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Cheney's Crimes: Case for Impeachment
Builds
Momentum
Sat Feb 7 21:11:35 2004
64.140.158.30
Cheney's Crimes: Case for Impeachment Builds Momentum by
an EIR Investigative Team, with Lyndon LaRouche
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/index.html#Anchor-Speci-35955
Dick Cheney's days as Vice President appear to be numbered, even
as, on his tour of Western Europe, he tried to "soften his image"
as the Bush Administration's leading war hawk, and the architect of
the Big Lie campaign that led to the disastrous and needless Iraq
invasion. An entire brigade of American soldiers have already been
killed or wounded in Iraq, in a war fought over non-existent
weapons of mass destruction, and fabricated links between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda. Cheney, beyond all other Administration
officials, was the Joseph Goebbels of the Iraq war. As recently as
his media interviews in Switzerland and Italy in late January, he
continued to lie about Iraq's weapons, claiming that several
trailers seized by American inspectors, following the March 2003
invasion, were mobile bio-weapons labs.
David Kay, the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq, until his
hasty mid-January resignation, made clear in interviews and in
testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 28, that
these trailers had nothing to do with WMD. Former CIA chief of
counterterrorism Vincent Cannistraro told Salon magazine on Jan.
29, "It's disgusting. I just can't find words to describe how
horrible it is.... It just illustrates the peculiar worldview
Cheney has and how distorted it is. And it shows there's a real
contempt for the professional intelligence community." And Cheney
is coming under mounting fire for his recent interview with the
Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, in which he violated a Bush
Administration Executive Order on classified material, by
confirming that a Pentagon memo, leaked illegally to The Weekly
Standard, was the "best source" of proof of Saddam Hussein's ties
to al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.
Just moments after Air Force Two had landed back in Washington,
returning Cheney from his failed European "charm offensive," the
Vice President made a bee-line for Capitol Hill, where he launched
a one-man damage-control offensive against the Kay revelations, and
growing Congressional demands for an independent commission to
probe the Cheney-led disinformation campaign which led to the Iraq
invasion. According to Capitol Hill sources, Cheney arm-twisted
House Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Porter Goss
(R-Fla), and Senate panel chair Pat Roberts (R-Kan), to ram through
plans to close out their investigations of the pre-war intelligence
lapses, without any probe of White House manipulation and abuse of
the intelligence process. Cheney's instructions: Blame the CIA and
close the books on the probe.
What is new in this latest flurry of Cheney displays of beast-man
arrogance, is that the Vice President is no longer being given a
free ride.
Exit Scenarios
In the reports that follow, you will be presented with some of the
most damning evidence against the Vice President—evidence
that should lead to his impeachment from office, or his voluntary
or involuntary retirement. It was all the way back in September
2002, six months prior to the Iraq invasion, that Democratic
Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche demanded Cheney's ouster
from the Bush Administration. The evidence for Cheney's removal
from office has grown by leaps and bounds since then. And now, as
the result of the persistence of LaRouche and his associates, a
growing chorus of Democrats, and even some Republicans, are
demanding Cheney's departure.
There are a number of scenarios in play, any one of which could
lead to Cheney's resignation or, at minimum, his early removal from
President George W. Bush's re-election ticket. LaRouche summed up
President Bush and Karl Rove's dilemma in a recent discussion: If
George Bush dumps Dick Cheney from the ticket, he loses. If he
keeps Cheney on the ticket, he loses.
According to sources close to the Bush campaign, polls show that
Vice President Cheney is increasingly becoming a drag on the
re-election effort, with many moderate Republicans preparing to
jump ship, if the Administration continues to buy into the paranoid
wanna-be imperial policies associated with the Vice President and
his neo-conservative allies. Leading Republicans, like former
Secretary of State James Baker III and even former President George
H.W. Bush, had quietly been assuring Establishment
colleagues—both Republican and Democrat—that G.W.'s
State of the Union address would signal a clear return to the
non-abrasive, "coalition-building" politics of "Bush 41." When the
President, instead, delivered a no-holds-barred defense of the
Cheney doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war, Baker et al.
came away with egg on their faces.
The same sources report that the just-published memoir by former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind, which exposed
Cheney's role as the driver of the Iraq war and the agenda of
massive tax cuts for the rich, was no mere "kiss and tell"
gripe-fest. O'Neill's criticisms reflect the growing disgust, among
"Main Street" Republicans, with Cheney in particular, and the Bush
Administration in general.
If this were the only consideration, it is likely that Dick Cheney
would have already been removed from the 2004 ticket, and, perhaps,
he would have even stepped down as Vice President. But campaign
Svengali Karl Rove is also painfully aware that the Republican
Party's strange-bedfellow election coalition includes at least a
5-10% factor of crazies—neo-cons, Bible Belt Christian
Zionists, and other radical rightists—who would possibly sit
home on election day, were Cheney to be off the ticket.
As one Washington insider put it, for a sitting Republican
President, running unopposed for his party's nomination, to be
running neck-and-neck with an as-yet-unchosen Democratic rival, is
unprecedented. Another former Cabinet-level official, familiar with
the Veep's hooligan style, warned that a desperate Dick Cheney
could resort to desperate measures to keep his job. He made
explicit reference to another 9/11.
No Free Ride in November
What makes Rove's position so damning is the dramatic
transformation of the Democratic Party, in the immediate aftermath
of the Iowa caucuses, President Bush's disastrous Jan. 20 State of
the Union address, and the Jan. 27 New Hampshire Democratic primary
vote. Suddenly, leading Democratic Party "institutional"
players—from Senators Edward Kennedy (Mass), John D.
Rockefeller (WVa), Carl Levin (Mich), Tom Daschle (SD), and
Representatives Henry Waxman (Calif), John Conyers (Mich.), and
Nancy Pelosi (Calif), to party operatives like Center for American
Progress head John Podesta—have awakened to the reality, long
promoted by LaRouche, that Dick Cheney is the Achilles' heel of the
Bush re-election effort, and that Bush can and must be defeated in
November.
No longer does organized-crime-tainted Democratic National
Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe have the political muscle to
wreck the party's chances to wage a genuine campaign to take back
the White House. As one well-known Democratic campaign strategist
put it, "The DNC is irrelevant."
The avalanche of attacks on Cheney constitute a virtual bill of
indictment against the Vice President for a string of crimes
touching on the national security of the United States, and on
issues of corruption that reach the highest echelons of the
Administration. Many of these crimes are the subject of ongoing
investigations or of calls for new probes:
* As first reported in EIR on Jan. 9, 2004, a French criminal probe
is underway, into $180 million in bribes, purportedly paid to
Nigerian government officials by a consortium of companies led by
Halliburton—during Cheney's tenure as CEO. French Judge
Renaud Van Ruymbeke is heading the probe, and told French and
American journalists in mid-January, that he is considering "misuse
of corporate assets" charges against Cheney personally.
* On Jan. 25, CBS-TV's "Sixty Minutes" broadcast a story charging
that Halliburton engaged in "trading with the enemy" while Cheney
headed the company. Through a Cayman Islands subsidiary,
Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., the company built up a
$40-million-a-year business in Iran, in what New York City
Comptroller William Thompson told CBS was a violation of "the
spirit of the law." Thompson charged that Halliburton's offshore
dealing "benefits terrorism."
* Cheney is already a prime subject of the Justice Department probe
into the leak of the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie
Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. On Jan. 26, six
leading Congressional Democrats wrote to the Comptroller General,
demanding a separate General Accounting Office probe of White House
violations of security procedures for preventing national security
leaks. The procedures violated by Cheney and others are spelled out
in Executive Order 12958, signed by President George W. Bush
shortly after he was inaugurated.
In their letter to David Walker, Senators Daschle, Lieberman and
Rockefeller, and Representatives Pelosi, Waxman and Conyers
concluded: "Protecting our nation's secrets is essential to
protecting our nation's security. Safeguarding the identities of
covert intelligence officers is especially critical to protecting
their lives and the lives of everyone they come in contact with....
The disclosure of Valerie Plame's covert CIA identity calls into
doubt the adequacy of the procedures that the White House has
followed to safeguard these vital national secrets. GAO's thorough
and prompt investigation into this matter is necessary so that the
deficiencies in the White House procedures can be identified and
corrected. This is an essential step in restoring public confidence
in how the White House handles national security secrets."
On Jan. 26, even Gen. Wesley Clark, a faltering candidate for the
Democratic Presidential nomination, lambasted Cheney for endorsing
a Weekly Standard article on Saddam's links to al-Qaeda that was
exclusively drawn from a leaked Pentagon document. It is a
violation, under E.O. 12958, even to give after-the-fact
corroboration of an illegally leaked classified document. Worse,
the document in question, prepared by Pentagon neo-con Under
Secretary of Defense Doug Feith, was a patchwork of raw
intelligence leads and outright lies and distortions, attempting to
make a credible case of Saddam ties to the 9/11 attackers, when no
such case exists.
* Cheney has come under escalating attack for his role in the
disinformation campaign to win Congressional and public support for
the Iraq war. In appearances this week, Sens. Levin, Rockefeller,
and Daschle all singled out the Vice President for using fake
intelligence to launch a predetermined war—and for continuing
to use the same now officially disproven lies, to justify the war.
The Senators cited Cheney's repeated references, during his
European tour, to the discovery of the mobile trailers—the
ones Kay had confirmed were not weapons-related—as
"bio-weapons labs."
"I find it incredible, utterly incredible," Sen. Rockefeller told
reporters, "that the Vice President of the United States could, a
few days ago, say that two semi-trailers, which were found, were
'conclusive evidence' that Saddam had programs for weapons of mass
destruction when his own intelligence community, according to David
Kay, has reached a consensus that they had nothing to do with
weapons of mass destruction. There are many other examples of
exaggerations that continue to this day, by the Vice President of
the United States and others in this Administration, and it is
intolerable. It is incredible."
Senator Rockefeller zeroed in on another Cheney crime—the use
of unvetted intelligence to make the case for war. Through former
Cheney staffer William Luti, the normally nondescript Near East and
South Asia (NESA) policy shop at the Pentagon was turned into
"Neo-con Central," housing the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a
clearinghouse for disinformation and illegal covert operations,
which reported directly to Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby.
Rockefeller told reporters, "It's now a question, which we are
looking at, whether or not there were other sources of intelligence
which uniquely went around the intelligence community as a whole,
went directly through a particular department of the Defense
Department and then directly—often unvetted, often
single-sourced, often raw material—directly to the vice
president, to policymakers, from which they began to make
decisions.
"If that were to be the case," he continued, "it brings into sharp
definition the whole question of preemption as a national policy
... Which leads to a further point, that was this a predetermined
war or not? And I think that remains an overwhelming question."
Senators Levin, Rockefeller, and Daschle all endorsed a call by a
group of ten former CIA officers for an independent bipartisan
House probe of the intelligence fakery (See EIR, Jan. 30, 2004).
The Senators also mooted they may be forced to press for an
independent commission, to get to the bottom of White House
manipulation of pre-war intelligence. Following David Kay's Jan. 28
testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) announced he'd be introducing legislation to create an
independent commission to probe the pre-war intelligence,
bolstering an earlier call by Sen. John Corzine (D-N.J.).
More Public Roasting of Cheney
The New York Times on Jan. 27 weighed in with yet another direct
hit at the Vice President, in a lead editorial headlined, "Mr.
Cheney, Meet Mr. Kay." The editorial, citing recent Cheney
statements about Iraq's WMD schemes, declared, "The Vice
President's myopia suggests a breathtaking unwillingness to accept
a reality that conflicts with the Administration's preconceived
notions. This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an
invasion without broad international support, and, if Mr. Cheney is
as influential as many say, could propel us into further
misadventures down the road."
Jan. 29, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd summarized the case
against Dick Cheney as spinmeister-in-chief of the Bush
Administration's war party: "Dick Cheney, who declared that Saddam
had a nuclear capability and who visited CIA headquarters in the
Summer of 2002 to make sure the raw intelligence was properly
interpreted, is sticking to his deluded guns.... The vice president
pushed to slough off the allies and the UN and go to war partly
because he thought that slapping a weakened bully like Saddam would
scare other dictators. He must have reckoned there would be no day
of reckoning on weapons once Saddam was gone. So it had to be some
new definition of chutzpah on Tuesday, when Mr. Cheney, exuding
more infallibility than the Pope, presented him with a crystal
dove."
While dumping Cheney from the ticket might not salvage George
Bush's re-election, it would, as LaRouche has argued for the past
18 months, partly salvage his Presidential legacy, and offer an
opportunity to avert future disasters, which neither the United
States nor the rest of the world can afford. The President's men
would do well to study the documentation of Dick Cheney's crimes
that follows, before making their fateful decision.
An EIR Special Report
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/index.html#Anchor-Speci-35955
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/02-07-04/discussion.cgi.14.html
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