Friends,
I've been tracking news reports and the noose is clearly
tightening around Bush and the neocons. I was about to post a
summary, along with some comments, when Brian sent me this
piece by Michael Ruppert. I have problems with some of
Ruppert's claims about 9/11, but I think he's done a very good
job of assembling evidence showing that a coup is in progress.
Unlike Col. Donn de Grand-Pre, Ruppert doesn't claim to have
access to the actual coup organizers. Ruppert relies on
published documents. His notions about who's behind the coup,
and why, are therefore somewhat speculative. He assumes it is
a "CIA coup" and he gives lots of reasons why the CIA would be
upset with the neocons. But Ruppert's evidence applies equally
well to the Col.'s version: that the top plotters also include
elements from the Pentagon and the Senate. I've posted
articles here that corroborate that version.
Ruppert makes no mention of the Col., the possibility of
military tribunals, nor the possibility that the coup will
eventually be announced publicly. I have yet to see any
material that corroborates, or conflicts with, these elements
of the Col.'s version.
I would imagine that these elements, if they are to be, will
begin to emerge if Bush or his close associates attempt to
stonewall the Senate hearings or any of the other
investigations in progress--or if Bush attempts to escape by
resigning. If the Col. is right, then such attempts will not
be allowed to end the matter. That might lead to playing the
coup card publicly.
Ruppert closes with :
That being said, they have to go. FTW [Ruppert's organization]
wishes that it was as certain that what will come after them
will be better.
Indeed, we know nothing about what the coup has planned for
after the neocons are ousted. In such unprecedented circumstances,
anything may be possible.
yours,
rkm
btw> This is a long article.
--------------------------------------------------------
From: "Brian Hill"
To: "Richard K. Moore" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Fw: Is George W. Bush about to be indicted?
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 07:43:01 -0700
Organization: Institute for Cultural Ecology
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Robinowitz"
To: <Recipient List Suppressed:>
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 10:29 PM
Subject: Is George W. Bush about to be indicted?
see also http://www.oilempire.us/plame.html
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060804_coup_detat.html
COUP D'ETAT:
The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the
CIA on June 3rd and 4th
Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming
by Michael C. Ruppert
additional reporting by
Wayne Madsen from Washington
© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness
Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All
Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or
posted on an Internet web site for non-profit
purposes only.
JUNE 8, 2004 1600 PDT (FTW) - Why did DCI George
Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be
followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's
Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?
The real reasons, contrary to the saturation
spin being put out by major news outlets, have
nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the
fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence
"failures" before the upcoming presidential
election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed
by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy
Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and
extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his
Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being
executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The
coup, in the planning for at least two years, has
apparently become an urgent priority as a number
of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.
Based upon recent developments, it appears that
long-standing plans and preparations leading to
indictments and impeachment of Bush, Cheney and
even some senior cabinet members have been
accelerated, possibly with the intent of removing
or replacing the entire Bush regime prior to the
Republican National Convention this August.
FTW has been documenting this Watergate-like
coup for more than fifteen months and almost
everything we will discuss about recent events
was by us predicted in detail in these pages.
Please see our stories "The Perfect Storm - Part
I" (March 2003); "Blood in the Water" (July
2003); "Beyond Bush - Part I" (July 2003);
"Waxman Ties Evidentiary Noose Around Rice and
Cheney" (July 2003); and "Beyond Bush - Part II"
(October 2003).
There were two things we didn't get right. One
was the timing. We predicted the developments
taking place now as likely to happen after the
November election, not before. Secondly, we did
not foresee the sudden resignations of Tenet and
Pavitt. Understanding the resignations is the key
to understanding a deteriorating world scene and
that America is on the precipice of a
presidential and constitutional crisis that will
ultimately dwarf the removal of Richard Nixon in
1974.
So why did Tenet and Pavitt resign? We'll explain
why and we will provide many clues along the way
as we make our case.
HIGH CRIMES AND REALLY STUPID MOVES
Shortly after the "surprise" Tenet-Pavitt
resignations, current and former senior members
of the U.S. intelligence community and the
Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen,
a former Naval intelligence officer, that they
were directly connected to the criminal
investigation of a 2003 White House leak that
openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA
officer. What received less attention was that
the leak also destroyed a long-term CIA
proprietary intelligence gathering operation
which, as we will see, was of immense importance
to US strategic interests at a critical moment.
The leak was a vindictive retaliation for
statements, reports and actions taken by Plame's
husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, which
had deeply embarrassed the Bush administration
and exposed it to possible charges for
impeachable offenses, including lying to the
American people about an alleged (and totally
unfounded) nuclear threat posed by Iraq's Saddam
Hussein. Conservative columnist Robert Novak, the
beneficiary of the leak, immediately published it
on July 14, 2003 and Valerie Plame's career (at
least the covert part) instantly ended. The
actual damage caused by that leak has never been
fully appreciated.
Wilson deeply embarrassed almost every senior
member of the Bush junta by proving to the world
that they were consciously lying about one of
their most important justifications for invading
Iraq: namely, their claim to have had certain
knowledge, based on "good and reliable"
intelligence, that Hussein was on the brink of
deploying a nuclear weapon, possibly inside the
United States. It was eventually disclosed that
the "intelligence" possessed by the
administration was a set of poorly forged
documents on letterhead from the government of
Niger, which described attempts by Iraq to
purchase yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapons
program.
It has since been established by Scott Ritter
and others that Iraq's nuclear weapons program
had been dead in the water and non-functioning
since the first Iraq war.
Wilson was secretly dispatched in February 2002,
on instructions from Dick Cheney to the CIA, to
go to Niger and look for anything that might
support the material in the documents. They had
already been dismissed as forgeries by the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and
apparently everyone else who had seen them. The
CIA cautioned the administration, more than once,
against using them. Shortly thereafter, Wilson
returned and gave his report stating clearly that
the allegations were pure bunk and unsupportable.
In spite of this, unaware of the booby traps laid
all around them, the entire power core of the
Bush administration jumped on the Niger documents
as on a battle horse and charged off into in a
massive public relations blitz. Bush, Cheney,
Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and others - to
varying degrees - insisted, testified, and swore
that they knew, and had reliable, credible and
verified intelligence that Saddam was about to
deploy an actual nuclear device built from the
Niger yellowcake.
It was full court media press and they
successfully scared the pants off of most
Americans who believed that Saddam was going to
nuke them any second.
George Bush made the charge and actually cited
the documents in his 2003 State-of-the-Union
address, even after he had been cautioned by
George Tenet not to rely on them. In a major
speech at the United Nations, Colin Powell
charged that Iraq was on the verge of deploying a
nuke and had been trying to acquire uranium. Dick
Cheney charged in several speeches that Saddam
was capable of nuclear terror. And shortly before
the invasion, when asked in a television
interview whether there was sufficient proof and
advance warning of the Iraqi nuclear threat, a
smug and confident Condoleezza Rice quipped, "If
we wait for a smoking gun, that smoking gun may
be a mushroom cloud over an American city." Rice
was lying through her teeth.
By July of 2003, as the Iraqi invasion was
proving to be a protracted and ill-conceived
debacle, executed in spite of massive resistance
from within military, political, diplomatic and
economic cadres, there was growing disgust within
many government circles about the way the Bush
administration was running things. The mention of
Wilson's report came in July though his name was
not disclosed. It suggested corroborative
evidence of criminal, rather than stupid,
behavior by the administration. The San Francisco
Chronicle reported:
"A senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed
the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months
before Bush's nationally televised speech - that
an agency source who had traveled to Niger could
not confirm European intelligence reports that
Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West
African country."
Note the reference to an Agency source.
It was inevitable that Wilson would move from no
comment, to statements given on condition of
anonymity, and finally into the public spotlight.
That he did, in a July 6th New York Times
Editorial titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."
Soon he was giving interviews everywhere.
On July 14th Novak published the column outing
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. As a result, any
criminal investigation of the Plame leak will
also go into the Niger documents and any crimes
committed which are materially related to Plame's
exposure.
Instead of retreating, Wilson advanced. In
September he went public, writing editorials and
granting interviews which thoroughly exposed the
Bush administration's criminal use of the
documents, Cheney's lies about the mission, and
all the other lies used to deceive the American
people into war.
At the moment he went on the record, Wilson
became another legally admissible, corroborative
evidentiary source; a witness available for
subpoena and deposition, ready to give testimony
to the high crimes and misdemeanors he has
witnessed.
First Clue: James Pavitt was Valerie Plame's boss. So was George Tenet.
HOW THE TRAP WAS SET
Conflicting news reports suggest that perhaps
several sets of the documents were delivered
simultaneously to several recipients. I could
find only one news story (out of almost 60 I have
reviewed) which indicated just when the Niger
papers were first put into play. One of the most
fundamental questions in journalism, "when?" was
omitted from every major press organization's
coverage except for a single story from the
Associated Press on July 13th.
" [T]he forged Niger government documents,
showing attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake,
were delivered by unknown sources to Italian
journalist Corriere della Sera who gave them to
the Italian intelligence service. She then
reportedly gave them to Italian intelligence
agents who gave them to the US embassy. Seymour
Hersh of the New Yorker also offered this version
indicating that the documents had surfaced in
Italy in the fall of 2001."
The fall of 2001. That means that the documents
were created no more than three and a half months
after September 11th.
The earliest press report mentioning the
documents was a March 7, 2003 story in The
Financial Times. On that day, Mohammed El
Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency reported to the UN Security Council that
the documents were forgeries. The story contained
a revealing paragraph.
"The allegation about the uranium purchase first
surfaced in a UK government dossier published on
September 24 last year about Iraq's alleged
weapons programmes, though it did not name Niger.
Niger was first named when the US State
Department elaborated on the allegations on
December 19 [2002]"
Canada's Globe and Mail reported on March 8, 2003:
"[T]he forgeries were sold to an Italian
intelligence agent by a con man some time ago and
passed on to French authorities, but the scam was
uncovered by the IAEA [International Atomic
Energy Agency] only recently, according to United
Nations sources familiar with the investigation.
The documents were turned over to the IAEA
several weeks ago.
"In fact, the IAEA says, there is no credible
evidence that Iraq tried to import uranium ore
from the Central African country in violation of
UN resolutions.
"Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has
concluded, with the concurrence of outside
experts, that these documents, which formed the
basis for the reports of these uranium
transactions between Iraq and Niger, are, in
fact, not authentic," Mr. El Baradei told the UN
Security Council Friday".
The Chicago Tribune reported on March 13, 2003,
"Forged documents that the United States used to
build its case against Iraq were likely written
by someone in Niger's embassy in Rome who hoped
to make quick money, a source close to the United
Nations investigation said.
The Washington Post gave yet a different story, also on March 8, 2003:
"Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery
investigation described the faked evidence as a
series of letters between Iraqi agents and
officials in the central African nation of Niger.
The documents had been given to the U.N.
inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by
U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made
relatively crude errors that eventually gave them
away - including names and titles that did not
match up with the individuals who held office at
the time the letters were purportedly written,
the officials said"
"The CIA, which had also obtained the documents,
had questions about 'whether they were accurate,'
said one intelligence official, and it decided
not to include them in its file on Iraq's program
to procure weapons of mass destruction."
In a follow-up story on March 13th the Post reported:
"'It's something we're just beginning to look at,'
a senior law enforcement official said yesterday.
Officials are trying to determine whether the
documents were forged to try to influence U.S.
policy, or whether they may have been created as
part of a disinformation campaign directed by a
foreign intelligence service...
"The phony documents - a series of letters
between Iraqi and Niger officials showing Iraq's
interest in equipment that could be used to make
nuclear weapons - came to British and U.S.
intelligence officials from a third country. The
identity of the third country could not be
learned yesterday."
What if it wasn't a foreign intelligence
service? I had been suspicious that a
Watergate-like coup was forming immediately after
reading the first few stories about the
documents. I was convinced when the AP reported
on March 14, 2003 (just days before the Iraqi
invasion) that the ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee had called for an FBI
investigation of the documents' origins. The
Boston Globe reported two days later that the
Senator was specifically seeking to determine
whether administration officials had forged the
documents themselves to marshal support for the
invasion.
The request was not nearly as significant to me
as who it had come from - Jay Rockefeller of the
Standard Oil Rockefellers. An oil dynasty was
calling for an investigation of a bunch of oil
men. Somebody was screwing up big time.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went
virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an
October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled
"The Stovepipe."
"Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is
nothing approaching a consensus on this question
within the intelligence community. There has been
published speculation about the intelligence
services of several different countries. One
theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is
that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi
produced the false documents and passed them to
Panorama for publication.
"Another explanation was provided by a former
senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me
about the Niger papers in March, when I first
wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody
deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months,
eventually saying that a small group of
disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators
had banded together in the late summer of last
year and drafted the fraudulent documents
themselves."
Hersh's revelation provided corroboration for
something I and others, like the renowned
political historian Peter Dale Scott, had been
suspecting for a long time. The CIA was fighting
back. This was a well orchestrated, long-term
covert operation - exactly what the CIA does all
over the world.
POINT OF NO RETURN
Willing disclosure of the identity of a covert
operative is a serious felony under Federal law,
punishable by fine and/or imprisonment. The
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982
makes it a crime for anyone with access to
classified information to intentionally disclose
information identifying a covert operative. The
penalties get worse for doing it to a deep cover
Direcorate of Operations (DO) case officer (as
opposed to an undercover DEA Agent).
After John Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself
from the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S.
Attorney in Chicago, was transferred to
Washington and appointed special prosecutor in
the Plame case.
Robert Novak, rightly standing by the
journalistic code of ethics, has steadfastly
refused to identify his White House source. We
would do the same thing in his shoes. The
investigation is nearing a climax with pending
issuance of criminal indictments. Press reports
citing sources close to the investigation have
directly and indirectly pointed fingers at Dick
Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, as suspects.
Second clue: The criminal investigation of the
Plame leak was [initiated] after a September
2003 formal request from the CIA, approved by
George Tenet.
Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of
her cover company, Brewster, Jennings &
Associates. With the public exposure of Plame,
intelligence agencies all over the world started
searching data bases for any references to her
(TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as
the CIA asserted that her mission had been
connected to weapons of mass destruction.
However, it was not long before stories from the
Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied
Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil
and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company,
or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder
of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal
founders.
According to additional sources interviewed by
Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a
well-established CIA proprietary company, linked
for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster
Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was
outed.
It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs,
as they are known, to become really effective.
Over time, they become gradually more trusted;
they work their way into deeper information
access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are
generally regarded in the community as among the
best and most valuable of all CIA operations
officers and the agency goes to great lengths to
protect them in what are frequently very risky
missions.
By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet
unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and
torture or death from hostile governments and
individual targets who have been judged threats
to the United States, she got done in by her own
President, whom we also judge to be a domestic
enemy of the United States.
Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame
may have been one of the most important NOCs the
CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at
just how valuable she was.
ARAMCO
According to an April 29, 2002 report in
Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the
world's total oil production; a figure which has
certainly increased as other countries have
progressed deeper into irreversible decline.
ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a
state-owned Saudi company in partnership with
four major US oil companies. One of them is
ExxonMobil which gave up one of its board
members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the
National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of
ARAMCO's key decisions are made by the Saudi
royal family while US oil expertise, personnel
and technology keeps the cash coming in and the
oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and
maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields - 25% of
all the oil on the planet.
It gets better.
According to a New York Times report on March 8th
of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25%
investment in a new and badly needed refinery to
produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of
the refinery will go to the only nation that is
quickly becoming America's major world competitor
for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.
Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had
signed a $140 million multi-year contract with
Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to
develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot
of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of
Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the
country run into the tens of billions of dollars.
So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.
As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz
sitting on its Supreme Council or board of
directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former
treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has
been reported in several places to be Osama bin
Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied
this and brought intense legal pressure to bear
demanding retractions of these allegations. He
has major partnership investments with the
multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies
and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous
criminal drug-money laundering bank which
performed a number of very useful services for
the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal
investigation by a whole lot of countries.
As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the
accounts of the royal family and - no doubt -
ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named
defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11
victim families against the Saudi government and
prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges,
were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical
connections to the Bush family dating back to the
1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to
Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a
cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25
million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a
no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush
promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump
scheme and made a whole lot of money.
Knowing all of this, there's really no good
reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there?
It was only a long-term proprietary and
deep-cover NOC - well established and
consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and
who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was
destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance
(there may have been other motives) by someone
inside the White House.
From the CIA's point of view, at a time when
Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four
countries of highest interest to the US, the
Plame operation was irreplaceable.
Third clue: Tenet's resignation, which occurred
at night, was the first "evening resignation" of
a Cabinet-level official since October 1973 when
Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his
deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest
of Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate special
prosecutor Archibald Cox. Many regard this as the
watershed moment when the Nixon administration
was doomed.
SAUDI ARABIA
Given that energy is becoming the most important
issue on the planet today, if you were the CIA,
you might be a little pissed off at the Plame
leak. But there may be justification to do more
than be angry. Anger happens all the time in
Washington. This is something else.
One of the most important intelligence prizes
today - especially after recent stories in major
outlets like the New York Times reporting that
Saudi oil production has peaked and gone into
irreversible decline - would be to know of a
certainty whether those reports are correct. The
Saudis are denying it vehemently but they are
being strongly refuted by an increasing amount of
hard data. The truth remains unproven. But the
mere possibility has set the world's financial
markets on edge. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi
came to Washington on April 27th to put out the
fires. It was imperative that he calm everybody's
nerves as the markets were screaming, "Say it
ain't so!"
Naimi said emphatically that there was nothing
to worry about concerning either Saudi reserves
or ARAMCO's ability to increase production. There
was plenty of oil and no need for concern.
FTW covered and reported on that event. Writer
and energy expert Julian Darley noted that there
were some very important ears in the room,
listening very closely. He also noted that
Naimi's "scientific" data and promises of large
future discoveries did not sit well many who are
well versed in oil production and delivery.
[See FTW's June 2nd story, "Saudi's Missing
Barrels" and our May 2003 story, "Paris Peak Oil
Conference Reveals Deepening Crisis." In that
story FTW editor Mike Ruppert was the first to
report on credible new information that Saudi
Arabia had possibly peaked.]
If anybody has the real data on Saudi fields it
is either ARAMCO or the highest levels of the
Saudi royal family.
The answer to the Saudi peak question will
determine whether Saudi Arabia really can
increase production quickly, as promised. If they
can't, then the US economy is going to suffer
bitterly, and it is certain that the Saudi
monarchy will collapse into chaos. Then the
nearby US military will occupy the oilfields and
the U.S. will ultimately Balkanize the country by
carving off the oil fields - which occupy only a
small area near the East coast. That U.S. enclave
would then provide sanctuary to the leading
members of the royal family who will have agreed
to keep their trillions invested in Wall Street
so the US economy doesn't collapse.
So far the Saudis haven't had to prove that they
could increase production due to convenient
terror attacks at oil fields, and more "debates"
within OPEC.
Fourth clue: Bush and Cheney have both hired or
consulted private criminal defense attorneys in
anticipation of possible indictments of them
and/or their top assistants in the Plame
investigation. On June 3, just hours before Tenet
suddenly resigned, President Bush consulted with
and may have retained a criminal defense attorney
to represent him in the Plame case.
According to various press reports Bush has
either retained or consulted with powerhouse
attorney Jim Sharp, who represented Iran-contra
figure retired Air Force Major General Richard
Secord; Enron's Ken Lay; and Watergate
co-conspirator Jeb Stuart Magruder. All three
were facing criminal rather than civil charges.
Either way, a clear signal has been sent that
Bush expects to be either called to testify
(which was a precursor in Watergate to a criminal
indictment of Richard Nixon) or be named as a
defendant. Either way, the President's men are
falling faster than their counterparts fell in
Watergate, and the initial targets are much
higher up the food chain.
Cheney's attorney is Terrence O'Donnell, a
partner of the Williams and Connolly law firm.
O'Donnell worked for then White House chief of
staff Cheney in the Ford administration and as
General Counsel for the Pentagon when Cheney was
Defense Secretary under the first President Bush.
He has been representing the Vice President in
criminal and civil cases involving Cheney's
chairmanship of Halliburton. These include a
Justice Department investigation of Halliburton
for alleged payment of bribes to Nigerian
political leaders and a stockholders' fraud law
suit against Halliburton. O'Donnell also
represented former CIA director John Deutch when
he was accused of violating national security by
taking his CIA computer home and surfing the
Internet while it contained hundreds of
highly-classified intelligence documents.
SPRINGING THE TRAP
Now, seemingly all of a sudden, Bush and Cheney
are in the crosshairs. Cheney has been questioned
by Fitzgerald within the last week.
The CIA Director's job by definition, whether
others like it or not, is to be able to go to his
President and advise him of the real scientific
data on foreign resources (especially oil); to
warn him of pending instability in a country
closely linked to the US economy; and to tell him
what to plan for and what to promise politically
in his foreign policy. In light of her position
in the CIA's relationship with Saudi Aramco, the
outing of Valerie Plame made much of this
impossible. In short, the Bush leak threatened
National Security.
Former White House Counsel and Watergate figure
John Dean, writing for the prestigious legal
website findlaw.com on June 4th made some very
ominous observations that appear to have gone
unnoticed by most.
"This action by Bush is a rather stunning and
extraordinary development. The President of the
United States is potentially hiring a private
criminal defense lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the
White House is doing all it can to bury the
story, providing precious little detail or
context for the President's action.
"But from what I have learned from those who
have been quizzed by the Fitzgerald investigators
it seems unlikely that they are interviewing the
President merely as a matter of completeness, or
in order to be able to defend their actions in
front of the public. Asking a President to
testify - or even be interviewed - remains a
serious, sensitive and rare occasion. It is not
done lightly. Doing so raises separation of
powers concerns that continue to worry many.
"If so - and if the person revealed the leaker's
identity to the President, or if the President
decided he preferred not to know the leaker's
identity. - Then this fact could conflict with
Bush's remarkably broad public statements on the
issue. He has said that he did not know of
'anybody in [his] administration who leaked
classified information.' He has also said that he
wanted 'to know the truth' about this leak.
"If Bush is called before the grand jury, it is
likely because Fitzgerald believes that he knows
much more about this leak than he has stated
publicly.
"Perhaps Bush may have knowledge not only of the
leaker, but also of efforts to make this issue go
away - if indeed there have been any. It is
remarkably easy to obstruct justice, and this
matter has been under various phases of an
investigation by the Justice Department since it
was referred by the CIA last summer.
"On this subject, I spoke with an experienced
former federal prosecutor who works in
Washington, specializing in white collar criminal
defense (but who does not know Sharp). That
attorney told me that he is baffled by Bush's
move - unless Bush has knowledge of the leak. 'It
would not seem that the President needs to
consult personal counsel, thereby preserving the
attorney-client privilege, if he has no knowledge
about the leak,' he told me.
"What advice might Bush get from a private
defense counsel? The lawyer I consulted opined
that, 'If he does have knowledge about the leak
and does not plan to disclose it, the only good
legal advice would be to take the Fifth, rather
than lie. The political fallout is a separate
issue.'
"I raised the issue of whether the President
might be able to invoke executive privilege as to
this information. But the attorney I consulted -
who is well versed in this area of law - opined
that 'Neither outing Plame, nor covering for
the perpetrators would seem to fall within the
scope of any executive privilege that I am aware
of.'
"That may not stop Bush from trying to invoke
executive privilege, however - or at least from
talking to his attorney about the option. As I
have discussed in one of my prior columns, Vice
President Dick Cheney has tried to avoid invoking
it in implausible circumstances - in the case
that is now before the U.S .Supreme Court. Rather
he claims he is beyond the need for the
privilege, and simply cannot be sued.
"Suffice it to say that whatever the meaning of
Bush's decision to talk with private counsel
about the Valerie Plame leak, the matter has
taken a more ominous turn with Bush's action. It
has only become more portentous because now Dick
Cheney has also hired a lawyer for himself,
suggesting both men may have known more than they
let on. Clearly, the investigation is heading
toward a culmination of some sort. And it should
be interesting."
Last and final clue: Under Executive Privilege, a
principle intended to protect the constitutional
separation of powers, officials in the Executive
Branch cannot give testimony in a legal case
against a sitting President. The Bush
administration has invoked or threatened to
invoke the privilege several times. Dick did it
over the secret records of his energy task force
and George Bush tried to use it to prevent
Condoleezza Rice from testifying before the
'Independent' Commission investigating September
11th.
Former officials of the Executive Branch are,
however, free to testify if they are no longer
holding a government office when subpoenaed or
when the charges are brought.
[To learn more about Executive Privilege visit www.findlaw.com]
The Bush administration has proved itself to be
an insular group of inept, dishonest and
dangerous CEO's of the corporation known as
America. They have become very bad for business
and the Board of Directors is now taking action.
Make no mistake, the CIA works for "The Board" -
Wall Street and big money. The long-term (very
corrupt and unethical) agenda of the Board, in
the face of multiple worsening global crises, was
intended to proceed far beyond the initially
destructive war in Iraq, toward an effective
reconstruction and a strategic response to Peak
Oil. But the neocons have stalled at the ugly
stage: killing hundreds of thousands of people;
destroying Iraq's industrial and cultural
infrastructure as their own bombs and other
people's RPGs blow everything up; getting caught
running torture camps; and making the whole world
intensely dislike America.
These jerks are doing real damage to their masters' interests.
But (not surprisingly) Tenet and the CIA were
and remain much better at covert operations and
planning ahead than the Bush administration ever
was. Tenet and Pavitt actually prepared and left
a clear, irrefutable and incriminating paper
trail which not only proves that they had shunned
and refused to endorse the documents, the CIA
also did not support the nuke charges and warned
Bush not to use them.
Where are those documents now? They're part of
the Justice Department Plame investigation - and
they're also in the hands of the Congressman who
will most likely introduce and manage the
articles of impeachment, if that becomes
necessary: Henry Waxman (D), of California. If
you would like to see how tightly the legal trap
has been prepared, and how carefully the evidence
has been laid out, I suggest taking a look around
Waxman's web site at:
http://www.house.gov/waxman/.
THE SWARM
There are a multitude of signs that the Bush
administration is being "swarmed" in what is
becoming a feeding frenzy as opposition is
surfacing from many places inside the government,
including the military. The signs are not hard to
find.
The June 3rd issue of Capitol Hill Blue, the
newspaper published for members of Congress, bore
the headline "Bush Knew About Leak of CIA
Operative's Name". That article virtually
guaranteed that the Plame investigation had
enough to pursue Bush criminally. The story's
lead sentence described a criminal, prosecutable
offense: "Witnesses told a federal grand jury
President George W. Bush knew about, and took no
action to stop, the release of a covert CIA
operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to
discredit her husband, a critic of administration
policy in Iraq."
A day later, on June 4th Capitol Hill Blue took
another hard shot at the administration. Titled
"Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House
Aides", the story's first four paragraphs say
everything.
"President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic
behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of
the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately
express growing concern over their leader's state
of mind.
"In meetings with top aides and administration
officials, the President goes from quoting the
Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against
the media, Democrats and others that he
classifies as 'enemies of the state.'
"Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a
man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who
disagree with him and paranoid of a public that
no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
'It reminds me of the Nixon days,' says a
longtime GOP political consultant with contacts
in the White House. 'Everybody is an enemy;
everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over
there.'"
The attacks have not stopped. On June 8th, the
same paper followed with another story headlined,
"Lawyers Told Bush He Could Order Suspects
Tortured".
Journalist Wayne Madsen, a Washington veteran
with excellent access to many sources has
indicated for this story that the Neocons have
few remaining friends anywhere. All of this is
consistent with a CIA-led coup.
Ahmed Chalabi
Madsen reported that the Plame probe comes amid
another high-level probe of Pentagon officials
for leaking classified National Security Agency
cryptologic information to Iran via Iraqi
National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi. FBI agents
have polygraphed and interviewed a number of
civilian political appointees in the Pentagon in
relation to the intelligence leak, said to have
severely disrupted the National Security Agency's
ability to listen in on encrypted Iranian
diplomatic and intelligence communications.
Chalabi's leak has once again forced Iran to
change equipment, resulting in impaired U.S.
intelligence gathering of Iran's sensitive
communications. The probe into the Chalabi leak
is centering on Pentagon officials who have been
close to Chalabi, including Office of Net
Assessment official Harold Rhode, Director of
Policy and Plans officials Douglas Feith and
William Luti, Undersecretary for Intelligence
Stephen Cambone, and Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz. In addition, some former Pentagon
advisers are also targeted in the probe.
Many press reports throughout 2003 indicated
that Chalabi, distrusted and virtually discarded
by the CIA, had been resurrected and inserted
into the Iraqi political mix on the orders of
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other
Neocons listed above.
Abu Ghraib and Torture
A former CIA official told Madsen that between
the Plame leak and the Abu Ghraib torture affair,
the Bush administration is facing something that
will be "worse than Watergate."
PLANNING FOR SUCCESSION
If both Bush and Cheney are removed or resign,
what happens? Madsen reported that lobbyists and
political consultants in Washington are dusting
off their copies of the Constitution and checking
the line of presidential succession.
One lobbyist said he will soon pay a call on
Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who, as
President pro tem of the Senate, is second in
line to House Speaker Dennis Hastert to become
President in the event Bush and Cheney both go.
It is one of the greatest ironies of the Plame
affair that the Bush administration, spawned and
nurtured by oil, might have committed suicide by
vindictively, cruelly and unthinkingly exacting
personal retribution on an intelligence officer
who had committed no offense, and who was, quite
possibly, providing the administration with
critical oil-related intelligence which the
President needed to manage our shaky economy and
affairs of state for a while longer to squeak
through to re-election. In our opinion, nothing
better epitomizes the true nature of the Neocons.
That being said, they have to go. FTW wishes that it was as
certain that what will come after them will be better.
--
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Wexford, Ireland
_____________________________
"...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the
suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the
Reichstag fire."
- Srdja Trifkovic
There is not a problem with the system.
The system is the problem.
Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs.
_____________________________
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Informative links:
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http://www.rachel.org
http://www.truthout.org
http://www.zmag.org
http://www.co-intelligence.org
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