WOW! --- PREWAR INTELLIGENCE --- Insulating Bush --- By MURRAY WAAS

PREWAR INTELLIGENCE
Insulating Bush
By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

.....................

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax.

.............

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

lots more at (with some interesting Plame stuff):
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm

The Sergeant Schultz defense.

:kick:

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more plain.

Good time line by Waas shows the conspiracy between Cheney, Rove, Rice, Hadley and Libby especially their "meetings" on the the 2 plane trips.

people or just for the President?

If just the President, he ought to pay them out of his own pocket and they shouldn't be allowed to spy and more.

If the work for us, the people, they should all be arrested and locked up for making a mission of hiding the truth from the people.

Anybody know who they work for?

national security apparatus report directly to the president of the United States. The group that was created is called the National Security Council or the NSC in Washington-ese. That group under law can be configured as the president chooses. The NSC has a group of people called principals. They are the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. This same Act created the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was amended two years later.

The NSC can exist of many groups or undersecretaries and other cabinet members. The NSC has staff(huge budget issue) appointed by the president. The National Security Advisor (NSA) is appointed by the president to run the staff and the principals meetings. The NSA's assistant works to head up the undersecretary and national security portfolios assigned to the staff. The NSC has ABSOLUTELY NO OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS as mandated by the 1947 Act.

Each president can remake the NSC ,once elected, in their own image with no fear of Congress. The president may choose who serves on which committees of the NSC and who receives which classified materials. Each president from 1947 has remade the NSC and the chief of staff of the president is sometimes also appointed onto the NSC.

To move from concept to real world, when you look at presidential power and its use, many of the dumbest mistakes from 1947 forward can be laid at the NSC's doorstep. Because it is insular there are many people who play a part in both Democratic or Republican presidencies. The club is small and has gotten into great historical debacles like: Iran Contra, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the most current WHIG, White House Iraq Group to put together Iraq response and crush opposition (Plame/Wilson), appointed by the president with no legal reason to share anything the group does with Congress.

To read more, the first book about the NSC is Running The World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, by David Rothkopf. He is the first to examine in a scholastic fashion the effects of the NSC on American foreign and national security policy. It is actually quite an excellent read and speaks to the clubby atmosphere and its relationships at the NSC.

It sounds like the NSA could easily become a rogue office.

:nuke: IS! :nuke: Big Brother has been watching for many, many years. The National Spying Agency has been given carte blanch by the bush administration. They were dirty as hell before, imagine the things that they're up to now completely unshackled! :grr:

NSA/FBI/CIA surveillance in the US, as opposed to overseas. it also applies to insulating him from the likely WAR CRIMES committed in the area of prisoner rendition, torture, etc.

it's MUCH worse than you think, and a key section in the book deals with how CAREFUL Bush's 'underlings' were to do his bidding without letting him know any details, so that he could say that he never PERSONALLY any of the things that they were doing that were constitutionally suspect, at the very least

Risen interviewed quite a few government officials who were APPALLED at what was going on; they knew how badly they were abrogating their responsibilities as officers of government, bound by the constitution

I could only read this book in short stretches, cause it's so infuriating

and you know they want to prosecute Risen

as NS Advisor

she'd been elbowed out by Rumsfeld and Cheney, the latter of whom served as defacto NSA

Rumsfeld went around her all the time, and his underlings ignored just about everything that came from her office

one official he interviewed called her the "worst" NSA ever

the worst

each and every time he's in close proximity to Rove and the rest of Bush etal. The things that he has seen highly classified documents on the dirty, stinking corruptness of the Executive Branch and it's slimy tendrils must make him physically ill.

Report claims Plame outed to keep public from knowing
Bush 'specifically advised' uranium claims untrue

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

Bush Knew
by emptywheel

Murray Waas (hat tip Jeff) has a great new article detailing how Stephen Hadley completed a review of the claims Bush made and the intelligence he used to make those claims. Hadley determined that Bush had made claims that he had previously been warned were challenged within the Intelligence Community. In particular, Bush's claims about the aluminum tubes were shaky:

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

Go read Waas' story. I'd just like to point out a few implications of Waas' story, about the timing of Hadley's review, about Judy's testimony, about the orders to leak information from the NIE, and about the SSCI report
more at:
http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2006/03/bush_knew.html

Based on the WaAs and other time lines this july 7th -9th time frame works well for answering this question of when did the conspirators conspire.

Also the leaking of the NIE is a smokescreen/diversion/cover up for what Bush really knew, and this 1 page summary is crucial to phase II if it ever happens.

TIME TO SHUT DOWN THE SENATE AGAIN, I am f**kin livid right now - light bulbs are going off in my head

SHUT IT DOWN SHUT IT ALL DOWN.:argh:

something about this. Isn't withholding evidence against a crime a CRIME? Don't these officials HAVE to say something or they will be conspirators to war crimes also?

It reminds me of the Catholic Church leaders who sat silent when they knew priest were molesting children. They are just as guilty as the priests.

the mods will take care of it. :)

It is ALL good...

Just read this





Sen. Roberts should be #$#%#$^^$%^^&%^&:argh::argh::argh:

thanks...

Here's what I can add to this story.

We saw this and the cover-up it spawned first hand. While I and reporters from CBS were working on this story through 2004 it was clear that folks on the Hill would agree to talk and then suddenly un-agree when they got the call from the White House. The White House worked doggedly at almost every turn to get the story killed or delayed beyond the election, which they of course did.

That's not all.

Various arms of the US government actually have been trying or at least been interested in trying to get to the bottom of the story. But that will the cooperation of the Italian government. And that, of course, is not likely to be forthcoming since at least some elements in the Italian government are responsible for or participated in the scam. The problem? The Bush administration has not lifted a finger to get the Italians to cooperate. That's the hang-up. Why wouldn't they want the Italian government to cooperate with US law enforcement and intelligence agencies on getting to the bottom of this? Go back and read Waas's description of Rove's analysis -- the Niger case was kryptonite for the president.

The cover-up on this one is deep. Really deep. And much of it has yet to be uncovered.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008058.php

Chapter 3: Casus Belli

Risen cites multiple anecdotes of the dominance of Donald Rumsfeld and his defense department over other principles and their bureaucratic fiefdoms in the Bush administration, cheerleader by Dick Cheney and his office, including the National Security Council's (NSC) Condi Rice and the CIA's George Tenet. "Rumsfeld's ascendancy led to endless headaches and personnel turnover, particularly at the NSC. Rumsfeld, for example, concluded that he didn't have to pay any attention to the counterterrorism coordinator at the White House, since he believed fighting the global war on terrorism was his job." Risen describes the uneven playing field that Tenet and Rumsfeld played on: "In fact, when it came to intelligence matters, it seemed as if Rumsfeld had sized up Tenet and decided he could run right over him. 'George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens, but in reality, he was a pussy,' complained one former Tenet lieutenant, roughly."

**

Risen describes how Rumsfeld tried to seize control of all U.S. intelligence capabilities, including from the CIA, as the Bush Administration worked to centralize its intelligence branches. Risen also describes how Rumsfeld worked to expand some of the limited intelligence gathering programs in the Pentagon: "Rumsfeld's plans represented a radical expansion of the Defense Department's existing espionage capabilities. The Defense HUMINT (Human Source Intelligence) Service, a wing of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had for years done some limited clandestine intelligence work, but it had never been involved in the kind of high-risk operations that Rumsfeld had in mind for secret units that he created... Rumsfeld was creating his own private spy service, buried deep within the Pentagon's vast black budget, with little or no accountability. Before long, the State Department and CIA began to hear reports from ambassadors and station chiefs that special covert military teams were operating in Africa and elsewhere in the third world... In 2005, trouble came: members of an operational support element team working in Latin America killed a man outside a bar. The incident has never been made public..."

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/30404/

Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld should be impeached and removed from office and along with several of their aides and subordinates, past and present, be indicted, tried and convicted for war crimes and incarcerated for the rest of their natural lives.

crimes in the US for "grave offenses against the Geneva Convention", which, in turn, could be interpreted by some as treasonous

treason still carries the death penalty, IINM, yes?

Under the US Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land. Consequently, violating them is illegal.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who sat on the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended three articles of impeachment against President Nixon in 1974, has examined both the possibility of impeachment and war crimes trials for Bush and other members of the regime under US law.

I would further add that it would be so wrong to allow Bush and his aides to get away with there crimes in Iraq that, if the US government is unable or unwilling to put forward a good faith effort in prosecuting them for war crimes, then a special international tribunal should be established for that purpose. The charges would stem not only from waging a war of aggression under false pretenses, but also the establishment and maintenance of Bush's network gulags, where terror suspects were and continue to be subjected to torture and other forms of cruel and humiliating treatment.

murdering swine

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

Ba#$tards

:beer:

:kick:

anyone have a copy?

What's more important: The truth? Or getting elected?

For this administration, we now know the answer.

We also know that Bush is being handled. He is fed only information which gets through the filters of his handlers. He is a puppet, at least of Roves.

wouldn't want the little monkey boy looking like the liar and thief is really is, would we, KKKarl? :grr: The American public has caught up with you anyway but unfortunately the damage is done. However, we're going to make the rest of your term a LIVING HELL you mother-fuckers! No one will ever trust bush again and this entire administration will go down in history as THE WORST, EVER! :mad: That won't be the end of it though boys, you're not getting away that easy. At least a few of you, hopefully ALL, will be going to prison. A few should be executed for treason. You're all war criminals and should be dealt with accordingly.

Your punishment hasn't even begun yet, you fucking swine! :grr:

he still knew too much.

I knew that, back in October 2002.

Why didn't the US "government"?