It’s like the Watergate Saturday Night Massacre
Fascinating reading. Much of it may be true. The first part is the hardest to believe, but the articles after that look logical.
Bob Reuschlein
fraser
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:29:11 +0100
Subject: up! 0016// Tony Blair, MI5 Agent// Oct 23, 05
Bush-Cheney CIA/Plame Case Indictments Released On Friday BUSH ORDERS FITZGERALD FIRED AND ESPIONAGE INDICTMENTS QUASHED “It’s like the Watergate Saturday Night Massacre!”
Washington, DCOctober 21, 200512:00 EST Today Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald handed over 22 indictments to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, accusing President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney and others of espionage, obstruction of justice, perjury and a variety of other charges in the matter of the CIA/Valerie Plame leak-gate case.
According to intelligence sources who spoke with federal whistleblowers Thomas Heneghan and Stewart Webb, Bush then ordered Gonzalez to fire Fitzgerald and have the indictments quashed and sealed.
Gonzalez (Bush’s former personal White House counsel before receiving a presidential appointment as U.S. Attorney General) refused to release the indictments which have been handed down by the grand jury and ordered served by a judge, subjecting the Attorney General to additional charges of obstruction of justice, the sources said.
The move is reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” when President Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in an attempt to save his presidency and obstruct justice.
Intelligence sources added that Bush tried to distract attention from the indictments and delay publicity about his attempt to fire Fitzgerald this afternoon by ordering a diversion regarding a “Capitol Hill police attempt to disrupt a suspicious package in a car near the U.S. Capitol.”
Since Bush was in California this morning, scheduled to speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California when Gonzalez received the service of indictments, it can be assumed that Bush’s orders for Gonzalez to refuse receipt of process and fire the prosecutor were discussed over the telephone.
It is open to conjecture whether Bush could be arrested in California before even returning to Washington, given the criminal nature of the indictments.
An attempt to quash indictments and to fire Fitzgerald may also cause a constitutional crisis if Bush and Gonzalez continue to obstruct justice and defy U.S. law and constitutional legal process.
Intelligence sources maintain that the military or U.S. marshals should arrest Bush, Gonzalez, Cheney and others immediately for their criminal acts in keeping explosive espionage, obstruction and perjury indictments hidden from the American people, all of which affects U.S. national security.
Developing……………… [TomFlocco.com exclusive] http://www.tomflocco.com up!
THE WASHINGTON POST, FRI OCT 21, 2005: Several scenarios have begun to emerge if Rove or vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby is indicted and forced out. Senior GOP officials are developing a public relations strategy to defend those accused of crimes and, more importantly, shield Bush from further damage. " People are very demoralised and unhappy ," a former administration official said. "The leak investigation is part of it, but things were not happy before this took pre-eminence " Bush implicitly acknowledged the distractions in answer to a reporter's question, while reassuring the public that he remained focused on the pressing matters of state facing his White House. " There's some background noise here, a lot of chatter, a lot of speculation and opining," Bush said. "But the American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to." up!
Authority Of The Attorney General The letter which appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as Special Counsel granted to him the "authority of the Attorney General .
. .
independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department." Careful to confirm the extent of his mandate, he further inquired and was advised that
"It is plenary and includes the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure, as well as federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, your investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted . . ."
"Plenary" means "absolute and unqualified." In a word, Fitzgerald has all the power of the attorney general, the top law enforcement officer of the federal government himself, to pursue the facts wherever they may lead. It therefore appears he now possesses his own authority, and cannot be legally removed from his position, even by Bush. He has his own operating budget too, direct from the GAO.
For the criminal purposes of the Bush administration, Patrick Fitzgerald is their worst nightmare come true. He is a career prosecutor with a reputation for being not only "frighteningly" brilliant but fearless, and with a driving passion for determining the truth, their most mortal enemy. Indeed, the fastest way to get Fitzgerald’s fur up is to try to lie to him as a witness. See, he's a workaholic already, and liars just make him work harder. UP!
The Most Important Criminal Case in American (and World) History by James Moore // The Huffington Post If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.
We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard, that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false preteens to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.
Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. Since, if he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, he has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider, it seems unlikely that he’d simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war.
Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned that her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson was uncovering the plot. Though it sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.
We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic (and the planet). Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The final thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people we’ve elected, but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the death rattles of history’s greatest democracy.
Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the blatantly fake papers which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, and which turned up after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defence minister.
Is Fitzgerald examining the possibility that rabidly anti-Arab Ledeen was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq? Ledeen, who makes the other neo-cons appear passive, has long ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and has spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of what he calls “creative destruction” to build democracies. He brought the Reagan administration together with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged the country through Iran-Contra and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a personal obsession with Machiavelli.
Is it mere coincidence that some months after he and his neo-con consorts and Italian intelligence officers met in Rome that the Niger embassy was illegally entered, but nothing was stolen other than letterhead and seals. And is it equally coincident that forged papers under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer for an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, and a backer of the Bush invasion. Unfortunately for the pro-war neo-cons, even the Italian tabloids refused to publish the fake documents, instead turning them over to the CIA and US government in Rome.
The other American attendees at Ledeen’s Roman Holiday are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defence but Franklin faces prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterised as a “counter-intelligence shop,” OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered data that said otherwise, OSP ‘analysed’ it differently or ignored the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller about the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.
No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who defrauded the government and the public.
I have seen the spawn of Rove’s tortured mind and watched a hundred of his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one played out. Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains in the White House Iraq Group, a propaganda organisation set up to disseminate information supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the plan to smack down Wilson out of the White House.
There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former Republican presidential candidate, “You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.” We expect you also to have sufficient evidence to prove all of this.
There are many of us who are on the verge of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced there are people within the highest ramparts of American government who are willing to put our country at great risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want our country back. And all we have left is the power of the law. >From what we know, you are the right man come forth at the right time.
Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws. UP!
UNITED FOR PEACE & JUSTICE | 212-868-5545
From ufpj-news
Bob Reuschlein
fraser
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:29:11 +0100
Subject: up! 0016// Tony Blair, MI5 Agent// Oct 23, 05
Bush-Cheney CIA/Plame Case Indictments Released On Friday BUSH ORDERS FITZGERALD FIRED AND ESPIONAGE INDICTMENTS QUASHED “It’s like the Watergate Saturday Night Massacre!”
Washington, DCOctober 21, 200512:00 EST Today Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald handed over 22 indictments to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, accusing President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney and others of espionage, obstruction of justice, perjury and a variety of other charges in the matter of the CIA/Valerie Plame leak-gate case.
According to intelligence sources who spoke with federal whistleblowers Thomas Heneghan and Stewart Webb, Bush then ordered Gonzalez to fire Fitzgerald and have the indictments quashed and sealed.
Gonzalez (Bush’s former personal White House counsel before receiving a presidential appointment as U.S. Attorney General) refused to release the indictments which have been handed down by the grand jury and ordered served by a judge, subjecting the Attorney General to additional charges of obstruction of justice, the sources said.
The move is reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” when President Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in an attempt to save his presidency and obstruct justice.
Intelligence sources added that Bush tried to distract attention from the indictments and delay publicity about his attempt to fire Fitzgerald this afternoon by ordering a diversion regarding a “Capitol Hill police attempt to disrupt a suspicious package in a car near the U.S. Capitol.”
Since Bush was in California this morning, scheduled to speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California when Gonzalez received the service of indictments, it can be assumed that Bush’s orders for Gonzalez to refuse receipt of process and fire the prosecutor were discussed over the telephone.
It is open to conjecture whether Bush could be arrested in California before even returning to Washington, given the criminal nature of the indictments.
An attempt to quash indictments and to fire Fitzgerald may also cause a constitutional crisis if Bush and Gonzalez continue to obstruct justice and defy U.S. law and constitutional legal process.
Intelligence sources maintain that the military or U.S. marshals should arrest Bush, Gonzalez, Cheney and others immediately for their criminal acts in keeping explosive espionage, obstruction and perjury indictments hidden from the American people, all of which affects U.S. national security.
Developing……………… [TomFlocco.com exclusive] http://www.tomflocco.com up!
THE WASHINGTON POST, FRI OCT 21, 2005: Several scenarios have begun to emerge if Rove or vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby is indicted and forced out. Senior GOP officials are developing a public relations strategy to defend those accused of crimes and, more importantly, shield Bush from further damage. " People are very demoralised and unhappy ," a former administration official said. "The leak investigation is part of it, but things were not happy before this took pre-eminence " Bush implicitly acknowledged the distractions in answer to a reporter's question, while reassuring the public that he remained focused on the pressing matters of state facing his White House. " There's some background noise here, a lot of chatter, a lot of speculation and opining," Bush said. "But the American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to." up!
Authority Of The Attorney General The letter which appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as Special Counsel granted to him the "authority of the Attorney General .
. .
independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department." Careful to confirm the extent of his mandate, he further inquired and was advised that
"It is plenary and includes the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure, as well as federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, your investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted . . ."
"Plenary" means "absolute and unqualified." In a word, Fitzgerald has all the power of the attorney general, the top law enforcement officer of the federal government himself, to pursue the facts wherever they may lead. It therefore appears he now possesses his own authority, and cannot be legally removed from his position, even by Bush. He has his own operating budget too, direct from the GAO.
For the criminal purposes of the Bush administration, Patrick Fitzgerald is their worst nightmare come true. He is a career prosecutor with a reputation for being not only "frighteningly" brilliant but fearless, and with a driving passion for determining the truth, their most mortal enemy. Indeed, the fastest way to get Fitzgerald’s fur up is to try to lie to him as a witness. See, he's a workaholic already, and liars just make him work harder. UP!
The Most Important Criminal Case in American (and World) History by James Moore // The Huffington Post If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.
We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard, that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false preteens to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.
Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. Since, if he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, he has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider, it seems unlikely that he’d simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war.
Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned that her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson was uncovering the plot. Though it sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.
We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic (and the planet). Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The final thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people we’ve elected, but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the death rattles of history’s greatest democracy.
Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the blatantly fake papers which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, and which turned up after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defence minister.
Is Fitzgerald examining the possibility that rabidly anti-Arab Ledeen was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq? Ledeen, who makes the other neo-cons appear passive, has long ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and has spanned the globe to bring the world the constant variety of what he calls “creative destruction” to build democracies. He brought the Reagan administration together with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged the country through Iran-Contra and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a personal obsession with Machiavelli.
Is it mere coincidence that some months after he and his neo-con consorts and Italian intelligence officers met in Rome that the Niger embassy was illegally entered, but nothing was stolen other than letterhead and seals. And is it equally coincident that forged papers under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer for an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, and a backer of the Bush invasion. Unfortunately for the pro-war neo-cons, even the Italian tabloids refused to publish the fake documents, instead turning them over to the CIA and US government in Rome.
The other American attendees at Ledeen’s Roman Holiday are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defence but Franklin faces prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterised as a “counter-intelligence shop,” OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered data that said otherwise, OSP ‘analysed’ it differently or ignored the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller about the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.
No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who defrauded the government and the public.
I have seen the spawn of Rove’s tortured mind and watched a hundred of his political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one played out. Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains in the White House Iraq Group, a propaganda organisation set up to disseminate information supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the plan to smack down Wilson out of the White House.
There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former Republican presidential candidate, “You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.” We expect you also to have sufficient evidence to prove all of this.
There are many of us who are on the verge of losing faith in our democracy. We are convinced there are people within the highest ramparts of American government who are willing to put our country at great risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want our country back. And all we have left is the power of the law. >From what we know, you are the right man come forth at the right time.
Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws. UP!
UNITED FOR PEACE & JUSTICE | 212-868-5545
From ufpj-news
Starmail - 24. Okt, 13:27
