Yet More Evidence of Bush Administration Lies: Cheney Admits that His Talking Points Helped Bring About the Outing of Valerie Plame? (With Music Video)

by Damozel | Deb reported yesterday on Henry Waxman's courage and intrepidity in trying---in vain, but trying---to hold the Bush administration accountable for something. Both he and John Conyers, his Senate counterpart did their all.  I suppose it never occurred to past presidents that if you just said, "Oh yeah?  Make me!" to Congress and the courts, there wouldn't be a whole lot they could actually do about it.  Well, at least not with a Democratic Congress composed by and large of invertebrates.

And now we hear from none other than Dick Cheney himself---not that we hadn't heard it rumored before---that Pelosi, Rockefeller, Harman, and Reid were fully briefed on the NSA. I don't know about you, but I'd like to hear some response to this, just for the satisfaction of knowing at long last whether the Democratic leadership were merely spineless enablers as opposed to accessories to the Bush administration's crimes against decency, science, religion, international law, and the Constitution.

Speaking of which:  Murray Waas says that leaked information from a "still highly confidential" FBI report reflects Cheney's role in the outing of Valerie Plame.

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer....(Murray Waas; emphasis added)

Well, I'm certainly convinced and I think you probably are as well.   While he certainly intended to do harm, he would like for you to know that he didn't mean to go after Valerie!  It was her husband he wished to punish and discredit.  She was merely---what is the phrase?---collateral damage.

Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.  (Murray Waas)

There's a surprise, eh?  Intrepid prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knows, and the jurors in the Libby case know, and you and I know that the only reason Cheney didn't fall down and go boom after the Plame affair was because Libby took the fall for him. 

Libby was convicted on March 6, 2007 of four felony counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice, in attempting to conceal from authorities his own role, and that of other Bush administration officials, in leaking information to the media about Plame.

One of the jurors in the case, Dennis Collins, told the press shortly after the verdict that he and many other jurors believed that Libby was serving as a “fall guy” for Cheney, and had lied to conceal the role of his boss in directing information about Plame to be leaked to the press.

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald, said in both opening and closing arguments that because Libby did not testify truthfully during the course of his investigation, federal authorities were stymied from determining what role Vice President Cheney possibly played in directing the leaking of information regarding Plame that led to the end of her career as a covert CIA officer, and jeopardized other sensitive intelligence information.

In his closing argument in February 2007, Fitzy famously said:

“There is talk about a cloud over the Vice President. There is a cloud over the White House as to what happened. Do you think the FBI, the Grand Jury, the American people are entitled to a straight answer?” (Murray Waas)

During my lifetime, presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton always had the same answer to that question, but the Bush administration took lying to the public to a whole new level.  I don't believe any of their predecessors (yes, including Bill Clinton) went so far as to say in effect, "Yes, I did lie and I have lied repeatedly since. What are you going to do about it huh?  HUH?" and had Congress simply wring its hands, whine, and DO NOTHING AT ALL.

Amazing that Clinton could be impeached for a blow job and Bush and Cheney could reign for eight years without being required even to account for their actions. 

Hah.  Cernig filed his account of this article, and the media's lack of interest, under "douchebaggery."   I can see why ABC and Harper's didn't want to run the story, though---who cares, really, except a few obsessed-with-justice progressives like us?  Unless Cheney actually gets arrested, it's old news.  Whatever happens, it'll be too little and too late, now that the Cheney Branch is about to become a private citizen.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch Daily thinks that Bush owes it to correct the vast injustice to Scooter Libby.

As the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who suffered in a fiasco made worse by the White House, Mr. Libby deserves a full Presidential pardon. Mr. Bush commuted Mr. Libby's sentence in 2007, an action that kept him out of jail. But that doesn't expunge his conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice. As a felon, Mr. Libby is barred by law from voting or practicing law, his occupation for most of his working life. The half-measure reflected poorly on the President, whose commutation statement treated Mr. Libby at a chilly arm's length....

The pardon power is granted to the President by Article II of the Constitution -- and is not to be taken lightly. At its best, the power should be used not for political favors but to correct injustice in cases where the courts have erred....With perspective, they have helped to close the book on political mistakes, struggles and mismanagement, returning history's judgment from minor actors to the President.

The Bush Administration is mythologized as one in which loyalty is a defining virtue, especially on the part of the President himself. In this dark episode, an honest man became the fall guy in a larger political war over the war. Mr. Libby deserved better -- and Mr. Bush owes it to Mr. Libby, and to future occupants of the White House, to give him a full pardon.  (Wall Street Journal)

And why stop there?  Bush's old man preemptively pardoned the perpetrators of Iran-contra.  Why shouldn't Cheney preemptively pardon Cheney and himself, not to mention Karl Rove, Gonzalez, George Tenet, and every other line-crossing Bush administration official?

At least we'll have the tell-all books to look forward to.

All of this is pretty rich---pun intended---in light of  the "controversy" over Eric Holder's role in Clinton's  exercise of his pardon power.  The right---being unable to tell a hawk from a handsaw at the best of times---will doubtless fail to see the comic ironies implicit in their objections.

Granted the Rich pardon was an unseemly use of that presidential prerogative, and Clinton deserves robust criticism for that decision, it is by no means the most egregious episode in Presidential pardoning.

It wasn't, after all, used to cover up the un-Constitutional expansion of executive power or other political abuses by the President and his coterie.  That form of pardon is far more pernicious than one-off pardons of criminal acts unrelated to the Presidency. Pardons in defense of un-Constitutional abuses/political crimes have a greater potential to negatively impact, long term, the integrity of the Constitution and our system of government.  They set a corrosive precedent and eviscerate Constitutional protections through the post hoc removal of penalties for violating same.  Why would future administration officials shy away from breaking the law or violating the Consitution when they know that the President will eventually pardon them?  (Eric Martin)

As to Cheney, I reckon Digby has it about right:

Of course he [directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.] I'm just surprised he hasn't openly admitted it on his "yeah I ordered torture, whatcha gonna do about it?" tour. I honestly don't know what Cheney cares about except the big money boyz getting access to the federal treasury, so he may push for a pardon --- or not. I don't think he gives a damn one way or the other.

And now---from "Songs of the Bushmen"---Harry Shearer as (Dick Cheney) sings "No Cooler for the Scooter."   You might ask yourself:  do you really need to see "Dick Cheney" stretched out across the lid of a piano in a cheap nightclub?  I think you do.

WARNING:  May cause chilling of the spine and crawling of the flesh.

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Comments

[barbara sampley]

Two corrections to your facts:

1. Henry Waxman made it clear that he didn't have time or the priority (since the world was falling down around out ears when he came to power) to impeach Bush and Cheney, but the plan was to build a case for a special prosecutor to be assigned after their tenure had ended. Holding them responsible is essential unless we expect to lay the foundation for more of the same.To do otherwise is to take the position their kind know best - street fighting.

2. Nancy Pelosi has said repeatedly that there was too much damage to repair to make impeachment a priority, even though richly deserved and easy to prove. First we survive their tenure.

One of the worst crimes committed against the American public has been the undermining of our greatest institutions, i.e., the Constitution, by what the Reps called "public relations" - a throwing out of the idea that there was such a thing as truth and that objectivity was to be held as a goal. They accomplished their goal remarkably well with the establishment of thousands of fm radio stations across the country dedicated to this purpose. Anything short of telling the whole truth is adding to their most heinous offense.