Saints And Sinners: Bipartisan

What it takes is not a Democrat or a Republican, per se, but a person with integrity and courage to stick to your values and principles when the fear campaign is on to manipulate you; an attempt to scare you into dropping every principle you ever had.

It's easy to stick to your principles when all is well and your not being tested. It's also easy to understand why an elected official, responsible for our safety, might be tempted to go along with the Bush gulag system and torture, especially when those officials could be blamed, publicly, if there had been another attack on American soil.

Still, should we not expect more of our officials?

They represent us.

I know that we do not want America being turned into the new Soviet Union and we don't want people tortured in our name and with our resources, no matter what said people have done nor how evil we may think they are, even if torture did work, which it doesn't, except to force people to say what someone wants them to say, not necessarily the truth.

Are Americans no longer as courageous as they once were? Are we so frightened that we no longer care about our own souls? I don't want to believe that.

I only hope it isn't true.

December 9th, 2007

Congress Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
y: Nicole Belle @ 6:30 AM - PST

When I first read this report, I admit that I got angry. Then I got smart. Look carefully at the names named in this report. Isn’t it interesting that the WaPo reporters made sure to point out the Democrats in attendance when Congress was still operating under a Republican majority? Hmmm….who do you suppose could have leaked this story to the press to perhaps deflect from their own negative stories?

No matter how you slice it, there’s some serious ’splaining that needs to be done, but the lopsidedness of this article makes me more than a little leery of its accuracy.

WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was water-boarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.[..]

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.[..]

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which water-boarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Cognitive Dissonance ALERT At The WaPo

Slightly OT, but it seems obvious to me that not only is there no military solution in Iraq, but there is, and never as been, a Bush solution in Iraq.

What the American masses don't seem to get is that even as despised as Saddam was by many Iraqis, those very same Iraqis felt betrayed by Bush I and the Sunni Iraqis who supported Saddam felt that Bush I betrayed and suckered punched him at the beginning of Gulf War I.

The facts are that all of that is true, but Americans' seeming failure to see beyond waving flags and Bush self-righteousness and propaganda to understand the big picture prevents us from understanding the basics of one of the major issues preventing any real success (however that is being defined today).

No one named Bush could have ever succeeded in accomplishing the goals as they were told to the American people, once it became obvious to anyone with more than three neurons firing that "mushroom clouds and small pox sprayed all over the eastern seaboard" were nothing but terrorist tactics used by our own government in order to gain our support for an illegal and unjust war. (Who needs Osama when we have Dick Cheney?)

No government approved of by Bush will ever be accepted by the Iraqis and, possibly, approved by any American administration after the nightmare this administration has created in Iraq.

Why doesn't someone, in Washington, have the guts to just simply say it: Far more than America or Americans, in general, the very name "Bush" is despised by the Arab/Muslim masses and they have their reasons.

November 18, 2007

The Post's editorial dysfunction

The editorialists at the Washington Post should try reading the Washington Post. I know this is asking a lot -- such a concession would risk tailspinning their merely disturbed cognitive dissonance into a wildly despondent mental unblockage -- but some radical measure of intervention is worth the gamble. They simply cannot go on like this, lest they soon find themselves writing for Fox News, a fate worse than journalistic obscurity.

This morning the WP's plucky opinion crew has written yet another logic-defying, reportage-denying editorial on Iraq. It opens orgiastically, and only the full measure of their come-hither ecstasy will do as a quote:

THE EVIDENCE is now overwhelming that the "surge" of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success. By every metric used to measure the war -- total attacks, U.S. casualties, Iraqi casualties, suicide bombings, roadside bombs -- there has been an enormous improvement since January. U.S. commanders report that al-Qaeda has been cleared from large areas it once controlled and that its remaining forces in Iraq are reeling. Markets in Baghdad are reopening, and the curfew is being eased; the huge refugee flow out of the country has begun to reverse itself. Credit for these achievements belongs in large part to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, who took on a tremendously challenging new counterterrorism strategy and made it work; to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of that strategy; and to President Bush, for making the decision to launch the surge against the advice of most of Congress and the country's foreign policy elite.

PRETTY THRILLING, huh? One can almost see the rockets' red glare, and the visage of George the Lionhearted is decidedly ineradicable.

But wait. A bummer is coming; their editorial erection is heading south. They're unable to cleanly wipe the day's problems from their minds and just lie back and enjoy the moment. It's frustrating, I know, but they smell trouble brewing in George and David's Middle East paradise -- dang it.

Or, as the editorial board put it with more than a trifle understatement: "It is, however, too early to celebrate," since, after all, "the principal objective of the surge was not military, but political." And, alas, that objective has met with unqualified failure.

Oh, shoot. And here we thought we were onto something -- a thought suggested by the very folks who then promptly suggested we forget all that. All their wooing and cooing meant nothing, since the cause of the troubles has been wholly unaltered by the surge's effect.

So what was their opening point? Just foreplay, I guess, which, of course, all real men -- even manly editorialists -- should properly disdain.

And their recommendation for recovery was just as disdainful, since it showed an utter lack of understanding of, say, Thomas Ricks' reporting in their own paper, which they acknowledge with only fleeting cognition.

"The White House and State Department seem to be turning their attention from Iraq at the very moment when they should be mounting a diplomatic offensive to secure concrete steps toward a political settlement," such as holding local elections, say the vastly worried editorialist. . "Such negligence would be another fateful mistake in the conduct of this war."

If they had read above, below and between Ricks' lines -- or perhaps even the lines themselves -- they would have realized his reporting allowed for only the bleakest of prognoses.

Quoting Ricks: "The best promise for breaking the deadlock would be holding provincial elections, [U.S. military] officers said -- though they recognize that elections could turn bloody and turbulent, undercutting the fragile stability they now see developing in Iraq....

"So, how to force political change ... without destabilizing the country further? 'I pity the guy who has to reconcile that tension,' said Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, the chief of planning for U.S. military operations in Baghdad."

Hopeless is hopeless, especially when the only possible cure exacerbates the disease.

As for the WP's editorial board's sorrowful dysfunction? They should consult a professional. Like Ricks.

****

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Is Richard Cohen Just Dumb or What?

Is WP's Cohen Dumbest Columnist?
By Robert Parry June 19, 2007

Granted it would be quite a competition, but is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen the dumbest columnist ever?

In his June 19 op-ed, Cohen joined the latest Inside-the-Beltway craze, the neoconservative media riot over the 30-month jail sentence facing former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

From reading the column, it does appear that Cohen has the skills at least to master and recite the litany of talking points that the neocons have compiled to make their case about the injustice of Libby going into the slammer for committing perjury and obstruction of justice.
Cohen accuses special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of violating longstanding Justice Department guidelines on when to bring a case; he denounces the trial – over Libby’s lying about his role in unmasking covert CIA officer Valerie Plame – as “a mountain out of a molehill”; he asserts that there was no “underlying crime”; he even pokes fun at Americans who thought the invasion of Iraq might have been a bad idea.

“They thought – if ‘thought’ can be used in this context – that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something,” Cohen wrote.

Yet, beyond a talent for reprising the conventional wisdom from Washington dinner parties, it is hard to tell what justifies Cohen’s long career as a political columnist. On nearly every major development over the past couple of decades, Cohen has missed the point or gotten it dead wrong.

For example, during the Florida recount battle in 2000, Cohen cared less about whom the voters wanted in the White House than the Washington insiders' certainty that George W. Bush would be a uniter, not a divider.

“The nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse,” Cohen wrote. “That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

Cohen also joined the Washington herd in the disastrous stampede for invading Iraq. After Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deceptive Iraq War speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, Cohen mocked anyone who still dared doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed hidden WMD stockpiles.

“The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations – some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail – had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them,” Cohen wrote. “Only a fool – or possibly a Frenchman – could conclude otherwise.”


Misplaced Enthusiasm

It took Cohen another three years before he recognized that his enthusiasm for the war had been misplaced.

On April 4, 2006, as the U.S. death toll reached into the thousands and the Iraqi death toll soared into the tens of thousands, Cohen wrote, “those of us who once advocated this war are humbled. It’s not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration.”

In normal work settings, incompetence – especially when it is chronic and has devastating consequences – justifies dismissal or at least demotion, maybe a desk in Storage Room B where Cohen could sit with his red stapler, but without access to a word processor.

Yet, in the strange world of Washington punditry, success is measured not in being right but in keeping one’s opinion within the parameters of the capital’s respectable opinion, even if those judgments are atrociously wrong.

As for the Plame case, Cohen seems to be living in the propaganda dreamscape of the still-influential neocons, not in the real world where the disclosure of Plame’s identity caused actual damage, destroying her undercover career as a CIA officer and putting in jeopardy the lives of foreigners who worked with her investigating weapons proliferation.

Plus, the motive behind the leaking of Plame’s identity was not “gossip,” as Cohen asserts, but a White House-orchestrated campaign to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth about his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa. Wilson’s findings helped the U.S. intelligence community debunk false claims about Iraq attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Despite warnings from the CIA, however, President George W. Bush cited Iraq’s supposed uranium shopping during his 2003 State of the Union Address, making it a key part of the case to invade Iraq.

When Wilson went public with his story in July 2003, the Bush administration sought to discredit him by suggesting that his Africa trip was just a junket arranged by his CIA wife. One White House official told a reporter from the Washington Post that the administration had informed at least six reporters about Plame.

The official said the disclosure was “purely and simply out of revenge.” That was a revelation that special prosecutor Fitzgerald corroborated in his investigation.


Libby’s Role

Also, contrary to Cohen’s column, Libby, as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was a central figure in this anti-Wilson smear campaign. Libby briefed two reporters – Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper – about Plame’s identity and brought press secretary Ari Fleischer into the leak operation.

Though it turned out that other senior administration officials, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, White House political adviser Karl Rove, were the successful ones in getting a journalist, Robert Novak, to publish Plame’s identity, it wasn’t for the lack of
Libby trying to get Plame’s identity into the press.

Nor is it accurate to say that there was no underlying crime. It is illegal to willfully disclose the identity of a covert CIA officer – and the administration officials involved were well aware that her identity was classified. Leaking classified material also can be – and often is – treated as a crime.

But this was a conspiracy that involved both the President and Vice President, presenting extraordinary obstacles for prosecution. The President and the Vice President, through delegation of authority from the President, have broad power to declassify information.
Indeed, some constitutional experts would argue that the President can declassify any information he wishes, and it’s known that Bush did so in the Plame matter at least to the degree that he cleared some parts of a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate for Libby and others to use in briefing reporters.

It remains unclear whether Bush and/or Cheney specifically approved leaking Plame’s identity – since their interviews with prosecutor Fitzgerald remain secret – but their involvement would have made prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 or the Espionage Act extremely difficult if not impossible.

Bush and Cheney also appear to have played a role in the cover-up of the Plame leak after a criminal investigation began in September 2003. Though Bush knew a great deal about the get-Wilson campaign (having declassified information for it), he claimed to know nothing and disingenuously urged his subordinates to say what they knew.

“I want to know the truth,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

However, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. Rove issued a false statement through the White House press office denying any involvement.

That prompted Libby to seek help from Cheney. As Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells disclosed in the trial’s opening remarks, Libby’s complaint was that “they’re trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb.”

‘The Pres’

In response to Libby’s appeal, Cheney penned a message to the press secretary demanding equal treatment for Libby. “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others,” Cheney wrote to press secretary Scott McClellan.

In the note, Cheney initially ascribed Libby’s sacrifice to Bush but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in a passive tense. Complying with Cheney’s wishes on Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”

So, the evidence is that not only was there a high-level administration conspiracy to leak Plame’s identity but there was an equally high-level conspiracy to cover up the truth. Libby got nailed because he failed to shift away from the cover stories when the investigation grew serious following Fitzgerald’s appointment in December 2003.

Rather than a wild-eyed prosecutor on a rampage, Fitzgerald actually appears to have been a very cautious prosecutor who chose not to pursue what would have been a deserving but politically disruptive case against Bush, Cheney and other government conspirators implicated in both leaking classified material and participating in a cover-up.

But all this is missed by Cohen. In his June 19 column, he does reiterate his current position that the Iraq War was a mistake. He also acknowledges that lying under oath is a bad thing to do. But – blinded by the pervasive neocon talking points – he refuses to see the larger scandal.

“I have come to hate the war and I cannot approve of lying under oath – not by Scooter, not by Bill Clinton, not by anybody,” Cohen wrote. “But the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place. This is a mess. Should Libby be pardoned? Maybe. Should his sentence be commuted? Definitely.”

There was a time when the Washington Post aggressively pursued cover-ups of government wrongdoing. Not that long ago, during the Clinton administration, a favorite pearl of Washington wisdom was: “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”

But that was then and this is now. Today, the Post editorial page and its prized columnists, like Cohen, eagerly join in cover-ups and happily bash anyone who won’t go with the Washington flow.

So, the question remains, is Cohen just a clueless incompetent when he berates Fitzgerald for the “train wreck” of the Libby conviction or is this columnist really a clever guy who is very skilled at knowing how to stay on the gravy train of modern Washington journalism?

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Shame On WaPo, Again

The Libby Trial Is Serious Business

Wednesday, February 21, 2007; A14

Shame on The Post for publishing Victoria Toensing's irrelevant opinings ["Trial in Error," Outlook, Feb. 18] as the case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby goes to the jury.

My issue is not legal. My issue is the extreme damage that occurs when CIA identities are bandied about by political hacks and the newspapers that cheer them on.

These leaks violate the code of blood honor of the CIA, MI-6, Mossad and every clandestine officer. Real people die. Real heroes are exposed and murdered. Real intelligence is lost. Real sources lose trust in our honor and refuse to cooperate. Real wars are fought mistakenly. Real troops are endangered. Real damage is done to U.S. credibility throughout the world.

War is not a dinner party for ideologues. Espionage is not a 007 movie. The lives of covert operatives are not petty cash to be bartered for spin.

If Mr. Libby is acquitted, God bless him. If he is convicted, President Bush should immediately renounce a pardon. Our heroes deserve a standing ovation, not a stab in the back.

BRENT BUDOWSKY
Washington

The writer served as an aide to former senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), sponsor of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Victoria Toensing; Rethug Hit-Woman

Does anyone really believe anything Toensing or, her husband, Joe DiGenova, have to say about anything?

My God, the two of them were all for lyching Clinton, for lying about adultery, but, now, believe it is the prosecutor, investigating the outing of a CIA agent, treasonous in the extreme, who should be lynched.

These two are NUTZ!


Shame on the Washington Post, Again
By Robert ParryFebruary 19, 2007

Just days before the perjury/obstruction trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby goes to the jury, the Washington Post’s Outlook section published a bizarre front-page article by right-wing legal expert Victoria Toensing suggesting that the prosecutor and one of the chief victims in the case should be put on trial.

Beyond the absurdity – and dishonesty – of Toensing’s arguments, the Post illustrated the article with fabricated “mug shots” of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq War critic whose undercover CIA wife, Valerie Plame, was outed by the Bush administration.

In this lead opinion article for Washington’s biggest-circulation newspaper, Toensing, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, cites Fitzgerald, Wilson and several other targets in proposed “indictments,” each of which begins: “This Grand Jury Charges …”
Given the Post’s prominence in the nation’s capital and Toensing’s former position in the Justice Department, the article has the look and feel of an attempt to influence the jury that will be judging whether Libby committed perjury and obstruction of justice.

Though the Post’s Outlook editors are sure to argue that the “mug shots” were tongue in cheek, the Post has editorially supported the Iraq War and disparaged American critics, especially Wilson who stepped forward in summer 2003 as one of the first establishment figures to accuse the Bush administration of “twisting” intelligence.
The Post also has bashed Fitzgerald for prosecuting Libby. So, there is a pattern and a motive to the Post’s behavior.

False Claims

Toensing’s article hinges largely on her false claim that Plame was not a covert CIA officer involved with sensitive counter-proliferation operations – and that therefore no real crime was committed when the Bush administration leaked her identity.

To bolster that central lie in the article, Toensing argues that Fitzgerald and the CIA may have described Plame’s status as “classified,” but that the prosecutor “never introduced one piece of evidence to support such status.”

Toensing leaves out, however, that it has been Libby’s defense lawyers who have fought to exclude evidence of Plame’s covert CIA status because they regard the fact as likely to prejudice the jury against their client. Plus, Plame’s covert status has been judged mostly irrelevant to a trial about whether Libby lied to investigators and the grand jury.

So, in muddying up the issue of Plame’s classified identity, Toensing is exploiting the limitations on evidence introduced at the Libby trial – and the unwillingness of the CIA to unnecessarily expose additional secrets relating to Plame’s sensitive assignments.

Toensing also recycles other misleading Republican talking points that have been used for three years to confuse the public and protect the White House. For instance, part of Toensing’s “indictment” of Wilson cites his correct belief that Vice President Dick Cheney instigated the investigation that Wilson undertook to Niger.

Ever since Wilson disclosed in 2003 that he found no evidence to support Cheney’s suspicions that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, the Republicans have made a big deal out of the fact that Cheney didn’t personally ask Wilson to go on the mission; Cheney asked the CIA which recruited Wilson for the task.

Why this minor point of confusion is deemed significant has been one of the curiosities of this sorry affair.

But it is stunning that the Post so values this argument that it would let a partisan writer like Toensing include it in an “indictment” of a citizen who undertook a difficult mission for the CIA, without pay, and reported back correctly that the Niger-Iraq suspicions appeared to be baseless.

Republicans also have condemned Wilson because he believed the substance of his oral report on his mission was conveyed to Cheney’s office. Though Wilson was essentially right – the CIA repeatedly intervened to strike Niger references from White House speeches – the supposed contradiction here was that a formal report on Wilson’s findings was never sent to Cheney.

So, Toensing writes in her “indictment” that “This Grand Jury charges Joseph C. Wilson IV with misleading the public about how he was sent to Niger, about the thrust of his March 2003 oral report of that trip, and about his wife’s CIA status, perhaps for the purpose of getting book and movie contracts.” [Toensing's reference to "March 2003" appears to be another factual error in her article, since Wilson reported back to the CIA in early 2002.]

To back up her accusations, Toensing cites Wilson’s comment on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked [about the Niger uranium] and that response was based upon my trip there.”

With a dramatic flourish, Toensing then adds, “But Cheney said he had no knowledge of Wilson’s trip and was never briefed on his oral report to the CIA.”

What Toensing ignores, however, is that Cheney and other White House officials may not have known specifically about Wilson, but they were aware that the CIA had checked out the Niger claims and judged them to be unfounded.

That was why White House speechwriters had to sneak around the CIA’s negative findings and attribute the Niger claims to the British government in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address. But none of that detail finds its way into Toensing’s “indictment.”

Nailing Fitzgerald

In her “indictment” of Fitzgerald, Toensing accuses him of making “one factual assertion that turned out to be flat wrong: Libby was not ‘the first official’ to reveal Plame’s identity.” But, again, Toensing is playing games with a quote.

At his Oct. 28, 2005, news conference, Fitzgerald actually said: “Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson.”

In October 2005, Fitzgerald’s comment was accurate. Libby was “the first official known” to have divulged Plame’s identity.

Only later did Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reveal that he had heard about Plame earlier from deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. By editing out the full context of the quote, however, Toensing succeeds in maligning Fitzgerald’s honesty.

On and on Toensing goes, making one phony argument after another as she “indicts” pretty much everyone who played any role in advancing the case, from Fitzgerald to Wilson to the CIA to “the media” to the Justice Department. She does throw in two ex-administration officials, former press secretary Ari Fleischer and Armitage.

But Toensing leaves out of her “indictments” the principals who were responsible for misusing the Niger intelligence to scare the American people into supporting the Iraq War and who then organized the anti-Wilson smears that ended up exposing his wife’s clandestine work for the CIA.

Cheney, for instance, isn’t in line for a Toensing “indictment” although he was the sparkplug behind the outing of a CIA officer. Nor does George W. Bush merit an “indictment” although he issued misleading statements about the Plame leak that could have been interpreted as encouraging a cover-up.Before Fitzgerald was appointed as special prosecutor – and when it looked like the scandal could be contained – Bush disingenuously urged his staff to cooperate.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to friendly reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House hand and possibly signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.

Toensing also spares White House political adviser Karl Rove from an “indictment” although he was another senior administration official peddling Plame’s identity to the press. One well-placed conservative source told me that Rove was a close behind-the-scenes associate of Armitage, and thus may have had a hand in coordinating Armitage’s role in the leaks. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “New Clues in the Plame Mystery.”]

The Post’s Role

Yet, while it may be understandable why a right-wing operative like Toensing would recycle these smears against Wilson and Fitzgerald at this time, what is more shocking is that the Washington Post would give her such prominence – as 12 Washington residents are about to be asked to weigh the evidence on Libby impartially.

By presenting these pro-Libby arguments in such a high-profile manner, including fabricated “mug shots” of prosecutor Fitzgerald, the Post could be seen as joining in a last-ditch bid for jury nullification to spare Libby from conviction.

While the Post’s behavior may be surprising to some, it actually fits with a long campaign by Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt to undermine Fitzgerald’s investigation and tear down Wilson. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Shame on the Post’s Editorial Page” or “Smearing Joe Wilson Again.”]

Yet, regardless of the Post’s editorial biases, there’s no justification for a newspaper publishing information that it knows to be false or intentionally misleading, even if the deceptions are in its opinion section.

Back in the late 1980s, I co-wrote a lead article for the Post’s Outlook section and the piece underwent intensive review for fairness and accuracy. So the argument doesn’t hold that the Post sees no problem in publishing reckless charges in the Outlook section just because it can be passed off as opinion.

Indeed, the Post editors never would have countenanced a similar “indictment” article that actually made sense – one that presented the criminal case against Bush, Cheney, Rove and, say, Fred Hiatt for participating in a conspiracy that involved exposing a covert CIA officer and then trying to cover up the disgraceful action.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.