With
the announcement by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.)
that he had obtained a pledge from Senate Intelligence
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to open
a formal probe of the pre-Iraq war intelligence
process, "Cheney-gate" has moved into
an intensive new phase.
Based
on interviews with a dozen leading U.S. military,
intelligence, and Congressional sources, it
can be fairly stated that the fate of Vice President
Dick Cheney --and the direction of the Bush
Presidency-- will be determined by how this
battle plays out over the weeks ahead.
There
are signs of fissures in the Cheney and neo-conservative
camp inside the Bush Administration, and also
of intense pressure by Cheney loyalists on key
Republican members of Congress to stymie the
Senate probe.
Under
the current rules of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, an inquiry can be launched
whenever five members of the panel formally
request it.
And,
as Vice Chairman of the panel, Senator Rockefeller
can chair meetings in Roberts' absence.
This
situation has the Cheney crew panicked, and
during the week of Nov. 3, they launched a number
of dirty tricks aimed at subverting the committee's
work.
Their
efforts have the potential to backfire, and
even trigger a "Watergate cover-up"-style
scandal that could hasten Cheney's resignation
or impeachment.
In
early November, Senator Rockefeller, after months
of staff investigation and behind-the-scenes
wrangling, announced that he had won agreement
from Chairman Roberts to launch a formal investigation
of several facets of the pre-Iraq War intelligence
process.
Since
that agreement was struck, letters have gone
out to the Pentagon, State Department, CIA,
and White House, requesting specific documents
and interviews with key personnel.
Some
of the letters were co-signed by Roberts and
Rockefeller, and others went out under Rockefeller's
signature alone.
As
of Oct. 31, the State Department and CIA had
largely complied with a deadline for initial
document submissions to the panel, but both
the White House and the Pentagon were stalling.
On
"Meet the Press" on Nov. 2, Senator
Roberts told co-guest Rockefeller and host Tim
Russert that he had received promises from the
White House and the Pentagon on Oct. 31, that
they would comply with the voluntary document
requests.
Rockefeller
responded skeptically to the Roberts announcement.
An
Oct. 31 Knight-Ridder wire service charged that
top officials in Cheney's office were putting
tremendous pressure on Roberts to block any
probe of White House abuse of the intelligence
process, and focus all blame for the Iraq failures,
instead, on the CIA.
With
Roberts being pulled in two directions, Rockefeller
produced the five committee votes required to
launch a further inquiry, and Roberts, at that
point, signed on.
The
areas now known to be under investigation by
the Senate panel include:
*
The role of the Office of Special Plans (OSP),
the Pentagon unit under Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith that was
tasked with Iraq war planning and pre-war intelligence
assessments. The OSP was headed by William J.
Luti, who came to the Pentagon from the Office
of Vice President Dick Cheney in mid-2001, where
he was a Special Advisor for National Security
Affairs and Mideast Policy.
The
chief intelligence analyst in the unit, Abram
Shulsky, assembled a team of full-time and ``personal
service contract'' employees, drawn from the
neo-conservative scene in Washington. There
are widespread allegations that the OSP conducted
``out of channel'' intelligence gathering, drawing
upon Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress,
a group widely discredited in the eyes of the
CIA, the State Department, and even the Defense
Intelligence Agency; and on intelligence flows
from a parallel rogue intelligence unit created
in the Office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, at Feith's initiative.
One
key question posed by Senator Rockefeller and
others on the intelligence panel is whether
the raw intelligence generated by the OSP went
through normal intelligence community vetting,
before being passed along to Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. According
to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF, ret.),
who served in the Near East and South Asia policy
shop at the Pentagon that housed OSP, at staff
meetings Luti had boasted that the unit was
being tasked by Lewis Libby, Cheney's national
security advisor and chief of staff.
According
to one senior U.S. intelligence source, OSP,
as well as an earlier secret intelligence unit,
was established at the Pentagon so that it would
function in a low profile, at arm's length from
Cheney's office. The aim was to avoid a repeat
of the disastrous "Iran-Contra" scandals
that rocked the Reagan Administration in the
1980s, when the National Security Council was
caught running unauthorized covert operations.
*
The role of John Bolton, the State Department's
chief arms control officer, in hyping reports
of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs
in the run-up to the war. Although an October
2002 hastily prepared National Intelligence
Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
program included an extensive dissent, from
the State Department's Intelligence and Research
(INR) unit, expressing serious doubts about
the existence of any Iraqi current nuclear weapons
program, a Dec. 19, 2002 State Department fact
sheet explicitly charged that Iraq was covering
up its quest for large volumes of "yellowcake''
uranium from Niger. This, despite the fact that
the "yellowcake" allegations had been
investigated by former Ambassador Joe Wilson
and two others. State Department sources have
told {EIR} that Bolton and his deputy at the
time, David Wurmser, were responsible for that
insertion in the official State Department document.
Rockefeller
has stated that he wants the committee to get
to the bottom of the now infamous "16 words"
inserted into President Bush's January 2003
State of the Union address, alluding to British
evidence of Iraq's quest for African uranium--when
the same false allegations had been purged from
Bush's October 2002 Cincinnati speech, at the
insistence of CIA Director George Tenet.
*
The role of at least one National Security Council
official in the same State of the Union lie:
Dr. Robert Joseph, the proliferation desk officer
at the NSC and a longtime protege of neo-conservative
Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy
Board who was a key player in the "yellowcake"
caper. Sources familiar with the current functioning
of the NSC say that Joseph takes his orders
from Lewis Libby in Cheney's office--not National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Joseph got
his job at the NSC at the insistence of Perle.
*
The Valerie Plame leak. FBI investigators, according
to intelligence community sources, have expanded
their investigation into the source of the leak
of the identity of the wife of Ambassador Wilson,
a CIA "non-official cover" officer.
The sources say that the Bureau is now looking
back as early as March 2003, and is also interested
in the possible role of former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a member of the Defense
Policy Board. Gingrich, along with Cheney and
Libby, made several unprecedented visits to
CIA headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq War,
to pressure analysts to come up with "proof"
that Saddam was amassing weapons of mass destruction
and colluding with al-Qaeda....
http://www.libertyforum.org/showthreaded.php?Board=
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