The _resident has failed this nation miserably...The
multi-trillion dollar federal deficit, the war in
Iraq, the rape of the environment and the abomination
of 9/11 have dragged us far from that bridge to 21st
Century that the Clinton-Gore America of the 1990s
built in spite of the "vast reich-wing
conspiracy"...the _resident does not have the
CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY or the COMPETENCY that the job
demands...He is desperate, and so he is
dangerous...The Democratic Party must think
ahead...The Bush cabal may well play "pin the tail on
the Plutocrat" and jettison VICE _resident Cheney to
get himself a little electoral bounce and some
breathing room in the news. What does Cheney care? He
already has his Halliburton money, and he has gotten
the war he wanted...Bush-Rice? She may be too damaged
from all the lies, and she could easily turn off his
bigoted base in the Expanded Confederacy. Maybe.
Bush-Powell? I think it is over, they only stay
together for the kids. Bush-Guiliani? Maybe. But
Guilani is a "wild and crazy guy." Bush-First? Maybe,
especially with the Ricin audition. But all it does is
shore up the base (maybe). Bush-Hagel? Maybe. It
counteracts Kerry-Clark (i.e. the personal courage and
honor factor), but does little more than shore up the
base (which DOES need it now, it is crumbling). But I
am thinking of something more
troublesome...Bush-Pataki. The Governor of New York is
a Yalie stooge and a family retainer. Imagine the
Electoral College chaos such a move would instigate.
The Clinton-Gore victories (all *three* of them) were
predicated on California and New York. But Rove has
Conan the Deceiver installed in Sacrament, and with
Pataki on the ticket, the _resident could cause a
disturbance in the Force within these two Electoral
vote troves, which the Democratic candidate would
otherwise own...So how does the Democratic Party deal
with this very real threat? The Republican convention
will be in September. The Democrats will have decided
on a ticket long before that. Those two men (the LNS
suggest Kerry-Clark now is our best chance) could be
confronted with a double-whammy, twin bounce: the
"capture" of Osama bin Laden and the jettisoning of
Cheney for a "fresh face" with less baggage.
Richard Sale/UPI: Federal law-enforcement officials
said that they have developed hard evidence of
possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice
President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful
exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The
investigation, which is continuing, could lead to
indictments, a Justice Department official said.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml
Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe
Posted Feb. 5, 2004
By Richard Sale
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have
developed hard evidence of possible criminal
misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick
Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a
CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation,
which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a
Justice Department official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's
chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two
Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the
major player in this," one federal law-enforcement
officer said. Calls to the vice president's office
were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return
calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah
"that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time"
as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one
federal law-enforcement official said.
The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative
then working for the weapons of mass destruction
division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph
Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a
senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s.
Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African
affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press
accounts.
Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March
2002 to check on an allegation made by President
George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the
previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium
from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a
report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."
On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus
revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a
negative report" on the claim and then, on July 6, as
the Bush administration was widely accused of
manipulating intelligence to get American public
opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an
op-ed piece in the Post in which he accused the Bush
administration of "misrepresenting the facts." His
piece also asked, "What else are they lying about?"
According to one administration official, "The White
House was really pissed, and began to contact six
journalists in order to plant stories to discredit
Wilson," according to the New York Times and other
accounts.
As Pincus said in a Sept. 29 radio broadcast, "The
reason for putting out the story about Wilson's wife
working for the CIA was to undermine the credibility
of [Wilson's] mission for the agency in Niger. Wilson,
as the last top diplomat in Iraq at the time of the
Gulf War, had credibility beyond his knowledge of
Africa, which was his specialty. So his going to Niger
to check the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium
there and returning to say he had no confirmation was
considered very credible."
Eight days later, columnist Robert Novak wrote a
column in which he named Wilson's wife and revealed
she was "an agency operative on weapons of mass
destruction." Since Plame was working undercover, it
exposed her and, in the opinion of some, ruined her
usefulness and her career. It also violated a 1982 law
that prohibits revealing the identity of U.S.
intelligence agents.
On Oct. 7, Bush said that unauthorized disclosure of
an undercover CIA officer's identity was "a criminal
matter" and the Justice Department had begun its
investigation into the source of the leak.
Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI,
a sister wire service of Insight magazine.