1. Background: Robert Kuttners Aug. 28, 2006 survey piece in American Prospect, See Dick Run (the Country) Why does this matter? If Cheney were the actual president, not just the de facto one, he simply could not govern with the same set of policies and approval ratings of 20%. The media focuses relentless attention on the president, on the premise that he is actually the chief executive. But for all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in the ceremonial role of the queen of England. Yet the press buys the pretense of Bush being the decider You can count serious newspaper or magazine articles on Cheney's operation on the fingers of one hand. One of the first was by Bob Dreyfuss writing in the Prospect -- " Vice Squad <http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=1 1401> ," on all the vice-president's men, which ran in our May issue. Another notable example is Charlie Savage's important May 28th piece <http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/05/28/cheney_aide_is_screen ing_legislation/> in The Boston Globe on Cheney operative David Addington, the architect and chief reviewer of legislation for "signing statements." The most comprehensive was Jane Mayer's fine piece <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060703fa_fact1> in the July 3 New Yorker on Addington. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=1192 6 <http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=119 26>
2. Cheneys Shadow looms over Libby trial: Cheney's press officer, Cathie Martin, approached his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to ask how she should respond to journalists' questions about Joseph C. Wilson IV. Libby looked over one of the reporters' questions and told Martin: "Well, let me go talk to the boss and I'll be back." On Libby's return, Martin testified in federal court last week, he brought a card with detailed replies dictated by Cheney, including a highly partisan, incomplete summary of Wilson's investigation into Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction program. Libby subsequently called a reporter, read him the statement, and said -- according to the reporter -- he had "heard" that Wilson's investigation was instigated by his wife, an employee at the CIA, later identified as Valerie Plame. The reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was one of five people with whom Libby discussed Plame's CIA status during those critical weeks that summer. After seven days of such courtroom testimony, the unanswered question hanging over Libby's trial is, did the vice president's former chief of staff decide to leak that disparaging information on his own? No evidence has emerged that Cheney told him to do it. But Cheney's dictated reply is one of many signs to emerge at the trial of the vice president's unusual attentiveness to the controversy and his desire to blunt it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/03/AR2007020301 344.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/03/AR200702030 1344.html> References: The AP has a list of documents presented as evidence in the Libby trial. So does the Washington Post, but then you have to put up with the annoying ads. http://wid.ap.org/documents/libbytrial/index.html <http://wid.ap.org/documents/libbytrial/index.html> Again, what does it matter? As the fifth year of Bushs war looms ahead, with no exit strategy or quantitative improvement, a much-delayed NIE admits that the surge wont work, the Sunnis and Shiites will not be put back together again. And the Iraqi Interior Minister announced that 1,000 Iraqis died this week. As the POTUS asks Congress for another XXX BILLION, give or take a few million hidden in the budgets of other agencies, and the American people become more cynical and distrusting of their own government, why should we be concerned about the perjury trial of Scooter Libby? 3. David Ignatius A Failed Coverup: Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA. The truth began to emerge on July 11, 2003, when CIA Director George Tenet issued a public statement <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/plame/54201.pdf> disclosing that the agency had tried to warn the White House off the Niger allegations. In that sense, the Libby trial is about a cover-up that failed. So we begin to understand why the White House was worried about the CIA in the summer of 2003: It feared the agency would breach the wall of silence about the claims regarding weapons of mass destruction. Robert Grenier, a CIA official who was the agency's Iraq mission manager, told colleagues that he remembered "a series of insistent phone calls" that month from Libby, who wanted the CIA to tell reporters that "other community elements such as State and DOD" had encouraged Wilson's Niger trip, not just Cheney. The bottom line? Grenier was asked in court last week to explain the White House's 2003 machinations. Here's what he said <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR200701240 0944.html> : "I think they were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium." Let me say it again: This trial is about a cover-up that failed. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101 784.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR200702010 1784.html> 4. Frank Rich Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up What we are learning from Mr. Libbys trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilsons article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libbys lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was and still is a stooge for the vice president. Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it. Call it a coincidence though there are no coincidences but its only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later. Still, we cant push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country cant wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood. http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0204-22.htm <http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0204-22.htm> If we really were a democracy, as others have argued, we would have already replaced the president and vice president, after the resounding, historical midterm election defeat on November 7, 2006. The publics opinion is that this administration is done, it has no credibility. So why are we tolerating more robbery of human life and treasury? Have we become so accustomed to outrage that we no longer expect to do the right thing?
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