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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Cheney was hiding still more bad intel

This is mindblowing enough, but I gotta wonder who the Bush administration source was that gave this to National Journal and why that person wanted to sell Cheney out over the WMD lies.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.....

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

And Newsweek's got something on more bad Cheney intel follies. This one regarding Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case: in the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. (One cache of documents even claimed that six of 19 of the September 11 hijackers had been trained to fly in Iraq.)

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that when officials at the Bush White House learned about the existence of documents linking Saddam to Al Qaeda, they became very excited and pressured intelligence agencies to work quickly to validate and decipher them. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium.


It's all coming out now. And it's all coming out all over Dick Cheney.

Somebody's after Cheney's skin. I wish I knew who.

Later.

Just a ponder. Wilkerson blasts Cheney. Scowcroft blasts Cheney. Documents leak.

I wonder if Colin Powell is smiling somewhere. "Set me up in front of the UN..."

2 Comments:

  • a guy on democracy now said yesterday that he is likely to be named as an "unindicted co-conspirator"

    if true, i take it this means they think he did something but they either
    1. can't prove it, or
    2. aren't going to do anything about it
    ??

    By Blogger michael the tubthumper, at 6:00 PM  

  • I would guess option 1. That's why all the pressure has been applied to Libby and Rove in the last few days. The NYTimes story showing that Libby lied on Monday morning, the very public "secretive" meeting with Rove's lawyer on Tuesday.

    Fitzgerald qpparently has a history of snagging the big bear in his cases by locking up cases on the underlings and climbing up the ladder on their testimony.

    That's one of the things to watch if any of the indictments are sealed. It means that the investigation is still ongoing.

    And Cheney should look out.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 6:14 PM  

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