White House stone-walling about their lies of pre-Iraq "intelligence"

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Rebuffed by Rice, Hadley, House Panel Tracks Down Witnesses for Iraq Probe

By Helen Fessenden
The Hill Tuesday 19 June 2007

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's probe into prewar intelligence has again postponed a hearing, scheduled for today, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who refuses to testify publicly despite a panel subpoena.

The panel has also had no luck in securing a closed-door deposition of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. As Rice's deputy at the National Security Council during President Bush's first term, Hadley was central in the controversy over the flawed claim in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa.

The panel has taken a closed-door deposition from George Tenet, former head of the CIA, who was also scheduled to testify today, and other former officials, including his former deputy, John McLaughlin. But the impasse with Rice and Hadley suggests that the administration will not budge in prohibiting senior officials to testify.

Barring a congressional vote invoking contempt, the committee effectively has no other formal tool to compel Rice to testify.

One Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.), believes the probe should go beyond its focus on senior aides and instead find out why the forged documents behind the uranium claim were not debunked until shortly before the war, and how they came into existence in late 2001 in the first place.

In February 2002, the Italian intelligence service sent a verbatim copy of the text, in French, to the CIA, where it was not widely circulated. The actual documents did not come into the U.S. intelligence community's possession until the following October, after an Italian businessman, Rocco Martino, gave them to a Milan-based journalist who then passed the documents along to U.S. officials. The CIA handed them over in February 2003 to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which promptly deemed them forgeries.

"I'd really like to talk to Martino," said Maloney. "Why did he do the forgeries, and just as important, who paid him to do it?"

Maloney said she has discussed the matter informally with panel Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). But Waxman said he prefers to take "a narrower perspective."

"We're not looking at the broad issue of intelligence failure," Waxman told The Hill. "Martino would be interesting, but we're more interested in finding out why the CIA let this information get in."

On that front, the committee's staff conducted a phone interview in early June with another CIA official, Alan Foley, who negotiated the uranium language in Bush's speech with Hadley aide Robert Joseph. Tenet had told Hadley in October 2002 to take out similar language in another presidential speech, but Joseph and Hadley sought to include the claim three months later. Foley has claimed he was not aware of Tenet's previous objections, and Tenet has said he did not read the final draft of the January speech because he didn't know it would include the uranium claim.

In letters sent to Rice and Tenet last week, Waxman wrote that the panel has interviewed and conducted depositions with other former officials such as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Carl Ford, former assistant secretary of state for Intelligence and Research. More interviews are expected over the coming weeks, the letters noted, and "the CIA and State Department have begun to provide important documents to the Committee."

Waxman told The Hill that the panel still intends to hold a public hearing with Rice at a still-undetermined date, adding that the information from Tenet and others will help make the committee's questions "more pointed." He also said that the panel will also issue a report, but "that's a ways off."

Neither Rice nor Hadley intend to testify before the panel "as long as it has to do with their roles as advisers to the president," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.

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No big deal. There are and will be plenty of ex-intel officials who feel betrayed, misled, scape-goated by the WH and will come forth with details, just as Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba has done about his report on Abu Ghraib.

And why stop with the uranium? There are plenty of other Repug lies to investigate:

mobile bio-weapons labs Powell lied to the UN about.

cheney's insistence of totally bogus connection of Saddad - WTC

WMD

etc, etc.

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Presidential Stone Walls

The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 17 June 2007

The template for the Bush administration's mania for secrecy was signed by the president six years ago - Executive Order 13233, reversing the presumption of right of public access to presidential papers. This basic right of taxpayers and historians alike was embedded in the 1978 laws enacted after the Nixon administration. The reforms established a reasonable 12-year waiting period for access. But Mr. Bush's reversal lets presidents or vice presidents (guess who?) keep their records sealed in perpetuity unless they or their heirs approve access.

Fortunately, Congress is in the process of demonstrating that such hermetic devotion to secrecy has no place in a democracy. Mr. Bush's order would be rescinded by a proposal approved overwhelmingly in the House in March and now making its way to passage in the Senate. The White House, of course, is vowing to veto any final bill. So it is important that the Senate re-establish the public's obvious right to historical transparency with the same veto-proof support achieved in the House.

Otherwise, Mr. Bush's dictum will stand, with no explanation required for denying requests, nor any appeal allowed. The executive order leaves a costly, lengthy lawsuit as Americans' only avenue of possible redress.

Hiding secrets and embarrassments may be a predictable part of a politician's instinct for survival. But attempting to enshrine this instinct timelessly is a stain on the Constitution and an insult to history. The administration insists that only 64 of more than two million pages have been sealed thus far. They would be a good place to start reading once Congress re-establishes the public's right to know.

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the dubya Exec has a LOT of lies, incompetence, bungling to hide.

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and then there is the destruction of documents and using RNC email for official business.


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House Committee: Presidential Records Act Broken

By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Tuesday 19 June 2007

A report issued by the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Monday claims that there have been wide-spread violations of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) by numerous officials in the Bush Administration since 2001.

The report concluded that "[t]hese violations could be the most serious breach of the PRA in the 30-year history of the law."

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 states that the records of a president, his immediate staff, and specific areas of the Executive Office of the President belong to the United States, not to the individual president or his staff. The act further states, "the president shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section and other provisions of law."

The Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Representative Henry Waxman (D-California) issued a statement about the findings of the report. He said, "We now know that senior officials in the White House made extensive use of their [unofficial] Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts; that these accounts were used for official communications; and that the RNC destroyed an enormous volume of these communications."

Despite the conclusions of the report, it is not yet clear whether Congress is willing to use its subpoena power and fight the Bush Administration in court. A spokesperson for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that they are in full support of the investigations and the actions taken by the Democratic Committee chairmen.

Watchdog lawyer Anne Weismann said that Congress should act more aggressively. "The White House is running out the clock. Congress has subpoena power. They could subpoena the White House. They could pass legislation that ties the White House's budget to their compliance with archiving procedures. It is time they bring out the big guns because the White House has every incentive to delay," Weismann said. Weismann's organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has been tracking the Bush Administration's non-compliance with presidential archiving procedures.

The Committee report, titled "Investigation of Possible Presidential Records Act Violations," is based on an ongoing investigation that was initiated shortly after the Democrats gained control of Congress. The report contrasts the stated email policies of the Bush Administration with documented evidence that at least 88 White House officials held unofficial, unarchived email accounts. Evidence that these accounts were used for official business, a direct violation of the law, is also provided. The report points out that the Bush Administration's response to this issue underrepresented the number of White House officials involved. Dana Perino, spokesperson for the White House, said that a "handful of officials" used RNC email accounts. Perino made a subsequent estimate of "50 [individuals] over the course of the administration" who held RNC accounts.

According to the RNC, of the known 88 Bush Administration officials who held RNC accounts, documents exist for only 37 of them. The records that do exist were proved incomplete by the Congressional investigators. The report states that, "Whether intentionally or inadvertently, it appears that the RNC has destroyed a large volume of the emails of the White House officials." According to the RNC, it had a "document retention" policy under which they erased emails from their servers after 30 days. The RNC policy did not prevent users from accessing the server and manually deleting their email. The report states that "as a result of these policies, potentially hundreds of thousands of White House emails have been destroyed."

The White House staff manual contains a February 26, 2001, memorandum from then Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales which stated that "email is no different from other kinds of documents. Any email relating to official business therefore qualifies as a Presidential record... [I]f you happen to receive an email on a personal email account that otherwise qualifies as a Presidential record, it is your duty to ensure that it is preserved and filed as such by printing it out and saving it or by forwarding it to your White House email account."

The report states that Gonzales may have known about violations of White House email policy by Presidential Advisor Karl Rove, who, according to the Republican National Committee, often sent more than 100 emails and received over 200 emails per day using his RNC account in 2007. In a sworn deposition to congressional investigators, former Aide to Rove Susan Ralston said that the White House Counsel's office knew about Rove's violation of email policy as far back as 2001, when his email was searched in connection with investigations into the Enron scandal and the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. According to Ralston, "all of the documents that we collected [for investigators] were then turned over to the White House Counsel's office."

In addressing this apparent discrepancy, the report suggests that Gonzales may have been complicit in the destruction of Rove's email records: "former White House Counsel Gonzales may have been aware in 2001 that Mr. Rove was using RNC email accounts for official communications. Yet it was not until six years later that the White House wrote to the RNC instructing them to preserve any 'emails or documents that may relate to the official business of the Executive Office of the President that may be in the possession of the RNC.'"

This is not the first time Gonzales has been accused of complicity in the destruction of White House records that were sought by investigators. When Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald began his investigation into the leak of Plame Wilson's identity, then White House Counsel Gonzales informed Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card that the Department of Justice was investigating the issue immediately but waited 12 hours before officially notifying other White House staff to preserve all of their documents. Democrats later questioned whether Card or Gonzales had informed anyone else of the impending order to preserve documents, allowing them time to destroy evidence.

Many top-level White House officials were cited by the report for their use of these RNC email addresses, including Presidential Adviser Karl Rove, former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett. The RNC emails were also used by every person to hold the position of Director of Political Affairs under the Bush Administration, including Sara Taylor, who was recently subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of their investigation into the firing of nine US attorneys.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said, "Now that we know more than 100,000 of Mr. Rove's secret emails have not been destroyed, I hope the White House will respond to my request for any emails from his account that are relevant to the Judiciary Committee's investigation," adding, "I look forward to Ms. Taylor searching the thousands of emails from her account in accordance with a subpoena she was issued last week."

According to information given to Waxman's Committee, the RNC has possession of 140,216 emails from Rove's account and 66,018 emails from Taylor's. The White House sought preemptive access to these and other RNC emails and has not yet turned the emails over to congressional investigators. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) sent a letter to the RNC requesting emails relating to the US attorney firing scandal. The White House intervened, threatening to invoke claims of executive privilege to prevent Congress from acquiring the documents.

Inherent in a claim of executive privilege would be an admission of a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Ohio State Law Professor Peter Shane described the situation as a legal "catch-22" for the Bush Administration. Shane said previously, "If they say that the subject matter of these communications makes them susceptible to executive privilege claims, then they should have been sent through official government channels, not through unofficial emails. If these communications are of this kind, the Bush Administration is clearly in violation of the Presidential Records Act."

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The dubya/Repug Exec, what reeking pile of scumbags.