Deformed before it is born?: "The Franklin case and the Five
"Don't forget to tip!”
By Jean-Guy Allard / 27-02-2006
The most dangerous spy in recent U.S. history, Lawrence "Larry" Franklin, 59, is currently working as a parking attendant at an exclusive Casino and Racetrack in West Virginia while waiting to testify in the trial of his two accomplices.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal publication Franklin, an expert Pentagon analyst who personally advised Donald Rumsfeld, is working as a "valet" in the parking lot at the Charles Town Races & Slots, located in Charles Town, West Virginia between Baltimore and Washington D.C.
Charles Town Races & Slots is a private racetrack and casino specializing in video lottery, where 3, 800 slot machines—according to its advertisements— attract a wealthy clientele from the U.S. federal capital area.
While the Cuban Five, who were arrested by the Miami FBI, accused of espionage for infiltrating that city’s terrorist groups and given sentences including life imprisonment, wait in prison for a court decision, Franklin, a real spy, is collecting tips from gambling clients.
This situation is so absurd that a Washington Post reporter used this title in a brief commentary on the subject: "Don't Forget to Tip!”
Franklin has already enjoyed an incredible sentence reduction despite his treason. After negotiations between the spy’s lawyers and the Attorney General, Federal Judge T.S. Ellis III, of the Alexandria district of Virginia, gave him a 12-year sentence… and then freed him on bail pending the trial of two Israeli agents, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, with whom he actively collaborated.
Franklin handed over an enormous volume of information from the Pentagon on Iran, to those two individuals and another Israeli spy, Naor Gilon, then political advisor at the Israeli embassy in Washington, an action evidently behind Israel’s escalating threats of war on Iran.
But the news of Franklin’s well-paying job in the parking lot of Charles Town Races did not appear on its own.
"THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SUCCESSFUL CASE…"
It is accompanied by the rhetoric of Rosen and Weissman’s astute lawyers, who are claiming that by accusing their client of espionage, the Attorney General violated the First Amendment of the Constitution and that to sentence them would oblige the state to also bring charges against a large number of activists and journalists.
The legislation banning the unauthorized distribution of classified material has never been applied to simple citizens, stated the learned John Nassikas III, spokesman of the defense team, to the New York daily, The Sun.
"There has never been a successful case regarding the unauthorized circulation of material by individuals not under legal or contractual obligation to keep the information classified," said Nassikas.
Rosen and Weissman were lobbyists for the American Israel Political Committee (AIPAC), the most important Israeli lobby group in Washington.
Their espionage activities took place between April 1999 and August 27, 2004, during which time the FBI observed numerous meetings held with the precautions that characterized the group’s activities.
Franklin’s two accomplices are to appear before the Alexandria Federal Court on April 25.
The charges against them are that they received classified information from Franklin and distributed this information to "members of the press and foreign government agents."
The prosecution has not given a public description of the information that they allegedly distributed nor have they named the reporters or foreign agents implicated, according to The Sun.
A document summarizing the defense of the two accused was co-authored by Viet Dinh, a professor at the Georgetown University Faculty of Law, who also used to hold an important position in the Justice Department. Dinh, a constitutional expert, is famous for being one of the “architects” of the Patriot Act.
Dinh’s argument has caused controversy. "Does the First Amendment grant the right to steal and distribute vital U.S. secrets to a foreign power?" writes Justin Raimundo of Antiwar.com. The journalist ends his piece by asking if there is a double standard regarding espionage. "What would happen if Rosen and Weissman were named Abdullah and Mohammed? Or if they worked for the Muslim American Political Action Committee (MAPAC)?"
"ONE HAS TO BE VERY CAUTIOUS"
According to The Sun, the lawyers’ text also cites an eminent federal attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, "regarding the risks in bringing charges related to the diffusion of classified information."
"One must be very cautious about applying this law because numerous interests can be implicated", said the expert during a press conference last year, upon explaining why this charge was not brought against I. Lewis Libby, the White House staffer who revealed the identity of a CIA agent.
The defense document was published by Secrecy News and circulated around the internet by the Federation of American Scientists.
Nassikas announced that Weissman is proposing to launch a defense fund to cover his court costs.
It is worth remembering how, in violation of all prison regulations and international conventions against torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, Héctor Pesquera, chief of the Miami FBI, and his accomplices in the Federal Attorney’s Office, kept the Cuban Five in solitary confinement for 17 consecutive months after their arrest. Since their rigged trial, René González, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González have been held in five separate prisons scattered across the immense U.S. territory, with only extremely limited contact with their families.
Franklin is out on bail until the end of court proceedings that could drag on for years. It is unknown how the outcome of that trial will affect the subsequent review of his sentence.
In the mean time he will continue collecting money in the Charles Town parking lot."
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Iran's top mullah may be on our side - Los Angeles Times
Iran's top mullah may be on our side - Los Angeles Times: "Iran's top mullah may be on our side
By Dariush Zahedi and Ali Ezzatyar
Dariush Zahedi teaches international political economy and political science at UC Berkeley. In 2003, he was imprisoned in Iran on charges of espionage and later acquitted. Ali Ezzatyar is a doctoral candidate at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
THE UNITED STATES has a surprising ally in its impatience with the new Iranian president. Since his inauguration, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pugnacious demeanor has not only roiled the international community but also a significant portion of Iran's ruling elite. A coalition of traditional conservatives, pragmatists and reformists is emerging within the government to oppose Ahmadinejad's brand of governance. With Iran saying it will resume nuclear fuel research, the U.S. should do all in its power to boost the bargaining power of these more moderate Iranian leaders.
ADVERTISEMENT
The rise of the anti-Ahmadinejad faction defies the expectations of Iran analysts, who believed that the post-Khatami era would produce a monolithic conservative bloc in control of most major levers of power. Instead, the coalition is strengthening and attracting many of the regime's powerful personalities, perhaps even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Evidence of the latter is Khamenei's recent decree giving the Expediency Council, a non-elected body headed by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, oversight of the presidency.
Ahmadinejad's primary supporters have always been the rank and file of the country's paramilitary forces. Renowned for their fearlessness and passionate commitment to the populist ideals of the Islamic revolution, they had not dominated government before or since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death in 1989.
The political struggle of Iran's security establishment has come full circle with Ahmadinejad's rise, which makes dealing with Tehran more difficult. The paramilitaries are the ultimate guarantors of the regime's survival. Their leaders wield enormous influence in the Islamic Republic's coercive security establishment, particularly those associated with the Revolutionary Guards. The militants also dominate the volunteer, or Basiji, militia force, believed to have more than 1 million members.
The paramilitaries are not fully tied to any one of the groups vying for power in Iran. Rather, they seek to influence domestic and foreign policy through their numbers and martial strength. They know international tensions that heighten security threats to Iran enhance their status in the power struggle. Although Ahmadinejad owes his presidency to allies in the guards and the Basiji forces, they are not totally beholden to him.
The unlikely counterbalance to Ahmadinejad could be Khamenei. He has frequently cultivated the paramilitaries since his elevation and relied on them to consolidate his power. But should the radicals attempt to direct policy without his explicit consent, Khamenei could move toward pragmatists allied with Rafsanjani and reformist supporters of former President Mohammad Khatami. The two former presidents don't want one of their few achievements in the last 16 years — Iran's moderately improved relations with the outside world — to disappear.
Contrary to popular belief, the traditional conservative clerical establishment is apprehensive about the possibility of violence inside and outside Iran. It generally opposes an aggressive foreign policy and, having some intimate ties with Iran's dependent capitalist class, is appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The value of Tehran's stock market has plunged $10 billion, the nation's vibrant real estate market has withered and capital outflows are increasing.
Khamenei has intimated his readiness to distance himself from the radicals. Apart from authorizing nonpresidential bodies to supervise the three branches of government, he has instructed the Supreme Council for National Security to more fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency in the development of Iran's nuclear program. These moves have strengthened his institutional power and helped prevent Ahmadinejad's administration from undermining the regime's credibility.
Here is where the United States comes in. The history of U.S.-Iran relations shows that the more Washington chastises Tehran for its nuclear ambitions, the more it plays into the hands of the radicals by riling up fear and nationalist sentiment. Instead, the U.S. needs to offer Iran an acceptable face-saving mechanism to allow it to master, under appropriate international supervision, the nuclear fuel cycle. A seed planted now could even grow into the long-awaited detente between the two countries and help the U.S. extricate itself from Iraq."
By Dariush Zahedi and Ali Ezzatyar
Dariush Zahedi teaches international political economy and political science at UC Berkeley. In 2003, he was imprisoned in Iran on charges of espionage and later acquitted. Ali Ezzatyar is a doctoral candidate at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.
THE UNITED STATES has a surprising ally in its impatience with the new Iranian president. Since his inauguration, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pugnacious demeanor has not only roiled the international community but also a significant portion of Iran's ruling elite. A coalition of traditional conservatives, pragmatists and reformists is emerging within the government to oppose Ahmadinejad's brand of governance. With Iran saying it will resume nuclear fuel research, the U.S. should do all in its power to boost the bargaining power of these more moderate Iranian leaders.
ADVERTISEMENT
The rise of the anti-Ahmadinejad faction defies the expectations of Iran analysts, who believed that the post-Khatami era would produce a monolithic conservative bloc in control of most major levers of power. Instead, the coalition is strengthening and attracting many of the regime's powerful personalities, perhaps even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Evidence of the latter is Khamenei's recent decree giving the Expediency Council, a non-elected body headed by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, oversight of the presidency.
Ahmadinejad's primary supporters have always been the rank and file of the country's paramilitary forces. Renowned for their fearlessness and passionate commitment to the populist ideals of the Islamic revolution, they had not dominated government before or since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death in 1989.
The political struggle of Iran's security establishment has come full circle with Ahmadinejad's rise, which makes dealing with Tehran more difficult. The paramilitaries are the ultimate guarantors of the regime's survival. Their leaders wield enormous influence in the Islamic Republic's coercive security establishment, particularly those associated with the Revolutionary Guards. The militants also dominate the volunteer, or Basiji, militia force, believed to have more than 1 million members.
The paramilitaries are not fully tied to any one of the groups vying for power in Iran. Rather, they seek to influence domestic and foreign policy through their numbers and martial strength. They know international tensions that heighten security threats to Iran enhance their status in the power struggle. Although Ahmadinejad owes his presidency to allies in the guards and the Basiji forces, they are not totally beholden to him.
The unlikely counterbalance to Ahmadinejad could be Khamenei. He has frequently cultivated the paramilitaries since his elevation and relied on them to consolidate his power. But should the radicals attempt to direct policy without his explicit consent, Khamenei could move toward pragmatists allied with Rafsanjani and reformist supporters of former President Mohammad Khatami. The two former presidents don't want one of their few achievements in the last 16 years — Iran's moderately improved relations with the outside world — to disappear.
Contrary to popular belief, the traditional conservative clerical establishment is apprehensive about the possibility of violence inside and outside Iran. It generally opposes an aggressive foreign policy and, having some intimate ties with Iran's dependent capitalist class, is appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The value of Tehran's stock market has plunged $10 billion, the nation's vibrant real estate market has withered and capital outflows are increasing.
Khamenei has intimated his readiness to distance himself from the radicals. Apart from authorizing nonpresidential bodies to supervise the three branches of government, he has instructed the Supreme Council for National Security to more fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency in the development of Iran's nuclear program. These moves have strengthened his institutional power and helped prevent Ahmadinejad's administration from undermining the regime's credibility.
Here is where the United States comes in. The history of U.S.-Iran relations shows that the more Washington chastises Tehran for its nuclear ambitions, the more it plays into the hands of the radicals by riling up fear and nationalist sentiment. Instead, the U.S. needs to offer Iran an acceptable face-saving mechanism to allow it to master, under appropriate international supervision, the nuclear fuel cycle. A seed planted now could even grow into the long-awaited detente between the two countries and help the U.S. extricate itself from Iraq."
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Jerusalem Post | 'Allies no excuse for breaking law' By NATHAN GUTTMAN
Jerusalem Post: "Feb. 22, 2006 4:02 | Updated Feb. 22, 2006 6:03
'Allies no excuse for breaking law'
By NATHAN GUTTMAN
WASHINGTON
The prosecution in the case against two former AIPAC employees stated, in a document submitted to the court, that the fact that Israel is a US ally has no bearing on the case and cannot be seen as a relevant consideration in dealing with the actions of defendants Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The response to defense motions, which was filed with the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, refers to the defense's request to obtain depositions from Israeli diplomats to prove that "any actions that happened to inure to the benefit of Israel were always seen by Israel to benefit the United States."
The prosecution responded that the law "makes no distinctions between allies or enemies, friends or foes." Referring to Israel, the prosecutors added that "it is not for any foreign nation to opine on whether the threat posed by an unauthorized disclosure of United States national defense information jeopardizes the national security of the United States or is a violation of United States law."
The statement makes it clear that the US government does not accept the notion that passing on classified information to a friendly country does not cause any harm to the US.
The government is requesting the court deny the defense motion for submission of depositions from three Israeli diplomats who were mentioned in the indictment as being in contact with the AIPAC staffers and with Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst. Franklin has already been sentenced to 12 years in prison for leaking classified information to AIPAC and the Israelis.
Two of the Israeli diplomats were identified as Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of Mission.
Israel has denied the defense request to take depositions from the diplomats or to allow them to appear in court. The prosecution also asked to interview the Israeli diplomats. Though Israel did not refuse, the modalities of such an interview had not been worked out yet, according to Israeli sources.
The defense would like the Israelis to help prove their claim that Rosen and Weissman were not Israeli agents, that they had not received payment from Israel for their work, and that there were "unique circumstances" that justify the fact that Rosen did pass on information to Gilon concerning a threat that Iranian terrorists might abduct and murder Israelis working in the Kurdish region in Iraq. It was only revealed later that information about the threat was given to Rosen and Weissman by Franklin as part of a sting operation, while Franklin was cooperating with the FBI.
Judge T.S. Ellis will hear the pre-trial motions of both sides next month. Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman will ask that the case be dismissed, claiming that prosecuting the former AIPAC employees under the Espionage Act would infringe on freedom of speech and the First Amendment, as it would be the first time in which civilians who are on the receiving end of a classified leak were put on trial.
In its response to the dismissal motion, the prosecution states that the law does not distinguish between government employees and others, and claims that "an ordinary person would know that foreign officials, journalists and other persons with no current affiliation to the US government would not be entitled to receive information related to our national defense."
If the motion to dismiss the case is rejected, the jury trial will begin on April 25. "
'Allies no excuse for breaking law'
By NATHAN GUTTMAN
WASHINGTON
The prosecution in the case against two former AIPAC employees stated, in a document submitted to the court, that the fact that Israel is a US ally has no bearing on the case and cannot be seen as a relevant consideration in dealing with the actions of defendants Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The response to defense motions, which was filed with the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, refers to the defense's request to obtain depositions from Israeli diplomats to prove that "any actions that happened to inure to the benefit of Israel were always seen by Israel to benefit the United States."
The prosecution responded that the law "makes no distinctions between allies or enemies, friends or foes." Referring to Israel, the prosecutors added that "it is not for any foreign nation to opine on whether the threat posed by an unauthorized disclosure of United States national defense information jeopardizes the national security of the United States or is a violation of United States law."
The statement makes it clear that the US government does not accept the notion that passing on classified information to a friendly country does not cause any harm to the US.
The government is requesting the court deny the defense motion for submission of depositions from three Israeli diplomats who were mentioned in the indictment as being in contact with the AIPAC staffers and with Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst. Franklin has already been sentenced to 12 years in prison for leaking classified information to AIPAC and the Israelis.
Two of the Israeli diplomats were identified as Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of Mission.
Israel has denied the defense request to take depositions from the diplomats or to allow them to appear in court. The prosecution also asked to interview the Israeli diplomats. Though Israel did not refuse, the modalities of such an interview had not been worked out yet, according to Israeli sources.
The defense would like the Israelis to help prove their claim that Rosen and Weissman were not Israeli agents, that they had not received payment from Israel for their work, and that there were "unique circumstances" that justify the fact that Rosen did pass on information to Gilon concerning a threat that Iranian terrorists might abduct and murder Israelis working in the Kurdish region in Iraq. It was only revealed later that information about the threat was given to Rosen and Weissman by Franklin as part of a sting operation, while Franklin was cooperating with the FBI.
Judge T.S. Ellis will hear the pre-trial motions of both sides next month. Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman will ask that the case be dismissed, claiming that prosecuting the former AIPAC employees under the Espionage Act would infringe on freedom of speech and the First Amendment, as it would be the first time in which civilians who are on the receiving end of a classified leak were put on trial.
In its response to the dismissal motion, the prosecution states that the law does not distinguish between government employees and others, and claims that "an ordinary person would know that foreign officials, journalists and other persons with no current affiliation to the US government would not be entitled to receive information related to our national defense."
If the motion to dismiss the case is rejected, the jury trial will begin on April 25. "
Monday, February 20, 2006
McDonald's sued for having milk, wheat in fries-WSJ - Yahoo! News
McDonald's sued for having milk, wheat in fries-WSJ - Yahoo! News: "McDonald's sued for having milk, wheat in fries-WSJ Sun Feb 19, 5:49 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - McDonald's Corp. (NYSE:MCD - news) faces at least three lawsuits claiming the fast-food giant misled the public after it acknowledged earlier this week its French fries contain milk and wheat ingredients, the Wall Street Journal Online reported on Sunday.
The suits were filed by people with celiac disease, who have an intolerance to a protein found in wheat, the Journal said.
McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, had previously described the flavoring as safe for people with food allergies and other dietary sensitivities, the Journal said."
NEW YORK (Reuters) - McDonald's Corp. (NYSE:MCD - news) faces at least three lawsuits claiming the fast-food giant misled the public after it acknowledged earlier this week its French fries contain milk and wheat ingredients, the Wall Street Journal Online reported on Sunday.
The suits were filed by people with celiac disease, who have an intolerance to a protein found in wheat, the Journal said.
McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, had previously described the flavoring as safe for people with food allergies and other dietary sensitivities, the Journal said."
Sunday, February 19, 2006
deseretnews.com | Skousen evoked strong feelings
deseretnews.com | Skousen evoked strong feelings: "Skousen evoked strong feelings
By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret Morning News
His friends and admirers saw W. Cleon Skousen as a deeply religious man who wasn't afraid to publicly marry his faith with his interpretation of constitutional principles and his disdain for communism.
W. Cleon Skousen Those who were leery of his many writings and speeches saw him as an ultra-conservative alarmist with a penchant for fueling political conspiracy theories.
So as family and friends prepare to bid him farewell at local funeral services scheduled for Saturday, Skousen's life and teachings are being remembered in a variety of ways. The former FBI special agent, Salt Lake City police chief, Brigham Young University religion teacher and founder of the Center for Constitutional Studies died on Monday at age 92.
Though they may view him in different spheres, both friends and foes knew he was passionate about his beliefs.
His son, Paul, said the modest family home in Salt Lake City has been deluged with condolences from "a lot of people from across the nation and overseas calling in once word started to get out. They're asking what was he working on, wondering whether they can get a plane in on time" for the funeral.
"He made a lot of friends in Israel, in Central and Latin America — just about everywhere. They had a great love for him. He counseled with them on politics, and on the drafting of a constitution he helped with in Canada and Latin America. Many of them admired his wisdom and understanding, and as a result want to come and offer due respect and honor for a man that helped them understand constitutional principles."
Author of 46 books, including Cold War-era tomes on communism and religious works directed at fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Skousen was most widely known for his devotion to America's Founding Fathers and his interpretation of their writings. The National Center for Constitutional Studies was an outgrowth of his original Freemen Institute, both conservative think tanks that published his articles, speeches and audio tapes. Paul Skousen said his father often made hundreds of speeches a year in a wide variety of venues.
Glenn Kimber, Cleon Skousen's son-in-law, said he had the chance to travel with Skousen for 20 years, working by his side and lecturing with him in all 50 states.
"I was absolutely thrilled watching his great desire for documentation. He covered the spectrum," leaving behind a library with some 7,000 volumes, he said.
While most are books he devoured on the Founding Fathers, politics and the LDS Church, many were penned by Skousen, including scores of personal journals and "scrapbook-type" histories he kept, Kimber said.
A few years ago, Skousen had planned to establish a private library to house his holdings, but plans fell through, Kimber said. Days before he died, Kimber said Skousen told his children about his desires for the library. A deal with what Kimber described as a Provo-based "educational organization" known as FranklinSquires is in the works, and he said the library will eventually be open to the public. Copies of Skousen's writings will also be donated to Brigham Young University's Special Collections library, he said.
"People would come up and say how much they appreciated his work. Different people found him to be their friend in so many different disciplines," Kimber said.
That included friendships with people from a variety of faiths.
One of those is the Rev. Donald Sills, a Baptist minister, fellow conservative and past president of the American Freedom Coalition. He said he first met Skousen as a young pastor in Spokane, Wash., back in 1964, when he put together a meeting called the "God Bless America Rally."
"I thought the only person to do it was Cleon Skousen, and I took a lot of flak for that," as church members asked why a Mormon would be invited to address them. But the two "developed a very close relationship. We traveled throughout different parts of the world teaching the basics of free enterprise system. He was the voice of real constitutionalism. I know he had read over 200 volumes of writings of the Founding Fathers." The Rev. Sills said he found Mr. Skousen in Washington, D.C., once, sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. When he asked what Mr. Skousen was doing, the reply came, " 'I'm talking to Tom Jefferson.' That's the kind of man he was," he said. Another personal experience further endeared him to Mr. Skousen when he was invited to stay at his home in Salt Lake City. "I got up the next morning, and there was Dr. Skousen and his wife in the kitchen. He asked me if I wanted to join them in morning prayer. There they were, getting down on their knees by the table. It was absolutely marvelous."
Both were friends with former LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson and other conservative politicos. When Mr. Skousen and the Rev. Sills organized a three-day "Making of America" conference in Salt Lake City years ago, the Rev. Sills said President Benson quipped, "If they'll take a Mormon elder with a Baptist preacher on the platform for three days, we've got a winner."He dubbed Mr. Skousen "probably the greatest constitutionalist I know. I've been in ministry for 47 years, and I admired the man, I loved him." He told Mr. Skousen's family years ago that when their father died, he wanted to be at the funeral, and "by God's grace I hope to be there."
Another admirer is Joseph Ginat, former adviser to the prime minister of Israel and now director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
"He was in Israel over 20 times, and I went with him to meet top politicians and government ministers," Ginat said. "He always had good questions and analyzed the situation in the Middle East. He had a great love for Israel, no question about it. I think that he followed the approach of President Ezra Taft Benson, who also loved Israel very much." The two talked biblical studies and the history of the Old Testament. "He was so articulate. He explained things so every person could understand . . . and he had an excellent sense of humor that came out in his lectures."
Skousen also had plenty of critics and clashed with former University of Utah professors J.D. Williams and Obert C. Tanner, according to U. law professor Ed Firmage, who remembers working with Skousen as a young employee in his father's store in Provo. "I had talks with him when he came in and we sold him a suit or tie or shirt." While he He appreciated Mr. Skousen as a person, and even invited him to speak once to his First Amendment class at the U. But "on the issues that mattered, he and I were on opposite sides of the fence. He was way to the right — a John Birchy kind of person who really appealed to a particular brand of right-wing Mormonism at a particular time. I don't view him as a significant constitutional scholar. He had a rightward song that was ideologically driven."
Firmage said he didn't read much of Skousen's work, so "I wouldn't be much of a commentator on his writing. I know he had definite views on Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, as most rightward Christian denominations do. But I think his defense of right-wing ideas was subversive of Mormonism and notions of the Constitution." Firmage spent his early career working with Martin Luther King and Hubert Humphrey during the Cold War. "He saw Russia as bigger than it was and saw various plots and plans and schemes against the country that I think didn't exist. It was the height of the McCarthy era and he was one of the chief spokespersons."
Wrapping religion and constitutional views together as Mr. Skousen did makes political views "a religious principle for some people. That makes it impossible to see the real defenders of the Constitution when you're looking for a bogeyman all the time. It was a somewhat paranoid period in American history that we're now somewhat free of. I think we are in a better and healthier period now."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com"
By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret Morning News
His friends and admirers saw W. Cleon Skousen as a deeply religious man who wasn't afraid to publicly marry his faith with his interpretation of constitutional principles and his disdain for communism.
W. Cleon Skousen Those who were leery of his many writings and speeches saw him as an ultra-conservative alarmist with a penchant for fueling political conspiracy theories.
So as family and friends prepare to bid him farewell at local funeral services scheduled for Saturday, Skousen's life and teachings are being remembered in a variety of ways. The former FBI special agent, Salt Lake City police chief, Brigham Young University religion teacher and founder of the Center for Constitutional Studies died on Monday at age 92.
Though they may view him in different spheres, both friends and foes knew he was passionate about his beliefs.
His son, Paul, said the modest family home in Salt Lake City has been deluged with condolences from "a lot of people from across the nation and overseas calling in once word started to get out. They're asking what was he working on, wondering whether they can get a plane in on time" for the funeral.
"He made a lot of friends in Israel, in Central and Latin America — just about everywhere. They had a great love for him. He counseled with them on politics, and on the drafting of a constitution he helped with in Canada and Latin America. Many of them admired his wisdom and understanding, and as a result want to come and offer due respect and honor for a man that helped them understand constitutional principles."
Author of 46 books, including Cold War-era tomes on communism and religious works directed at fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Skousen was most widely known for his devotion to America's Founding Fathers and his interpretation of their writings. The National Center for Constitutional Studies was an outgrowth of his original Freemen Institute, both conservative think tanks that published his articles, speeches and audio tapes. Paul Skousen said his father often made hundreds of speeches a year in a wide variety of venues.
Glenn Kimber, Cleon Skousen's son-in-law, said he had the chance to travel with Skousen for 20 years, working by his side and lecturing with him in all 50 states.
"I was absolutely thrilled watching his great desire for documentation. He covered the spectrum," leaving behind a library with some 7,000 volumes, he said.
While most are books he devoured on the Founding Fathers, politics and the LDS Church, many were penned by Skousen, including scores of personal journals and "scrapbook-type" histories he kept, Kimber said.
A few years ago, Skousen had planned to establish a private library to house his holdings, but plans fell through, Kimber said. Days before he died, Kimber said Skousen told his children about his desires for the library. A deal with what Kimber described as a Provo-based "educational organization" known as FranklinSquires is in the works, and he said the library will eventually be open to the public. Copies of Skousen's writings will also be donated to Brigham Young University's Special Collections library, he said.
"People would come up and say how much they appreciated his work. Different people found him to be their friend in so many different disciplines," Kimber said.
That included friendships with people from a variety of faiths.
One of those is the Rev. Donald Sills, a Baptist minister, fellow conservative and past president of the American Freedom Coalition. He said he first met Skousen as a young pastor in Spokane, Wash., back in 1964, when he put together a meeting called the "God Bless America Rally."
"I thought the only person to do it was Cleon Skousen, and I took a lot of flak for that," as church members asked why a Mormon would be invited to address them. But the two "developed a very close relationship. We traveled throughout different parts of the world teaching the basics of free enterprise system. He was the voice of real constitutionalism. I know he had read over 200 volumes of writings of the Founding Fathers." The Rev. Sills said he found Mr. Skousen in Washington, D.C., once, sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. When he asked what Mr. Skousen was doing, the reply came, " 'I'm talking to Tom Jefferson.' That's the kind of man he was," he said. Another personal experience further endeared him to Mr. Skousen when he was invited to stay at his home in Salt Lake City. "I got up the next morning, and there was Dr. Skousen and his wife in the kitchen. He asked me if I wanted to join them in morning prayer. There they were, getting down on their knees by the table. It was absolutely marvelous."
Both were friends with former LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson and other conservative politicos. When Mr. Skousen and the Rev. Sills organized a three-day "Making of America" conference in Salt Lake City years ago, the Rev. Sills said President Benson quipped, "If they'll take a Mormon elder with a Baptist preacher on the platform for three days, we've got a winner."He dubbed Mr. Skousen "probably the greatest constitutionalist I know. I've been in ministry for 47 years, and I admired the man, I loved him." He told Mr. Skousen's family years ago that when their father died, he wanted to be at the funeral, and "by God's grace I hope to be there."
Another admirer is Joseph Ginat, former adviser to the prime minister of Israel and now director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
"He was in Israel over 20 times, and I went with him to meet top politicians and government ministers," Ginat said. "He always had good questions and analyzed the situation in the Middle East. He had a great love for Israel, no question about it. I think that he followed the approach of President Ezra Taft Benson, who also loved Israel very much." The two talked biblical studies and the history of the Old Testament. "He was so articulate. He explained things so every person could understand . . . and he had an excellent sense of humor that came out in his lectures."
Skousen also had plenty of critics and clashed with former University of Utah professors J.D. Williams and Obert C. Tanner, according to U. law professor Ed Firmage, who remembers working with Skousen as a young employee in his father's store in Provo. "I had talks with him when he came in and we sold him a suit or tie or shirt." While he He appreciated Mr. Skousen as a person, and even invited him to speak once to his First Amendment class at the U. But "on the issues that mattered, he and I were on opposite sides of the fence. He was way to the right — a John Birchy kind of person who really appealed to a particular brand of right-wing Mormonism at a particular time. I don't view him as a significant constitutional scholar. He had a rightward song that was ideologically driven."
Firmage said he didn't read much of Skousen's work, so "I wouldn't be much of a commentator on his writing. I know he had definite views on Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, as most rightward Christian denominations do. But I think his defense of right-wing ideas was subversive of Mormonism and notions of the Constitution." Firmage spent his early career working with Martin Luther King and Hubert Humphrey during the Cold War. "He saw Russia as bigger than it was and saw various plots and plans and schemes against the country that I think didn't exist. It was the height of the McCarthy era and he was one of the chief spokespersons."
Wrapping religion and constitutional views together as Mr. Skousen did makes political views "a religious principle for some people. That makes it impossible to see the real defenders of the Constitution when you're looking for a bogeyman all the time. It was a somewhat paranoid period in American history that we're now somewhat free of. I think we are in a better and healthier period now."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com"
Saturday, February 18, 2006
American Lap Dog Hamid Karzai Admits He was Wrong to Flee Afghanistan During The War - Yahoo! News
Afghan President Warns Against Meddling - Yahoo! News: "Afghan President Warns Against Meddling By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer
Sat Feb 18, 1:23 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai has a pointed warning for neighboring nations: Stop meddling in Afghan affairs, or risk seeing chaos spread from a destabilized Afghanistan across the region.
Speaking sharply during an interview with The Associated Press, Karzai said Afghans have had enough of conflict and foreign interference — the war against occupying Soviet troops in the 1980s, a civil war in the '90s, the insurgency following the U.S.-led campaign that toppled the Taliban and chased out al-Qaida training camps after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
He promised that further interference in his homeland will not go unchallenged and warned that Iran, Pakistan and others are not fooling anyone.
"We know (interference) is going on. We know that money is being brought into Afghanistan. It will not have the impact that they want it to have — not for Afghanistan and not for themselves — so they had better stop," Karzai said.
"If they don't stop, the consequences will be exactly what I said earlier. The consequences will be that this region will suffer with us, equally, as we suffer. In the past we suffered alone. This time everybody will suffer with us."
Karzai said he felt a sense of contentment with the progress his country has made since the collapse of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001. But he spoke with concern about outside attempts to manipulate Afghanistan's ethnic and religious groups and the dangers of encouraging discord in tumultuous south-central Asia.
"Any effort to divide Afghanistan ethnically or weaken it will create exactly the same things in the neighboring countries. All the countries in this neighborhood have the same ethnic groups that we have, so they should know that it is a different ball game this time," he said.
"We are bloody determined. It is not going to be Pakistan playing the Pashtun, non-Pashtun game in Afghanistan. It is not going to be Iran playing this or that game or any other country. We can play the same game with a lot more historical power, with a lot more power in our history than others can. They should know that very well."
Reflecting on Afghanistan's recent violence, and the manipulations of its neighbors, the president said his people are stronger now and know better how to face up to foreign interference.
"It won't work this time. Afghanistan has an ownership. I told you we will not be refugees again. We own this country. Afghanistan has a voice now," Karzai said.
"The past is gone. We were unaware: The Soviets came, invaded us and we went out of Afghanistan to defend our country. We defended our country and that was right, but we made a mistake by leaving our country. It was one of the biggest mistakes we made, leaving the country."
Talking without aides at his side, sitting alone at a long, heavy table in a cavernous room at the presidential palace, Karzai was passionate about Afghanistan's future and his determination to protect his country.
"The United States, Pakistan, Iran and everybody should know that this time Afghans will not become refugees. I would be one of those Afghans who would not become a refugee again," he said.
"It has to be very, very clear. That is why I am talking so clear. This is my conscience speaking, the conscience of an Afghan person.""
Sat Feb 18, 1:23 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai has a pointed warning for neighboring nations: Stop meddling in Afghan affairs, or risk seeing chaos spread from a destabilized Afghanistan across the region.
Speaking sharply during an interview with The Associated Press, Karzai said Afghans have had enough of conflict and foreign interference — the war against occupying Soviet troops in the 1980s, a civil war in the '90s, the insurgency following the U.S.-led campaign that toppled the Taliban and chased out al-Qaida training camps after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
He promised that further interference in his homeland will not go unchallenged and warned that Iran, Pakistan and others are not fooling anyone.
"We know (interference) is going on. We know that money is being brought into Afghanistan. It will not have the impact that they want it to have — not for Afghanistan and not for themselves — so they had better stop," Karzai said.
"If they don't stop, the consequences will be exactly what I said earlier. The consequences will be that this region will suffer with us, equally, as we suffer. In the past we suffered alone. This time everybody will suffer with us."
Karzai said he felt a sense of contentment with the progress his country has made since the collapse of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001. But he spoke with concern about outside attempts to manipulate Afghanistan's ethnic and religious groups and the dangers of encouraging discord in tumultuous south-central Asia.
"Any effort to divide Afghanistan ethnically or weaken it will create exactly the same things in the neighboring countries. All the countries in this neighborhood have the same ethnic groups that we have, so they should know that it is a different ball game this time," he said.
"We are bloody determined. It is not going to be Pakistan playing the Pashtun, non-Pashtun game in Afghanistan. It is not going to be Iran playing this or that game or any other country. We can play the same game with a lot more historical power, with a lot more power in our history than others can. They should know that very well."
Reflecting on Afghanistan's recent violence, and the manipulations of its neighbors, the president said his people are stronger now and know better how to face up to foreign interference.
"It won't work this time. Afghanistan has an ownership. I told you we will not be refugees again. We own this country. Afghanistan has a voice now," Karzai said.
"The past is gone. We were unaware: The Soviets came, invaded us and we went out of Afghanistan to defend our country. We defended our country and that was right, but we made a mistake by leaving our country. It was one of the biggest mistakes we made, leaving the country."
Talking without aides at his side, sitting alone at a long, heavy table in a cavernous room at the presidential palace, Karzai was passionate about Afghanistan's future and his determination to protect his country.
"The United States, Pakistan, Iran and everybody should know that this time Afghans will not become refugees. I would be one of those Afghans who would not become a refugee again," he said.
"It has to be very, very clear. That is why I am talking so clear. This is my conscience speaking, the conscience of an Afghan person.""
Friday, February 17, 2006
Iraq, Iran unintended results By Arnaud De Borchgrave
Iraq, Iran unintended results: "US Features
Iraq, Iran unintended results
By Arnaud De Borchgrave
Feb 17, 2006, 19:00 GMT
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- When Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law Oct. 31, 1998, it paved the way for the March 2003 shock and awe invasion of Iraq. Some $300 billion later, including $10 billion in military hardware chewed up, the meter is still running.
The law of unintended consequences has sprung yet another unpleasant surprise. The kingmaker of Baghdad is now a sworn enemy of the United States who has pledged his support to Iran should the U.S. attempt regime change there, too
Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led his Mehdi army militia not once but twice against U.S. forces in 2004, has emerged from the last round of elections with a crucial swing vote of 32 seats. His latest gambit was to threaten civil war unless his choice for prime minister was accepted. It was. By one vote.
That was how Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the interim prime minister, became Iraq`s next leader. The principal architect of the Iraq Liberation Act, Ahmad Chalabi, didn`t win a single seat in parliament; he got less than half of one percent of the vote. But the \'gray eminence\' of what went wrong may yet get a cabinet job. A mathematics PhD from the University of Chicago, his specialty is finance.
This was the same Jaafari, then the interim prime minister, who took ten of his cabinet ministers last spring to Tehran (where he had lived in exile during the Saddam Hussein regime) to apologize for the eight-year Iran-Iraq war under Saddam Hussein. He returned to Baghdad with a $1 billion gift from the Iranian ayatollahs for new schools and hospitals.
When president Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the last thing he anticipated was an Islamist radical calling the shots in a democratic Iraq. A glutton for geopolitical punishment -- which our enemies must see as congenital masochism -- the administration and Congress are crab-walking into an \'Iran Liberation Act.\' The first tranche requested by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is for $75 million \'to weaken Iran from within.\'
This time it wasn`t an Iranian Chalabi type with dubious credentials, but several little Chalabis in the form of influential Christian lobby groups -- and some of our born-again neocons determined to recover their Iraqi losses. Mercifully, Congress is looking askance at the project and after testy exchanges with Dr. Rice, the administration got what it wanted -- plus $10 million already budgeted.
So far the administration`s magic potion for democracy in the Middle East has produced a majority for Hamas and its Islamist leadership, a sworn enemy of Israel and ally of Iran, in the Palestinian territories, and an alarming election sally by the long banned Muslim Brotherhood, another sworn enemy of Israel and friend of Iran, in Egypt. Hezbollah, an adjunct of Iran in Lebanon, is also comfortably installed in the parliament in Beirut.
Iran today has a dangerous, West-hating religious fanatic as president. But two recent unofficial Iranian emissaries were in Washington to advise Republicans and Democrats to be patient and to stay in lockstep with the European Union, Russia and China. If the U.S. breaks from a united international front, and goes the \'Iraq Liberation Act\' route in Iran, this will only assist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in widening a fairly narrow base of popular support. He can pose as Saladin against the heathen Americans and Zionist Jews, but he cannot take on the whole world -- without antagonizing his clerical superiors. At least, that was the argument of the two low-key emissaries.
United international pressure against Iran`s nuclear program -- and full support for the Russian compromise proposal whereby Moscow undertakes to enrich Iran`s nuclear fuel and return it short of weapons-grade uranium -- will lead the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to unload the president. So argued the two Iranians who said, \'If we weaponize nukes, others in the region will follow suit. So the non-weaponizers are now dominant but they also say they should have the capability of a full fuel enrichment cycle, just in case.\'
Khamenei, known as rahbar, or leader, is elected for life by the 86-member \'Assembly of Experts\' who themselves are elected by their provinces and have a guardian watchdog role. More important, the president has sharply limited executive powers. He doesn`t control the High Council of the Nation`s Security, the armed forces, the revolutionary guards, the intelligence services, the judiciary and broadcasting. All the important levers of power belong to rahbar.
Nor does the president have the power to dismiss parliament and call new elections. He is making \'all sorts of wild promises,\' said the two Iranians told their American interlocutors, \'and parliament is already asking him `who`s going to pay?`\'
The president who wants to wipe Israel off the map and scoffs at the Holocaust as fiction invented by the Jews draws his principal support from the very poor -- five million votes -- and Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) veterans who feel the supreme leader has deviated from the path set by his predecessor, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1979-89).
The veterans, according to the emissaries, share a deep distrust of any cooperation with the West because of the assistance given Saddam Hussein during the war. The U.S. supplied satellite intelligence of Iranian troop locations and the French sold military equipment, including 10,000 battlefield flares per day.
Ahmadinejad the verbal bomb thrower has already incurred the wrath of some senior ayatollahs by denouncing corruption. Everybody knows former president Ayatollah Rafsanjani became one of Iran`s wealthiest men while in office. Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani to become the first non-clerical president since the revolution. But what he lacks in clerical credentials, he makes up in religious fanaticism.
While in Washington, the two Iranian emissaries also made clear that U.S. and/or Israeli attacks against Iran`s nuclear facilities would set the whole region ablaze against the United States. \'They have clandestine assets throughout the oil producing countries of the Gulf,\' said one of them in a barely audible voice, \'and they also remember how you were forced to leave Vietnam in 1975.\' Iran`s Shiite friends in Iraq, led by fee-faw-fum scarecrow al-Sadr, will be asked to harass U.S. troops \'as you prepare to end the occupation with honor.\'
Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel`s internal security agency, said recently his country might come to regret its decision to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. \'I`m not sure we won`t come to miss Saddam,\' he told a group of students broadcast on Israeli TV. Last throes anyone?
Copyright 2006 by United Press International"
Iraq, Iran unintended results
By Arnaud De Borchgrave
Feb 17, 2006, 19:00 GMT
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- When Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law Oct. 31, 1998, it paved the way for the March 2003 shock and awe invasion of Iraq. Some $300 billion later, including $10 billion in military hardware chewed up, the meter is still running.
The law of unintended consequences has sprung yet another unpleasant surprise. The kingmaker of Baghdad is now a sworn enemy of the United States who has pledged his support to Iran should the U.S. attempt regime change there, too
Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led his Mehdi army militia not once but twice against U.S. forces in 2004, has emerged from the last round of elections with a crucial swing vote of 32 seats. His latest gambit was to threaten civil war unless his choice for prime minister was accepted. It was. By one vote.
That was how Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the interim prime minister, became Iraq`s next leader. The principal architect of the Iraq Liberation Act, Ahmad Chalabi, didn`t win a single seat in parliament; he got less than half of one percent of the vote. But the \'gray eminence\' of what went wrong may yet get a cabinet job. A mathematics PhD from the University of Chicago, his specialty is finance.
This was the same Jaafari, then the interim prime minister, who took ten of his cabinet ministers last spring to Tehran (where he had lived in exile during the Saddam Hussein regime) to apologize for the eight-year Iran-Iraq war under Saddam Hussein. He returned to Baghdad with a $1 billion gift from the Iranian ayatollahs for new schools and hospitals.
When president Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the last thing he anticipated was an Islamist radical calling the shots in a democratic Iraq. A glutton for geopolitical punishment -- which our enemies must see as congenital masochism -- the administration and Congress are crab-walking into an \'Iran Liberation Act.\' The first tranche requested by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is for $75 million \'to weaken Iran from within.\'
This time it wasn`t an Iranian Chalabi type with dubious credentials, but several little Chalabis in the form of influential Christian lobby groups -- and some of our born-again neocons determined to recover their Iraqi losses. Mercifully, Congress is looking askance at the project and after testy exchanges with Dr. Rice, the administration got what it wanted -- plus $10 million already budgeted.
So far the administration`s magic potion for democracy in the Middle East has produced a majority for Hamas and its Islamist leadership, a sworn enemy of Israel and ally of Iran, in the Palestinian territories, and an alarming election sally by the long banned Muslim Brotherhood, another sworn enemy of Israel and friend of Iran, in Egypt. Hezbollah, an adjunct of Iran in Lebanon, is also comfortably installed in the parliament in Beirut.
Iran today has a dangerous, West-hating religious fanatic as president. But two recent unofficial Iranian emissaries were in Washington to advise Republicans and Democrats to be patient and to stay in lockstep with the European Union, Russia and China. If the U.S. breaks from a united international front, and goes the \'Iraq Liberation Act\' route in Iran, this will only assist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in widening a fairly narrow base of popular support. He can pose as Saladin against the heathen Americans and Zionist Jews, but he cannot take on the whole world -- without antagonizing his clerical superiors. At least, that was the argument of the two low-key emissaries.
United international pressure against Iran`s nuclear program -- and full support for the Russian compromise proposal whereby Moscow undertakes to enrich Iran`s nuclear fuel and return it short of weapons-grade uranium -- will lead the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to unload the president. So argued the two Iranians who said, \'If we weaponize nukes, others in the region will follow suit. So the non-weaponizers are now dominant but they also say they should have the capability of a full fuel enrichment cycle, just in case.\'
Khamenei, known as rahbar, or leader, is elected for life by the 86-member \'Assembly of Experts\' who themselves are elected by their provinces and have a guardian watchdog role. More important, the president has sharply limited executive powers. He doesn`t control the High Council of the Nation`s Security, the armed forces, the revolutionary guards, the intelligence services, the judiciary and broadcasting. All the important levers of power belong to rahbar.
Nor does the president have the power to dismiss parliament and call new elections. He is making \'all sorts of wild promises,\' said the two Iranians told their American interlocutors, \'and parliament is already asking him `who`s going to pay?`\'
The president who wants to wipe Israel off the map and scoffs at the Holocaust as fiction invented by the Jews draws his principal support from the very poor -- five million votes -- and Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) veterans who feel the supreme leader has deviated from the path set by his predecessor, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1979-89).
The veterans, according to the emissaries, share a deep distrust of any cooperation with the West because of the assistance given Saddam Hussein during the war. The U.S. supplied satellite intelligence of Iranian troop locations and the French sold military equipment, including 10,000 battlefield flares per day.
Ahmadinejad the verbal bomb thrower has already incurred the wrath of some senior ayatollahs by denouncing corruption. Everybody knows former president Ayatollah Rafsanjani became one of Iran`s wealthiest men while in office. Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani to become the first non-clerical president since the revolution. But what he lacks in clerical credentials, he makes up in religious fanaticism.
While in Washington, the two Iranian emissaries also made clear that U.S. and/or Israeli attacks against Iran`s nuclear facilities would set the whole region ablaze against the United States. \'They have clandestine assets throughout the oil producing countries of the Gulf,\' said one of them in a barely audible voice, \'and they also remember how you were forced to leave Vietnam in 1975.\' Iran`s Shiite friends in Iraq, led by fee-faw-fum scarecrow al-Sadr, will be asked to harass U.S. troops \'as you prepare to end the occupation with honor.\'
Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel`s internal security agency, said recently his country might come to regret its decision to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. \'I`m not sure we won`t come to miss Saddam,\' he told a group of students broadcast on Israeli TV. Last throes anyone?
Copyright 2006 by United Press International"
Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/16/2006 | Swann sat out on most election days
Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/16/2006 | Swann sat out on most election days: "Posted on Thu, Feb. 16, 2006
Swann sat out on most election daysBy Mario F. CattabianiInquirer Staff WriterWhen Lynn Swann votes for himself in the May Republican primary, it will be a rare springtime trip to the polls.
Despite once saying that the right to vote should never be taken for granted, Swann missed 20 of the state's 36 elections in the last 18 years - including 13 of his party's primaries, records show.
In that period, Swann missed elections for governor, U.S. senator and president, while also skipping a chance to vote on a dozen statewide referendums, including a 1989 question on property-tax reform - now a centerpiece of his campaign.
Swann, who was unanimously endorsed by the state GOP last weekend, was not available for comment yesterday. But his campaign spokeswoman, Melissa Walters, said: "He regrets not voting, and he should have voted. He encourages all Pennsylvanians to vote, and he feels that it is an important duty."
Asked why Swann missed so many votes, Walters said it was probably because he was traveling. Records from Allegheny County, where he has lived since 1983, show that Swann was aware of absentee-voting rules, because he voted by absentee ballot three times.
Swann's campaign manager, Ray Zaborney, later added: "Like many Pennsylvanians, he did not vote in every election. It was a mistake, but unlike career politicians, Lynn has not been focused on his next campaign."
By comparison, Gov. Rendell, who will face Swann in the fall, has not missed a trip to the voting booth dating back at least to 1980, records show.
"It's not for us to explain Mr. Swann's voting record," said Rendell's campaign manager, Tricia Enright. "That's between him and the voters."
In October 2004, in an interview with the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Swann said: "I have always been someone to believe that when you have certain freedoms, you should exercise them and not take it for granted. If you don't take part in the process and you don't vote, then I am not willing to listen to your complaints."
Swann voted by absentee ballot in the general election the month after making those comments. But earlier that year, he missed the pivotal GOP primary election in which U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter narrowly defeated challenger U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, and Swann didn't cast votes at all in 2003.
In 1988, Swann missed the general election for George H.W. Bush, and also the reelection bid of U.S. Sen. John Heinz (R., Pa.), whom he has called his political idol.
Three years later, he did not vote in the race to fill Heinz's seat after the senator was killed in a plane crash.
In 1990, when Gov. Robert Casey was seeking reelection against Republican Barbara Hafer, Swann didn't vote. Nor did he vote the last time his party had a contested gubernatorial primary - 1994, when Tom Ridge claimed the nomination.
Since 1988, Swann has missed voting on 12 of 20 statewide ballot referendums, including several that asked whether voters supported borrowing billions of dollars for a variety of programs, from environmental initiatives to funding for volunteer fire companies.
Swann, a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, will be alone on the GOP gubernatorial ballot May 16. Last week, his major party rival, former Lt. Gov. Bill Scranton, bowed out of the race. On Tuesday, former business advocate Jim Panyard did the same.
With the field clear, Swann - a former football analyst with ABC Sports - is focusing on unseating Rendell, a veteran campaigner, in November.
And the reality of a spotty voting record doesn't help in that uphill climb, analysts said yesterday.
Still, poor voting records didn't affect fellow celebrity gubernatorial hopefuls in other states. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger withstood bitter campaign ads that trumpeted the fact that he missed 13 of the previous 21 elections in California.
And five years earlier, Jesse Ventura - in a campaign in Minnesota that succeeded by getting disaffected voters to the polls - had a history of his own of not bothering to vote. Of the 14 elections before his own, Ventura cast ballots in just four.
Like Schwarzenegger and Ventura, Swann is a novice politician, in his first bid for office, who is already facing pointed questions about his readiness to serve as the state's chief executive.
Swann's voting record "underscores the emerging theme of a lot of recent news coverage: that he's not prepared to run for governor," said Michael Young, a former longtime Penn State politics professor.
G. Terry Madonna, a pollster at Franklin and Marshall College, said the news was damaging to a young campaign that appeared to be building momentum. It puts the campaign on the defensive, he added.
"We have all been sort of captivated by his candidacy," Madonna said. "This is the beginning of what will become extensive scrutiny into every aspect of Swann's life. Now, the honeymoon is over."
Contact staff writer Mario F. Cattabiani at 717-787-5990 or mcattabiani@phillynews.com."
Swann sat out on most election daysBy Mario F. CattabianiInquirer Staff WriterWhen Lynn Swann votes for himself in the May Republican primary, it will be a rare springtime trip to the polls.
Despite once saying that the right to vote should never be taken for granted, Swann missed 20 of the state's 36 elections in the last 18 years - including 13 of his party's primaries, records show.
In that period, Swann missed elections for governor, U.S. senator and president, while also skipping a chance to vote on a dozen statewide referendums, including a 1989 question on property-tax reform - now a centerpiece of his campaign.
Swann, who was unanimously endorsed by the state GOP last weekend, was not available for comment yesterday. But his campaign spokeswoman, Melissa Walters, said: "He regrets not voting, and he should have voted. He encourages all Pennsylvanians to vote, and he feels that it is an important duty."
Asked why Swann missed so many votes, Walters said it was probably because he was traveling. Records from Allegheny County, where he has lived since 1983, show that Swann was aware of absentee-voting rules, because he voted by absentee ballot three times.
Swann's campaign manager, Ray Zaborney, later added: "Like many Pennsylvanians, he did not vote in every election. It was a mistake, but unlike career politicians, Lynn has not been focused on his next campaign."
By comparison, Gov. Rendell, who will face Swann in the fall, has not missed a trip to the voting booth dating back at least to 1980, records show.
"It's not for us to explain Mr. Swann's voting record," said Rendell's campaign manager, Tricia Enright. "That's between him and the voters."
In October 2004, in an interview with the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Swann said: "I have always been someone to believe that when you have certain freedoms, you should exercise them and not take it for granted. If you don't take part in the process and you don't vote, then I am not willing to listen to your complaints."
Swann voted by absentee ballot in the general election the month after making those comments. But earlier that year, he missed the pivotal GOP primary election in which U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter narrowly defeated challenger U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, and Swann didn't cast votes at all in 2003.
In 1988, Swann missed the general election for George H.W. Bush, and also the reelection bid of U.S. Sen. John Heinz (R., Pa.), whom he has called his political idol.
Three years later, he did not vote in the race to fill Heinz's seat after the senator was killed in a plane crash.
In 1990, when Gov. Robert Casey was seeking reelection against Republican Barbara Hafer, Swann didn't vote. Nor did he vote the last time his party had a contested gubernatorial primary - 1994, when Tom Ridge claimed the nomination.
Since 1988, Swann has missed voting on 12 of 20 statewide ballot referendums, including several that asked whether voters supported borrowing billions of dollars for a variety of programs, from environmental initiatives to funding for volunteer fire companies.
Swann, a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, will be alone on the GOP gubernatorial ballot May 16. Last week, his major party rival, former Lt. Gov. Bill Scranton, bowed out of the race. On Tuesday, former business advocate Jim Panyard did the same.
With the field clear, Swann - a former football analyst with ABC Sports - is focusing on unseating Rendell, a veteran campaigner, in November.
And the reality of a spotty voting record doesn't help in that uphill climb, analysts said yesterday.
Still, poor voting records didn't affect fellow celebrity gubernatorial hopefuls in other states. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger withstood bitter campaign ads that trumpeted the fact that he missed 13 of the previous 21 elections in California.
And five years earlier, Jesse Ventura - in a campaign in Minnesota that succeeded by getting disaffected voters to the polls - had a history of his own of not bothering to vote. Of the 14 elections before his own, Ventura cast ballots in just four.
Like Schwarzenegger and Ventura, Swann is a novice politician, in his first bid for office, who is already facing pointed questions about his readiness to serve as the state's chief executive.
Swann's voting record "underscores the emerging theme of a lot of recent news coverage: that he's not prepared to run for governor," said Michael Young, a former longtime Penn State politics professor.
G. Terry Madonna, a pollster at Franklin and Marshall College, said the news was damaging to a young campaign that appeared to be building momentum. It puts the campaign on the defensive, he added.
"We have all been sort of captivated by his candidacy," Madonna said. "This is the beginning of what will become extensive scrutiny into every aspect of Swann's life. Now, the honeymoon is over."
Contact staff writer Mario F. Cattabiani at 717-787-5990 or mcattabiani@phillynews.com."
Jerusalem Post | Israeli Lobby Claims Spying Is Constitutionally Protected Free Speech
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World "Washington: Lobbying for freedom of speech
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NATHAN GUTTMAN, THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 16, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A legal document posted on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists this week became an instant best-seller, with almost 4,000 downloads in a single day. This is remarkable, considering the fact that the document is a lengthy legal opinion under the not-so-appealing headline: "Memorandum of Law in support of Motion to Dismiss the Superseding indictments."
Yet its 63 pages tell an interesting story - a new take on what has come to be known as the "AIPAC case."
The memorandum marks a new phase in the defense efforts of former AIPAC staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, charged with receiving classified information from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and passing it on to diplomats in the Israeli Embassy and to members of the press. Franklin was sentenced last month, as part of a plea bargain, to 12 years in prison - a sentence that is expected to be reduced significantly after he testifies against Rosen and Weissman, whose trial is scheduled for April 25 in Virginia.
This new phase is one in which the focus of the case is shifting from the question of espionage (or illegal handling of documents) to the much more fundamental issue of freedom of speech.
The person responsible for the memorandum and for turning the Rosen-Weissman criminal case into a First Amendment issue is Viet Dinh, a former senior official in the Justice Department and a well-known law professor. Why this is so significant is that, in his former capacity in the Justice Department, Dinh was one of the chief architects of the USA Patriot Act, which gave government agencies much more freedom to conduct surveillance for the purpose of gathering and sharing information about citizens for the cause of fighting terror. In other words, no one can accuse him of being soft on issues of national security or of preferring civil rights to fighting crime or terror.
These credentials make Dinh's memorandum - a request to dismiss all charges against Rosen and Weissman before the trial begins - even more valuable for the defense.
The memorandum claims that there is no base to charge Rosen and Weissman under the 90-year-old section 793 of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime not only to disclose classified information but also to receive it. According to Dinh, invoking the Espionage Act in the Rosen-Weissman case is simply going too far.
Indeed, for the first time since the case broke in the summer of 2004, the American media has begun to deal with this very issue: If it was illegal for Rosen and Weissman to have received classified information, who will be next in line for prosecution?
In a city like Washington, which thrives on information-trading - and in which those who know more have more power - the AIPAC case is suddenly seen as a real threat.
"This is what members of the media, members of the Washington policy community, lobbyists and members of congressional staffs do perhaps hundreds of times a day," the memorandum states. "Never has a lobbyist, reporter, or any other non-government employee been charged for receiving oral information the government alleges to be national defense material as part of that person's normal First Amendment protected activities."
THE DEFENSE hopes that turning the case into a freedom-of-speech issue will not only raise public interest in the matter, but also convince the jury - in the event that the dismissal motion is rejected - that what Rosen and Weissman did is simply common practice in the Washington information business. Furthermore, if anyone - namely the court - tries to tamper with this practice, it would deal a severe blow to the cornerstone of the Constitution by silencing the media, whistle-blowers and political activists.
Indeed, redefining the meaning of "common practice" in the American capital may be precisely what the AIPAC case is really about.
If so, it is not all that different from another recent case, in which a federal investigation into the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame led to the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and to a grand jury investigation of other journalists.
The message in both cases is similar: Leaking is no longer acceptable to this administration and anyone who is involved in it, no matter on which end of the leak, will be dealt with harshly.
Both cases are now on their way to court - Rosen and Weissman in the near future, and the Plame case at a later date, as part of the Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial. At the end of the day, what emerges from these two trials can define the way business is done in Washington for years to come.
If receiving classified information turns out to be a punishable crime, then the whole practice of journalism and political advocacy will have to undergo major adjustments. One opinion writer has already suggested that if Rosen and Weissman are found guilty, not only reporters, but even readers, could be accused under the same Espionage Act.
The prosecution in the AIPAC case would rather steer clear of the First Amendment issue. It is building its case on a simple reading of the law, claiming, in essence, that the accused knew they were receiving classified information which they were not supposed to receive.
Judge T.S. Ellis, who will hear the case, has already given an indication of his views on the matter, saying he did not see any difference between a government employee, such as Franklin, and "academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever" where dealing with classified information is concerned.
But the Virginia jury will really be deciding on a greater principle. The prosecution would like the case to be seen as an isolated case of two lobbyists who simply broke the rules and should pay the price for their actions. The defense will try to claim that it is actually freedom of speech in the United States that is on the stand, not two mere individuals."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NATHAN GUTTMAN, THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 16, 2006
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A legal document posted on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists this week became an instant best-seller, with almost 4,000 downloads in a single day. This is remarkable, considering the fact that the document is a lengthy legal opinion under the not-so-appealing headline: "Memorandum of Law in support of Motion to Dismiss the Superseding indictments."
Yet its 63 pages tell an interesting story - a new take on what has come to be known as the "AIPAC case."
The memorandum marks a new phase in the defense efforts of former AIPAC staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, charged with receiving classified information from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and passing it on to diplomats in the Israeli Embassy and to members of the press. Franklin was sentenced last month, as part of a plea bargain, to 12 years in prison - a sentence that is expected to be reduced significantly after he testifies against Rosen and Weissman, whose trial is scheduled for April 25 in Virginia.
This new phase is one in which the focus of the case is shifting from the question of espionage (or illegal handling of documents) to the much more fundamental issue of freedom of speech.
The person responsible for the memorandum and for turning the Rosen-Weissman criminal case into a First Amendment issue is Viet Dinh, a former senior official in the Justice Department and a well-known law professor. Why this is so significant is that, in his former capacity in the Justice Department, Dinh was one of the chief architects of the USA Patriot Act, which gave government agencies much more freedom to conduct surveillance for the purpose of gathering and sharing information about citizens for the cause of fighting terror. In other words, no one can accuse him of being soft on issues of national security or of preferring civil rights to fighting crime or terror.
These credentials make Dinh's memorandum - a request to dismiss all charges against Rosen and Weissman before the trial begins - even more valuable for the defense.
The memorandum claims that there is no base to charge Rosen and Weissman under the 90-year-old section 793 of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime not only to disclose classified information but also to receive it. According to Dinh, invoking the Espionage Act in the Rosen-Weissman case is simply going too far.
Indeed, for the first time since the case broke in the summer of 2004, the American media has begun to deal with this very issue: If it was illegal for Rosen and Weissman to have received classified information, who will be next in line for prosecution?
In a city like Washington, which thrives on information-trading - and in which those who know more have more power - the AIPAC case is suddenly seen as a real threat.
"This is what members of the media, members of the Washington policy community, lobbyists and members of congressional staffs do perhaps hundreds of times a day," the memorandum states. "Never has a lobbyist, reporter, or any other non-government employee been charged for receiving oral information the government alleges to be national defense material as part of that person's normal First Amendment protected activities."
THE DEFENSE hopes that turning the case into a freedom-of-speech issue will not only raise public interest in the matter, but also convince the jury - in the event that the dismissal motion is rejected - that what Rosen and Weissman did is simply common practice in the Washington information business. Furthermore, if anyone - namely the court - tries to tamper with this practice, it would deal a severe blow to the cornerstone of the Constitution by silencing the media, whistle-blowers and political activists.
Indeed, redefining the meaning of "common practice" in the American capital may be precisely what the AIPAC case is really about.
If so, it is not all that different from another recent case, in which a federal investigation into the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame led to the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and to a grand jury investigation of other journalists.
The message in both cases is similar: Leaking is no longer acceptable to this administration and anyone who is involved in it, no matter on which end of the leak, will be dealt with harshly.
Both cases are now on their way to court - Rosen and Weissman in the near future, and the Plame case at a later date, as part of the Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial. At the end of the day, what emerges from these two trials can define the way business is done in Washington for years to come.
If receiving classified information turns out to be a punishable crime, then the whole practice of journalism and political advocacy will have to undergo major adjustments. One opinion writer has already suggested that if Rosen and Weissman are found guilty, not only reporters, but even readers, could be accused under the same Espionage Act.
The prosecution in the AIPAC case would rather steer clear of the First Amendment issue. It is building its case on a simple reading of the law, claiming, in essence, that the accused knew they were receiving classified information which they were not supposed to receive.
Judge T.S. Ellis, who will hear the case, has already given an indication of his views on the matter, saying he did not see any difference between a government employee, such as Franklin, and "academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever" where dealing with classified information is concerned.
But the Virginia jury will really be deciding on a greater principle. The prosecution would like the case to be seen as an isolated case of two lobbyists who simply broke the rules and should pay the price for their actions. The defense will try to claim that it is actually freedom of speech in the United States that is on the stand, not two mere individuals."
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Vice President Cheney Interviewed by Fox News - 1 Day to get the Alcohol out of his system.
Vice President Cheney Interviewed�by Fox News: "Transcript
Vice President Cheney Interviewed by Fox News
Source: Office of the Vice President
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; 6:03 PM
INTERVIEW OF THE VICE PRESIDENT BY BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS
Vice President's Ceremonial Office
This photo provided by the White House shows Vice President Dick Cheney, left, talking with Brit Hume of Fox News in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006. The vice president talked about the accidental shooting of friend and fellow hunter Harry Whittington on the Armstrong Ranch in Armstrong, Texas. (AP Photo/David Bohrer, White House) (David Bohrer - AP)
Eisenhower Executive Office Building 2:01 P.M. EST
Q Mr. Vice President, how is Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is he's doing very well today. I talked to him yesterday after they discovered the heart problem, but it appears now to have been pretty well resolved and the reporting today is very good.
Q How did you feel when you heard about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.
Q How long have you known him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I first met him in Vail, Colorado, when I worked for Gerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.
Q Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.
Q Tell me what happened?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, basically, we were hunting quail late in the day --
Q Describe the setting.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild quail. It's some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country. I've gone there, to the Armstrong ranch, for years. The Armstrongs have been friends for over 30 years. And a group of us had hunted all day on Saturday --
Q How many?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, probably 10 people. We weren't all together, but about 10 guests at the ranch. There were three of us who had gotten out of the vehicle and walked up on a covey of quail that had been pointed by the dogs. Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his, it had gone down in some deep cover, and so he went off to look for it. The other hunter and I then turned and walked about a hundred yards in another direction --
Q Away from him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Away from him -- where another covey had been spotted by an outrider. I was on the far right --
Q There was just two of you then?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there -- but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --
Q You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.
Q What was he wearing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was dressed in orange, he was dressed properly, but he was also -- there was a little bit of a gully there, so he was down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of his body when -- I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind him -- that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.
But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.
Q Then what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we went over to him, obviously, right away --
Q How far away from you was he?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.
Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.
Q So did you run over to him or --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --
Q And what did you see? He's lying there --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --
Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --
Q What did you say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --
Q What did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him. The doc was fantastic --
Q What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no idea how serious it was going to be. I mean, it could have been extraordinarily serious. You just don't know at that moment. You know he's been struck, that there's a lot of shot that had hit him. But you don't know -- you think about his eyes. Fortunately, he was wearing hunting glasses, and that protected his eyes. You -- you just don't know. And the key thing, as I say, initially, was that the physician's assistant was right there. We also had an ambulance at the ranch, because one always follows me around wherever I go. And they were able to get the ambulance there, and within about 30 minutes we had him on his way to the hospital.
Q And what did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I had -- I told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night. And Harry --
Q Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we're getting reports, but they were confusing. Early reports are always wrong. The initial reports that came back from the ambulance were that he was doing well, his eyes were open. They got him into the emergency room at Kingsville --
Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.
Q So by now what time is it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have an exact time line, although he got there sometime that evening, 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m.
Q So this is several hours after the incident?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would say he was in Kingsville in the emergency room probably within, oh, less than an hour after they left the ranch.
Q Now, you're a seasoned hunter --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.
Q Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.
Q Now, what about this -- it was said you were hunting out of vehicles. Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that's your -- the way you chose to hunt that day?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, the way -- this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres. You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt. Birds are oftentimes -- you're looking for coveys. And these are wild quail, they're not pen-raised. And you hunt them -- basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail. And when they spot them, they've got radios, you'll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail. So you need --
Q So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, usually you'll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards. Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.
Q Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, you always -- in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is. Then you get off -- there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey. And then you walk up on the covey. And as the covey flushes, that's when you shoot.
Q Was anybody drinking in this party?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --
Q So he wasn't, and you weren't?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m.
The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.
Q Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.
But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.
Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch --
Q Right, what about his children?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made. One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited. But one of the things I'd learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down. And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth -- a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages. But we really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ. And that's when we began the process of notifying the press.
Q Well, what -- you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, true, it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.
Q Not since Aaron Burr.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not since Aaron Burr --
Q Different circumstances.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Different circumstances.
Q Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.
Q But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct.
Q And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --
Q Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did not. The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself. I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning.
Q Not until Sunday morning? Was that the first conversation you'd had with anybody in the -- at the White House?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, Karl talks to -- I don't recall talking to Karl. Karl did talk with Katherine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us. Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well --
Q Say that again?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.
And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the website, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.
Q What do you think now?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I still do. I still think that the accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me, I didn't have any press people with me. I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch. In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we're even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katherine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn't know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun -- a rifle bullet and a shotgun. And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding. And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.
Q By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: The next morning I talked to his wife. And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.
Q When was that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.
Q Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe it had. I can't remember what time Katherine actually talked to the reporter. She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter. But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that's when the story then went out.
Q Now, it strikes me that you must have known that this was going to be a national story --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Q -- and it does raise the question of whether you couldn't have headed off this beltway firestorm if you had put out the word to the national media, as well as to the local newspaper so that it could post it on its website. I mean, in retrospect, wouldn't that have been the wise course --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, who is going to do that? Are they going to take my word for what happened? There is obviously --
Q Well, obviously, you could have put the statement out in the name of whoever you wanted. You could put it out in the name of Mrs. Armstrong, if you wanted to. Obviously, that's -- she's the one who made the statement.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was --
Q Right, understood. Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.
Q When did you first speak to -- if you spoke to Andy Card at, what, mid-day, you said, on Sunday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sometime Sunday morning.
Q And what about -- when did you first -- when, if ever, have you discussed it with the President?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I talked to him about it yesterday, or Monday -- first on Monday, and then on Tuesday, too.
Q There is reporting to the effect that some in the White House feel you kind of -- well, look at what Scott McClellan went through the last couple days. There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so -- that you kind of hung him out to dry. How do you feel about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.
Q Well, perhaps so, but isn't there an institution here present at the White House that has long-established itself as the vehicle through which White House news gets out, and that's the pool?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no press person with me, no coverage with me, no White House reporters with me. I'm comfortable with the way we did it, obviously. You can disagree with that, and some of the White House press corps clearly do. But, no, I've got nothing but good things to say about Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett. They've got a tough job to do and they do it well. They urged us to get the story out. The decision about how it got out, basically, was my responsibility.
Q That was your call.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was my call.
Q All the way.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: All the way. It was recommended to me -- Katherine Armstrong wanted to do it, as she said, and I concurred in that; I thought it made good sense.
Q Now, you're talking to me today -- this is, what, Wednesday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wednesday.
Q What about just coming out yourself Monday/Tuesday -- how come?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it obviously has to do with the status of Harry Whittington. And it's a difficult subject to talk about, frankly, Brit. But most especially I've been very concerned about him and focused on him and feel more comfortable coming out today because of the fact that his circumstances have improved, he's gotten by what was a potential crisis yesterday, with respect to the developments concerning his heart. I think this decision we made, that this was the right way to do it.
Q Describe if you can your conversations with him, what you've said to him and the attitude he's shown toward you in the aftermath of this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's been fantastic. He's a gentleman in every respect. He oftentimes expressed more concern about me than about himself. He's been in good spirits, unfailingly cheerful --
Q What did he say about that? You said, "expressed concern" about you -- what did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, when I first saw him in the hospital, for example, he said, look, he said, I don't want this to create problems for you. He literally was more concerned about me and the impact on me than he was on the fact that he'd been shot. He's a -- I guess I'd describe him as a true Texas gentleman, a very successful attorney, successful businessman in Austin; a gentleman in every respect of the word. And he's been superb.
Q For you, personally, how would you -- you said this was one of the worst days of your life. How so?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never experienced anything quite like that before.
Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt. I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think about it.
Q Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am. But as I say, the season is ending, I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future.
Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.
Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.
Q There is.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Have you done it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --
Q You ever done it unilaterally?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.
Q There have been two leaks, one that pertained to possible facilities in Europe; and another that pertained to this NSA matter. There are officials who have had various characterizations of the degree of damage done by those. How would you characterize the damage done by those two reports?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There clearly has been damage done.
Q Which has been the more harmful, in your view?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into just sort of ranking them, then you get into why is one more damaging than the other. One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.
Q Mr. Vice President, thank you very much for doing this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Brit.
END 2:28 P.M. EST"
Vice President Cheney Interviewed by Fox News
Source: Office of the Vice President
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; 6:03 PM
INTERVIEW OF THE VICE PRESIDENT BY BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS
Vice President's Ceremonial Office
This photo provided by the White House shows Vice President Dick Cheney, left, talking with Brit Hume of Fox News in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006. The vice president talked about the accidental shooting of friend and fellow hunter Harry Whittington on the Armstrong Ranch in Armstrong, Texas. (AP Photo/David Bohrer, White House) (David Bohrer - AP)
Eisenhower Executive Office Building 2:01 P.M. EST
Q Mr. Vice President, how is Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is he's doing very well today. I talked to him yesterday after they discovered the heart problem, but it appears now to have been pretty well resolved and the reporting today is very good.
Q How did you feel when you heard about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.
Q How long have you known him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I first met him in Vail, Colorado, when I worked for Gerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.
Q Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.
Q Tell me what happened?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, basically, we were hunting quail late in the day --
Q Describe the setting.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild quail. It's some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country. I've gone there, to the Armstrong ranch, for years. The Armstrongs have been friends for over 30 years. And a group of us had hunted all day on Saturday --
Q How many?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, probably 10 people. We weren't all together, but about 10 guests at the ranch. There were three of us who had gotten out of the vehicle and walked up on a covey of quail that had been pointed by the dogs. Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his, it had gone down in some deep cover, and so he went off to look for it. The other hunter and I then turned and walked about a hundred yards in another direction --
Q Away from him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Away from him -- where another covey had been spotted by an outrider. I was on the far right --
Q There was just two of you then?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there -- but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --
Q You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.
Q What was he wearing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was dressed in orange, he was dressed properly, but he was also -- there was a little bit of a gully there, so he was down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of his body when -- I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind him -- that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.
But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.
Q Then what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we went over to him, obviously, right away --
Q How far away from you was he?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.
Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.
Q So did you run over to him or --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --
Q And what did you see? He's lying there --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --
Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --
Q What did you say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --
Q What did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him. The doc was fantastic --
Q What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no idea how serious it was going to be. I mean, it could have been extraordinarily serious. You just don't know at that moment. You know he's been struck, that there's a lot of shot that had hit him. But you don't know -- you think about his eyes. Fortunately, he was wearing hunting glasses, and that protected his eyes. You -- you just don't know. And the key thing, as I say, initially, was that the physician's assistant was right there. We also had an ambulance at the ranch, because one always follows me around wherever I go. And they were able to get the ambulance there, and within about 30 minutes we had him on his way to the hospital.
Q And what did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I had -- I told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night. And Harry --
Q Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we're getting reports, but they were confusing. Early reports are always wrong. The initial reports that came back from the ambulance were that he was doing well, his eyes were open. They got him into the emergency room at Kingsville --
Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.
Q So by now what time is it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have an exact time line, although he got there sometime that evening, 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m.
Q So this is several hours after the incident?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would say he was in Kingsville in the emergency room probably within, oh, less than an hour after they left the ranch.
Q Now, you're a seasoned hunter --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.
Q Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.
Q Now, what about this -- it was said you were hunting out of vehicles. Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that's your -- the way you chose to hunt that day?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, the way -- this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres. You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt. Birds are oftentimes -- you're looking for coveys. And these are wild quail, they're not pen-raised. And you hunt them -- basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail. And when they spot them, they've got radios, you'll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail. So you need --
Q So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, usually you'll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards. Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.
Q Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, you always -- in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is. Then you get off -- there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey. And then you walk up on the covey. And as the covey flushes, that's when you shoot.
Q Was anybody drinking in this party?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --
Q So he wasn't, and you weren't?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m.
The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.
Q Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.
But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.
Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch --
Q Right, what about his children?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made. One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited. But one of the things I'd learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down. And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth -- a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages. But we really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ. And that's when we began the process of notifying the press.
Q Well, what -- you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, true, it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.
Q Not since Aaron Burr.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not since Aaron Burr --
Q Different circumstances.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Different circumstances.
Q Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.
Q But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct.
Q And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --
Q Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did not. The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself. I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning.
Q Not until Sunday morning? Was that the first conversation you'd had with anybody in the -- at the White House?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, Karl talks to -- I don't recall talking to Karl. Karl did talk with Katherine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us. Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well --
Q Say that again?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.
And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the website, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.
Q What do you think now?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I still do. I still think that the accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me, I didn't have any press people with me. I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch. In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we're even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katherine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn't know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun -- a rifle bullet and a shotgun. And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding. And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.
Q By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: The next morning I talked to his wife. And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.
Q When was that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.
Q Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe it had. I can't remember what time Katherine actually talked to the reporter. She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter. But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that's when the story then went out.
Q Now, it strikes me that you must have known that this was going to be a national story --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Q -- and it does raise the question of whether you couldn't have headed off this beltway firestorm if you had put out the word to the national media, as well as to the local newspaper so that it could post it on its website. I mean, in retrospect, wouldn't that have been the wise course --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, who is going to do that? Are they going to take my word for what happened? There is obviously --
Q Well, obviously, you could have put the statement out in the name of whoever you wanted. You could put it out in the name of Mrs. Armstrong, if you wanted to. Obviously, that's -- she's the one who made the statement.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was --
Q Right, understood. Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.
Q When did you first speak to -- if you spoke to Andy Card at, what, mid-day, you said, on Sunday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sometime Sunday morning.
Q And what about -- when did you first -- when, if ever, have you discussed it with the President?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I talked to him about it yesterday, or Monday -- first on Monday, and then on Tuesday, too.
Q There is reporting to the effect that some in the White House feel you kind of -- well, look at what Scott McClellan went through the last couple days. There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so -- that you kind of hung him out to dry. How do you feel about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.
Q Well, perhaps so, but isn't there an institution here present at the White House that has long-established itself as the vehicle through which White House news gets out, and that's the pool?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no press person with me, no coverage with me, no White House reporters with me. I'm comfortable with the way we did it, obviously. You can disagree with that, and some of the White House press corps clearly do. But, no, I've got nothing but good things to say about Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett. They've got a tough job to do and they do it well. They urged us to get the story out. The decision about how it got out, basically, was my responsibility.
Q That was your call.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was my call.
Q All the way.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: All the way. It was recommended to me -- Katherine Armstrong wanted to do it, as she said, and I concurred in that; I thought it made good sense.
Q Now, you're talking to me today -- this is, what, Wednesday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wednesday.
Q What about just coming out yourself Monday/Tuesday -- how come?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it obviously has to do with the status of Harry Whittington. And it's a difficult subject to talk about, frankly, Brit. But most especially I've been very concerned about him and focused on him and feel more comfortable coming out today because of the fact that his circumstances have improved, he's gotten by what was a potential crisis yesterday, with respect to the developments concerning his heart. I think this decision we made, that this was the right way to do it.
Q Describe if you can your conversations with him, what you've said to him and the attitude he's shown toward you in the aftermath of this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's been fantastic. He's a gentleman in every respect. He oftentimes expressed more concern about me than about himself. He's been in good spirits, unfailingly cheerful --
Q What did he say about that? You said, "expressed concern" about you -- what did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, when I first saw him in the hospital, for example, he said, look, he said, I don't want this to create problems for you. He literally was more concerned about me and the impact on me than he was on the fact that he'd been shot. He's a -- I guess I'd describe him as a true Texas gentleman, a very successful attorney, successful businessman in Austin; a gentleman in every respect of the word. And he's been superb.
Q For you, personally, how would you -- you said this was one of the worst days of your life. How so?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never experienced anything quite like that before.
Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt. I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think about it.
Q Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am. But as I say, the season is ending, I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future.
Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.
Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.
Q There is.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Have you done it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --
Q You ever done it unilaterally?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.
Q There have been two leaks, one that pertained to possible facilities in Europe; and another that pertained to this NSA matter. There are officials who have had various characterizations of the degree of damage done by those. How would you characterize the damage done by those two reports?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There clearly has been damage done.
Q Which has been the more harmful, in your view?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into just sort of ranking them, then you get into why is one more damaging than the other. One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.
Q Mr. Vice President, thank you very much for doing this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Brit.
END 2:28 P.M. EST"
Gary Wasserman Argues That Israeli Sying Is A Good Thing - in the Washington Post
Plugging Leaks, Chilling Debate: "Plugging Leaks, Chilling Debate
By Gary Wasserman
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page A27
"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law. That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."
-- Judge T.S. Ellis III
The judge was speaking last month after sentencing a former Pentagon desk officer for Iran to prison for sharing classified information too widely. It didn't seem to matter that Lawrence Franklin was a conservative former Air Force colonel who was using contacts outside of government to lobby for a harder line on Iran. In a week when an American soldier was given no more than a reprimand for smothering an Iraqi general to death, Franklin's 12 1/2 -year sentence was a reminder that this is an administration more horrified by leaks than torture.
The judge's comments were directed to a related trial that he will oversee on April 25 of two former staffers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. They face the possibility of 10 years in prison for allegedly having classified information verbally leaked by Franklin and others and passing it along to reporters and diplomats.
Not content with jailing an employee for mishandling classified material, the government is applying to private citizens a never-used part of the 1917 Espionage Act. Its expanding secrecy powers threaten to paralyze public participation in making foreign policy. The experts, lobbyists and journalists who, in the normal routines of their jobs, discuss confidential information could now become criminals.
No one disputes that verbal leaks occurred; two years of FBI wiretaps on AIPAC recorded them. But despite all this wiretap evidence, the government felt it necessary to add a "sting" operation, which was engineered with Franklin's help in the summer of 2004. Having "flipped" Franklin after finding confidential documents that he had carelessly brought home to work on, the government had him call the AIPAC lobbyists -- whom he hadn't spoken to in a year -- on a supposedly life-or-death matter. He claimed that Iran was planning to kidnap and kill Americans and Israelis working in Iraq. Franklin said he wanted to warn the White House, something that he, as a mid-level analyst, didn't have the clout to do himself.
The lobbyists fell for the appeal to save lives. They contacted a Post reporter and an Israeli diplomat and tried, unsuccessfully, to reach the National Security Council. Months afterward, under what former staffers say was considerable pressure from the government, AIPAC fired them. A year after the sting they were indicted. U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty announced the indictments last August, declaring that "when it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law." Alas, nothing could be less clear.
Information is the lifeblood of policymaking. Expanding restrictions on information adds greatly to the power of the executive; criminalizing citizens' contact with that information adds even greater uncertainty. Any Washington power lunch touching on national security issues -- between Reporter A or Lobbyist B and Official C -- inevitably contains something that someone has classified. Who's to know what's legal? Are "classified" White House discussions about Hurricane Katrina to be treated the same as troop movements? Even if the information is classified, is the official authorized to disclose it? In a long conversation, where is the "clear line"? For some leaks Bob Woodward gets a bestseller; Steve Rosen may get jail.
Officials have their own uses for leaks. In the past AIPAC has provided an informal back channel to the Israeli government. Giving a lobbyist details about illegal Israeli settlements is a diplomatic warning to Jerusalem, but only if he passes them on. How is he to know the difference between an authorized official and an FBI sting?
For better or worse, the rules of this game have traditionally been enforced by the players. Reporters receiving national security leaks have shown them to officials for confirmation and comment. Advocates and experts who spread information meant only for their ears were cut off from further briefings. This rough-and-ready marketplace lasted throughout the Cold War. Now a more fearful leadership finds such practices intolerable.
One argument for why autocratic regimes such as pre-World War II Germany and Japan have engaged in risky foreign adventures is that these narrow elites are not subject to the kind of outside review by knowledgeable people that exists in democracies. The run-up to the Iraq war has raised questions about whether America's marketplace of ideas in foreign policy is still viable. Did the Bush administration's success in gaining public approval for its invasion of Iraq have something to do with its ability to control secret information in a way that muted doubts about inflated claims of Iraqi threats?
Judge Ellis has it backward. A democratic government does not, in general, "authorize" the information citizens are allowed. Given enough information, citizens authorize and control their government. Or at least we used to.
The writer teaches lobbying at Georgetown University, where he is an adjunct professor of government."
By Gary Wasserman
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page A27
"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law. That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."
-- Judge T.S. Ellis III
The judge was speaking last month after sentencing a former Pentagon desk officer for Iran to prison for sharing classified information too widely. It didn't seem to matter that Lawrence Franklin was a conservative former Air Force colonel who was using contacts outside of government to lobby for a harder line on Iran. In a week when an American soldier was given no more than a reprimand for smothering an Iraqi general to death, Franklin's 12 1/2 -year sentence was a reminder that this is an administration more horrified by leaks than torture.
The judge's comments were directed to a related trial that he will oversee on April 25 of two former staffers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. They face the possibility of 10 years in prison for allegedly having classified information verbally leaked by Franklin and others and passing it along to reporters and diplomats.
Not content with jailing an employee for mishandling classified material, the government is applying to private citizens a never-used part of the 1917 Espionage Act. Its expanding secrecy powers threaten to paralyze public participation in making foreign policy. The experts, lobbyists and journalists who, in the normal routines of their jobs, discuss confidential information could now become criminals.
No one disputes that verbal leaks occurred; two years of FBI wiretaps on AIPAC recorded them. But despite all this wiretap evidence, the government felt it necessary to add a "sting" operation, which was engineered with Franklin's help in the summer of 2004. Having "flipped" Franklin after finding confidential documents that he had carelessly brought home to work on, the government had him call the AIPAC lobbyists -- whom he hadn't spoken to in a year -- on a supposedly life-or-death matter. He claimed that Iran was planning to kidnap and kill Americans and Israelis working in Iraq. Franklin said he wanted to warn the White House, something that he, as a mid-level analyst, didn't have the clout to do himself.
The lobbyists fell for the appeal to save lives. They contacted a Post reporter and an Israeli diplomat and tried, unsuccessfully, to reach the National Security Council. Months afterward, under what former staffers say was considerable pressure from the government, AIPAC fired them. A year after the sting they were indicted. U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty announced the indictments last August, declaring that "when it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law." Alas, nothing could be less clear.
Information is the lifeblood of policymaking. Expanding restrictions on information adds greatly to the power of the executive; criminalizing citizens' contact with that information adds even greater uncertainty. Any Washington power lunch touching on national security issues -- between Reporter A or Lobbyist B and Official C -- inevitably contains something that someone has classified. Who's to know what's legal? Are "classified" White House discussions about Hurricane Katrina to be treated the same as troop movements? Even if the information is classified, is the official authorized to disclose it? In a long conversation, where is the "clear line"? For some leaks Bob Woodward gets a bestseller; Steve Rosen may get jail.
Officials have their own uses for leaks. In the past AIPAC has provided an informal back channel to the Israeli government. Giving a lobbyist details about illegal Israeli settlements is a diplomatic warning to Jerusalem, but only if he passes them on. How is he to know the difference between an authorized official and an FBI sting?
For better or worse, the rules of this game have traditionally been enforced by the players. Reporters receiving national security leaks have shown them to officials for confirmation and comment. Advocates and experts who spread information meant only for their ears were cut off from further briefings. This rough-and-ready marketplace lasted throughout the Cold War. Now a more fearful leadership finds such practices intolerable.
One argument for why autocratic regimes such as pre-World War II Germany and Japan have engaged in risky foreign adventures is that these narrow elites are not subject to the kind of outside review by knowledgeable people that exists in democracies. The run-up to the Iraq war has raised questions about whether America's marketplace of ideas in foreign policy is still viable. Did the Bush administration's success in gaining public approval for its invasion of Iraq have something to do with its ability to control secret information in a way that muted doubts about inflated claims of Iraqi threats?
Judge Ellis has it backward. A democratic government does not, in general, "authorize" the information citizens are allowed. Given enough information, citizens authorize and control their government. Or at least we used to.
The writer teaches lobbying at Georgetown University, where he is an adjunct professor of government."
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info - Yahoo! News
Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info - Yahoo! News: "Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
44 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said, while refusing to elaborate.
A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could foreshadow a Libby defense.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.
On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.
In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.
A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.
But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involves more than simply constructing legal arguments.
"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."
An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such a approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it.""
44 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said, while refusing to elaborate.
A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could foreshadow a Libby defense.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.
On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.
In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.
A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.
But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involves more than simply constructing legal arguments.
"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."
An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such a approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it.""
Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com: "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux
By Robert Parry
February 13, 2006
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, has written a critique of the Bush administration's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq that, in effect, corroborates the British “Downing Street Memo” in accusing the Bush administration of rigging the evidence to justify the invasion.
The British memo recounted a July 23, 2002, meeting in which Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, told Prime Minister Tony Blair about discussions in Washington with George W. Bush's top national security officials. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove said, according to the minutes.
After the “Downing Street Memo” was revealed in Great Britain in 2005, Bush's spokesmen heatedly denied its claims and major U.S. news outlets dismissed its significance. But in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Pillar offers a matching account. He wrote that the administration didn't just play games with the traditional notion that objective analysis should inform responsible policy, but “turned the entire model upside down.”
“The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made,” Pillar wrote. “The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- 'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments.”
These two accounts -- which are further bolstered by first-hand statements from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson -- reveal an administration long determined to invade Iraq and assembling reasons that would scare the American people into supporting an unprovoked war.
Yet, while the American public has a right to be furious about getting tricked into a war that has killed nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, there are other concerns about why the U.S. intelligence community let itself be so manipulated, staying silent when a strong protest to Congress might have derailed Bush's scheme.
On Oct. 23, 2003, Consortiumnews.com addressed this longer-range question of why U.S. intelligence failed. That story, which is reprinted in an updated form below, shows that the politicization of intelligence has been a goal of neoconservative operatives for three decades. They have long understood the value of turning the principle of objective analysis on its head:
In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.
CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”
Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by right-wing ideologues over the past quarter century.
Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation. [More on this below. Also see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated from the White House campaign, beginning in July 2003, to discredit retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. That retaliation included the exposure of Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA officer.
Dating Back to Watergate
Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.
At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.
Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.
But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and were granted access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
“Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 [1976] signed off on the experiment with the notation, ‘Let her fly!!,” wrote Anne Hessing Cahn after reviewing “Team B” documents that were released more than a decade ago. [See “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA’s official assessments. The elder Bush’s rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn’t have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan “Star Wars” missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA’s professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow’s capabilities and intentions. “The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup,” wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan’s transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition team report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.” [For details, see Mark Perry’s Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against “death squad” regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners’ animosity toward the CIA’s analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration’s campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan’s Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his protégé, Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
“The CIA’s objectivity on the Soviet Union ended abruptly in 1981, when Casey became the DCI [director of central intelligence] – and the first one to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. Gates became Casey’s deputy director for intelligence in 1982 and chaired the National Intelligence Council,” wrote former CIA senior analyst Melvyn Goodman. [See Foreign Policy magazine, summer 1997.]
Analysts Under Fire
Under Gates, CIA intelligence analysts found themselves the victims of bureaucratic pummeling. According to several former CIA analysts whom I interviewed, analysts faced job threats; some were berated or even had their analytical papers thrown in their faces; some were subjected to allegations of psychiatric unfitness.
The Gates leadership team proved itself responsive to White House demands, giving serious attention to right-wing press reports from around the world. The Reagan administration, for instance, wanted evidence to support right-wing media claims that pinned European terrorism on the Soviets. The CIA analysts, however, knew the charges were bogus partly because they were based on “black” or false propaganda that the CIA's operations division had been planting in the European media.
The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 was viewed as another opportunity to make propaganda points against what Reagan called the “evil empire.” Though the attack had been carried out by a neo-fascist extremist from Turkey, conservative U.S. writers and journalists began to promote allegations of a secret KGB role. In this case, CIA analysts knew the charges were false because of the CIA’s penetration of East Bloc intelligence services.
But responding to White House pressure in 1985, Gates closeted a special team to push through an administration-desired paper linking the KGB to the attack. Though the analysts opposed what they believed to be a dishonest intelligence report, they couldn’t stop the paper from leaving CIA and being circulated around Washington.
As the CIA’s traditions of analytical objectivity continued to erode in the 1980s, analysts who raised unwelcome questions in politically sensitive areas found their jobs on the line.
For instance, analysts were pressured to back off an assessment that Pakistan was violating nuclear proliferation safeguards with the goal of building an atomic bomb. At the time, Pakistan was assisting the Reagan administration’s covert operation in Afghanistan, which was considered a higher priority than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations division and the Pakistani intelligence service were helping Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, battle Soviet troops.
One analyst involved in the Pakistan nuclear-bomb assessment told me that the CIA higher-ups applied almost the opposite standards that were used two decades later in alleging an Iraqi nuclear program. In the Pakistani case, the Reagan administration blocked warnings about a Pakistani bomb “until the last bolt was turned” while more recently on Iraq, speculative worst-case scenarios were applied, the analyst said.
One consequence of giving Pakistan a pass on proliferation was that Pakistan did succeed in developing nuclear weapons, which have contributed to an escalating arms race with India in South Asia. It also has created the potential for Islamic extremists to gain control of the Bomb by taking power in Pakistan.
Missing the Fall
The politicization of intelligence in the 1980s had other effects. Under pressure always to exaggerate the Soviet threat, analysts had no incentive to point out the truth, which was that the Soviet Union was a decaying, corrupt and inefficient regime tottering on the brink of collapse. To justify soaring military budgets and interventions in Third World conflicts, the Reagan administration wanted the Soviets always to be depicted as 10 feet tall.
Ironically, this systematic distortion of the CIA’s Soviet intelligence assessments turned out to be a political win-win for Reagan and his supporters.
Not only did Congress appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for military projects favored by the conservatives, the U.S. news media largely gave Reagan the credit when the Soviet Union “suddenly” collapsed in 1991. The CIA did take some lumps for “missing” one of the most significant political events of the century, but Reagan’s success in “winning the Cold War” is now enshrined as conventional wisdom.
The accepted version of events goes this way: the Soviets were on the ascendance before Reagan took office, but thanks to Reagan’s strategic missile defense program and his support for right-wing insurgencies, such as arming contra rebels in Nicaragua and Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell apart.
A more realistic assessment would point out that the Soviets had been in decline for decades, largely from the devastation caused by World War II and the effective containment strategies followed by presidents from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The rapid development of technology in the West and the lure of Western consumer goods accelerated this Soviet collapse.
But the U.S. news media never mounted a serious assessment of how the Cold War really was won. The conservative press corps naturally pressed its favored theme of Reagan turning the tide, while a complacent mainstream press offered little additional context.
'Politicization'
The plight of the CIA analysts in the 1980s also received little attention in Washington amid the triumphalism of the early 1990s. The story did surface briefly in 1991 during Gates’s confirmation hearings to become President George H.W. Bush’s CIA director. Then, a group of CIA analysts braved the administration’s wrath by protesting the “politicization of intelligence.”
Led by Soviet specialist Mel Goodman, the dissidents fingered Gates as the key “politicization” culprit. Their testimony added to doubts about Gates, who was under a cloud for his dubious testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal and allegations that he had played a role in another covert scheme to assist Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren – to push Gates through.
Boren’s key staff aide who limited the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Those political chits would serve Tenet well a decade later when the younger George Bush protected Tenet as his own CIA director, even after the intelligence failure of Sept. 11, 2001, and embarrassing revelations about faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
In the early 1990s. with the Cold War over, the need for objective intelligence also seemed less pressing. Political leaders apparently didn’t grasp the potential danger of allowing a corrupted U.S. intelligence process to remain in place. There was a brief window for action with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, but the incoming Democrats lacked the political will to demand serious reform.
The “politicization” issue was put squarely before Clinton’s incoming national security team by former CIA analyst Peter Dickson, who wrote a two-page memo on Dec. 10, 1992, to Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a top Clinton national security aide. Dickson was an analyst who suffered retaliation after refusing to rewrite a 1983 assessment that noted Soviet restraint on nuclear proliferation. His CIA superiors didn’t want to give the Soviets any credit for demonstrating caution on the nuclear technology front. When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness.
Dickson urged Clinton to appoint a new CIA director who understood “the deeper internal problems relating to the politicization of intelligence and the festering morale problem within the CIA.” In urging a housecleaning, Dickson wrote, “This problem of intellectual corruption will not disappear overnight, even with vigorous remedial action. However, the new CIA director will be wise if he realizes from the start the dangers in relying on advice of senior CIA office managers who during the past 12 years advanced and prospered in their careers precisely because they had no qualms about suppressing intelligence or slanting analysis to suit the interest of Casey and Gates.”
The appeals from Dickson and other CIA veterans were largely ignored by Clinton and his top aides, who were more interested in turning around the U.S. economy and enacting some modest social programs. Although Gates was removed as CIA director, Clinton appointed James Woolsey, a neo-conservative Democrat who had worked closely with the Reagan-Bush administrations. Under Woolsey and Clinton’s subsequent CIA directors, the Gates team sans Gates consolidated its bureaucratic power.
The old ideal of intelligence analysis free from political taint was never restored. Clinton’s final CIA director was George Tenet, who was kept on by George W. Bush in 2001. In violation of the CIA’s long-standing tradition of avoiding even the appearance of partisanship, Tenet happily presided over the ceremony that renamed the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters the George Bush Center for Intelligence, after George Bush senior.
The Iraq Debacle
Tenet also has proved himself a loyal bureaucrat to the second Bush administration. For instance, in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council about Iraq’s alleged WMD program, Tenet was prominently seated behind Powell, giving the CIA’s imprimatur to Powell’s assertions that turned out to be a mixture of unproved assertions, exaggerations and outright lies. At one point in his speech, Powell even altered the text of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials to make their comments appear incriminating. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Bush's Alderaan."]
“If one goes back to that very long presentation [by Powell], point by point, one finds that this was not a very honest explanation,” said Greg Thielmann, a former senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in an interview with PBS Frontline. “I have to conclude Secretary Powell was being a loyal secretary of state, a ‘good soldier’ as it were, building the administration’s case before the international community.” [For details, see Frontline’s “Truth, War and Consequences.”]
In the Foreign Affairs article, Pillar noted that Powell's U.N. speech also compromised the objectivity of the CIA on Iraq because “the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in [Powell's] intelligence-laden presentation.”
Pillar added that the CIA also was compromised “in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.”
Though Tenet’s primary responsibility should have been to the integrity of the intelligence product, he was helping Powell and the White House present a largely bogus case before the U.N.
After the March 2003 invasion, as the case for Iraq’s possession of trigger-ready WMD fell apart, the Washington debate turned to who was at fault for the shoddy intelligence.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25, 2003, Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid offered a clue when he compared the accuracy of tactical intelligence in the Iraq war versus the faulty strategic intelligence.
“Intelligence was the most accurate that I have ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the operational level, and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction,” said Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for Iraq.
In other words, the intelligence handled by low-level personnel was excellent. It was the intelligence that went through senior levels of the Bush administration that failed.
The WMD issue really came down to two questions: Was the CIA’s intelligence analysis that bad or did the White House cherry-pick the intelligence that it wanted to march the country off to war? The answer appears to be that both points were true. A thoroughly politicized CIA slanted the intelligence in the direction that Bush wanted and the White House then trimmed off any caveats the CIA may have included.
The CIA’s internal complaint that it was just the victim of administration ideologues was undercut by its own analytical products, including a post-invasion report claiming that two captured Iraqi trailers were labs to produce chemical or biological weapons. That claim later collapsed as evidence emerged to show that the labs were for making hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. [For an early critique of this CIA report, see Consortiumnews.com’s "America's Matrix."]
Plus, while Tenet and other CIA officials noted that they objected to other bogus administration claims, such as the assertion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, those protests were mostly half-hearted and made behind closed doors. Bush was only forced to back off the yellowcake claim, which he cited in his 2003 State of the Union Address, after former Ambassador Wilson went public with evidence that the allegation was a fraud.
'Stovepipe'
Yet it's also true that the Bush administration didn't want to chance having its Iraqi WMD allegations vetted by any serious intelligence professionals. So, at the State Department, Pentagon and White House, senior political officials created their own channels for accessing raw or untested intelligence that was then used to buttress the charges.
In a New Yorker article about CIA analysts on the defensive, journalist Seymour Hersh described this “stovepiping” process of sending raw intelligence to the top. Intelligence agencies have historically objected to this technique because policy makers will tend to select unvetted information that serves their purposes and use it to discredit the more measured assessments of intelligence professionals.
“The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments,” a former CIA official told Hersh. “And they blame Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.” [See Hersh’s “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2003]
Pillar wrote that the battle between the intelligence analysts and the policymakers came to a head over the White House desire to assert that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda, a claim that the intelligence analysts had rejected despite repetitious demands from Vice President Cheney's office that the CIA corroborate the supposed link.
“The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group,” Pillar wrote. “The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and its briefing accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.”
But the intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones coming under attack for pointing out evidence that didn’t conform to the Bush administration’s propaganda. From the start of its drive to invade Iraq, the administration treated going to war like a giant public relations game, with the goal of manufacturing consent or at least silencing any meaningful opposition.
Evidence that undermined Bush’s conclusions was minimized or discarded. People who revealed unwanted evidence were personally discredited or intimidated. When former Ambassador Wilson reported that he had been assigned by the CIA to investigate the Niger yellowcake claims and found them bogus, administration officials leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed Plame's career and may have put at risk agents who worked with her.
'Slime and Defend'
Though Bush publicly denounced the leak, an unnamed Republican aide on Capitol Hill told the New York Times that the underlying White House strategy was to “slime and defend,” that is to “slime” Wilson and “defend” Bush. [NYT, Oct. 2, 2003]
The “slime and defend” strategy has been carried forward by conservative news outlets with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times attacking Wilson's motives, even as Wilson’s debunking of the Niger allegations has been borne out by other investigations.
“Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man accusing the White House of a vendetta against his wife, is an ex-diplomat turned Democratic partisan,” declared a front-page article in the Washington Times. “Mr. Wilson told the Washington Post he and his wife are already discussing who will play them in the movie.” [Washington Times, Oct. 2, 2003]
The Washington Times returned to its anti-Wilson campaign several days later. “As for Mr. Wilson himself, his hatred of Mr. Bush’s policies borders on the pathological,” wrote Washington Times columnist Donald Lambro on Oct. 6, 2003. “This is a far-left Democrat who has been relentlessly bashing the president’s Iraq war policies. … The mystery behind this dubious investigation is why this Bush-hater was chosen for so sensitive a mission.”
The Wall Street Journal also raised questions about Wilson’s motives. “Joe Wilson (Ms. Plame’s husband) has made no secret of his broad disagreement with Bush policy since outing himself with an op-ed,” the Journal wrote in a lead editorial on Oct. 3, 2003.
Strangely, these attacks on Wilson’s alleged bias (which he denies) continued even as Bush’s hand-picked Iraqi weapons inspector David Kay was confirming Wilson’s findings. In his report to the CIA and Congress, Kay acknowledged that no evidence has been found to support the stories about Iraq seeking African uranium.
“To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material,” Kay said.
The disconnect between fact and spin apparently has grown so complete among Bush’s allies that they can’t stop attacking Wilson’s findings as biased even when the facts he uncovered are being confirmed by one of Bush’s own investigators.
The clumsy attempt to discredit or punish Wilson eventually led to disclosures that Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby took part in revealing Plame's identity to reporters. In 2005, Libby was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about the leak. Rove apparently remains under investigation.
'Freedom Fries'
But the attacks on Wilson do not stand alone. In the drive to limit debate about Bush’s case for war, his allies ostracized virtually all major critics of the administration’s WMD claims, including the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Blacklisting campaigns also were mounted against celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn and the music group Dixie Chicks, for criticizing Bush’s rush to war. When France urged more time for U.N. weapons inspections, Bush’s supporters organized boycotts of French products, poured French wine in gutters and renamed “French fries” as “Freedom Fries.”
As with the Wilson case, Bush and his supporters didn't let the failure to find the alleged trigger-ready WMD stop their efforts to discredit these critics. Instead of apologies, for instance, Ritter continued to suffer from conservative smears about his patriotism.
In one particularly smarmy performance on June 12, 2003, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly teamed up with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., to air suspicions that Ritter had been bribed by the Iraqis to help them cover up their illegal weapons. Neither O’Reilly nor Pence had any evidence that Ritter accepted a bribe, so they framed the segment as a demand that the FBI investigate Ritter with the purported goal of clearing him of any suspicion of treason.
The segment noted that a London newspaper reporter had found Iraqi documents showing that Ritter had been offered some gold as gifts for his family. “I turned down the gifts and reported it to the FBI when I came back,” Ritter said in an interview with Fox News.
Though Ritter’s statement stood uncontradicted, O’Reilly and Pence demanded that the FBI disclose what it knew about Ritter’s denial. “Now, we want to know whether that was true,” said O’Reilly about whether Ritter had reported the alleged bribe. “The FBI wouldn’t tell us.” O’Reilly then asked Pence what he had done to get the FBI to investigate Ritter.
“After that report in the British newspaper, many of us on Capitol Hill were very concerned,” Pence said. “Candidly, Bill, there’s no one who’s done more damage to the argument of the United States that Iraq was in possession of large stores of weapons of mass destruction leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom other than Scott Ritter, and so the very suggestion that … there’s evidence of treasonous activity or even bribery, I believe, merits an investigation. I contacted the attorney general about that directly.”
Pence’s point was clear – that Ritter’s role as a skeptic about Bush’s WMD claims made him an appropriate target for a treason investigation. [Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 12, 2003]
Backward Filter
Time and again, Bush and his administration have replaced the principle that good intelligence makes for good policy with the near-opposite approach: you start with a conclusion and then distort all available information to sell the pre-ordained policy to a gullible, ill-informed or frightened public.
The WMD intelligence was pushed through a kind of backward filter. Instead of removing the imprecision that comes with raw intelligence, the Bush administration’s intelligence process shoved through the dross as long as it fit with Bush’s goal of bolstering political support for the war and removed the refined intelligence that undercut his desired actions.
Unlike the fictional president in Tom Clancy's “Sum of All Fears” – who was tricked into that “really bad information” – Bush and his team have actively sought out the bad information and assembled it as justification for going to war. This administration, which can sometimes act in a manner stranger-than-fiction, didn't just peer into the fog of war. It set up the fog machine.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'"
By Robert Parry
February 13, 2006
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, has written a critique of the Bush administration's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq that, in effect, corroborates the British “Downing Street Memo” in accusing the Bush administration of rigging the evidence to justify the invasion.
The British memo recounted a July 23, 2002, meeting in which Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, told Prime Minister Tony Blair about discussions in Washington with George W. Bush's top national security officials. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove said, according to the minutes.
After the “Downing Street Memo” was revealed in Great Britain in 2005, Bush's spokesmen heatedly denied its claims and major U.S. news outlets dismissed its significance. But in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Pillar offers a matching account. He wrote that the administration didn't just play games with the traditional notion that objective analysis should inform responsible policy, but “turned the entire model upside down.”
“The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made,” Pillar wrote. “The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- 'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments.”
These two accounts -- which are further bolstered by first-hand statements from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson -- reveal an administration long determined to invade Iraq and assembling reasons that would scare the American people into supporting an unprovoked war.
Yet, while the American public has a right to be furious about getting tricked into a war that has killed nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, there are other concerns about why the U.S. intelligence community let itself be so manipulated, staying silent when a strong protest to Congress might have derailed Bush's scheme.
On Oct. 23, 2003, Consortiumnews.com addressed this longer-range question of why U.S. intelligence failed. That story, which is reprinted in an updated form below, shows that the politicization of intelligence has been a goal of neoconservative operatives for three decades. They have long understood the value of turning the principle of objective analysis on its head:
In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.
CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”
Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by right-wing ideologues over the past quarter century.
Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation. [More on this below. Also see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated from the White House campaign, beginning in July 2003, to discredit retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. That retaliation included the exposure of Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA officer.
Dating Back to Watergate
Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.
At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.
Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.
But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and were granted access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
“Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 [1976] signed off on the experiment with the notation, ‘Let her fly!!,” wrote Anne Hessing Cahn after reviewing “Team B” documents that were released more than a decade ago. [See “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA’s official assessments. The elder Bush’s rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn’t have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan “Star Wars” missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA’s professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow’s capabilities and intentions. “The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup,” wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan’s transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition team report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.” [For details, see Mark Perry’s Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against “death squad” regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners’ animosity toward the CIA’s analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration’s campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan’s Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his protégé, Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
“The CIA’s objectivity on the Soviet Union ended abruptly in 1981, when Casey became the DCI [director of central intelligence] – and the first one to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. Gates became Casey’s deputy director for intelligence in 1982 and chaired the National Intelligence Council,” wrote former CIA senior analyst Melvyn Goodman. [See Foreign Policy magazine, summer 1997.]
Analysts Under Fire
Under Gates, CIA intelligence analysts found themselves the victims of bureaucratic pummeling. According to several former CIA analysts whom I interviewed, analysts faced job threats; some were berated or even had their analytical papers thrown in their faces; some were subjected to allegations of psychiatric unfitness.
The Gates leadership team proved itself responsive to White House demands, giving serious attention to right-wing press reports from around the world. The Reagan administration, for instance, wanted evidence to support right-wing media claims that pinned European terrorism on the Soviets. The CIA analysts, however, knew the charges were bogus partly because they were based on “black” or false propaganda that the CIA's operations division had been planting in the European media.
The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 was viewed as another opportunity to make propaganda points against what Reagan called the “evil empire.” Though the attack had been carried out by a neo-fascist extremist from Turkey, conservative U.S. writers and journalists began to promote allegations of a secret KGB role. In this case, CIA analysts knew the charges were false because of the CIA’s penetration of East Bloc intelligence services.
But responding to White House pressure in 1985, Gates closeted a special team to push through an administration-desired paper linking the KGB to the attack. Though the analysts opposed what they believed to be a dishonest intelligence report, they couldn’t stop the paper from leaving CIA and being circulated around Washington.
As the CIA’s traditions of analytical objectivity continued to erode in the 1980s, analysts who raised unwelcome questions in politically sensitive areas found their jobs on the line.
For instance, analysts were pressured to back off an assessment that Pakistan was violating nuclear proliferation safeguards with the goal of building an atomic bomb. At the time, Pakistan was assisting the Reagan administration’s covert operation in Afghanistan, which was considered a higher priority than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations division and the Pakistani intelligence service were helping Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, battle Soviet troops.
One analyst involved in the Pakistan nuclear-bomb assessment told me that the CIA higher-ups applied almost the opposite standards that were used two decades later in alleging an Iraqi nuclear program. In the Pakistani case, the Reagan administration blocked warnings about a Pakistani bomb “until the last bolt was turned” while more recently on Iraq, speculative worst-case scenarios were applied, the analyst said.
One consequence of giving Pakistan a pass on proliferation was that Pakistan did succeed in developing nuclear weapons, which have contributed to an escalating arms race with India in South Asia. It also has created the potential for Islamic extremists to gain control of the Bomb by taking power in Pakistan.
Missing the Fall
The politicization of intelligence in the 1980s had other effects. Under pressure always to exaggerate the Soviet threat, analysts had no incentive to point out the truth, which was that the Soviet Union was a decaying, corrupt and inefficient regime tottering on the brink of collapse. To justify soaring military budgets and interventions in Third World conflicts, the Reagan administration wanted the Soviets always to be depicted as 10 feet tall.
Ironically, this systematic distortion of the CIA’s Soviet intelligence assessments turned out to be a political win-win for Reagan and his supporters.
Not only did Congress appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for military projects favored by the conservatives, the U.S. news media largely gave Reagan the credit when the Soviet Union “suddenly” collapsed in 1991. The CIA did take some lumps for “missing” one of the most significant political events of the century, but Reagan’s success in “winning the Cold War” is now enshrined as conventional wisdom.
The accepted version of events goes this way: the Soviets were on the ascendance before Reagan took office, but thanks to Reagan’s strategic missile defense program and his support for right-wing insurgencies, such as arming contra rebels in Nicaragua and Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell apart.
A more realistic assessment would point out that the Soviets had been in decline for decades, largely from the devastation caused by World War II and the effective containment strategies followed by presidents from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The rapid development of technology in the West and the lure of Western consumer goods accelerated this Soviet collapse.
But the U.S. news media never mounted a serious assessment of how the Cold War really was won. The conservative press corps naturally pressed its favored theme of Reagan turning the tide, while a complacent mainstream press offered little additional context.
'Politicization'
The plight of the CIA analysts in the 1980s also received little attention in Washington amid the triumphalism of the early 1990s. The story did surface briefly in 1991 during Gates’s confirmation hearings to become President George H.W. Bush’s CIA director. Then, a group of CIA analysts braved the administration’s wrath by protesting the “politicization of intelligence.”
Led by Soviet specialist Mel Goodman, the dissidents fingered Gates as the key “politicization” culprit. Their testimony added to doubts about Gates, who was under a cloud for his dubious testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal and allegations that he had played a role in another covert scheme to assist Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren – to push Gates through.
Boren’s key staff aide who limited the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Those political chits would serve Tenet well a decade later when the younger George Bush protected Tenet as his own CIA director, even after the intelligence failure of Sept. 11, 2001, and embarrassing revelations about faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
In the early 1990s. with the Cold War over, the need for objective intelligence also seemed less pressing. Political leaders apparently didn’t grasp the potential danger of allowing a corrupted U.S. intelligence process to remain in place. There was a brief window for action with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, but the incoming Democrats lacked the political will to demand serious reform.
The “politicization” issue was put squarely before Clinton’s incoming national security team by former CIA analyst Peter Dickson, who wrote a two-page memo on Dec. 10, 1992, to Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a top Clinton national security aide. Dickson was an analyst who suffered retaliation after refusing to rewrite a 1983 assessment that noted Soviet restraint on nuclear proliferation. His CIA superiors didn’t want to give the Soviets any credit for demonstrating caution on the nuclear technology front. When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness.
Dickson urged Clinton to appoint a new CIA director who understood “the deeper internal problems relating to the politicization of intelligence and the festering morale problem within the CIA.” In urging a housecleaning, Dickson wrote, “This problem of intellectual corruption will not disappear overnight, even with vigorous remedial action. However, the new CIA director will be wise if he realizes from the start the dangers in relying on advice of senior CIA office managers who during the past 12 years advanced and prospered in their careers precisely because they had no qualms about suppressing intelligence or slanting analysis to suit the interest of Casey and Gates.”
The appeals from Dickson and other CIA veterans were largely ignored by Clinton and his top aides, who were more interested in turning around the U.S. economy and enacting some modest social programs. Although Gates was removed as CIA director, Clinton appointed James Woolsey, a neo-conservative Democrat who had worked closely with the Reagan-Bush administrations. Under Woolsey and Clinton’s subsequent CIA directors, the Gates team sans Gates consolidated its bureaucratic power.
The old ideal of intelligence analysis free from political taint was never restored. Clinton’s final CIA director was George Tenet, who was kept on by George W. Bush in 2001. In violation of the CIA’s long-standing tradition of avoiding even the appearance of partisanship, Tenet happily presided over the ceremony that renamed the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters the George Bush Center for Intelligence, after George Bush senior.
The Iraq Debacle
Tenet also has proved himself a loyal bureaucrat to the second Bush administration. For instance, in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council about Iraq’s alleged WMD program, Tenet was prominently seated behind Powell, giving the CIA’s imprimatur to Powell’s assertions that turned out to be a mixture of unproved assertions, exaggerations and outright lies. At one point in his speech, Powell even altered the text of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials to make their comments appear incriminating. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Bush's Alderaan."]
“If one goes back to that very long presentation [by Powell], point by point, one finds that this was not a very honest explanation,” said Greg Thielmann, a former senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in an interview with PBS Frontline. “I have to conclude Secretary Powell was being a loyal secretary of state, a ‘good soldier’ as it were, building the administration’s case before the international community.” [For details, see Frontline’s “Truth, War and Consequences.”]
In the Foreign Affairs article, Pillar noted that Powell's U.N. speech also compromised the objectivity of the CIA on Iraq because “the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in [Powell's] intelligence-laden presentation.”
Pillar added that the CIA also was compromised “in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.”
Though Tenet’s primary responsibility should have been to the integrity of the intelligence product, he was helping Powell and the White House present a largely bogus case before the U.N.
After the March 2003 invasion, as the case for Iraq’s possession of trigger-ready WMD fell apart, the Washington debate turned to who was at fault for the shoddy intelligence.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25, 2003, Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid offered a clue when he compared the accuracy of tactical intelligence in the Iraq war versus the faulty strategic intelligence.
“Intelligence was the most accurate that I have ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the operational level, and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction,” said Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for Iraq.
In other words, the intelligence handled by low-level personnel was excellent. It was the intelligence that went through senior levels of the Bush administration that failed.
The WMD issue really came down to two questions: Was the CIA’s intelligence analysis that bad or did the White House cherry-pick the intelligence that it wanted to march the country off to war? The answer appears to be that both points were true. A thoroughly politicized CIA slanted the intelligence in the direction that Bush wanted and the White House then trimmed off any caveats the CIA may have included.
The CIA’s internal complaint that it was just the victim of administration ideologues was undercut by its own analytical products, including a post-invasion report claiming that two captured Iraqi trailers were labs to produce chemical or biological weapons. That claim later collapsed as evidence emerged to show that the labs were for making hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. [For an early critique of this CIA report, see Consortiumnews.com’s "America's Matrix."]
Plus, while Tenet and other CIA officials noted that they objected to other bogus administration claims, such as the assertion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, those protests were mostly half-hearted and made behind closed doors. Bush was only forced to back off the yellowcake claim, which he cited in his 2003 State of the Union Address, after former Ambassador Wilson went public with evidence that the allegation was a fraud.
'Stovepipe'
Yet it's also true that the Bush administration didn't want to chance having its Iraqi WMD allegations vetted by any serious intelligence professionals. So, at the State Department, Pentagon and White House, senior political officials created their own channels for accessing raw or untested intelligence that was then used to buttress the charges.
In a New Yorker article about CIA analysts on the defensive, journalist Seymour Hersh described this “stovepiping” process of sending raw intelligence to the top. Intelligence agencies have historically objected to this technique because policy makers will tend to select unvetted information that serves their purposes and use it to discredit the more measured assessments of intelligence professionals.
“The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments,” a former CIA official told Hersh. “And they blame Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.” [See Hersh’s “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2003]
Pillar wrote that the battle between the intelligence analysts and the policymakers came to a head over the White House desire to assert that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda, a claim that the intelligence analysts had rejected despite repetitious demands from Vice President Cheney's office that the CIA corroborate the supposed link.
“The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group,” Pillar wrote. “The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and its briefing accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.”
But the intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones coming under attack for pointing out evidence that didn’t conform to the Bush administration’s propaganda. From the start of its drive to invade Iraq, the administration treated going to war like a giant public relations game, with the goal of manufacturing consent or at least silencing any meaningful opposition.
Evidence that undermined Bush’s conclusions was minimized or discarded. People who revealed unwanted evidence were personally discredited or intimidated. When former Ambassador Wilson reported that he had been assigned by the CIA to investigate the Niger yellowcake claims and found them bogus, administration officials leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed Plame's career and may have put at risk agents who worked with her.
'Slime and Defend'
Though Bush publicly denounced the leak, an unnamed Republican aide on Capitol Hill told the New York Times that the underlying White House strategy was to “slime and defend,” that is to “slime” Wilson and “defend” Bush. [NYT, Oct. 2, 2003]
The “slime and defend” strategy has been carried forward by conservative news outlets with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times attacking Wilson's motives, even as Wilson’s debunking of the Niger allegations has been borne out by other investigations.
“Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man accusing the White House of a vendetta against his wife, is an ex-diplomat turned Democratic partisan,” declared a front-page article in the Washington Times. “Mr. Wilson told the Washington Post he and his wife are already discussing who will play them in the movie.” [Washington Times, Oct. 2, 2003]
The Washington Times returned to its anti-Wilson campaign several days later. “As for Mr. Wilson himself, his hatred of Mr. Bush’s policies borders on the pathological,” wrote Washington Times columnist Donald Lambro on Oct. 6, 2003. “This is a far-left Democrat who has been relentlessly bashing the president’s Iraq war policies. … The mystery behind this dubious investigation is why this Bush-hater was chosen for so sensitive a mission.”
The Wall Street Journal also raised questions about Wilson’s motives. “Joe Wilson (Ms. Plame’s husband) has made no secret of his broad disagreement with Bush policy since outing himself with an op-ed,” the Journal wrote in a lead editorial on Oct. 3, 2003.
Strangely, these attacks on Wilson’s alleged bias (which he denies) continued even as Bush’s hand-picked Iraqi weapons inspector David Kay was confirming Wilson’s findings. In his report to the CIA and Congress, Kay acknowledged that no evidence has been found to support the stories about Iraq seeking African uranium.
“To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material,” Kay said.
The disconnect between fact and spin apparently has grown so complete among Bush’s allies that they can’t stop attacking Wilson’s findings as biased even when the facts he uncovered are being confirmed by one of Bush’s own investigators.
The clumsy attempt to discredit or punish Wilson eventually led to disclosures that Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby took part in revealing Plame's identity to reporters. In 2005, Libby was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about the leak. Rove apparently remains under investigation.
'Freedom Fries'
But the attacks on Wilson do not stand alone. In the drive to limit debate about Bush’s case for war, his allies ostracized virtually all major critics of the administration’s WMD claims, including the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Blacklisting campaigns also were mounted against celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn and the music group Dixie Chicks, for criticizing Bush’s rush to war. When France urged more time for U.N. weapons inspections, Bush’s supporters organized boycotts of French products, poured French wine in gutters and renamed “French fries” as “Freedom Fries.”
As with the Wilson case, Bush and his supporters didn't let the failure to find the alleged trigger-ready WMD stop their efforts to discredit these critics. Instead of apologies, for instance, Ritter continued to suffer from conservative smears about his patriotism.
In one particularly smarmy performance on June 12, 2003, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly teamed up with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., to air suspicions that Ritter had been bribed by the Iraqis to help them cover up their illegal weapons. Neither O’Reilly nor Pence had any evidence that Ritter accepted a bribe, so they framed the segment as a demand that the FBI investigate Ritter with the purported goal of clearing him of any suspicion of treason.
The segment noted that a London newspaper reporter had found Iraqi documents showing that Ritter had been offered some gold as gifts for his family. “I turned down the gifts and reported it to the FBI when I came back,” Ritter said in an interview with Fox News.
Though Ritter’s statement stood uncontradicted, O’Reilly and Pence demanded that the FBI disclose what it knew about Ritter’s denial. “Now, we want to know whether that was true,” said O’Reilly about whether Ritter had reported the alleged bribe. “The FBI wouldn’t tell us.” O’Reilly then asked Pence what he had done to get the FBI to investigate Ritter.
“After that report in the British newspaper, many of us on Capitol Hill were very concerned,” Pence said. “Candidly, Bill, there’s no one who’s done more damage to the argument of the United States that Iraq was in possession of large stores of weapons of mass destruction leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom other than Scott Ritter, and so the very suggestion that … there’s evidence of treasonous activity or even bribery, I believe, merits an investigation. I contacted the attorney general about that directly.”
Pence’s point was clear – that Ritter’s role as a skeptic about Bush’s WMD claims made him an appropriate target for a treason investigation. [Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 12, 2003]
Backward Filter
Time and again, Bush and his administration have replaced the principle that good intelligence makes for good policy with the near-opposite approach: you start with a conclusion and then distort all available information to sell the pre-ordained policy to a gullible, ill-informed or frightened public.
The WMD intelligence was pushed through a kind of backward filter. Instead of removing the imprecision that comes with raw intelligence, the Bush administration’s intelligence process shoved through the dross as long as it fit with Bush’s goal of bolstering political support for the war and removed the refined intelligence that undercut his desired actions.
Unlike the fictional president in Tom Clancy's “Sum of All Fears” – who was tricked into that “really bad information” – Bush and his team have actively sought out the bad information and assembled it as justification for going to war. This administration, which can sometimes act in a manner stranger-than-fiction, didn't just peer into the fog of war. It set up the fog machine.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'"
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