Here is some highly speculative, like dubious, if not 100% erroneous, fascinating reading that came across my desk this afternoon. It is large and may be nothing beyond subterfuge, but it'll sure spice up your afternoon:
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As I've said before, my desire to tackle the big topics and the great conspiracies of our time often out strips my ability to express myself or maintain a minimum of coherence. But, as an amateur freelance independent news analyst, when I find a particularly good jag, I like to let 'er rip, so, here goes nothing....
The end game has begun on a looming presidential and constitutional crisis that will ultimately dwarf the removal of Richard Nixon in 1974.
However this time around it's not going to be about petty burglaries or illegal wiretaps or payment of hush money or weapons for hostages and certainly, most emphatically, will not be about having sex "with that (or any other) woman."
This time around the the removal of the president will actually be intimately wrapped up with high crimes and misdemeanors of the utmost national security variety.
As I wrote on June 3, I was surprised by DCI George Tenet's sudden resignation, (only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations, DDO.) I thought surely others were going to have to take poison first. What I didn't know was that a few scant hours earlier that day President Bush had consulted with, and may have retained, a criminal defense attorney to represent him in the Plame case. Coincidence? I think not.
The media spin that day was, of course, that Tenet was being forced out as the fall guy for bad prewar Iraqi intelligence as part of some timely political housekeeping prior to the upcoming presidential election.
Wrong. It's the Plame game.
George Tenet's not the fall guy, he's Mr. Payback. Valerie Plame, it turns out was one of the most successful super spies that this country may ever have had, and outing her was just too unforgivable for words.
The criminal investigation of the Plame leak was investigated after a September 2003 formal request from the CIA, approved by George Tenet.
George W. Bush is the guy being forced out. It's a trap that Central Intelligence set for him when it became apparent that he'd gone off the reservation. The groundwork has all been set for indictments that will lead to resignations that could lead to possible impeachment, and if events unravel quickly enough, imminent doom for the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August, and failing that, certain defeat at the polls in November.
Yesterday, by the way, there was a rather strange White House ceremony to unveil President Clinton's and Senator Hillary Clinton's official portraits at which President Bush said some very sweet things about the former first couple. My analysis is that this sudden episode of humility and lessening of hostility might be the President's sympathetic reaction now that he realizes that soon he was going to be impeached too?"
What precipitated this need for outside presidential on June 3rd was that witnesses had just told a federal grand jury that Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a top CIA covert operative's name, Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in a bogus attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an administration critic of Iraq war policy.
Wilson, it must be remembered, was secretly dispatched in February 2002, on instructions from Dick Cheney to the CIA, to go to Africa and look for anything that might support their views in documents over there.
Bogus Italian documents that had already been dismissed as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and apparently everyone else who had seen them but never-the-less were cited in the 2002 State of the Union address as proof that the Iraqis had bought yellow cake uranium from Niger, which meant they were capable of and probably were manufacturing atomic weapons to sellout the back door to al-Qa'ida, which sort of directly implied that all the primary users of the Douglas Kelley Show List should either move to a foreign city or kiss their asses good-bye?
What Cheney and Bush had against Wilson was later he went public with the facts- those claims were crap and they knew it and had lied anyway..
So in spite of Wilson's warnings, and apparently blissfully unaware of the legal land mines that those warnings set on them, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz jumped on the Niger documents like battle stallions and charged into paranoia TV-land to scare the pants off Americans testifying, and swearing up and down that they knew, and had reasonable and reliable, credible and verified intelligence that Saddam was about nuke us any second.
So to learn otherwise is fairly damning grand jury testimony I'd say- because evidence increasingly points to Bush's direct personal involvement in the leak. Him and Rove. Wilson suggested in his book, "The Politics of Truth," that the leaker was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheneys chief of staff, gave no conclusive evidence for the claim.
Personally, I don't see how the President would have to seek an outside counsel unless there was going to be an imminent criminal indictment of some sort from the grand jury looking into the Valerie Plame leak? I think it is a solid bet its on the way.
A key date in all this is July 14th 2002 when Bob Novak published his column outing Wilson's wife, Novak I think made a huge material mistake as any criminal investigation of the Plame name leak will also go to the Niger documents and any crimes committed which are materially related to Plame's exposure. Even though I support Robert Novak's legal position on the disclosure of sources, who is righteously standing by the journalistic code of ethics, by steadfastly refusing to identify his White House source. Its not about Novak, he a player, not the villain.
When I first heard that the President was seeking an outside lawyer, I thought , "Hmmmm? Lets See? Who would be good, that is, fun to watch?"
My first choice for Mr. Bush's attorney was of course Tom Hagen, the consigliore to the Corleone family played by Robert DuVall, but since he is only a fictional character in the "the Godfather" I settled on the "Mouthpiece to the Washington Stars" Plato Cacheris, who was last seen on the national stage when Monica Lewinsky hired him with seasoned Washington attorney Jacob Stein to head her legal team, replacing her dopey, gaffe-prone greenhorn family attorney William Ginsberg.
No stranger to Big Shots in Trouble, Cacheris is a tough-as-nails negotiator who represented Nixon's former Attorney-General and Watergate fall-guy John Mitchell, and CIA spy, discounte alcoholic double agent and super traitor Aldrich Ames, and Fawn Hall, the comely Department of Defense Secretary designated to be the fall-girl for Iran contra villain and drugs, arms, hostage, and money laundering services and technology entrepreneur par excellence, and current mainstay of Fox television's revisionist history news department, Oliver North.
Every one of those guys beat the rap except Ames, Plato is the man! But who listens to me?
According to press reports the President has tapped powerhouse attorney Jim Sharp, who represented Iran-Contra figure retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, Enron's Ken Lay, and Watergate co-conspirator Jeb Stuart Magruder, each of whom was presumably guilty of something?
The Vice-President's attorney is Terrence O'Donnell, a partner of the Williams and Connolly law firm, who worked for the VP when Cheney was White House chief of staff in the Ford administration and then later as General Counsel for the Pentagon when Cheney was Defense Secretary under the first President Bush. So it is all one big happy family.
Mr. O'Donnell has had his hands full representing the Vice President in criminal and civil cases involving Cheney's chairmanship of Halliburton.
These include a Justice Department investigation of Halliburton for alleged payment of bribes to Nigerian political leaders and a stockholders' fraud law suit against Halliburton. Mr. O'Donnell also represented former CIA director John Deutch when he "lawyered-up", accused of violating national security by taking his CIA computer home and surfing the Internet while it contained hundreds of highly-classified intelligence documents. (What a dope!?)
John Dean, the former Nixon White House Counsel and crafty would be Watergate fall guy (who refused to to down), whose most recent book about the Bush administration is entitled "Worse Than Watergate" writes a column for the very cool legal website findlaw.com and on June 4th he made some very deliciously ominous observations.....
--- This action by Bush is a rather stunning and extraordinary development. The President of the United States is potentially hiring a private criminal defense lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the White House is doing all it can to bury the story, providing precious little detail or context for the President's action
--- But from what I have learned from those who have been quizzed by the Fitzgerald investigators it seems unlikely that they are interviewing the President merely as a matter of completeness, or in order to be able to defend their actions in front of the public. Asking a President to testify - or even be interviewed - remains a serious, sensitive and rare occasion. It is not done lightly. Doing so raises separation of powers concerns that continue to worry many
--- If so - and if the person revealed the leaker's identity to the President, or if the President decided he preferred not to know the leaker's identity. - Then this fact could conflict with Bush's remarkably broad public statements on the issue. He has said that he did not know of "anybody in [his] administration who leaked classified information." He has also said that he wanted "to know the truth" about this leak.
If, as he says, Bush has no knowledge of the leaker, and genuinely wants to discover the identity of the leaker, then he is nothing to worry about in terms of being a threat to national security and ultimately the object of a federal prosecution?
Most of the facts and some of the languauge in this article I gleaned from here:
fromthewilderness.com |
