scooter?

"Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister wire service of Insight magazine."

???

[Zhade]

35. So the elite can save the investment.

BushCo is so abysmally incompetent, so blatant, so obvious, that even some of the sheeple are starting to wake up.

Such awakening may lead the sheeple to recast themselves as We the People (this has already started), and the rot at the heart of both parties, the government at large, the corporate world, and American-style capitalism might be exposed.

The elite simply can't allow this. And so, they will hedge their bets, to place someone more cunning and less infantile into the White House, at which point business as usual will continue.

[DrBB]

37. Yup--UPI is Moon-owned

I don't suppose he really controls ALL the content, but he did buy UPI about 10 years ago.

[Redbear]

26. GEEEEEZZZZ

My heart is pounding on this one. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[tom_paine]

Dupe

[tom_paine]

29. But...but...Ruthless Dick told us Libby was clean!

I am so shocked!

:silly: :silly: :crazy:

Yeah, shocked like when I heard Eichmann might be embezzling money from the Party.

[soleft]

33. Agnew went first

[girl gone mad]

34. wow.

"The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time," as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law enforcement official said."

[Lorien]

38. This must be why the gold Hummer

I saw today was sporting a "W04" sticker-maybe Dick is just getting a bit too slick for this misadministration?

[snippy]

40. Has God told Bush about this?

I expect Libby and Hannah to fall on their swords but I do not think they were the only ones involved. It is interesting that the article refers to pressure be brought on Hannah to name "superiors." Plural, not singular. That may be too much reliance on accurate reporting, but maybe not.

The White House had an exremely well organized disinformation and political strategy group called the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, that dealt with the invasion of Iraq. The WHIG was created and run by Andy Card and was responsible for fabricating the lies leading up to the invasion, including the uranium lies, and selecting who would present which particular lie and when. Libby was a member of the WHIG as was Turd Blossom Rove. I find it hard to believe that a group created expressly to be responsible for the fabrication and dissemination of lies relating to the invasion of Iraq would not be involved in the Plame leaks.

[NastyRiffraff]

41. Please God....let the senior official be Cheney

But it's strange that the "mainstream media" is ignoring this. I, too, wonder how Cheney pissed of Sun Myung Moon.

But, I'll be blogging this like crazy while it develops. Please, please, let it be true!