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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (63404)	4/8/2006 5:13:05 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 361693

Another White House is Buying Silence by Derrick Z. Jackson The next thing you know, President Bush will channel Richard Nixon to say, ''I am not a crook." The clock has started on whether Bush will make this declaration. Court documents released this week show that I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has testified that both Cheney and President Bush authorized him to leak classified intelligence about Iraq in July 2003. The leak scandal, which has Libby facing trial for lying and obstruction of justice, began as an effort to mop up the mess created when Bush falsely claimed a half-year earlier in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Libby was supposed to leak intelligence reports in a crass attempt to blame the intelligence community for bad intelligence. The high point of the scandal was the exposing of undercover CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson. The leak came two days after Wilson's husband wrote an Op-Ed column in the New York Times about his 2002 investigation that determined that any uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq were ''highly doubtful." Wilson wrote in the Times, ''Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The documents do not disclose whether Libby was directly told to leak Valerie Plame Wilson's name as retaliation for Joseph Wilson's Op-Ed. What special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's documents say is that Cheney told Libby about her employment the month before. ''The evidence will show," the documents say, ''that the July 6, 2003 op-ed by Mr. Wilson was viewed in the office of the vice president as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance; the rationale for the war in Iraq. Defendant undertook vigorous efforts to rebut this attack during the week following July 7, 2003." One of those efforts involved leaking information on July 8 to then New York Times reporter Judith Miller. According to Libby's testimony, it ''occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate)." Fitzgerald's report said Libby testified that ''getting the approval from the President through the vice president to discuss material that would be classified . . . [was] unique in his recollection." Bush indeed has the authority to declassify information. But these latest charges by the former insider Libby destroy the credibility of White House press secretary Scott McClellan when he said on Sept. 29, 2003, ''There's no information that has been brought to our attention, beyond what we've seen in the media reports, to suggest White House involvement . . . if anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." It destroys the credibility of Bush himself when he said Oct. 6, 2003, ''I don't know who leaked the information." This is beginning to look like June 3, 1973, when the Washington Post reported that White House counsel John Dean told Senate investigators and federal prosecutors that President Nixon was highly informed and involved in the cover-up of Watergate to the point of charging that Nixon knew about payment to buy the silence of Watergate defendants. This came after an Aug. 29, 1972, declaration from Nixon that ''no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident." The months after the Post story saw the bizarre self-destruction of the Nixon White House. There was the exploding controversy over the Nixon tapes and the ''Saturday Night Massacre," where Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox and forced the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. By November of 1973, Nixon, virtually on the run, declared, ''People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook." As the facts emerge, the possibility looms that while it is Libby who may be nailed for the crime, Bush and Cheney were the kingpins. Bush may or may not officially be a crook. The crooked road he chose to invade Iraq is becoming a crime against humanity. Published on Saturday, April 8, 2006 by the Boston Globe