Libby Trial Exposes NeoCons

[Nbadan]

Libby Trial Exposes Neocon Shadow Government
By Sydney Schanberg
The New York Observer
05 March 2007 Issue

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Cheney's man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course, it's an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its do entation, be inerasable. The trial record - testimony, exhibits, the lot - will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq - and other military excursions - for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war.

The critic was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson, whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked in 2002 by the C.I.A. to investigate unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson went to Africa, consulted his sources, and found no meaningful evidence of such a plot. He reported these negative findings to the C.I.A. And further investigations by several parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, established that the uranium story was phony. Yet Messrs. Bush, Cheney and others in the President's close circle kept presenting the uranium story as part of the pressing rationale for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Even as the White House found itself apologizing for a January 2003 State of the Union address which continued to tout the uranium story and other known falsehoods about the Iraqi threat, it continued the push for war. The invasion began on March 20, 2003.

Mr. Wilson responded to the White House in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article for The New York Times, charging that the administration had manufactured evidence to win support for the war. It was this story, published in the country's most influential news organ, that drove the White House into a frenzy - in particular Mr. Cheney, the administration's leading hawk.

The smear campaign against Mr. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, went into high gear. Conservative pundit Robert Novak, a frequent conduit for White House whispers, wrote a column on July 14, 2003, attacking Mr. Wilson and outing Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. "operative." The trial has since identified one of the unnamed senior administration officials Mr. Novak cited as his sources: Karl Rove, the advisor closest to the President.

The Justice Department responded to calls for an investigation into the leak by naming the U.S. Attorney for Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald, as special prosecutor for the case.

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald gets a conviction, he has created a trial record that establishes the administration's guilt. Sprinkled throughout are the names of most of the neoconservatives who had been planning the current Iraq War ever since the 1991 Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power.

They came out in the open in 1997 when they formed a Washington think tank of their own - the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift "removal of Saddam Hussein's regime."

Citing those still-undiscovered "weapons of mass destruction," they said: "[W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition ... to uphold the [U.N.] sanctions...."

Then, in 2000, just before Mr. Bush's elevation to the White House by the Supreme Court, the PNAC war-seekers issued a lengthy manifesto calling for a major escalation of the country's military mission. This 81-page do ent proposed a buildup that would make it possible for the United States to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." The report depicted these wars as "large scale" and "spread across [the] globe."

Iraq was named as a major threat.

Another aim of this escalation was as follows: "Control the new 'international commons' of space and cyberspace, and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - U.S. Space Forces - with the mission of space control."

Perhaps the eeriest sentence in the do ent is found on page 51, conjuring up images of 9/11: "The process of transformation ... is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." (The PNAC do ents can be found online at newamericancentury.org.)

Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad.

Most of these names echo throughout the Libby trial record. Besides the damning notes from Mr. Cheney, accounts of conversations between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby and Mr. Libby's subsequent conversations with other pivotal administration officials, there is at least one do ent, in Mr. Cheney's handwriting, that suggests the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.

The trial and its record was always all about the unnecessary war - a war created by massive and deliberate lying about an imminent security threat that wasn't there. That's why the President and his men were desperate to shut Mr. Wilson up.

He was the imminent threat - to their delusional empire-building.

Truthout

5 indictments - 5 convictions!

[gtownspur]

Was outing Valerie the crime here?

[whottt]

Now that's more like it


Any chance you could find a story on the Bush family being linked to accused witches back in Salem Mass, or something interesting like that?


Thanks...in advance.

[shelshor]

Now that's more like it


Any chance you could find a story on the Bush family being linked to accused witches back in Salem Mass, or something interesting like that?


Thanks...in advance.

I thought the Bush family was linked to the Gnomes of Zurich... or is that the Cheney family?

[Nbadan]

Greenwald: State Department promotion sends Iran war signal
Mike Sheehan
Published: Monday March 5, 2007

The promotion of a neoconservative to a key position at the U.S. State Department may be yet another signal of impending war with Iran, Salon reports.

"As they have done many times before, neoconservatives, with Iran in their sights, have installed one of their own at State to block any war-avoiding rapprochement," writes Glenn Greewald for Salon.

Last Friday, Eliot Cohen was chosen by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be new Counselor of the State Department.

"It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets," says Greenwald, who quotes a conservative writer's point that Cohen "was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq" and opposed negotiations with Iran and Syria.

Greenwald argues that Cohen is even "far more extremist than just that."

Rawstory

Greenwald's not kidding, Cohen is a neocon-nutcase...

Afghanistan cons utes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign ... The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran ... The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden

World War 4 by Cohen

[Yonivore]

CIA Leak Jury's Notes Suggest Confusion

WASHINGTON (AP) - Juror notes in the CIA leak case suggest some jury room confusion about what exactly former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is accused of doing.

After completing their ninth day of deliberations without a verdict Monday, jurors passed U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton three questions. All related to what Libby told the FBI regarding his 2003 telephone conversation with Time magazine's Matt Cooper about CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Libby is accused of lying about what he told Cooper. Cooper says Libby confirmed that Plame worked at the CIA. Libby told FBI agents that he only told Cooper he'd heard about Plame from other reporters but didn't know for sure whether she worked at the CIA.

In their questions, which were released Tuesday morning, jurors seemed confused about what Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was alleging.

**more**

Okay, that's frickin' hilarious.

[boutons_]

The counts of conviction, which necessarily reflected the charges, were extremely simple, so I assume the long, difficult, complex jury deliberations cleared up any confusion of one or more the jurors.

The trial was another view into the WH and how it runs on lies and lied about all the justifications for the Iraq war. head, and probably, Rove were the masterminds of attacking and sliming anybody who opposed the war.

[Oh, Gee!!]

Okay, that's frickin' hilarious.

Not really. The jury found him Not Guilty on the count relating to Libby's convo with Matt Cooper, but Guilty on all other counts. Could be that the evidence was weak in that regard which led to questions (and the acquital) from the jury.

[Yonivore]

Not really. The jury found him Not Guilty on the count relating to Libby's convo with Matt Cooper, but Guilty on all other counts. Could be that the evidence was weak in that regard which led to questions (and the acquital) from the jury.

I suppose.