From Volume 2, Issue Number 32 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Aug. 12, 2003

Bush Has A Chance to Dump Cheney Before It's Too Late
by Jeffrey Steinberg

On Aug. 4, the Washington Post printed a front-page leak alleging that Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage had recently informed Condi Rice that they would leave the Bush Administration the day after the 2005 inauguration, if Bush is reelected. While Powell's office immediately issued a carefully worded disclaimer, denying the purported Armitage-Rice meeting where the resignation message was delivered, Lyndon LaRouche has identified the significance of the Powell maneuver.

Powell, in effect, has issued a powerful warning to President George W. Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, that there is no longer room inside the Administration for himself and Vice President Dick Cheney and the gaggle of neo-conservative Chickenhawks who operate under Cheney's protection. As Rove is well aware, a Powell resignation would be the kiss of death for President Bush's reelection hopes.

While the "story behind the story" of the Washington Post leak is not fully known, Powell did make a point of spelling out his views on the Cheney/neo-con gang in an interview, published the same day in the Washington Times and many other newspapers around the country, with syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer. While he bristled against speaking directly about the neo-cons by name, Powell made clear that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 shifted the direction of the Bush Administration very negatively.

"The President came in with a philosophy that I could very much identify with," he told Geyer, "with helping people in need as well as dealing with these kinds of challenges. Then 9/11 came, and that fundamentally changed the nature and tone of the Administration. But I never lost sight of what the President was trying to accomplish in the first place. He is still active on those goals, but they don't get spoken about or written about enough."

Powell indicated his notion of diplomacy is "not moving armies around. It's moving alliances and friends around.... My job is to try to see if we can create conditions where military force won't be necessary"—an obvious rebuff to the Pentagon civilian neo-cons, who are promoting a string of "perpetual wars" in Eurasia, as part of their fantasy of a Pax Americana.

Powell acknowledged frictions in the Bush Administration, but saved his harshest words for the issue of intelligence and truth, a stinging, if veiled, attack on the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal who are under mounting attack for "spinning" intelligence to fit their Iraq war plans.

"I spoke to my intelligence crowd two days ago," he told Geyer, "and I told them, 'The highest loyalty you can show me is when you tell me what you think; and when you don't tell me something because you're afraid it will be contrary to what I want to hear, or because you think it will make me mad, then you're not being loyal to me.' "

Powell expressed his confidence that the Iraq war will not transform the country into a "different America"—i.e., a wannabe empire, as envisioned by Cheney et al. "I have supreme confidence in the judgment of the American people to stay true to the values of the country and to sort things out."

Geyer's own conclusion: "So who really is Colin Powell? He's the calm, rational and cultured center around whom the typhoons and riots play. And despite the care he takes in what he says, those typhoons and riots are not always in foreign lands, but are right around him, in the fanatical mind-sets of the 'other' part of this Administration. Out of loyalty and because of his own character, that's the story he simply will not tell." - But Others Tell It Like It Is -

LaRouche's assessment—that Powell has delivered a subtle but deadly ultimatum to Bush and Rove, that Cheney and the neo-cons must go—has been corroborated by several Washington intelligence sources, who say Powell has strengthened his position by this move. According to one, Powell recently moved to fire State Department arms control chief and former American Enterprise Institute vice president John Bolton for inflammatory statements about North Korea, and was rebuffed by "the White House"—that is, by Cheney. This prompted Powell to deliver his ultimatum.

On Aug. 5, Powell, his wife Alma, and Armitage visited privately with President Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch, and sources close to the Administration report that the President asked Powell to pledge that he'd stay on. Today, the Powells, Armitage, President Bush, and National Security Adviser Condi Rice all held a press conference together at the ranch, in what some sources characterized as a dramatic show of confidence by the President in his Secretary of State.

LaRouche observed that the question is squarely on the President's plate: Will he move against his neocon "enemy within"? If Bush fails to clean house, and Powell departs or confirms that he will not be part of a second Bush Administration, LaRouche noted, Bush will not have to resign. He will be resigned by the American electorate.

Over the past week, fresh ammunition against Cheney and his war party has surfaced, giving the President further cause to start dumping the neo-cons.

Most significant was the public reemergence of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who delivered a series of devastating exposés of the role of Cheney, his chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and the Pentagon neo-cons, in fabricating the evidence to start the Iraq war, and then launching vicious smears against those honest officials who dared to challenge their criminal misconduct.

Wilson, who travelled, at the behest of the U.S. intelligence community, to Niger in February 2002, to investigate charges that Iraq was seeking to purchase 500 tons of uranium precursor ("yellowcake"), gave TV interviews to MSNBC's Chris Matthews and CNN's Wolf Blitzer on July 31 and Aug. 3. He appeared on Aug. 4 at the National Press Club in Washington, to deliver his most detailed account yet of his mission, and the role of Vice President Cheney in perpetuating the fraud of Saddam Hussein's nuclear WMD program, to armtwist the Congress and the United Nations into backing a needless and now disastrous war.

In his opening remarks and in response to a question from this author, Wilson made clear why he was certain that Cheney had received an official report-back on his mission to Niger, in which he concluded that the reports of Iraq seeking uranium were very dubious. First, it was Cheney who tasked the intelligence community to probe the yellowcake story, through the official CIA briefer assigned to his office. This was not an informal request, but part of the standing procedure, through which the Vice President initiates intelligence probes. Wilson met with representatives of a number of intelligence agencies before his trip, and was informed that his mission was the result of the Vice President's initiative. He was debriefed upon his return, and a cable was generated off that debriefing on March 9, 2002.

Wilson made clear that he considered it out of the question that Cheney was not briefed on the results of the mission he had tasked.

Wilson also gave an account of the retribution against him—including a Robert Novak syndicated column based on reports from "two senior Administration officials," naming his wife as a CIA operative engaged in work on WMD—following his public account of his Niger mission. The leaking of the identification of a CIA officer, he pointed out, is a serious Federal crime. Although the laws prohibiting such leaks were not the basis for the prosecution of convicted Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, Wilson drew the parallel between the "senior officials" who leaked to Novak and Ames' spying for Moscow.

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