Dick Cheney was thrust into the centre of the criminal investigation of an intelligence leak yesterday after details were reported of a White House meeting in which the vice-president discussed a CIA officer whose cover was blown a few weeks later.

The discussion two years ago between Mr Cheney and his top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, would not represent a crime in itself, as both men have top security clearance. But the new revelations leave Mr Libby vulnerable to indictment for perjury or obstruction of justice. He is said to have testified to a grand jury that he heard about the CIA agent’s identity from journalists.

It is not known what Mr Cheney told a federal prosecutor investigating the leak, but if he failed to mention the reported meeting on June 12 2003, he could also be in danger of perjury or obstruction charges. The new report also conflicts with public remarks the vice-president made not long after the alleged White House meeting.
guardian.co.uk

Rep. Jerrold Nadler: Fitzgerald Must Broaden Investigation
“Did the Bush Administration deliberately mislead Congress about the war?

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In light of recent developments in the CIA leak investigation and other recent revelations, Congressman Jerrold Nadler today called for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to expand his investigation to include a criminal investigation to examine whether the President, the Vice President, and members of the White House Iraq Group conspired to deliberately deceive Congress into authorizing the war in Iraq.

“The CIA leak issue is only the tip of the iceberg,” Congressman Nadler said. “This is looking increasingly like a White House conspiracy aimed at misleading our country into war – in part by manufacturing now-refuted evidence in support of its rationale, in part by smearing and silencing critics, and in part by manipulating media complicity. There is mounting evidence that there may have been a well-orchestrated effort by the President, the Vice President, and other top White House officials to lie to Congress in order to get its support for the Iraq War.”

It is a crime to lie to Congress under several federal statutes. Congressman Nadler requested that Special Counsel Fitzgerald follow the leads he has already discovered and broaden his investigation to include charges of lying to Congress. In his letter to Acting Deputy Attorney General McCallum asking for a broadening of Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s investigation, Nadler cited the President’s infamous reference to African Uranium in the 2003 State of the Union Address, reports of the White House Iraq Group’s singular mission to sell the war at all costs, assertions made in the “Downing Street Memo,” and reporters’ own accounts of media manipulation.

“Honest, if mistaken, reliance on faulty intelligence to convince Congress to authorize a war is bad enough,” Congressman Nadler wrote in his letter to McCallum. “But, if, as mounting evidence is tending to show, Administration officials deliberately deceived Congress and the American people, this would constitute a criminal conspiracy against the entire country.”

Italy’s intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced.
With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leak investigation, questions are again being raised about the intelligence scandal that led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House obtained false Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Niger.

The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt later turned out to be crude forgeries, created on official stationery stolen from the African nation’s Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents — and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

The White House wants the CIA to be exempted from a proposed ban on the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects being held in United States custody.

The Senate defied a threatened presidential veto three weeks ago and passed legislation that would outlaw the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone held by the US. But the Washington Post and the New York Times, both quoting anonymous officials, said the vice-president, Dick Cheney, proposed a change so that the law would not apply to counter-terrorism operations abroad or to operations conducted by “an element” of the US government other than the defence department.
guardian.co.uk

US detainees ‘murdered’ during interrogations
10/25/05 “Associated Press” — — Washington — At least 21 detainees who died while in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were the victims of homicide and usually died during or after interrogations, according to an analysis of Defence Department data.

The analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, released today, looked at 44 deaths described in records obtained by the ACLU. Of those, the group characterised 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or “blunt force injuries”, as noted in the autopsy reports.

The 44 deaths represent a partial group of the total number of prisoners who have died in US custody overseas; more than 100 have died of natural and violent causes.

In one case, the report said, a detainee died after being smothered during interrogation by military intelligence officers in November 2003. In another case cited by the report, a prisoner died of asphyxiation and blunt force injuries after he was left standing, shackled to the top of a door frame, with a gag in his mouth.

The House bill that would reauthorize the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law includes several little-noticed provisions that would dramatically transform the federal death penalty system, allowing smaller juries to decide on executions and giving prosecutors the ability to try again if a jury deadlocks on sentencing.

The bill also triples the number of terrorism-related crimes eligible for the death penalty, adding, among others, the material support law that has been the core of the government’s legal strategy against terrorism.
washingtonpost.com

US Judge Sets December Date to Execute Nobel Peace Prize Nominee
A US judge signed a death warrant for a former street gangster and convicted killer who went on to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in tackling youth violence.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders set a December 13 date for the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, noting that his appeal against his death sentence had been rejected by the US Supreme Court on October 11.

Gigantic oil companies generally do not enjoy the best PR.

Pick your poison: Oil companies have caused tanker spills, proposed drilling into the Arctic wildlife ranges, crafted ties to shady nations and meddled in the affairs of others, and produced products that pollute.

Now, even as high gasoline prices continue to anger motorists and aggravate financial problems at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., the oil companies have begun to report record quarterly profit. Yesterday, British energy giant BP PLC reported a $6.53 billion third-quarter profit, up from $4.87 billion in the same period last year. And tomorrow, analysts expect Exxon Mobil Corp. to show that it earned nearly $9 billion over the past three months — the largest corporate quarterly profit ever.

Grumbling already has begun on Capitol Hill: Last month, one senator proposed a windfall-profit tax on oil conglomerates, and yesterday, House Republicans warned energy companies against price gouging.

To deflect the damage, the energy industry is relying on an ad campaign that was escalating even before hurricanes Katrina and Rita blitzed Gulf Coast petroleum refineries. The print and television ads are designed to educate consumers and lawmakers with a “we’re all in this together” tone.

In the pages of The Washington Post, for example, according to the paper’s ad executives, BP has taken out seven large issue ads so far this year, compared with zero through the same time last year. Exxon Mobil has had 19 so far this year, compared with 12 last year. For Chevron Corp., it’s 17 ads so far this year, compared with six last year. And the industry’s trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, has purchased seven ads in The Post so far this year, compared with none last year.
washingtonpost.com

The man believed to be the ringleader of the four London suicide bombers had extensive contacts with al-Qa’eda extremists and should have been intercepted by MI5, the BBC claimed last night.

A report said that a succession of intelligence failures had allowed Mohammad Sidique Khan, who detonated a device on a train at Edgware Road station on July 7, to “slip away” after briefly coming under scrutiny.

Khan, 30, from Dewsbury, West Yorks, was subject to a routine assessment by the security service because of an indirect connection to a suspect in an alleged terror plot in 2004.

The BBC claimed that he was secretly filmed and recorded speaking to the suspect. Khan was one of hundreds investigated but who was not judged a risk to warrant further surveillance.
telegraph.co.uk

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration is abandoning its push to develop a “bunker-buster” nuclear warhead and instead will pursue a conventional weapon that can penetrate hardened underground targets.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said Tuesday that lawmakers had agreed drop funding for the proposed nuclear bunker-buster from the Energy Department’s budget for the 12 months beginning Oct 1. He said the Energy Department had requested the move because it no longer planned to pursue a nuclear bunker-buster.

The decision was hailed by opponents of new nuclear weapons.
yahoo.com

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 – I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers involved in the case, who described the notes to The New York Times, said they showed that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby’s notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson’s undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status.

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government’s deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby’s legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday, when the term of the grand jury expires. Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser, both face the possibility of indictment, lawyers involved in the case have said. It is not publicly known whether other officials also face indictment.
nytimes.com

Facing a convergence of crises threatening his administration, President Bush and his team are devising plans to salvage the remainder of his presidency by applying the lessons of past two-term chief executives and refocusing attention on the president’s larger economic and foreign policy goals.

Rarely has a president confronted as many damaging developments that could all come to a head in this week. A special counsel appears poised to indict one or more administration officials within days. Pressure is building on Bush from within his own party to withdraw the faltering Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. And any day the death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq will pass the symbolically important 2,000 mark.

To deal with what they consider the darkest days of the Bush presidency, White House advisers have developed a twofold strategy — confront head-on problems such as the Iraq death toll, while shifting attention to other areas such as conservative economic policies, according to a senior White House official, who spoke about internal deliberations only under the condition of anonymity. Bush advisers are taking clues from the playbooks of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both of whom weathered second-term scandals.

The White House strategy will unfold over the next several days, starting with yesterday’s announcement of a new Federal Reserve Board chairman and continuing today with a presidential speech on Iraq at Bolling Air Force Base. Anticipating a barrage of criticism when the death toll hits 2,000, Bush will try to put the sacrifice in perspective by portraying the Iraq war as the best way to keep terrorists from striking the United States again, the official said. He will make the same case in another speech Friday in Norfolk.
washingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON – The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald’s inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald’s team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald’s team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush’s closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair’s aides has “sexed up” the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
commondreams.org

by Patrick Buchanan
While President Bush and his War Cabinet bear full moral responsibility for Iraq, they could not have taken us to war without the complicity of the “adversary press” and “loyal opposition.”

Today, this town is salivating over the prospect that Karl Rove and “Scooter” Libby will be indicted for outing Joe Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative. Thirty months ago, many of those anxious to see the White House brought down were hauling its water. Consider the role played by our newspaper of record, the New York Times.

To stampede us into a war neoconseratives had been plotting for a decade, Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s No. 3, set up an Office of Special Plans. Its role: Cherry-pick the intel that Saddam was acquiring weapons of mass destruction and hell-bent on using them on the United States. Then, stovepipe the hot stuff to the White House Iraq Group, and ignore the contradictory evidence.

A primary source of the hot intel about poison gas vans and nuclear bomb programs was a tight-knit exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and neocon-Pentagon favorite to lead the new Iraq.

But once the hyped intel suggesting Saddam was an imminent and mortal threat had been extracted, the WHIG needed to run it through a media centrifuge to convert it into hard news.

Enter Judy Miller, self-styled “Ms. Run Amok” and the go-to girl for the War Party. Miller took the cherry-picked intel and planted it on Page 1, enabling War Party propagandists to hit the TV talk-show circuit and reference ominous stories in the New York Times about how imminent a threat Saddam had become.

These propagandists were parroting their own pre-cooked intel, but it now had the imprimatur of the Times. The White House had seduced the good Gray Lady of 43rd Street into turning tricks for war.
informationclearinghouse.info