From Volume 4, Issue Number 48 of EIR Online, Published Nov. 29, 2005

This Week You Need To Know

Cheney's Lies Will Bring Him Down
by Jeffrey Steinberg

This article is reprinted from The New Federalist of Nov. 28.

Nov. 25 (EIRNS)—Vice President Dick Cheney has spent the past week delivering a series of rants against Administration critics who dare accuse him of lying the United States into a disastrous war with Iraq. Speaking on Nov. 21 at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney snarled that anyone making such accusations is "reprehensible" and practically guilty of high treason. His scheduled 90-minute appearance at the primo neocon thinktank in Washington, where his wife Lynne is a resident fellow, lasted a total of 19 minutes. Cheney came, he ranted, and he departed, without taking a single question.

The Vice President is a man with something to hide. The simple truth is: Cheney did lie, repeatedly, to bludgeon the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to several eyewitness accounts, Cheney personally lied to members of the U.S. Senate, claiming that the White House had rock-solid proof that Saddam Hussein was close to building a nuclear bomb, and that war was the only option. No such evidence existed.

Now, despite Cheney's campaign of obstruction, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is scheduled to produce a Phase II report on the role of policymakers, starting with the Vice President, in the so-called "intelligence failures" leading up to the Iraq invasion. No doubt, there were some significant intelligence failures—mostly failures of nerve by senior intelligence community bureaucrats, to resist White House pressure to spin the intelligence to justify invasion. But the overriding factor in the rush to war was a campaign of lies by Cheney and what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (USA-ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, dubbed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal."

While the SSCI probe is expected to take months, and a parallel investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General into the role of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in intelligence fakery is not expected to be completed until March, there are already some "smoking guns" proving the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal wittingly lied America into the Iraq war. And a number of those lies had already been refuted by the U.S. intelligence community.

- Saddam and al-Qaeda -

Senate Democrats have demanded the White House provide the SSCI the text of a Sept. 21, 2001 President's Daily Briefing, and a more in-depth CIA analysis, dealing with the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The White House has refused.

Why? One of Dick Cheney's favorite arguments for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. And according to news accounts, the Sept. 21, 2001 PDB made clear that there was no evidence of any Saddam/al-Qaeda ties. In fact, the intelligence estimate presented to President Bush, Cheney, and other top national security officials on Sept. 21, was that Saddam was an archenemy of al-Qaeda, and had spied on it.

Despite this, and an in-depth CIA study on why the Saddam/al-Qaeda ties were bogus, Cheney and company kept on lying that Saddam was behind 9/11.

The Sept. 21, 2001 PDB came in response to demands from the White House for all available evidence of a Saddam link to the authors of the 9/11 attack. Days before the PDB, President Bush had convened a war cabinet meeting at Camp David, where the planned attack on Afghanistan was finalized. At that meeting, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, speaking for the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal, had called for an invasion of Iraq, claiming Saddam was at the center of global terror and should be first target.

To counter the assessments of the official U.S. intelligence establishment, the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal created a secret "Iraq intelligence unit" in the office of Undersecretary Feith, Wolfowitz's policy deputy. This Counter-Terrorism Evaluations Group (CTEG) initially consisted of two well-known neocons with no intelligence backgrounds: David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. They produced scores of reports, based on a combination of "cherry-picked" intelligence from the community's data base, and information gathered from outside sources, particularly from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi. Their reports claimed the CIA, DIA, and other agencies had ignored "proof" of Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks, and similar "proof" of Saddam's nuclear weapons and other WMD programs. Wurmser would later serve as executive assistant to John Bolton, the State Department's top arms control official and a leading neocon, and then move on to Cheney's office as the key Mideast aide, a post he still holds.

The Chalabi-generated disinformation was "stovepiped" to Feith's office and to senior staff in the Office of the Vice President. Even when the Chalabi fabrications were passed to the CIA and DIA for vetting, they often appeared in Cheney speeches before the agencies did their work.

A most revealing handwritten note by Dick Cheney has recently surfaced on a CTEG document. It reads: "This is very good indeed.... Encouraging.... Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

- The Libby Draft -

Another White House document demanded by the Senate intelligence panel but refused by Cheney, was the draft UN testimony for Secretary of State Colin Powell, written by Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and chief national security aide until his indictment on Oct. 28, 2005 in the Valerie Plame Wilson case.

According to numerous news accounts, the Libby draft was tossed in the garbage by Powell, after he reviewed it with intelligence community analysts and senior officials, on the eve of his appearance at the UN Security Council Feb. 5, 2003. The Libby draft contained allegations against Iraq that were not backed up by intelligence community data. Where did Libby get the bogus information from? The answer to that question, sources report, has Dick Cheney sweating bullets. It may be the "smoking gun" that proves that Cheney was running his own rogue disinformation operation, to fake the case for war.

There's much more.

- Curveball -

In his Security Council testimony, Powell cited what he claimed as hard evidence that Saddam had developed mobile WMD labs, which were producing biological and chemical weapons that posed a grave threat to the region. Powell has since called that testimony the low point of his long career.

The source on the mobile labs was an Iraqi informant codenamed "Curveball," who was controlled by the German intelligence service BND.

On Nov. 20, 2005, the Los Angles Times published an exposé based on interviews with five BND officials, revealing that the German government had warned repeatedly that Curveball was a fabricator and a drunk, his information highly suspect. The CIA later issued its own warnings that Curveball was yet another frontman for Chalabi's INC. As of 1996, the CIA had written off the INC as a collection of corrupt losers and fabricators.

- Rendon Group's Info Warfare -

After the CIA's mid-1990s dumping of Chalabi, the convicted bank swindler kept up his ties to such neocon havens as the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. When Bush-Cheney came into office in 2001, the Pentagon picked up the INC franchise, and gave a lucrative contract to a Beltway PR firm the Rendon Group, to promote the overthrow of Saddam. The Rendon Group had literally created the INC back in 1992, on a secret CIA contract to begin covert operation to overthrow Saddam.

Under Bush-Cheney, the Rendon Group and INC ran a Pentagon-funded program, the Information Collection Program, via which Iraqi defectors were debriefed on Saddam regime crimes.

In December 2001, the INC promoted a defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to have worked at dozens of secret WMD sites in Iraq. A CIA polygraph exam exposed him as a liar. Yet, within weeks of submission of the CIA assessment, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Paul Moran were publishing "exclusive" stories based on interviews with al-Haideri. Cheney gave a series of speeches based on the Miller article.

On Sept. 8, 2002, as Cheney was gearing up the war drive, Miller wrote another "exclusive" INC-sourced story, claiming Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes that could only be used for centrifuges, a key component of a nuclear weapons program.

The State Department intelligence unit and Department of Energy strenuously objected to the story. But based on Miller's article, and already-discredited reports that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa, Cheney et al. forced the war down the throat of Congress with images of "nuclear mushroom clouds."

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