CHENEY KNEW Intell For War Had Been Cooked - How Libby Became Cheney's Pawn (Salon)

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How Libby became Cheney's pawn
The vice president knew the intelligence for the Iraq war was cooked. So he launched his aide to smear the man who took the information public.

By Sidney Blumenthal


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Cheney was distraught over Wilson's revelation that on his mission to Niger he had discovered that Saddam Hussein was not purchasing yellow uranium to develop nuclear weapons and that the documents that allegedly proved it were forgeries. He could have ignored Wilson, whose complaint might have faded into the woodwork. But Cheney was not trying to correct the record, but to suppress it. He knew that what Wilson had written in his New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, 2003, and what Wilson had said earlier about it at a public forum, obliquely reported, were accurate. Wilson posed a potential menace not only to the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion but also to the reelection of Bush-Cheney.

Cheney knew that the intelligence for the war had been cooked. He was not obsessed with Wilson because he was angry that Wilson was allegedly falsifying information. Cheney was not seized with a feeling of injustice or a need to inform the public of the truth. Cheney is not a fool. "Cheney knows how to read intelligence reports. He knows how to read classified information," Richard Clarke, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told me. Of course, Clarke said, "Cheney had read the reports" that disproved the administration's line. "Cheney knew it was false," said Clarke. What worried Cheney was that he was keenly aware that the so-called intelligence the administration propagated was phony, shabby and shaky. What also peeved him was that Wilson had said that his mission had been triggered by a request from the Office of the Vice President.

In the aftermath of the invasion, as President Bush swaggered in a fighter pilot's flight suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the administration's sway in Washington was at its zenith. The president's poll ratings were sky-high, the Republican control of the Congress airtight and the press corps embedded. Wilson was targeted as an enemy of the state. The same methods that had been used to whip up support for the war were now deployed against the straggler. Cheney's overbearing intensity was transmitted through his chief of staff. Once again, a compliant press would be exploited to do their bidding.

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Cheney is scheduled to testify soon at the federal courthouse as a defense witness, where he will be questioned about his direction of the operation in which Libby acted as his pawn. Meanwhile, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress debates resolutions against Bush's escalation of the war, haunted by the original "Authorization for Use of Military Force," which was approved with a naive trust that on a matter of war the president and the vice president would tell the truth.

more at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/02/01/libby_cheney/index1.html