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A concerted effort

Washington Post:

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a “concerted action” by “multiple people in the White House” — using classified information — to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” a critic of President Bush’s war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to “the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq.” They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by “nepotism.”

They were not alone. Fitzgerald reported for the first time this week that “multiple officials in the White House”– not only Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who have previously been identified — discussed Plame’s CIA employment with reporters before and after publication of her name on July 14, 2003, in a column by Robert D. Novak. Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that “it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish’ Wilson.”

The Bushites are in a tizzy with this “well it all depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” defense, but it’s critical that they not be allowed to frame this debate. Not this time. The above is what where the debate needs to stay. Not on the apparent legalities of declassification by the President, and certainly not spinning it as a good thing. The important points here are that Bush lied, brazenly, for no other reason than political gain, jeapardizing national security to prop up an already suspect rationale for war. That’s the core of the issue.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 10:23 am by Eric and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your site.

1 Comment to “A concerted effort”

  1. KEVIN SCHMIDT, STERLING VA
    Comment @ 04/09/06 at 11:50 am

    WHY THE WAPO IS WRONG ABOUT PLAMEGATE

    Aside from the FACT that the Washington Post chose to repeat misinformation about Plamegate, they left out a few glaring details in their ridiculous approval of Valerie Plame’s outing for political gain.

    Leaking Valerie Plame’s name took a valuable resource out of the REAL war on terror. This action approved by the President and Vice President has endangered the lives of every American citizen, both at home and abroad.

    Leaking Plame’s name also blew her front cover employer, Brewster Jennings & Associates. It was Robert Novak, American traitor, and political commentator hack, who in collusion with Bush and Cheney, first published the highly classified information.

    It has been suggested that there were other resources within the CIA who were also working undercover as non-official cover operative” (NOC) as employees of Brewster Jennings. It has also been suggested that once their undercover status was compromised, they were quickly captured and eliminated, thus multiplying the damage done to the CIA’s ability to gather valuable information in the Mid East.

    The outing of Plame destroyed all trust the CIA had for the Bush/Cheney administration. Why would they now put their lives on the line as NOCs knowing that at any time, their cover could also be blown for political gain, thus ending their careers and possibly ending their lives as well?

    But there’s more!

    Plame… ‘was a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing “take” from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.

    From the CIA’s point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.

    Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.

    The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.

    So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family’s past.

    As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia’s former treasurer and the nation’s largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden’s brother in law.

    ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies.

    Another one of Aramco’s partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush.

    All of ARAMCO’s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields – 25% of all the oil on the planet.’

    http://www.oilempire.us/plame.html

    Also, let’s not forget the long term friendship and business partnerships between the Bush family and the bin Laden family.

    Knowing all of this, how can anyone in their right mind approve of Bush and Cheney’s treasonous behavior of outing Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings for political gain?

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