Dick Don't Know Joe..If Dick Cheney didn't know Joseph Wilson, someone awfully close to him certainly did.
I am repeating these words, once again, from Matt Cooper's TIME magazine article. The words in quotation came from Lewis "Scooter" Libby. "Scooter" needed to disseminate the storyline good and fast - before the public could effectively point their finger at Dick Cheney."The Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn't know about it until this year when it became public in the last month or so." Other senior Administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have also claimed that they had not heard of Wilson's report until recently.
I gave you a blog entry in September, 2003. "Dick Cheney denies Joe Wilson Three Times"
Read it again. Think about it carefully. Why was it so important, in September, 2003, for Cheney to get out on the political talk shows and swear, hot and heavy on a stack o'Bibles, that he didn't know Joe? Why didn't Tim Russert ask more pointed questions at the time - when he could have?
AND NOW, READ THIS - from the same Time magazine article:"A source close to the matter says that Wilson was dispatched to Niger because Vice President Dick Cheney had questions about an intelligence report about Iraq seeking uranium and that he asked that the CIA get back to him with answers."
Could that source be JUDY MILLER?
How much does she know about Dick Cheney's involvement?
This one paragraph, from Sy Hersh's October, 2003 New Yorker article titled "The Stovepipe - How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons", leads me to wonder about Miller's involvement with Chalabi, and the Vice President's heavy handed approach in getting directly involved with the CIA while the planning and plotting of the Iraq war was happening:
"The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money [more than ninety million dollars in federal funds], arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. “The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn’t given the money to Chalabi,” the former official recalled. Cheney said, “Here we are, denying him money, when they”—the Iraqi National Congress—“are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.”
"Unique"..indeed. It's all so clear that our nation was pushed into war by a stack of deliberate lies. Let's go back in time:
From the Independent, June 1, 2003: Tony Blair's sensational pre-war claim that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "could be activated within 45 minutes" was based on information from a single Iraqi defector of dubious reliability, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. British intelligence sources said the defector, recruited by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, told his story to American officials.
Read the words of Karen Kwiatkowski, a lieutenant-colonel who quit the air force and her Pentagon job as a strategic planner because she didn't like the direction the war on terror was going:"The planners on the OSD [office of the secretary of defense] side were largely unqualified as military planners, and further, they were blinded by ideology, prejudice against Arabs in terms of their military or organizational capability, and confused on reality, because they appeared to only listen to Chalabi and others like him, and held the official intelligence as suspect because it didn't conform to their agenda. In the case of postwar planning, it suffered from the same flaws—incompetence, believing lies, false assumptions about Iraqis and their political culture.....I think Cheney should be impeached, Bush as well, for lying and attempting to deceive in order to go to war. Rumsfeld may be protected, as he worked for them, the Nuremberg defense, as with Perle. Perle, however, should probably be in jail for profiteering, but so far he hasn't been charged—this would be in a criminal or civil court. Because we have a Republican Congress, Bush is safe, as Clinton would have been given a Democrat Congress. More recently, we have reports of information-leaking and possible espionage in the Pentagon, and some of these same policymakers are said to be under FBI investigation. In a fair and objective world, some people will go to jail for their role in creating and implementing the Bush foreign policy."
I realize that these words are strong and that they have been very diffiicult for everyday Americans, who do not pay close attention, to hear (if they have heard them yet at all - the media being "the silencer" that it is.)
Karl Rove's betrayal of America is just the tip of the iceberg.
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KEEPING TRACK OF HISTORY AS I HAVE BLOGGED IT:
Some of my prior posts on Miller and Chalabi
Some may say that Judith Miller's reporting on WMD should not cause us to abandon the defense of her 1st amendment rights....but what if she has been involved- directly or indirectly - in a crime (or impeachable offense, at best) for which she needs to maintain silence in order to protect her rights? It seems and they're probably just as happy to keep her in jail and silent than to have her free and talking.
April 28, 2003- Chalabi the embezzler and Bush the American-democracy snuffer team up for fun and profit Chalabi, cousin of Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's choice to head the country, said he would be prepared to serve the Iraqi oil industry if a democratically elected government was in place. He said selling off Iraq's oil assets was the only way to secure investment in his country. 'Iraq is going to need a lot of money in the next five years, up to $300bn. 'Privatisation or partial privatisation is the way to secure this investment.
May 2003 - THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO 'HMMMM'...."A dustup between two NY Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein. An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter [sic] on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is paid by top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding WMD?... "
July 13, 2003 -Miller's Misleading Headlines Head-lies
-September 30, 2003- RIPPED OFF - US paid $1m for 'useless intelligence' from Chalabi , Buncombe, Independent UK ".... Information from Iraqi defectors made available by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress before the US invasion was of little or no use...The Pentagon and those pushing for war against Iraq were quick to cite the information it provided and to promote the cause of Mr Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department were much more cautious about the organization's reliability."
- March 23, 2004 - How the NY Times Contributed to the Great Lies
June 26, 2003 - Judith Miller---What WERE you thinking?"More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi.......The April trip to Chalabi's headquarters took place "at Judy's {Judith Miller's} direction," one officer said...."This was totally out of their {MET Alpha's} lane, getting involved with human intelligence," said one military officer who, like several others interviewed, declined to be named because he is not an authorized spokesman. But, the officer said of Miller, "this woman came in with a plan. She was leading them. . . . She ended up almost hijacking the mission."
February, 2004 - THE OBVIOUS TIE BETWEEN CHENEY'S OFFICE, AND THE MOTIVE FOR KARL ROVE TO HAVE OUTED VALERIE PLAME - ENMESHED WITH THE INVOLVEMENT OF JUDITH MILER AND AHMED CHALABI IN THE CREATION OF THE WHITE HOUSE CASE FOR THE IRAQ WAR: Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. --According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls. [Richard Sale, UPI, February 5, 2004]
**Per Kos at Daily Kos: "Hannah, by the way, is a "senior national security aide" for Cheney, and was, in fact, the administration's main point of contact with Chalabi's INC."**
May 4, 2004- The rift between CIA and Neocons begins to go public in a mean way.
From: How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons [Salon.com] -- Israel's most dangerous enemy -- have also alarmed both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties were highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that "U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq." According to one government source, some of the information he gave Iran "could get people killed." A Chalabi aide denied the allegation. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA -- Chalabi's longtime enemies -- were behind the leak: "the State Department and the CIA are using the intelligence about his Iran ties to persuade the president to cut him loose once and for all."
May 27, 2004- Chalabi and Judith Miller "The White House had a perfect "deal" when it came to Miller. Chalabi would provide the Bushites with the information they needed to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he would supply the same material to Miller. Chalabi would tip her on something and then she'd go to the White House, which had already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she'd get it corroborated by an insider she'd always described as a 'senior administration official.'
I'm not certain if it was arrogant ignorance or some greed or delusional heroic motive or downright intent to deceive the American public. All I know is that George W. Bush should have known better and his administration should have known what they were doing when they gave such enormous credence to Chalabi, whose own self-interest (and past indication of poor character) was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq.
The fact that the N.Y. Times failed to point out that much of its reporting was dependent on Chalabi and Iraqi defectors (while the Bushites apparently sucked up Chalabi's lies and distortions) is inexcusable."
- May 29, 2004- NeoCons Still Love Chalabi - The Inconvenient White House Friend"Would their vociferous defense of con-man Chalabi make the NeoCons anti-American? Have NeoCons become inconvenient friends of the White House? Wait! Some of the NeoCons are members of the White House administration !
June 1, 2004- Chalabi Duped Pentagon; Played U.S. vs. Iran for himself"I highly recommend you read a Stratfor.com analysis before it's removed from the site."
