Details the myriad illegal, immoral, and unethical activities of Dick Cheney when CEO of Halliburton, his obstruction of justice, and lies to the American public since his appointment as Vice President. For information on an equally corrupt politician, see link to Tom DeLay-Corporate Whore. Be sure to visit our cavernous vault of archives.

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Vice Axes That 70's Show

by Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
December 28, 2005

WASHINGTON We start the new year with the same old fear: Dick Cheney.

The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.

Vice is literally a shadow president. He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.

Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.

"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured." So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.

Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's residence in Washington remains obscured."

Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.

Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.

Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.

Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive branch's ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back toward Congress.

The 70's were also a heady period for the press, which reached the zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and exposed Watergate. Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger Freedom of Information Act.

Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged to the White House.

So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the deflated presidential muscularity. Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever. All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: "We know best. Trust us."

The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.). Very convenient.

Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.

"I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century. Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.

Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?

Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.

 


U.S. stalls on human trafficking
Pentagon has yet to ban contractors from using forced labor

By Cam Simpson
Washington Bureau
Published December 27, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Three years ago, President Bush declared that he had "zero tolerance" for trafficking in humans by the government's overseas contractors, and two years ago Congress mandated a similar policy.

But notwithstanding the president's statement and the congressional edict, the Defense Department has yet to adopt a policy to bar human trafficking.

A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions and a final policy still appears to be months away, according to those involved and Defense Department records.

The lobbying groups opposing the plan say they're in favor of the idea in principle, but said they believe that implementing key portions of it overseas is unrealistic. They represent thousands of firms, including some of the industry's biggest names, such as DynCorp International and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, both of which have been linked to trafficking-related concerns.

Lining up on the opposite side of the defense industry are some human-trafficking experts who say significant aspects of the Pentagon's proposed policy might actually do more harm than good unless they're changed. These experts have told the Pentagon that the policy would merely formalize practices that have allowed contractors working overseas to escape punishment for involvement in trafficking, the records show.

The long-awaited debate inside the Pentagon on how to implement presidential and congressional directives on human trafficking is unfolding just as countertrafficking advocates in Congress are running into resistance. A bill reauthorizing the nation's efforts against trafficking for the next two years was overwhelmingly passed by the House this month, but only after a provision creating a trafficking watchdog at the Pentagon was stripped from the measure at the insistence of defense-friendly lawmakers, according to congressional records and officials. The Senate passed the bill last week.

Delay seen as weakness

The Pentagon's delay in tackling the issue, the perceived weakness of its proposed policy and the recent setbacks in Congress have some criticizing the Pentagon for not taking the issue seriously enough.

"Ultimately, what we really hope to see is resources and leadership on this issue from the Pentagon," said Sarah Mendelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank in Washington. She also had called for creation of an internal Pentagon watchdog after investigating the military's links to sex trafficking in the Balkans.

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), author of the original legislation targeting human trafficking, said there seems to be an institutional lethargy on the issue at the Pentagon below the most senior levels. He said he was concerned that the Pentagon's overseas-contractor proposal might not be tough enough and that the delays in developing it could mean more people "were being exploited while they were sharpening their pencils."

But he pledged to maintain aggressive oversight of the plan.

`We're addressing the issue'

Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said he did not know why it has taken so long to develop a proposal but said, "From our point of view, we're addressing the issue."

An official more directly involved with the effort to draft a formal policy barring contractors from involvement in trafficking said it might not be ready until April, at least in part because of concerns raised by the defense contractors.

Bush declared zero tolerance for involvement in human trafficking by federal employees and contractors in a National Security Presidential Directive he signed in December 2002 after media reports detailing the alleged involvement of DynCorp employees in buying women and girls as sex slaves in Bosnia during the U.S. military's deployment there in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, the company fired eight employees for their alleged involvement in sex trafficking and illegal arms deals.

In 2003, Smith followed Bush's decree with legislation ordering federal agencies to include anti-trafficking provisions in all contracts. The bill covered trafficking for forced prostitution and forced labor and applied to overseas contractors and their subcontractors.

But it wasn't until last summer that the Pentagon issued a proposed policy to enforce the 2003 law and Bush's December 2002 directive.

The proposal drew a strong response from five defense-contractor-lobbying groups within the umbrella Council of Defense and Space Industries Associations: the Contract Services Association, the Professional Services Council, the National Defense Industrial Association, the American Shipbuilding Association and the Electronic Industries Alliance.

The response's first target was a provision requiring contractors to police their overseas subcontractors for human trafficking.

In a two-part series published in October, the Tribune detailed how Middle Eastern firms working under American subcontracts in Iraq, and a chain of human brokers beneath them, engaged in the kind of abuses condemned elsewhere by the U.S. government as human trafficking. KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, relies on more than 200 subcontractors to carry out a multibillion-dollar U.S. Army contract for privatization of military support operations in the war zone.

Case of 12 Nepali men

The Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepali men recruited from poor villages in one of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world and documented a trail of deceit, fraud and negligence stretching into Iraq. The men were kidnapped from an unprotected caravan and executed en route to jobs at an American military base in 2004.

At the time, Halliburton said it was not responsible for the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors, and the U.S. Army, which oversees the privatization contract, said questions about alleged misconduct "by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues."

Once implemented, the new policy could dramatically change responsibilities for KBR and the Army.

Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council who drafted the contractors' eight-page critique of the Pentagon proposal, said it was not realistic to expect foreign companies operating overseas to accept or act on U.S. foreign policy objectives.

"This is a clash between mission execution [of the contract] and policy execution," Chvotkin said. "So we're looking for a little flexibility."

He said that rather than a "requirement that says you have to flow this through to everybody," the group wants the policy to simply require firms to notify the Pentagon when their subcontractors refuse to accept contract clauses barring support for human trafficking.

Still, Chvotkin said, "We don't want to do anything that conveys the idea that we are sanctioning or tolerating trafficking."

In a joint memo of their own, Mendelson and another Washington-based expert, Martina Vandenberg, a lawyer who investigated sex trafficking for Human Rights Watch, told the Pentagon its draft policy "institutionalizes ineffective procedures currently used by the Department of Defense contractor community in handling allegations of human trafficking."

Without tough provisions requiring referrals to prosecutors, they said, contractors could still get their employees on planes back to the U.S. before investigations commenced, as they allege happened in several documented cases in the Balkans. They said some local contract managers even had "special arrangements" with police in the Balkans that allowed them to quickly get employees returned to the U.S. if they were found to be engaged in illegal activities.

 


Hagel unloads on Cheney and Bush

by kos
Thu Dec 22, 2005 at 11:31:18 AM PDT

It's a thing of beauty:

"Every president, that we know of, has complied with the law (FISA)," Hagel said. "No president is above the law. We are a nation of laws and no president, majority leader, or chief justice of the Supreme Court can unilaterally or arbitrarily avoid a law or dismiss a law. If the vice president holds a different point of view, then he holds a different point of view."

Based on the facts that are out there concerning whether domestic spying abuses were taking place, Hagel said, there was a "breakdown."

"I take an oath of office to the Constitution," he said. "I don't take an oath of office to the vice president, a president or a political party. My obligation and responsibility are to the people I represent and the country I serve. I do what I think is right for the people I represent and the country I serve." [...]

Hagel, referring to President Ronald Reagan, said people trusted him because he was not a "vitriolic person or one to impugn the motives of people who disagreed with him."

"Never did he do that," Hagel said. "There is no place for that in politics because it debases our system and our process. You can agree or disagree with your leaders and say whatever you like about your elected leaders and throw them out, but I do draw the line on the vilification and impugning of motives because someone disagrees with you."

He said the American people are "sick and fed up" with that type of politics.

"Cheney's poll numbers are very, very low," Hagel said. "This should be about elevating the debate and enhancing America and finding the solutions that we need to move forward. It doesn't help when you characterize people who disagree with you or threaten them or characterize them as unpatriotic or not caring about our people or our security. The American people see through that and it is beneath the dignity of this country."

The administration and its sycophants have placed their party above the Stars and Stripes the entire five years they've held power. What's shocking is how few Republicans like Hagel have spoken out about it.

 


U.S. Spying Plan Lacked Congress' Scrutiny, Leading Democrat Says

Sen. Rockefeller accuses the Bush administration of misleading the public in saying that lawmakers were kept informed on the wiretap program.

By Greg Miller and Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the Bush administration Monday of undercutting congressional scrutiny of a secret effort to eavesdrop on Americans, and of misleading the public regarding what it told Congress about the program.

Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said that, contrary to White House claims in recent days, "the administration never afforded members briefed on the program an opportunity to either approve or disapprove" of the eavesdropping program, conducted by the National Security Agency.

Rockefeller also released a July 2003 handwritten letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in which he expressed serious misgivings about the domestic spying operation, as well as the restrictive conditions under which only a handful of lawmakers were told of it.

The exposure of the eavesdropping program has fueled debate not only over domestic spying limits, but also whether the Bush administration kept Congress adequately informed, as is required by law.

It was not clear how many members of Congress were briefed on the program since its inception in 2002, but it appeared to have been limited to the majority and minority leaders of both chambers and the chairman and ranking Democrat on each chamber's intelligence committee.

A spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate minority leader, confirmed that he had been informed in the last six months — well after he had assumed a leadership position.

"I personally received a single, very short briefing on this program earlier this year prior to its public disclosure," Reid said. "That briefing occurred more than three years after the president said this program began."

He added that "based on what I have heard publicly since, key details about the program apparently were not provided to me."

Several lawmakers and congressional aides said Cheney often oversaw the briefings of lawmakers on intelligence activities, and that members were routinely barred from bringing senior aides from the intelligence committees or even consulting them later.

In many cases, staffers have been kept in the dark, even though they have the high-level security clearances required to receive such information. One senior aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee said staff members on the panel were unaware of the eavesdropping operation until it was reported last week.

In his 2003 letter, Rockefeller said the administration's restrictions prevented him from being able to judge the legality or potentially intrusive technical aspects of the eavesdropping program.

"As you know, I am neither a technician nor an attorney," Rockefeller wrote. "Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities."

Rockefeller's letter is dated July 17, 2003, which he said in a written statement Monday was the day he was briefed on the program. He pointed out in the 2003 letter that he intended to place a copy in a "sealed envelope in the secure spaces" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's offices to record his objections.

President Bush scoffed at the notion that Congress was not adequately informed of the operation.

"There is oversight," he said in a news conference Monday. "We're talking to Congress all the time…. We have briefed the United States Congress on this program a dozen times."

At a briefing for reporters on the legal aspects for the NSA program, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales acknowledged that a decision was made to limit the number of Congress members who would be told about the policy.

Federal law requires the executive branch to "keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities," although it allows for limits in cases when there is concern for "unauthorized disclosure." In most cases, the law requires intelligence activities to be reported to the committees in writing.

Lawmakers who have attended the briefings conducted by Cheney and senior intelligence officials at the White House have not been provided written notification or allowed to share what they learned with other committee members.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who did not yet hold her leadership post but was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when the eavesdropping program was launched, has acknowledged that she was among four members from the intelligence panels who attended a briefing on the topic in the vice president's office.

She said that she, like Rockefeller, raised objections to the program.

"When I was advised of President Bush's decision to authorize these activities, I expressed my strong concerns verbally and in a classified letter to the administration," Pelosi said in a statement. "The Bush administration, however, made clear that it did not believe that congressional notification was required and it also did not believe that congressional approval was required to conduct these activities."

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the Republicans who has raised concerns about the program, agreed that notifying a few members of Congress "does not constitute a check and balance."

"You can't have the administration and a select number of members alter the law," Specter said. "It can't be done."

 


Every Day Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are in Office, Our Lives and the Lives of Our Loved Ones are Increasingly at Risk

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

It is, let us remember again and again, the Bush Administration who puts us at greatest risk for terrorism.

Evidence Fact Number One: Bush and Rice were warned in August of 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning imminent hijackings in the United States -- in fact that was the title of the "eyes only" presidential briefing paper given to Rice and Bush -- but they did nothing -- we repeat, nothing -- to prevent hijackings in our nation.

Could they have prevented 9/11 by taking aggressive action to prevent hijackings? Yes, they very well could have. But, Bush went on a vacation for a month and Rice boned up on her survival skills in living in a parallel universe. Then 9/11 happened and Bush reacted by reading a book about a pet goat.

Evidence Fact Number Two: The hijackers of the four airplanes on 9/11 used sharp edged tools to kill people and take over the planes. What is Bush's first major "reform" of airline screening since 9/11? Why, to allow passengers to bring sharp edged tools on planes again!

Is he setting us up for another 9/11? What do you think?

Evidence Fact Number Three: Bush is making enemies faster than he can kill them. He told us so many lies for invading Iraq, but his primary lie -- repeated ad nauseum by Dick Cheney -- was that Saddam posed an immediate terrorist and nuclear threat to the United States.

Well, Saddam has been removed from power and no weapons of mass destruction have been found. But the Busheviks have turned Iraq into a terrorist swamp for, according to the New York Times, more than 100 insurgent groups, including terrorists: some fighting in the name of nationalism, some fighting in the name of jihad, some fighting in the name of anti-invader zeal, some fighting a civil war for their religious sects.

Bush is the one responsible for this war after a war. He is creating a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East to threaten us and our national security. They are learning a new set of modern terrorist warfare skills. And we are paying for their training with our tax dollars, the lives of our soldiers, and the lives of innocent Iraqis.

This current national security threat to the U.S. in Iraq -- such as it maybe -- did not result from Saddam. He is out of power. It resulted from Bush.

Evidence Fact Number Four: The leaders behind acts of terrorism against the U.S. are still at large: Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, the Anthrax domestic terrorist and Mullah Omar, among others.

This is an extraordinary record of failure alone on Bush's part.

Bush said that he would get Osama dead or alive, and Osama is free and alive laughing no doubt at how Bush is dismantling democracy in America without Osama having to lift a finger. Bush said "bring 'em on" and more than 2000 dead American soldiers later, they are still coming on.

Bush's only "mission accomplished" is to muscle Congress into continuing to betray the national security of the United States by supporting a man who wouldn't be appointed a platoon leader he is so bungling and inept. (With one hopeful exception occurring on Friday: the filibustering of the [Un]Patriot Act.)

We could go on with more facts evidencing how the Busheviks betray the national security of America, but this is just a short news analysis -- and not a place to write a multi-volume book.

Just remember that the first major terrorist attack on American soil was due to Bush's negligence -- and the second will be do to his incompetence.

Every day Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are in office, our lives and the lives of our loved ones are increasingly at risk.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

 


Bush calls DeLay innocent, stands by Cheney and Rove

- Jim VandeHei, Washington Post
Thursday, December 15, 2005

Washington -- President Bush said Wednesday that he is confident that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is innocent of money-laundering charges, and he offered strong support for several top Republicans who have been battered by investigations or by rumors of fading clout inside the White House.

In an interview with Fox News, Bush said he hopes DeLay, a fellow Texas Republican, will be cleared of charges that he illegally steered corporate money into campaigns for the Texas Legislature and will reclaim his powerful leadership position in Congress.

"I hope that he will, 'cause I like him, and plus, when he's over there, we get our votes through the House," Bush told Fox News' Brit Hume.

DeLay was forced to step down as majority leader after he was indicted in the fundraising case, and he is seeking a quick trial in hopes of returning to power early next year.

Bush has refused to speak about the CIA leak investigation or the impending trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former vice presidential chief of staff who was indicted in the case. But he said he believes that DeLay is not guilty -- weeks before his trial is expected to begin. It is highly unusual for a president to express an opinion about a pending legal case.

In the wide-ranging interview, Bush defended the Republican Party against charges of pervasive unethical behavior after the resignation of Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Del Mar (San Diego County), for taking bribes, and the unfolding money-for-favors scandal centered on former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"Well, first of all, I feel Duke Cunningham was wrong and should be punished for what he did," Bush said. "And I think that anybody who does what he did should be punished, Republican or Democrat. Secondly, the Abramoff -- I'm not, frankly, all that familiar with a lot that's going on over at Capitol Hill, but it seems like to me that he was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties."

According to campaign finance reports, Abramoff and his clients contributed substantially more money to Republicans than to Democrats.

Bush also defended three of the most powerful men in the White House, all of whom have been the subject of speculation that they are losing clout with the president: Vice President Dick Cheney, senior adviser Karl Rove and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Bush said his relationship with Cheney is better than ever, despite Libby's recent indictment and criticism of the Iraq and terrorism policies that were championed by the vice president.

"The truth of the matter is that our relationship hasn't changed hardly at all," Bush said. "I'd say the relationship -- it's only gotten better. We didn't know each other that well when we first came to Washington, D.C., and my respect for him has grown immensely."

The same goes for Rove, Bush said. Rove remains under investigation in the CIA leak case, and some aides have complained that he lied to the president and White House spokesman Scott McClellan about his role.

"We're still as close as we've ever been," Bush said. "You know, when we look back at the presidency and my time in politics, no question that Karl had a lot to do with me getting here, and I value his friendship. We're very close."

Bush dismissed rumors that Rumsfeld will leave his post early next year. Asked if Rumsfeld will stay through the second term, Bush said: "Well, end of my term is a long time, but I tell you, he's done a heck of a good job, and I have no intention of changing him."

 


Cheney led cheerleaders of Iraq invasion; is back on stump

09 Dec 2005
Carl Hiaasen
Miami Herald HeraldEd@aol.com

The loudest cheerleader for invading Iraq is on the stump once again, defending the bloody, bogged-down occupation and lambasting its critics.

Getting a war lecture from Dick Cheney is like getting dating advice from Michael Jackson.

The last time the United States went to battle, Cheney stayed far out of harm’s way. His only wounds from Vietnam were the paper cuts he got from opening his five — count them, five — draft deferment notices.

“I had other priorities in the ’60s other than military service,” he explained to a reporter in 1989.

Thousands of other young men applied for student deferments in the Vietnam era, or received draft lottery numbers that were never called (mine was 44). However, none grew up to be vice president of the nation, peddling a contrived war that somebody else’s kids would have to fight.

Nobody pushed harder than Cheney for a military strike against Saddam Hussein. Nobody was more cocksure about the presence of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear components. Nobody was more emphatic about a secret alliance between al Qaeda and Baghdad.

And nobody was more consistently wrong.

Cheney stuck to his dour WMD speech long after it was embarrassingly clear that no such weapons were in Iraq, and long after others in the administration had abandoned the argument.

The 9/11 Commission, the CIA and intelligence panels found no credible evidence of an Iraqi connection to al Qaeda, yet that never stopped Cheney from repeatedly suggesting otherwise.

One thing about the vice president: He doesn’t let the facts steer him “off message.” Only five months ago, he surprised even fellow hawks like Donald Rumsfeld by matter-of-factly stating that the Iraqi insurgency was in “its final throes.”

Wrong again, Dicky boy. Iraq remains a bloodbath, with insurgents killing more than 160 people in a recent two-week period.

Polls show that an increasing majority of Americans say the war was a mistake, for reasons transcending the $5-billion-per-month tab. As of recently, the U.S. military death toll stood at 2,100, with no end in sight.

The Shiites and Sunnis continue slaughtering each other, and the country remains so dangerous that candidates in the Dec. 15 national elections move from town to town in armored military convoys. No one’s safe from assassination, even Saddam Hussein’s defense lawyers.

Back home, prosecutors have accused two Americans — one a convicted fraud artist — of using bribery and kickbacks to plunder U.S. funds earmarked for reconstruction services in Iraq.

At the same time, the Justice Department is finally examining the award to Halliburton — the vice president’s corporate alma mater — of a no-bid, multibillion-dollar contract to repair Iraqi oil fields.

Day after day, the news gets worse.

After such a heavy cost — so many heroic soldiers and innocent civilians killed or injured, so many billions spent — the United State is more despised than ever by the radical Muslim world.

After all this, Iraq — which had no al Qaeda presence when Saddam Hussein was in power — is now a hotbed recruiting center for the fanatical terrorist group.

After all this, Osama bin Laden — the most wanted man on the planet, the monster who financed and helped mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers — is still on the loose.

It’s no wonder people feel weary and disillusioned.

For a time, Cheney’s office was Smear Central for retribution against critics of the Bush war policy. Some of the fun has gone out of that sport since his right-hand man, Scooter Libby, got busted.

Recently, the vice president carefully went out of his way to exempt from scorn Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam combat veteran who has called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

“A good man, a Marine, a patriot,” Cheney said of Murtha.

Only days earlier, a White House spokesman had lashed out at Murtha, comparing him to rabble-rousing filmmaker Michael Moore. The attacks stopped when somebody figured out that the public wouldn’t stand for another vicious Swift-Boating of a war veteran.

There’s no easy answer for how to get unstuck from Iraq, but there’s room for open and honest debate. Unfortunately, no one has less credibility on the subject than Cheney.

The last time he was right was 1991, after the first Gulf war, when he defended the first President Bush’s decision not to bomb Saddam out of power and install a new Iraqi government.

Such an invasion, Cheney warned then, would have gotten the United States “bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.”

A veritable voice of reason, he said, “How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?”

Good question, Dick.

It’s the same one now being asked by solid Americans in all parties and all walks of life, people who don’t need pious war lectures from a paper-cut expert.

 


Mondale: VP needs balance
Former vice president says office should be supporting role and that Cheney 'stepped across a line'

BY BILL SALISBURY
Pioneer Press

Walter Mondale, the man who transformed the vice presidency from a ceremonial job to a position of power, thinks Vice President Dick Cheney wields too much power and may be undermining the president.

But Mondale is increasingly impressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and believes she is steering the Bush administration toward more cooperative relations with other countries.

Mondale, 77, a former Minnesota attorney general and U.S. senator, was vice president under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980. He was the first vice president to have an office in the White House, have access to all presidential information and play a meaningful role in running the country.

Retired after 50 years in public life, he remains deeply involved in public-policy debates, and "of course I keep a constant interest in politics," he said during an interview in his Minneapolis law office last week.

He said he is deeply troubled by the war in Iraq and advocated a change in policy to bring U.S. troops home faster. He believes Cheney and other so-called neo-conservatives exaggerated the threat Iraq posed to the United States but Rice is steering the administration back to a more pragmatic foreign policy.

Here are excerpts from our interview.

Q. You have called Vice President Cheney the most powerful vice president in history, and you set the stage for him becoming that by making the vice presidency a more influential office. How do you assess his performance?

A.

I think Cheney has stepped across a line. The so-called "executivizing" of the vice presidency, which we did, strengthens the vice president's ability to help the president if the president wants it. That's what Carter did, and that's what's happened under most presidents since that time. But I believe Cheney has moved beyond what I think Carter or any of the other presidents would have tolerated.

He organized his staff to almost substitute for the (National) Security Council. He's gone deep into the agencies to pressure opinions and advice. I think that a vice president has to be careful not to intimidate the rest of the government. Otherwise, the president doesn't get honest advice from the other agencies.

Q.

How responsible do you think Cheney is for getting us into the war?

A.

Cheney's record on the facts leading up to this war is pretty appalling. He's the one who talked about imminent nuclear weapons delivery systems, chemical laboratories, the al-Qaida connection, and the Niger yellowcake and aluminum tubes. We now know he was making most of those points long after the agencies of our own government were saying, "This stuff is not true." But he kept doing it. I think that's outrageous.

I don't think we'd have gone into this war if we hadn't been persuaded that America was in imminent danger from these various facts, and they weren't true. So I think the vice president has a lot of explaining to do.

Q.

Does the vice presidency have too much power?

A.

I think the vice presidency is about right, but I think it should be understood the vice president is not the prime minister. He does not carry the presidential authority with him. He works to help the president in ways that the president wants it done.

I think the idea of moving the vice president into the White House to help the president is still a very good idea, and I think it's settled now as American institutional policy. But I think what the vice president does inside that office that has the potential to undermine the honesty of the advice the president gets from elsewhere in the government raises questions that ought to be considered.

Q.

You have criticized the administration's go-it-alone approach in foreign policy. Do you still think the administration has to work harder at getting international support?

A.

I do. I think the neo-conservatives did a lot of damage because their idea was that we were the only big power in the world, and other countries just had to go along with us. If they didn't, it didn't hurt us. In fact, almost everything that is important to us requires that we work with others as best possible.

I think the neo-cons have lost. They're not out of there completely yet, but you don't hear much about them anymore.

I think Condoleezza Rice is moving away some from the old neo-con line and restoring some balance. So maybe we're moving in the right direction. I hope so.

I think Rice is heading the State Department in a sounder, safer way. The more I watch her, the more I think she knows exactly what she's doing.

What she did last month in Gaza (brokering an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on security controls at a border crossing) may sound like a little thing, but I don't think that other (neo-conservative) crowd would have done it. They just had attitudes.

Q.

What do you think the United States should do in Iraq?

A.

I don't believe we can just walk out of there. But I do believe we have to have a plan for reducing the American presence in a way that will give the Iraqi government a decent chance to step up to the plate to do what they have to do to defend and govern themselves.

Some Iraqis want us to stay. But the fact that we are substituting for what a state and people should do for themselves is delaying the time when they should act on their own. I think it's time for Americans to reach a decent bargain with the Iraqi government that allows us to push more of this responsibility off onto the Iraqis. Give them time to do it, but tell them, "We're not just going to walk away and leave you alone, but this is something you increasingly have to do, and Americans will be around less and less to do it for you.''

How long it would be or what kind of presence it would take are practical issues that would have to be decided. But I think there ought to be that change in approach.

That may be going on right now. If they (the Bush administration) are taking 20,000 or 30,000 troops out of there next year, that is the beginning of the step out. That is not cutting and running. It is doing the one thing that gives the Iraqis an honorable chance to protect and govern themselves.

 


Cheney caught up in Big Lie

First published: Monday, December 5, 2005
by Helen Thomas

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's nose should be growing longer every day. His stream of falsehoods in his desperate defense of the administration's decision to attack Iraq is pitiful.

Cheney has accused Democratic war critics of being "dishonest and reprehensible" in saying the administration misled the nation into war. But that's what the administration did.

In a speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute -- a conservative think tank in Washington -- the vice president claimed congressional Democrats who voted to give President Bush authority to go to war had concluded -- "as the President and I did" -- that Saddam Hussein "was a threat."

But Cheney did not explain how Saddam was a threat to the United States, given that Iraq was the target of stringent economic sanctions and regular satellite surveillance, not to mention that American air power had chopped the northern and southern sectors of Iraq into no-fly zones for years.

Cheney also contended that pre-war intelligence showed that "the dictator of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." He asserted that "the burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq" on whether Iraq possessed unconventional weapons.

That's baloney.

Before Bush gave the order to invade, U.N. inspectors assured the U.S. Saddam had destroyed his stockpile of weapons after his 1991 defeat in the first Gulf war. The President chose to ignore those assurances.

After the U.S. invasion and occupation, two American weapons-hunting teams came to the same conclusion, having searched Iraq in vain for the unconventional weapons arsenals that Bush and Cheney used as their excuse to invade. But the vice president had no doubts before the invasion.

In 2002, Cheney said: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

In the same year, he said: "Saddam Hussein has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons" and "he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon."

In 2003, he said: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Cheney also said the U.S. knows where the nuclear weapons are. I remember reporters asking the White House spokesman back then why the administration didn't tell the U.N. inspectors where to find the weapons if the U.S. knew where they were. There was no answer because there were no weapons.

Perhaps more shameful is Cheney's continual efforts to link the 9/11 terrorist attacks with Iraq and to conflate the U.S. invasion with the war on terrorism.

In 2004, even after President Bush said there were no ties between Saddam and the al-Qaida terrorist network, Cheney insisted: "I think there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government. I'm very confident there was an established relationship there."

He continued this Big Lie in his AEI speech. He launched into a retrospective on the 9/11 catastrophe and sought to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq as somehow linked with that "watershed" event, noting the terrorist attack "signaled an entirely different era."

He also spoke of the need to take an "essential step in the war on terror" by ridding the world of a "murderous dictator."

The frequent vows by administration officials that we have "to stay the course" seem to mean that we are going to continue to compound the mistakes they made in the first place. I believe more and more Americans are beginning to see through this stonewall.

Helen Thomas e-mail address is hthomas@hearstdc.com

 


Bush Gossip & Tonight's Ten Minutes on Air America' Majority Report

December 01, 2005

Barbara Bush is allegedly TICKED off at Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Andy Card, nearly all of them -- except Karen Hughes -- for how her boy is faring in the hearts and minds of Americans.



The matriarch of the Bush clan is colder than North Pole ice right now to those around her son who she thinks have undermined him. I'll tell who my sources are if Patrick Fitzgerald gives a call and makes me -- but the sources are very close to Poppa Bush (41), who has been traveling a bit with some of his old entourage, including Brent Scowcroft and others of the first Bush regime.

While TWN has been able to confirm that Laura Bush's mother-in-law wants to do more than put coal in the stockings of the Vice President and the other top handlers of her son's White House, we have not been able to confirm a slightly stronger bit of the rumor, which is that Barbara -- not Laura -- was planning to call on Nancy Reagan just to get a refresher lesson on how she took on and kicked out then Chief-of-Staff Donald Regan. (I embellish here; Barbara Bush is not going to take lessons from Nancy, it just sounded good. My source told me that Barbara was about to "pull a Nancy Reagan" on these attendants.)

Cheney may be tougher to dump than Don Regan, but then again, Barbara Bush is one of those wonders of nature (we hear) who knows no limits and can easily surge beyond category 5 hurricane winds.

Should be interesting to watch the role of the First Mother in the coming couple of months. Watch for a lot to change right after the State of the Union address, I've been told.

And if you are near the radio or internet termninal, I'll be chatting with Sam Seder of Air America's Majority Report tonight at 7:50 p.m. ET for a quick ten minutes.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

 


Timing Entwined War Vote, Election

By Ronald Brownstein and Emma Vaughn
Times Staff Writers
November 28, 2005

WASHINGTON — Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, remembers the exchange vividly.

The time was September 2002. The place was the White House, at a meeting in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed congressional leaders for a quick vote on a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

But Daschle, who as Senate majority leader controlled the chamber's schedule, recalled recently that he asked Bush to delay the vote until after the impending midterm election.

"I asked directly if we could delay this so we could depoliticize it. I said: 'Mr. President, I know this is urgent, but why the rush? Why do we have to do this now?' He looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: 'We just have to do this now.' "

Daschle's account, which White House officials said they could not confirm or deny, highlights a crucial factor that has drawn little attention amid rising controversy over the congressional vote that authorized the war in Iraq. The recent partisan dispute has focused almost entirely on the intelligence information legislators had as they cast their votes. But the debate may have been shaped as much by when Congress voted as by what it knew.

Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, did not call for a vote authorizing the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm election. But the vote paving the way for the second war with Iraq came in mid-October of 2002 — at the height of an election campaign in which Republicans were systematically portraying Democrats as weak on national security.

Few candidates sparred over the war resolution itself. But Republicans in states including Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and Georgia strafed Democratic senators seeking reelection who had supported military spending cutbacks in the 1990s, accepted money from a liberal arms-control group, opposed Bush's preferred approach for organizing the new Department of Homeland Security, and voted in 1991 against the Persian Gulf War.

With national security then such a flashpoint in so many campaigns, many Democrats believe, the vote's timing enormously increased pressure on their party's wavering senators to back the president, whose approval rating approached 70% at the time.

"There was a sense I had from the very beginning that this was in part politically motivated, and they were going to maximize the timing to affect those who were having some doubt about this right before the election," Daschle said.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett denied that charge, saying the vote's timing represented a desire to increase pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, not Democrats.

"The president, during the run-up to the war, went out of his way not to make it political," Bartlett said.

Whatever the motivation for the vote's timing, the effect was to produce a clear contrast between the Democratic senators who sought reelection that November and those who did not.

The Democrats not on the ballot split almost evenly, with 19 supporting the war resolution and 17 opposing it. Among those facing the voters, 10 voted for the resolution while only four opposed it. And of those four, only one — Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in a plane crash a few weeks after the resolution vote — was in a seriously competitive race.

"The political currents were extraordinarily strong for everybody involved," said Jim Jordan, then executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "I'm certainly not implying that Democrats had their finger to the wind and didn't make votes of conscience, but it was a piece of the puzzle, clearly."

It is, of course, impossible to say whether more Democrats would have opposed the war resolution — which passed the Senate 77 to 23 on Oct. 11, just hours after the House approved it 296 to 133 — if the vote had occurred after the 2002 election.

Daschle, who voted for the resolution and was not up for reelection that year, said he did not think so, "given the circumstances, the environment, the sense that we were responding to 9/11, and all of the urgency that was created by the rhetoric and cajoling of the administration."

But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said recently that a delay might have prompted more Democrats to vote no by increasing the time available to study the evidence for war and by dissipating the political pressures surrounding the decision.

"There was a stampede to vote on this," Kennedy said. "A lot of our people got caught up in it."

Bartlett said that if some Democrats felt "like they would have made a different decision before the election or after, that doesn't speak very well of them, because the facts didn't change in the course of one month."

Democrats themselves were divided over the vote's timing. Kennedy, Wellstone and Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) were among those who passionately urged Daschle to defer the vote until after the election, said several sources who requested anonymity when discussing the party's internal debate.

The sources said that other Democratic senators supported Bush's push, in part because the senators believed an early vote might help the party shift attention to domestic issues it wanted to spotlight before election day. Democrats also felt more pressure to act because they recognized that the GOP-controlled House would agree to Bush's request on the vote's timing.

Against this backdrop, Republicans across the country were escalating attacks on their Democratic opponents on defense issues.

Starting in mid-September, for instance, then-Rep. John Thune (R-S.D.) issued statements and organized news conferences by veterans to criticize Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson for voting against the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

On Oct. 4, one week before the Senate vote, Thune released an ad that used images of Hussein and terrorist leader Osama bin Laden to criticize Johnson for voting against missile defense systems.

In Minnesota beginning in mid-September, Republican Norm Coleman organized retired military officials to hold news conferences charging that Wellstone "didn't just vote to devastate our defense; he voted to dismantle it." In late September, the National Republican Senatorial Committee ran ads attacking Wellstone over votes to reduce military spending.

The committee ran similar ads against Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) one week before the vote.

Although he did not criticize Democrats over Iraq, Bush stoked the overall security debate during a series of appearances between Sept. 23 and Oct. 4. He criticized Senate Democrats who were blocking the administration's preferred version of legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security because, they said, it gave the president too much freedom to suspend workers' civil service protections.

"The Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people," Bush said in New Jersey.

Bush's comments reverberated most powerfully in the Senate race in Georgia, where Saxby Chambliss, then a Republican House member, began criticizing incumbent Democrat Max Cleland over the Homeland Security issue.

Less than a day after the Senate authorized the use of force in Iraq, Chambliss aired what became the most talked-about ad of the 2002 election: a sharply worded jab that used pictures of Hussein and Bin Laden to accuse Cleland of voting "against the president's vital Homeland Security efforts."

Cleland, Johnson and Harkin were among the Democrats who voted for the war resolution; Wellstone voted no.

Less than a month later, Johnson and Harkin were reelected, Cleland was defeated and Coleman beat former Vice President Walter F. Mondale for Wellstone's seat after the senator's death. Overall, Republicans widened their majority in the House and swept back into control of the Senate.

 


Cheney's Trouble with Truth

by Robert Scheer

You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

In speeches Friday and Monday, the vice president, who has long insisted Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were allies, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, we would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad, and that the Iraqi insurgency is in its ''last throes," again evidenced his trademark inability to speak the truth.

Continuing the administration's recent shrill defensive barrage over whose fault the Iraq mess is and with the truth chasing the lies in full view, Cheney had the gall to smear the war's critics as ''corrupt and shameless." Then, within a few sentences, he showed again why 52 percent of those polled by Newsweek believe Cheney deliberately "misused or manipulated" prewar intelligence.

First, he shamelessly repeated the absurd notion that a bum-rushed Congress, most of which does not have high security clearance, was privy to the same intelligence as he and his war-salesmen allies. In fact, not only was Cheney and his staff poring over the classified testimonials of an array of known liars, forgers, drunks, opportunists and desperate exiles we now know supplied White House speechwriters with their best lines, he also had access to the intelligence community's combined disclaimers, rebuttals and outright denunciations of these sources and their conveniently tawdry tales.

"Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war," wrote former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a devastating statement in the Washington Post on Sunday. ''Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud."
Graham, then the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate was a sham. "It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed (WMD), avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version," wrote Graham.

Parsed out, Cheney's recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush administration didn't lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent, too eager for invasion to bother to do its due diligence.

The reality, however, is that while the Yalie president may not be the brightest star on the horizon, the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he is, and has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Hussein operative meeting with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague long after U.S. intelligence had dismissed it.

Similarly, it was Cheney who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to make the astonishing claims of the intelligence source code-named "Curveball" the centerpiece of the secretary of state's prewar presentation to the United Nations.

Now, thanks to a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, we find out that top German intelligence sources in charge of interrogating Curveball had already declared him an unreliable source.

"'We were shocked" a high-level German intelligence officer told the Times. "Mein Gott! We had always told (the United States) it was not proven -- it was not hard intelligence."
But perhaps the most outrageous lie Cheney and the White House kept -- and keep -- making is that invading Iraq was a sensible part of the response to Sept. 11.

''In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away," noted Graham on Sunday. ''Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda."
In making his continued one-man jihad against the facts, Cheney is apparently throwing Hail Mary passes to that part of the Republican base that will believe anything it is told -- having already lost the trust of the majority of Americans.

But as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said in response to the slander by a Republican congresswoman that he, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, is a coward for arguing for the quick and complete withdrawal from Iraq, "You can't spin this. You've got to have a real solution. This is not a war of words, this is a war."

Yes, Cheney's war.

 


Justice Dept. May Pursue Halliburton Probe

Sat Nov 19,12:12 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is deciding whether to pursue an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing over how a division of the Halliburton Co. was awarded a contract in Iraq .

Sen. Byron Dorg, , ), D-N.D., released a letter Friday from Defense Department Assistant Inspector General John R. Crane that said the department‘s Defense Criminal Investigative Services is investigating the allegations and "has shared its findings with the Department of Justice ."

Last year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers‘ top procurement official criticized Iraq-related work awarded to Halliburton by the Corps of Engineers. Bunnatine H. Greenhouse said her main objection was the issuance to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root of a no-bid, five-year contract to restore Iraqi oil fields shortly before the Iraq war began in 2003.

Dorgan said that the referral of the allegations for criminal investigation "add to the growing cloud of scandal that surrounds too much of the contracting effort regarding reconstruction in Iraq."

 


Kerry: Cheney ‘misleading’ on war

By Kimberly Atkins
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - Updated: 02:49 AM EST

Sen. John Kerry locked jaws yesterday with White House pitbull Vice President Dick Cheney over a congressman’s call to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within six months.



From the lobby of his Boston office, Kerry blasted the vice president, accusing Cheney of dodging honest debate in favor of “inappropriate and misleading” partisan attacks.

“It is time for the vice president to stop continually misleading America,” Kerry said, adding that the administration “ought to be trying to fix the problems they have created with their incompetence over the last three years.”

Earlier, Cheney toned down his criticism of decorated war veteran and U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), even calling him “my friend and former colleague.” But Cheney then blasted lawmakers for “dishonest and reprehensible” claims that the United States fudged intelligence to make the case for war.

“Some of the most irresponsible comments have come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein,” Cheney said. “These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high opinion of their own analytical capabilities.”

Cheney did not mention any senator by name, but Kerry still shot back.

“That is just plain, flat, not true,” Kerry said. “We did not see the same intelligence and I challenge the vice president, I challenge him to answer the fundamental questions from the facts.”

Kerry joined a number of senators who spoke out against Cheney, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who said the administration “manipulated and misused intelligence information that rushed us to war.”

But one Democrat, New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said an immediate pullout from Iraq would be a mistake that could incite a civil war “that would cause more problems for us in America.”

Kerry said Murtha’s call reflects the feelings of Americans and Iraqis of the urgent need to disengage U.S. forces the country. “There is no time to spare – that really was the message of John Murtha, whether you agree or disagree with how he said it,” Kerry said.

But Kerry declined to sign on to Murtha’s call to withdraw troops in six months. “It can be done in about a year under my plan,” Kerry said. “Others have different plans.”

 


Powell aide: Torture 'guidance' from VP
Former staff chief says Cheney's 'flexibility' helped lead to abuse

Sunday, November 20, 2005; Posted: 5:18 p.m. EST (22:18 GMT)



U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson said he does not know "if the president was witting in this or not."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the "philosophical guidance" and "flexibility" that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.

"There's no question in my mind that we did. There's no question in my mind that we may be still doing it," Wilkerson said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"There's no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated -- in the vice president of the United States' office," he said. "His implementer in this case was [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department."

At another point in the interview, Wilkerson said "the vice president had to cover this in order for it to happen and in order for Secretary Rumsfeld to feel as though he had freedom of action."

Traveling in Latin America earlier this month, President Bush defended U.S. treatment of prisoners, saying flatly, "We do not torture." (Full story)

Cheney has lobbied against a measure in Congress that would outlaw "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of prisoners, calling for an exception for the CIA in cases that involve a detainee who may have knowledge of an imminent attack.

The amendment was included in a $491 billion Pentagon spending bill that declared 2006 to be "a period of significant transition" for Iraq. (Full story)

Proposed by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the amendment was approved in the Senate last month by a 90-9 vote. It was not included in the House version of the bill.

The White House has said that Bush would likely veto the bill if McCain's language is included, calling the amendment "unnecessary and duplicative."

Rumsfeld told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that the White House was in negotiations with the Senate over the amendment.

"There's a discussion and debate taking place as to what the implications might be and what is supportable and what is not," he told the program. "But the fact of the matter is the president from the outset has said that he required that there be humane treatment."

Cheney has come under mounting criticism for his position. Last week, Stansfield Turner, a military veteran who served as director of the CIA during the Carter administration, labeled him the "vice president for torture." (Full story)

In a statement responding to Turner's remark, Cheney said his views "are reflected in the administration's policy. Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us."

"We are aggressively finding terrorists and bringing them to justice and anything we do within this effort is within the law," the statement said, adding that the United States "does not torture."

Rumsfeld denies 'cabal' charge
Bush administration officials, including Rumsfeld and military officials, have denied that instances of torture were ever officially condoned. Some personnel accused of torture have been convicted and sentenced for prisoner abuse.

"All the instructions I issued required humane treatment," Rumsfeld told ABC. "Anything that was done that was not humane has been prosecuted."

But Wilkerson argued last month in a speech that Cheney and Rumsfeld formed a cabal that "made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

Wilkerson told CNN Sunday he does not know "if the president was witting in this or not."

"I voted for him twice," he said. "I prefer to think that he was not."

Earlier, on the same CNN program, Rumsfeld dismissed as "ridiculous" the claim that he was involved in a cabal.

Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said they had no recollection of Wilkerson having attended meetings with Rumsfeld or Cheney.

"In terms of having first-hand information, I just can't imagine that he does," said Rumsfeld. "The allegation is ridiculous."

"I was in every meeting with the joint chiefs. I was in every meeting with the combatant commanders. I went to the White House multiple times to meet with the National Security Council and with the president of the United States. I have never seen that colonel," added Pace.

"They made my point for me," responded Wilkerson. "The decisions were not made in the principals' process, in the deputies' process, in the policy coordinating committee process. They were not made in the statutory process."

Wilkerson said his "insights" came from Powell "walking through my door in April or March of 2004 and telling me to get everything I could get my hands on with regard to the detainee abuse issue -- ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] reporting, memoranda, open-source information and so forth -- so that I could build some kind of story, some kind of audit trail so we could understand the chronology and we can understand how it developed."

While he acknowledged having no proof that the United States is torturing detainees, Wilkerson said, "I can only assume that, when the vice president of the United States lobbies the Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment and the need to be able to do that in order to get information out of potential terrorists... that it's still going on."

He said U.S. officials should realize they are involved in "a war of ideas" that cannot be advanced with torture.

"In a war of ideas, you cannot damage your own ideas, your own position by seeming to do things that are in contradiction of your values," he said.

Rumsfeld told ABC that the military has "overwhelmingly treated people humanely."

"The history of the United States military is clear. Torture doesn't work. The military knows that. We want our people treated humanely," he said.

 


Cheney Picks a Fight With a Marine

Published on Saturday, November 19, 2005 by The Nation
by John Nichols

When Dick Cheney, a Wyoming congressman who had never served in the military and who had failed during his political career to gain much respect from those who wore the uniform he had worked so hard to avoid putting on during the Vietnam War, was selected in 1989 by former President George Herbert Walker Bush to serve as Secretary of Defense, he had a credibility problem. Lacking in the experience and the connections required to effectively take charge of the Pentagon in turbulent times, he turned to a House colleague, Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, a decorated combat veteran whose hawkish stances on military matters had made him a favorite of the armed services. "I'm going to need a lot of help," Cheney told Murtha. "I don't know a blankety-blank thing about defense."

Murtha, a retired Marine colonel who earned a chest full of medals during the Vietnam fight and who has often broken with fellow Democrats to back U.S. military interventions abroad -- most notably in Latin America, where Murtha often supported former President Ronald Reagan's controversial policies regarding El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s -- gave that assistance.

During both the first and second Bush administrations he emerged as a key ally -- often, the most important Democratic ally -- of the Republican presidents. Cheney frequently acknowledged their long working relationship, describing Murtha in public statements as a Democrat he could "work with."

In the 2004 vice presidential debate, Cheney noted that, "One of my strongest allies in Congress when I was Secretary of Defense was Jack Murtha, a Democrat who is chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee." The vice president was particularly complimentary over the years of the Pennsylvania representatives decision to provide high-profile backing of the administration's 2002 request for authorization to use force against Iraq.

But the cross-party relationship has soured as Murtha, whose concern has always been first and foremost for the men and women who serve in the military, has reached the conclusion that the Iraq intervention has steered U.S. troops into a quagmire from which they must be extracted. Typically blunt, Murtha said this week: "The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring (the troops) home."

Cheney's response to the man he begged to help him understand military affairs during the first Bush administration was to rip into Murtha and other Democrats who had tried to work with the administration. "Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorising force against Saddam Hussein," the vice president growled in a speech to the conservative Frontiers of Freedom Institute. In another clear reference to Murtha, Cheney said, "The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone -- but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history."

Of course, it is not Murtha but Cheney who is rewriting history -- or, at least, attempting to obscure it.

As Murtha noted, he's the one who put on a Marine uniform, took his shots in Vietnam and went on to a long career of working with and defending the military, while Cheney is the one who did everything in his power to avoid serving in southeast Asia and has never been seen as a friend of the men and women who actually fight the wars the vice president so shamelessly -- and disingenuously -- promotes. "I like guys who got five deferments and (have) never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," said Murtha, referencing the vice president's long record of draft avoidance in the 1960s.

The clearest evidence that Cheney still does "get it" when it comes to defense policy is his decision to take on Jack Murtha. The draft dodger who not all that many years ago admitted that he "(didn't) know a blankety-blank thing about defense" will come to regret picking a fight with the Marine he called in to help him understand military matters.

An expanded paperback edition of John Nichols' biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press: 2005), is available nationwide at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com. The book features an exclusive interview with Joe Wilson and a chapter on the vice president's use and misuse of intelligence. Publisher's Weekly describes the book as "a Fahrenheit 9/11 for Cheney" and Esquire magazine says it "reveals the inner Cheney."

 


'Cheney is vice president for torture'

9.02AM, Fri Nov 18 2005

A former CIA director has claimed that torture is condoned and even approved by the Bush government.



The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney "a vice president for torture".

He said: "We have crossed the line into dangerous territory".

The American Senate says torture should be banned - whatever the justification. But President Bush has threatened to veto their ruling.

The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.

Speaking of Bush's claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: "I do not believe him".

On Dick Cheney he said "I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture.

"He condones torture, what else is he?".

Admiral Turner claims the secret CIA prisons used for torture are known as 'black sites', terror suspects are picked up in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They are flown by CIA-controlled private aircraft to countries where there are secret interrogation centres, operating outside any country's jurisdiction.

No one will confirm their locations, but there are several possibilities: The Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania is believed by many to be one such facility.

Admiral Turner's remarks were echoed by Republican Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.

He said torturing to get information was immoral, was not effective and encouraged potential enemies to do the same to Americans.

Both Mr Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have repeatedly stated that torture by US forces is not condoned.

 


Dick Cheney, who outright lied to justify invading Iraq, now attacks Demcrats for calling him on his lies

by John in DC - 11/16/2005 06:58:00 PM

UPDATE: Cong Henry Waxman has a document online detailing 51 times that Cheney misled the country about Iraq! (The Cheney stuff begins on page 26 of the document, which is actually page 32 of the pdf file.)

Oh this is rich. Cheney is the newest attack dog Bush is sending out to chastize Dems for calling Bush and company liars. The only problem? Cheney himself is one of the liars who repeatedly and intentionally misled the country in order to justify the war.

Do you remember the one where...

1. Cheney Claimed Iraq Was Providing WMD Training To Al-Qaeda Months After Source Recanted

or the one where...

2. Cheney claimed Saddam was harboring Al Qaeda? He wasn't.

or the one where...

3. Cheney claimed Saddam gave Al Qaeda bomb-making expertise and trained Al Qaeda terrorists how to use chemical and biological weapons? Saddam didn't.

or the one where...

4. On Sept 14, 2003 Cheney claimed, for the second time at least, that there was evidence suggesting Mohammad Atta visited the Iraqi embassy in the Czech Republic? He didn't, and Cheney knew the supposed evidence had already been debunked, yet repeated the charge on Tim Russert's show as a justification for the war.
With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack

or the one where...

5. Cheney said during the VP debates last October that he NEVER had publicly connected Iraq and 9/11. Of course, he did on Meet the Press a year before:
Cheney: "If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

or the one where...

6.Cheney denied linking Atta to the Iraqis, when he did:

June 17, 2004. Vice President Cheney talking to CNBC's Gloria Borger:
Borger: 'Well, let's go to Mohamed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.' '

Cheney: 'No, I never said that.'

Borger: 'Okay.'

Cheney: 'Never said that.'

Borger: 'I think that is . . . '

Cheney: 'Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.'

On Dec. 9, 2001. Cheney talking to NBC's Tim Russert (this is perhaps the first time he made this lie):

Cheney: 'Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that -- it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.

 


Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force

By Dana Milbank and Justin Blum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; Page A01

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.


Testifying at a Senate hearing last week were, from left, Lee R. Raymond of Exxon Mobil, David J. O'Reilly of Chevron, James J. Mulva of ConocoPhillips, Ross Pillari of BP America and John Hofmeister of Shell Oil. (By Chip Somodevilla -- Getty Images)

In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.

Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP's chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force's work; that meeting is not noted in the document.

The task force's activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of the task force discussions while corporate interests were present. The meetings were held in secret and the White House refused to release a list of participants. The task force was made up primarily of Cabinet-level officials. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club unsuccessfully sued to obtain the records.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force," Lautenberg said.

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on the document. She said that the courts have upheld "the constitutional right of the president and vice president to obtain information in confidentiality."

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

Alan Huffman, who was a Conoco manager until the 2002 merger with Phillips, confirmed meeting with the task force staff. "We met in the Executive Office Building, if I remember correctly," he said.

A spokesman for ConocoPhillips said the chief executive, James J. Mulva, had been unaware that Conoco officials met with task force staff when he testified at the hearing. The spokesman said that Mulva was chief executive of Phillips in 2001 before the merger and that nobody from Phillips met with the task force.

Exxon spokesman Russ Roberts said the company stood by chief executive Lee R. Raymond's statement in the hearing. In a brief phone interview, former Exxon vice president James Rouse, the official named in the White House document, denied the meeting took place. "That must be inaccurate and I don't have any comment beyond that," said Rouse, now retired.

Ronnie Chappell, a spokesman for BP, declined to comment on the task force meetings. Darci Sinclair, a spokeswoman for Shell, said she did not know whether Shell officials met with the task force, but they often meet members of the administration. Chevron said its executives did not meet with the task force but confirmed that it sent President Bush recommendations in a letter.

The person familiar with the task force's work, who requested anonymity out of concern about retribution, said the document was based on records kept by the Secret Service of people admitted to the White House complex. This person said most meetings were with Andrew Lundquist, the task force's executive director, and Cheney aide Karen Y. Knutson.

According to the White House document, Rouse met with task force staff members on Feb. 14, 2001. On March 21, they met with Archie Dunham, who was chairman of Conoco. On April 12, according to the document, task force staff members met with Conoco official Huffman and two officials from the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, Wayne Gibbens and Alby Modiano.

On April 17, task force staff members met with Royal Dutch/Shell Group's chairman, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Shell Oil chairman Steven Miller and two others. On March 22, staff members met with BP regional president Bob Malone, chief economist Peter Davies and company employees Graham Barr and Deb Beaubien.

Toward the end of the hearing, Lautenberg asked the five executives: "Did your company or any representatives of your companies participate in Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001?" When there was no response, Lautenberg added: "The meeting . . . "

"No," said Raymond.

"No," said Chevron Chairman David J. O'Reilly.

"We did not, no," Mulva said.

"To be honest, I don't know," said BP America chief executive Ross Pillari, who came to the job in August 2001. "I wasn't here then."

"But your company was here," Lautenberg replied.

"Yes," Pillari said.

Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, who has held his job since earlier this year, answered last. "Not to my knowledge," he said.

 


Cheney's Presence More Scarce at White House

By MIKE ALLEN, TIME

(Nov. 13) -- The signs, apparent to insiders for months, surfaced at a quick clip. Vice President Dick Cheney, once viewed as training wheels for a President who was a novice on the world stage, was becoming less essential.

He disappeared to a new weekend place in Maryland, and friends fretted about his weight. Katrina hit, and he tarried at his home in Wyoming, checking in by videoconference. Harriet Miers was picked for the Supreme Court, and he found out secondhand.

On Capitol Hill last week, the Republican Party was coping with an impasse over spending cuts and the fallout from an embarrassing loss in the Virginia Governor's race, and he was in South Dakota for a week of pheasant hunting. "I just haven't seen him around as much lately," said Sam Brownback, the conservative Republican Senator from Kansas.

Friends say Cheney is well aware that his unique bond with the President, while not broken, is diminished. "He has become," said a former aide still close to the White House, "one adviser among many." Renewing his relationship with a troubled President, the friends say, has become a more urgent mission for the 64-year-old Vice President than bolstering his own sagging public image.

The President's poll ratings remain at a five-year low, and two of the big reasons are a discouraging war for which Cheney served as head hawk, and the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff in an investigation that sprang from a heavy-handed White House effort to discredit an annoying critic. The prosecutor's narrative makes tantalizing reference to one or more conversations Cheney had about the matter with the aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, which raises the possibility of a fight for the Vice President's testimony.

Cheney, according to friends and subordinates, sees himself as an uber-staffer whose mission is to shape and promote the President's agenda, even at the expense of his own popularity. Lately, with the Vice President making a signature issue out of opposing new restrictions on the treatment of suspected terrorists, the price has been steep. In one poll, Cheney's approval rating slipped into the 20s, and a former White House nemesis has gained traction on the issue.

Republican John McCain, the Senate's most famous prisoner of war, has won strong bipartisan support for a ban on inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists and other detainees, and is fighting Cheney's push for an exemption for the CIA. With the issue in the headlines, McCain raised just over $1 million last week for his probable presidential campaign.

A former Administration official sees Cheney's lack of interest in running for President as a liability. "It liberates him to risk his own standing on behalf of the policy and the President," the official said. "But it can be a real problem when that approach starts to affect the President's standing." And while the Vice President's partisans remain convinced that most conservatives still love him, even some of those bedrock fans are expressing growing doubts.

"Cheney's war is swallowing Bush's presidency," said a conservative leader who is an ally of the Vice President's. "The cost of Iraq is everything else Bush wanted to do." Cheney's office argues, of course, that the partnership continues on the same keel. "Obviously," said Steve Schmidt, Cheney's counselor, "the Vice President works tirelessly every day on behalf of the American people, alongside President Bush."

One problem, according to former staff members, is the tightness of the Veep's circle. He relies heavily on his wife Lynne and two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, for advice on media and internal politics. Insiders took his decision to replace Libby with counsel David S. Addington as a sign that Cheney was circling the wagons rather than making peace with his detractors inside the government. They reason that Addington is a hard-liner who has made enemies around the West Wing with his unwillingness to cooperate or yield on troublesome issues like a court fight for access to records of Cheney's energy task force.

In the end, it's Cheney's steely certainty, a quality the President has so appreciated in the past, that may be most damaging to him now in this season of political reinvention, say people who have worked closely with the Vice President. While Bush has shown an ability to reverse himself in the face of heavy headwinds, suddenly embracing the 9/11 commission or campaign-finance reform, Cheney takes pride in not backing down.

In March 2004, when Cheney was about to walk onstage to deliver his first formal excoriation of Senator John Kerry as being soft on Saddam, a frantic aide telephoned to urge him to tone it down. A suicide car bomber had just torn the front off a hotel in central Baghdad. Cable news was going crazy, and aides had nightmares of Cheney speaking in split screen with smoldering rubble.

According to a person familiar with the incident, Cheney raised his right eyebrow, gave a quarter grin and shook off the advice. "The guy cannot be unnerved," the person said. A former Administration official put it this way: "If the VP isn't proven right until after he has kicked off, he's fine with that. The idea of being proved right before the end of his life is a false deadline in his mind. Right is right."


Is Dick Cheney less important to the president lately?

No, he's just laying low right now 54%
Yes, he's less relevant 46%


Does Cheney help or hurt the administration?

Hurts 72%
Helps 16%
Neither 12%


What's your impression of Cheney overall?

Mostly negative 76%
Mostly positive 17%
Neutral 8%

Total Votes: 150,121

 


Halliburton violated pension law

NYT Staff and agencies
11 November, 2005

NEW YORK - An investigation by the U.S. Labor Department found that Halliburton Co.‘s (NYSE:HAL - news) pension plans violated the law three times and the company paid more than $8.6 million to correct the violations, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing correspondence from the department.

The abuses included charging some costs of the company‘s executive pension and bonus plans to a workers‘ pension fund, the paper said, and the company was found to have violated federal pension law prohibitions against self-dealing and using pension money for the benefit of the company.

Halliburton was required to replenish improperly withdrawn funds, repay those individuals affected and pay an undisclosed tax penalty.

According to the Times, two of the violations began while Vice President Dick Cheney Dick Cheney was the company‘s chief executive, but the largest infraction took place after he resigned in the summer of 2000.

Halliburton told the paper the issues had been fully resolved.

 




Kristof: Cheney Must Explain CIA Leak Role--or Resign

By E&P Staff
Published: October 30, 2005 10:15 AM ET

NEW YORK Nicholas Kristof, whose New York Times column in May 2003 helped set in motion the "Plamegate" scandal, called today for Vice President Dick Cheney to explain his role in the matter or resign.

It was an unexpected proposal from Kristof, who has long been skeptical about criminal wrongdoing in this case. In fact, he opens today's column with an apology to federal prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

What Kristof now points to is a detail in the Libby indictments, that Cheney had learned from the C.I.A. that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the agency and told Libby that on about June 12, 2003.

Kristof observes that he can't stop wondering if Libby's alleged perjury "was purely his own idea and whether Mr. Cheney was aware of it.

"Since Mr. Libby is joined at the hip to Mr. Cheney, it's reasonable to ask: What did Mr. Cheney know and when did he know it? Did the vice president have any grasp of the criminal behavior allegedly happening in his office? We shouldn't assume the worst, but Mr. Cheney needs to give us a full account.

"Instead, Mr. Cheney said in a written statement: 'Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.'

"Balderdash. If Mr. Cheney can't address the questions about his conduct, if he can't be forthcoming about the activities in his office that gave rise to the investigation, then he should resign. And if he won't resign, Mr. Bush should demand his resignation.

"It's not that there's a lick of evidence that Mr. Cheney is a criminal. There isn't. But the standard of the office should be higher than that: the White House should symbolize integrity, not legalistic refusals to discuss criminal cover-ups. I didn't want technical indictments of White House officials because they inflame partisanship and impede government; for just the same reason, it's unsavory when a vice president resorts to technical defenses and clams up."

 


Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers To Senate Intelligence Panel

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.

The disclosures also come as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the nearly two-year-old CIA leak investigation that has focused heavily on Libby's role in discussing covert intelligence operative Valerie Plame with reporters. Fitzgerald could announce as soon as tomorrow whether a federal grand jury is handing up indictments in the case.

Central to Fitzgerald's investigation is whether administration officials disclosed Plame's identity and CIA status in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador and vocal Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who wrote newspaper op-ed columns and made other public charges beginning in 2003 that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq that he gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa.

In recent weeks Fitzgerald's investigation has zeroed in on the activities of Libby, who is Cheney's top national security and foreign policy advisor, as well as the conflict between the vice president's office on one side and the CIA and State Department on the other over the use of intelligence on Iraq. The New York Times reported this week, for example, that Libby first learned about Plame and her covert CIA status from Cheney in a conversation with the vice president weeks before Plame's cover was blown in a July 2003 newspaper column by Robert Novak.

The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

In April 2004, the Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded that "much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's [United Nation's] speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee say that their investigation was hampered by the refusal of the White House to turn over key documents, although Republicans said the documents were not as central to the investigation.

In addition to withholding drafts of Powell's speech -- which included passages written by Libby -- the administration also refused to turn over to the committee contents of the president's morning intelligence briefings on Iraq, sources say. These documents, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, are a written summary of intelligence information and analysis provided by the CIA to the president.

One congressional source said, for example, that senators wanted to review the PDBs to determine whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were being presented to the president.

An administration spokesperson said that the White House was justified in turning down the document demand from the Senate, saying that the papers reflected "deliberative discussions" among "executive branch principals" and were thus covered under longstanding precedent and executive privilege rules. Throughout the president's five years in office, the Bush administration has been consistently adamant about not turning internal documents over to Congress and other outside bodies.

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Administration sources also said that Cheney's general counsel, David Addington, played a central role in the White House decision not to turn over the documents. Addington did not return phone calls seeking comment. Cheney's office declined to comment after requesting that any questions for this article be submitted in writing.

A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said.

But the same former official also said that Libby felt passionate that the CIA and other agencies were not doing a good job at intelligence gathering, that the Iraqi war was a noble cause, and that he and the vice president were only making their case in good faith. According to the former official, Libby cited those reasons in fighting for the inclusion in Powell's U.N. speech of intelligence information that others mistrusted, in opposing the release of documents to the Intelligence Committee, and in moving aggressively to counter Wilson's allegations that the Bush administration distorted intelligence findings.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee backed the document request to the White House regarding Libby's drafts of the Powell speech, communications between Libby and other administration officials on intelligence information that might be included in the speech, and Libby's contacts with officials in the intelligence community relating to Iraq.

In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Powell argued that intelligence information showed that Saddam Hussein's regime was aggressively pursuing programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons

Only after the war did U.N. inspectors and the public at large learn that the intelligence data had been incorrect and that Iraq had been so crippled by international sanctions that it could not sustain such a program.

The April 2004 Senate report blasted what it referred to as an insular and risk- averse culture of bureaucratic "group think" in which officials were reluctant to challenge their own longstanding notions about Iraq and its weapons programs. All nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed onto this document without a single dissent, a rarity for any such report in Washington, especially during an election year.

After the release of the report, Intelligence Committee, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said they doubted that the Senate would have authorized the president to go to war if senators had been given accurate information regarding Iraq's programs on weapons of mass destruction.

"I doubt if the votes would have been there," Roberts said. Rockefeller asserted, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war, in 75 votes, if we knew what we know now."

Roberts' spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the second phase of the committee's investigation would also examine how pre-war intelligence focused on the fact that intelligence analysts -- while sounding alarms that a humanitarian crisis that might follow the war - failed to predict the insurgency that would arise after the war.

Little says that it was undecided whether the committee would produce a classified report, a declassified one that could ultimately be made public, or hold hearings.

When the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee was made public, Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials cited it as proof that the administration acted in good faith on Iraq and relied on intelligence from the CIA and others that it did not know was flawed.

But some congressional sources say that had the committee received all the documents it requested from the White House the spotlight could have shifted to the heavy advocacy by Cheney's office to go to war. Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

In advocating war with Iraq, Libby was known for dismissing those within the bureaucracy who opposed him, whether at the CIA, State Department, or other agencies. Supporters say that even if Libby is charged by the grand jury in the CIA leak case, he waged less a personal campaign against Wilson and Plame than one that reflected a personal antipathy toward critics in general.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Powell as Secretary of State, charged in a recent speech that there was a "cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense [Donald L.] Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made."

In interagency meetings in preparation for Powell's U.N. address, Wilkerson, Powell, and senior CIA officials argued that evidence Libby wanted to include as part of Powell's presentation was exaggerated or unreliable. Cheney, too, became involved in those discussions, sources said, when he believed that Powell and others were not taking Libby's suggestions seriously.

Wilkerson has said that he ordered "whole reams of paper" of intelligence information excluded from Libby's draft of Powell's speech. Another official recalled that Libby was pushing so hard to include certain intelligence information in the speech that Libby lobbied Powell for last minute changes in a phone call to Powell's suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the speech. Libby's suggestions were dismissed by Powell and his staff.

John E. McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, has testified to Congress that "much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material... that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable."

The passion that Libby brought to his cause is perhaps further illustrated by a recent Los Angeles Times report that in April 2004, months after Fitzgerald's leak investigation was underway, Libby ordered "a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003" because Libby was "consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair" to him.

The newspaper reported that the "intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan, or its rationale."

A former administration official said that "this might have been about politics on some level, but it is also personal. [Libby] feels that his honor has been questioned, and his instinct is to strike back."

Now, as Libby battles back against possible charges by a special prosecutor, he might be seeking vindication on an entirely new level.