Newsweek: Prelude to a Leak

[understandinglife]

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.

By John Barry, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

Newsweek October 31, 2005 Issue - It is the nature of bureaucracies that reports are ordered up and then ignored. In February 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney received a CIA briefing that touched on Saddam Hussein's attempts to build nuclear bombs. Cheney, who was looking for evidence to support an Iraq invasion, was especially interested in one detail: a report that claimed Saddam attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. At the end of the briefing, Cheney or an aide told the CIA man that the vice president wanted to know more about the subject. It was a common enough request. "Principals" often ask briefers for this sort of thing. But when the vice president of the United States makes a request, underlings jump. Midlevel officials in the CIA's clandestine service quickly arranged to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate the uranium claims. A seasoned diplomat, Wilson had good connections in the region. He would later say his week in Africa convinced him that the story was bogus, and said so to his CIA debriefers. The agency handed the information up the chain, but there is no record that it ever reached Cheney. Like hundreds of other reports that slosh through the bureaucracy each day, Wilson's findings likely made their way to the middle of a pile. The vice president has said he never knew about Wilson's trip, and never saw any report.

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Behind the scenes, no one pushed the terror link harder than Libby. He urged Colin Powell's staff to include the Prague meeting in the secretary of State's speech to the United Nations. But Powell wanted no part of it. After one long session debating the evidence before the speech, Libby turned to a Powell aide. "Don't worry about any of this," he said, according to someone who was in the room. "We'll get back in what you take out." They didn't. Powell refused to use the line, but Libby's audacity stunned everyone at the table. "The notion that they've become a gang has some merit," says a longtime colleague of Libby's who requested anonymity to preserve the friendship. "A small group who only talk to each other ... You pay a price for that."

Libby seemed to bring the same kind of intensity when it came to Wilson. The timing of the diplomat's fiery op-ed couldn't have been worse for the administration. It was July 2003, two months after Saddam's statue fell, and still no WMD had been found. The administration's primary sales pitch was being called into doubt.

Libby and other administration officials were quick to denounce Wilson's claims, and to allege that it was his wife who had chosen him for the African trip. (Wilson and Plame say she merely recommended him to her supervisor when asked.) According to the Los Angeles Times, Libby began keeping close track of Wilson's interviews and television appearances, and pushed for an aggressive PR campaign against him. He also began chatting up reporters on his own. An outgoing schmoozer who's been known to trade shots of tequila with reporters until the wee hours, at the very least he reached out to members of the press. The New York Times's Judith Miller, one of the reporters caught up in the investigation, wrote last week that she had three conversations with Libby before Plame's name became public. And Rove, who talked to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper about the case, reportedly told the grand jury that he may have also spoken to Libby about Plame. It's now up to Fitzgerald to decide if those conversations were more than just talk.

Link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9787692/site/newsweek/page/2

As many have noted these past few days -- Libby, dude, cop-a-plea, quickly.

Oh, and could the Newsweek 'gang' be any more transparent; just asking.....


Peace.

[MichiganVote]

1. When I ask for information, I remember whether I got it or not

When you're the VP and asking about information about a threat such a nuclear armament, you can bet Cheney remembered it too. Its either that or dementia, and we all know that ain't it.

[cliss]

4. Cheney got it.

I absolutely believe Cheney got the report from Ambassador Wilson. He was no doubt pissed about the results. Later, when Wilson started talking to reporters, Cheney probably got homicidal. He geared up for Clash of the Titans against Wilson.

[MichiganVote]

5. No free lunch w/Cheney unless you're Halliburton

Sure he got it. He just didn't like what he didn't get.

[understandinglife]

7. They're all lying because that is the only thing they know how ....

... to do, besides mass murder, torture, and raiding the Treasury (of more than one country).


Peace.

[bleever]

2. Hey! The press is actually investigating! Discovering all sorts of stuff

that we've known for a long time.

Newsweek, Time, NYT, and WaPo are now on a track that they will not abandon til all the facts are out. The sleeping giant of the Fourth Estate has awoken.

Hallelujah.

[Patsy Stone]

3. I suppose

it's better late than never. :hi:

[understandinglife]

6. I've started a thread in GD to ensure maximum exposure to this truly ...

... revealing article:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5143645&mesg_id=5143645

I had hoped to just have it be in LBN, but it got moved and I truly want folk to see this article now. In the next days and weeks, it will be one of the corporate news articles I think we will want to return and evaluate as events unfold.

"The pile on Scooter thingie has been interesting to watch in the past few days and this article definitly turns up the volume on the "chomping sound heard throughout the beltway."


Peace.

[Garbo 2004]

8. Meanwhile Bush & his staff are virginal innocents merely taken in by big

bad Cheney and his gang? That appears to be the theme of recent articles. Like the LA Times article on Libby that even had documents given turned over to the times...by whom? and why? one wonders. What about the other cast of characters involved at the time?

Condi "Mushroom Cloud" Rice, WHIG, worked for Bush.
Hadley, WHIG, worked for Condi/Bush.
Karl "sorry, my conversation with Matt Cooper just slipped out of my mind when I first testified" Rove, WHIG, worked for Bush.
Karen Hughes, WHIG, worked for Bush.
Andrew "you don't bring out new products in August" Card, WHIG organizer, was Bush's Chief of Staff.
Ari Fleischer worked for Bush.
And not least, Rumsfeld and his OSP worked for Bush.

Seems the stenographer press is falling in line in a direction they've been steered to. It wasn't Bush's war, it was Cheney's and Rove was only playing telephone on the Plame thing because Scooter...what, coerced him?

Remember when Matt Cooper wrote about his testimony to the grand jury regarding his conversation with Rove? Rove told him Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on WMD and was responsible for sending Wilson to Africa. From his article:

"The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings." http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1083899,00.html

That most likely was the now famous classified State Dept memo that apparently was and continued to be one of the sources for the Administration's campaign against Wilson using the media noise machine.

Clearly WH "strategery" is to throw the VP's office under the bus and try to save themselves.