Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming By Michael C. Ruppert. Posted 7/11/2004 3:38:00 PM

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 predicted by
us in the following 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 Septmeber 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 a journalist working for
Italy's Corriere della Sera which then 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. [emphasis added]

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 investigated
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. Another one of Aramco’s partners
is Chevron-Texaco 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. 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. [Emphasis added]

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.





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