Text 1635, 290 rader
Skriven 2006-07-03 18:36:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Treason?
================
Well well well.
Looks like Bush told Cheney to commit (as George Bush elder described,) 
the worst kind of treason.

Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic 
By Murray Waas, National Journal

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he 
directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to 
counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that 
his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make 
the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the 
president's statement. 

Bush told prosecutors he directed Cheney to disclose classified 
information that would not only defend his administration but also 
discredit Wilson. 
 
Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview 
in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader 
effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that 
would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the 
sources said. 

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed 
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to 
covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of 
releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental 
declassification processes. 

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never 
directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer 
Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Bush said he had no information that 
Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so. 

Libby has said that neither the president nor the vice president 
directed him or other administration officials to disclose Plame's CIA 
employment to the press. Cheney has also denied having any role in the 
disclosure. 

On October 28, 2005, a federal grand jury indicted Libby on five felony 
counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, 
for allegedly concealing his own role, and perhaps that of others, in 
outing Plame as a covert CIA officer. 

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between 
Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's 
interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to 
"Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that 
administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and 
would discredit him. 

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm 
that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account 
was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor 
Patrick Fitzgerald. 

Libby, in language strikingly similar to Bush's words, testified to the 
federal grand jury in the leak case that Cheney had told him to "get all 
the facts out" that would defend the administration and discredit 
Wilson. Portions of Libby's grand jury testimony were an exhibit in a 
recent court filing by Fitzgerald. 

Dana Perino, a spokesperson for the White House, declined to comment. 
James E. Sharpe, an attorney for President Bush, did not return a phone 
message left at his home on Saturday. The special prosecutor's office 
also declined to comment. 

The disclosure of classified information as part of an effort to 
discredit Wilson, and the unmasking of Plame as a CIA "operative" by 
columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, occurred after Wilson began 
asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence 
to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. 

Wilson had led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger in March 2002 to 
investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to 
buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. 
Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were almost 
certainly not true. Still, President Bush cited the Niger allegations 
during his 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Saddam had 
an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction. 

Wilson has said he sought out White House officials, believing they did 
not know all the facts, and was rebuffed, he began speaking to reporters 
about his Niger mission, although he initially asked journalists not to 
reveal his identity. 

On June 12, 2003, the same day that news accounts appeared citing 
Wilson's allegations against the administration-albeit without him being 
named-Libby first learned from Cheney that Plame worked at the CIA and 
might have played a role in sending her husband to Niger. Libby's 
indictment stated: "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the 
Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the 
Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby 
understood that the Vice President learned this information from the 
CIA." 

On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public in an op-ed piece in The New 
York Times and on NBC's "Meet the Press" with his claims that the Bush 
administration had misrepresented the Niger information to make the case 
for war. 

Among those who took notice was Cheney. 

Cheney cut Wilson's op-ed out of the newspaper and wrote in the margins: 
"Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador] to 
answer a question. Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for 
us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?" 

In grand jury testimony, Libby testified that Cheney would "often... cut 
out from a newspaper an article using a little penknife he had" and 
"look at, think about it." Whether Libby saw Cheney's annotation of 
Wilson's column is not clear. Libby testified: "It's possible if it was 
sitting on his desk that, you know, my eye went across it." 

That aside, court papers filed by Fitzgerald's office have asserted: "At 
some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice 
President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to 
[Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it 
was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife." 

Two days after Wilson's column appeared, on July 8, 2003, Libby met with 
then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby questioned Wilson's 
mission to Niger by telling Miller that Wilson's wife worked for the 
CIA, according to Miller's federal grand jury testimony, and the 
indictment of Libby. Libby has claimed that he and Miller never 
discussed Plame that day -- a claim that prosecutors assert is a lie. 

Four days later, on July 12, 2003, Libby told Time magazine 
correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame worked for the CIA and that she 
might have had a role in her husband's selection for the Niger mission. 
Libby also spoke to Miller again that day and discussed Plame's work at 
the CIA, according to Miller's grand jury testimony and the Libby 
indictment. 

Central to the criminal charges against Libby is Libby's grand jury 
testimony and his statements to the FBI that when he talked to Cooper 
and Miller about Plame, he was only repeating rumors that he had heard 
from other journalists. Libby has testified that one or two days before 
talking to Miller and Cooper about Plame, NBC Washington bureau chief 
Tim Russert told Libby that Plame worked for the CIA, and that other 
reporters had heard the same information. 

According to Libby's indictment, Libby told the FBI that after Russert 
told him about Plame, Libby responded "that he did not know that, and 
Russert replied that all the reporters knew it. Libby was surprised by 
this statement because, while speaking with Russert, Libby did not 
recall that he previously had learned about Wilson's wife's employment 
from the Vice President." 

Contradicting Libby, Russert testified to the grand jury that he never 
spoke about Plame to Libby. Prosecutors alleged that Libby lied about 
Russert, and the Libby indictment states that he learned about Plame 
from Cheney and also from State Department and CIA officials with either 
direct or indirect access to classified information. 

A central focus of Fitzgerald's investigation has been why Libby would 
devise a cover story on how he learned of Plame's CIA work when 
prosecutors had obtained Libby's own notes showing that Libby had first 
gotten the information from Cheney. Libby told the FBI and testified to 
the grand jury that he had forgotten what Cheney had told him by the 
time that he made the Plame disclosure to reporters. 

"I no longer remembered it," Libby testified to the grand jury regarding 
his June 12 conversation with Cheney. It was only after speaking to 
Russert, Libby testified, that he "learned" the information about 
Plame's CIA employment "anew." 

Federal investigators have concluded that Libby's account is 
implausible. They have also questioned Libby's testimony that he does 
not believe he discussed the matter again with Cheney until at least 
July 14, 2003, the date of Novak's column that called Plame an "agency 
operative." 

Federal investigators have a substantial amount of evidence that Cheney 
and Libby spoke about the matter in detail shortly after Wilson's column 
appeared on July 6. Cheney's handwritten notes in the margin of the 
Wilson column are one reason that prosecutors have believed that the two 
men spoke earlier than Libby has said they did. 

Why -- if the criminal charges against Libby are correct -- would Libby 
lie to the FBI and the grand jury that he was only circulating rumors he 
had heard from reporters? 

One obvious reason, prosecutors have believed, is that Libby did not 
want to admit that he was disseminating material gleaned from classified 
information. Even if Libby believed that he was unlikely to be charged 
with disclosing classified information, the investigators think that 
Libby could have feared the loss of his security clearance or his job. 
Or, perhaps most important of all, he worried about embarrassing Cheney 
and Bush. 

Sources say investigators believe it is possible that Libby was trying 
to obscure Cheney's role in the Plame leak -- either by the vice 
president directing Libby to leak her CIA status, or through a general 
instruction from Cheney encouraging Libby to get the word out about 
Plame's role in sending Wilson to Niger. They say it is also possible 
that Libby lied to conceal the fact that he leaked Plame's identity to 
the press without Cheney's approval. 

Another important reason that Cheney and Libby may have spoken about 
Plame shortly after July 6, rather than July 12, is that Libby testified 
that he and Cheney talked on a regular basis after July 6 about how to 
counteract Wilson's allegations. During grand jury testimony, a 
prosecutor asked Libby whether this was "a topic that was discussed on a 
daily basis?" Libby replied: "Yes, sir." When the prosecutor followed up 
by saying, "And it was discussed on multiple occasions each day, in 
fact?" Libby again responded: "Yes, sir." 

Asked why the matter was so important to Cheney, Libby replied: "He 
wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn't done-what 
the facts were or were not. He was very keen on that and said it 
repeatedly: Let's get everything out." 

Libby further testified that Cheney was not referring to going public 
with information about Plame, but rather making available other 
classified information that both men believed would rebut Wilson's 
charges and discredit him. 

Cheney encouraged Libby to disclose portions of a then-still highly 
classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam's weapons-of-
mass-destruction program, according to court records filed by 
Fitzgerald. One section of the report mentioned the Niger allegations as 
credible, and Cheney, Libby, and other senior administration officials 
wanted to demonstrate that the CIA's incorrect assessments were a reason 
why the administration was making its own claims about the Niger matter. 

As National Journal first reported in April, Cheney directed Libby to 
leak portions of a highly classified March 2002 intelligence report on 
the CIA's Directorate of Operations debriefing of Wilson after he 
returned from Niger. Although the debriefing did not mention Plame, 
Cheney and Libby believed that portions of it would contradict Wilson's 
accounts. 

During the same time that Cheney and Libby's effort to leak classified 
information to discredit Wilson was under way, other White House 
officials were working through a formal interagency declassification 
process to make public portions of one or both of the same documents. It 
is unclear why Cheney and Libby were apparently acting without the 
knowledge of other senior government officials who were working with 
Cheney and Libby to formally declassify much of the very same 
information. 

Leading the effort to formally declassify some of the same information, 
according to legal and government sources, were presidential counselor 
Dan Bartlett, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, 
and then-CIA Director George Tenet. 

A senior government official who has spoken to the president about the 
matter said that although Bush encouraged Cheney to get information out 
to rebut Wilson's charges, Bush was unaware that Cheney had directed 
Libby to leak classified information. The White House has pointed out 
that the president and vice president have broad executive powers to 
declassify whatever information they believe to be in the public 
interest. Meanwhile, court papers filed by Fitzgerald in April suggest 
that Libby was reluctant to leak any classified information to the 
press, and only did so after being assured that his actions were 
approved by both the president and vice president. 

Regarding a meeting with Judith Miller that was scheduled for July 8, 
2003, in which Cheney wanted Libby to leak her portions of the National 
Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald asserted in the court papers that 
Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the 
meeting to disclose... [portions] of the classified NIE to Miller on 
that occasion." 

"[Libby] further testified that he at first advised the Vice President 
that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of 
the classified nature of the NIE. [Libby] testified that the Vice 
President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to 
disclose the relevant portions of the NIE." 

And Libby "testified that he spoke to David Addington, then Counsel to 
the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national 
security law, and Mr. Addington opined that presidential Authorization 
to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of a 
document." 

A senior government official familiar with the matter said that in 
directing Libby to leak the classified information to Miller and other 
reporters, Cheney said words to the effect of, "The president wants this 
out," or "The president wants this done." 

Copyright 2006 by National Journal Group Inc.

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