ASK RUDY GUILIANI HOW HE KNEW... Former US Attorney says Congress' job to investigate Iraq-gate.

Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:21:28 -0800 (PST)
From: "LymeQ Ween" <lymeqween@xxxxxxxxx> Add to Address BookAdd to
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Subject: Former US Attorney: Congress' job to investigate White House'
phoney case for war
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I would only add that we need to
know who received Larry Silverstein's
instructions to pull WTC7.

Who was on the other end of the phone
call when Larry said there had been so much
loss of life, maybe the best thing to do is to
pull it.

I *remember* that day and the decision being
made to demolish WTC7 *before it happened.*

It was announced on CNN.

'Suppose we could get the CNN transcsripts from
that entire day?

And ask Rudy Guiliani who told him to leave
the area because the towers were going to fall,
before they did? WHO TOLD HIM???

That was, like, on TV, but to my knowledge
no one raised the question in the 9/11 report.
That would be because Henry Kissinger was
on the investigation squad and Henry is the
president of the United States and Israel, and
HAS BEEN for the past 35 years. In the CNN
transcripts, we will hear Ol' Henry calling in from
Europe saying whoever is not with us is against
us, and that we, the US, would be going after
countries that harbor terrorists, as if that state
itself was the terrorist. GET THE TRANSCRIPTS.

Ask Henry how is it he either dictates or knows
US "foreign policy" ahead of time...


Published on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by TomDispatch.com
Public Misconduct
A Call to Investigate All of the President's Men
by Elizabeth de la Vega

Last week, apparently belatedly realizing the obvious -- that the
attack on former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame
was a White House family affair -- New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof called for the administration to come clean. Bush and Cheney
owe "the American people a candid explanation" of their conduct with
regard to the leaking of Plame's identity as a CIA agent, Kristof
insisted.
If, after observing this administration for over six years, Nicholas
Kristof thinks that the President and Vice President are going to
suddenly be overcome by conscience and tell all because he has put his
foot down, then Nicholas Kristof is downright adorable.
The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was merely a snapshot view of
this administration in daily action; but incomplete as it was, it
nevertheless starkly revealed what many had known all along: that the
most powerful officials in the United States government -- including,
but not limited to, the Vice President, the Vice President's Chief of
Staff, the Deputy Secretary of State, the President's Press Secretary,
the President's Chief of Staff, and, yes, the President himself -- had
responded to the barrage of criticism being aimed at their fictitious
case for war in the spring and summer of 2003 by focusing their sights
on a man and woman who had devoted their lives to public service.
Such people -- those who will use the highest offices of the United
States government to protect themselves and their prospects for
reelection by whatever means they deem necessary, regardless of the
damage they leave in their wake -- are not going to confess to
anything...ever.
Indeed, in answer to questions from a reporter about this very issue
on February 14, President Bush explained helpfully, "I'm not going to
talk about any of it." We will surely all expire if we hold our
collective breath waiting for the President to change his mind about
this (or anything else, for that matter). Fortunately, we do not need
to hear what Bush and Cheney have to say about "it" right now.
Nor do we have to wait for the outcome of any further investigation by
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, even though it is entirely
possible he and his eminently capable prosecutors Peter Zeidenberg,
Debra Bonamici, and the rest of their team will continue to explore
possible criminal activity on the part of Vice President Cheney and
others. A continued investigation would, in fact, be both appropriate
and warranted, given the abundant evidence of Cheney's wrongdoing.
As Fitzgerald implied on the day he announced the charges against
Scooter Libby, however, the criminal justice system is not designed to
address all the issues raised by the CIA leak affair, perhaps not even
the major ones. The Libby case was not, Fitzgerald said, as he
announced the indictment, about the validity or honesty of the
President's arguments for an invasion of Iraq. In fact, the Libby case
was not even about the conduct of other members of the administration;
it was solely about I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and whether he obstructed
a grand jury investigation, lied to federal agents, and then lied to a
grand jury.
Despite the spin immediately set in motion by Libby's cadre of
supporters, Fitzgerald was not suggesting that the charges he was
leveling were trivial, nor was he presuming to sanction the conduct of
the Bush administration in the run-up to the war. As a seasoned
prosecutor, he was merely making a simple, but necessary, point about
the nature of criminal charges and the laws that govern them. The laws
of perjury and obstruction of justice exist to vindicate an important
government interest in the integrity of grand-jury proceedings. Once
such charges are brought, however, they raise but a single issue: Is
there proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual or
individuals charged committed the conduct specified in the indictment?
From the perspective of the prosecution team, that question was, quite
properly, the only one raised by the criminal trial of Scooter Libby.
And within the confines of United States District Court Judge Reggie
Walton's courtroom, the prosecutors were only entitled to offer
evidence relating to that question. That is why the Libby trial has
offered such an incomplete and unsatisfying picture.
Evidence in the trial showed, for example, that, on May 29, 2003,
Libby first asked former Undersecretary of Defense Marc Grossman for
information about an unnamed former ambassador's trip to Niger to
inquire about possible Iraqi purchases of uranium. Evidence was also
presented that such a trip had been mentioned in a May 6, 2003 op-ed
written by Nicholas Kristof. But because the prosecution was limited
to introducing evidence that tended to prove the charges in the
indictment, the evidence did not indicate what else were reporters
saying about the administration's case for war in the spring of 2003.
From the Bush administration's perspective, it would be the height of
understatement to say that there was not a whole lot of positive
press.
For starters, by at least mid-May, the Democrats, with Jay Rockefeller
leading the charge, were calling for an investigation into the
intelligence cited repeatedly by senior administration officials as
grounds for the invasion of Iraq. And here is a sampling of the
accompanying media furor:

May 30 -- Nicholas Kristof, "Save our Spooks," the New York Times:
"According to a 'torrent' of sources, there is reason to believe
that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was 'deliberately
warped...to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize
[the war in Iraq]."
June 2 -- Jim Lobe, "Credibility Gap over Iraq WMD Looms Larger,"
Foreign Policy in Focus:
"When all three major U.S. newsweeklies -- Time, Newsweek and U.S.
News & World Report -- run major features on the same day on possible
government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major
scandal."
June 7 -- "Questions Swirl Around WMD Charges," CBS/AP
"President Bush's administration distorted intelligence and
presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq,
according to a retired intelligence official who served during the
months before the war.
"'What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous
statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did
say,' said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. 'The area of
distortion was greatest in the nuclear field.'"
June 9 -- Unnamed reporter to White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer at White House Press Briefing
"Q. You said in April that the war was about weapons of mass
destruction. The war resulted in tens of thousands of innocent
civilian deaths -- thousands of innocent civilian deaths, according to
The Los Angeles Times. Do you personally feel any remorse, given the
public case that's being made that this war was based on that false
pretext?"

It was, in short, a public relations nightmare, involving a sudden
upsurge in calls for an investigation as well as a surge of reports,
stories, and questions about government lying, warped intelligence,
distortions, and false pretexts for war. And the criticisms were aimed
not only at the White House but at the State Department, which was the
likely reason for the appearances of both National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State Colin Powell on the
June 8, 2003 Sunday morning talk shows.
To make things worse, the Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign was about to rev
up, with major fundraisers scheduled for mid-June. Given this context,
"no sane person" (to borrow Patrick Fitzgerald's phrase from his
closing argument in the Libby case) could possibly believe that anyone
in the Bush administration was not involved in the smears, selective
declassifications, ongoing deceit, and cover-up that spun out of
control in the spring and summer of 2003. Indeed, we know that at
least one key re-election campaign committee member, lobbyist Ken
Duberstein, was involved as well, acting as an intermediary between
reporter Robert Novak and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage.
No criminal investigation, and certainly no criminal trial, is ever
going to illuminate these White House machinations. In addition, as
significant as the criminal issues that arise from the circumstances
of the CIA leak may be -- and they are significant -- whether any
members of the administration violated any federal statutes in
conducting their attack on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame has never
been the most important issue raised by this whole tawdry affair.
The paramount issue is one of abuse of power by our highest executive
branch officials and their stable of White House staffers, lobbyists,
Republican operatives and other surrogates. The criminal justice
system was never intended by the framers of the Constitution to be the
sole, or even primary, means of investigating and redressing what the
late Congresswoman from Texas Barbara Jordan described during the
Watergate investigations as "the misconduct of public men." On the
contrary, it is Congress that is both entitled and obligated to
oversee the conduct of the Executive Branch.
So yes, the trial of Scooter Libby has raised as many questions as it
has answered, but we need not wait for the President and Vice
President to answer them; nor should we wait for the outcome of any
further criminal investigation. What is needed is a full-scale
congressional hearing by the House Oversight Committee on Government
Reform. Representative Henry Waxman (D. Ca.), the chair of the
committee, has subpoena power and can subpoena telephone records,
meeting notes, daily calendars, memos, and a host of key players whose
testimony was not legally relevant in the Libby trial, but who
obviously have intimate knowledge of the entire CIA leak case and
cover-up. These figures would include Karl Rove, Richard Armitage,
lobbyist Ken Duberstein, Colin Powell and Stephen Hadley among others.
Finally, unlike the prosecutor in a grand jury investigation, Waxman
can hold hearings that are public -- in Room 2154 Rayburn Office
Building, Washington, D.C. So the misconduct of these public men and
women, our highest elected and appointed officials in the Executive
Branch, can finally be judged by a much larger jury of their peers,
the people of the United States.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20
years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the
Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the
U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her
pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times,
and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com. She is the author
of United States v. George W. Bush et al. She may be contacted at
ElizabethdelaVega@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Copyright 2007 Elizabeth de la Vega

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