2. I am struck by recurrent patterns in these scandals:
a. the Iran-Contra “I can’t recall” defense. Cheney was a major enabler of this scandal’s cover-up in Congress. (If I used “I can’t recall,” I doubt I’d get away with such lies or the crime.)
b. Nixon’s ‘If the President does it, then it must be legal’ is a big part of the Cheney modus operandi. Cheney even was part of a conference about how to avoid Watergate’s mistakes — mistakes that led to the scandal being discovered and somewhat prosecuted. The cover-up was prosecuted. We still have little or no idea what was so imporant in that DNC office for the ‘burglars’ to break in twice to bug the phones. I’m too young to know, but Nixon was probably leading in the polls at that point, and he won by a landslide.
i. The Executive Order excuse is part and parcel of this. Cheney’s just emiting stuff to confuse us. It is a lie. In covert ops you deny and then throw counter-accusations. This is similar. I can’t think of a single time Bush or Cheney told the truth.

3. I have long believed that the outing of Valerie Plame was only partially retribution for Joe Wilson deflating the Nuke/Bio WMD claim, specifically the Nuke part. With Wilson’s revelation Cheney only had the Bio WMD part left to use for lies. Remember the search for the mobile weapons labs that were hidden anywhere in Iraq?
Wilson was an American Hero. In the early 1990s Gulf War, he negotiated face to face with Saddam Hussein and freed some Americans. He and his wife represented knowledge and power, a unique threat to Cheney’s lies and power. Plame had an entire Cover and network in the Middle East, Africa, and Iran. If Cheney were to lie about Bio WMD, she could be in a position to debunk that as well. Outing Plame ruined not just Plame, but the entire network and cover. People who worked with the CIA might have been killed over this.

4. Interestingly, in early July 2003, around when this Niger Yellowcake fraud was being revealed, Judith Miller co-wrote a NYTimes piece that Steven Hatfill was creating a mobile bio-weapons lab that was about to be sent to Iraq for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Delta Force. “We are not growing anthrax or botulinum toxin,” Colonel Darley said [of the mobile bio-wmd training lab]. “None of this equipment is functional. It looks like — it is — the real stuff, but it’s nonfunctional.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/02/us/after-war-biological-warfare-subject-anthrax-inquiry-tied-anti-germ-training.html?scp=1&sq=Subject of Anthrax Inquiry Tied to Anti-Germ Training&st=cse&pagewanted=all

There is a fine line between defense/training and offense/false-flag operations.

I have long wondered why false-flag Bio WMD weren’t planted in Iraq, justifying the invasion. Valerie Plame was in a unique position to debunk this, and Hatfill was a hot topic back then as a person of interest in the Anthrax investigation. He’s since been cleared, but he was still consulting/volunteering for the DIA & Delta Force on this very realistic mobile bio-weapons lab. This could be the scandal behind the scandal. What we are discussing here with Cheney and Libby is a cover-up of a cover-up, and it might be a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up.

Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the nuke sham, and his wife was working in the area justifying the War on Terror’s false-association with Iraq and maybe Iran down the road.

71 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Not the kind of “snowbound evenings” poets have in mind…, November 6, 2005
By Mrs. Tarquin Biscuitbarrel (Undisclosed Location) –
Perhaps I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby thought that by setting his novel in a snowbound inn in northern Honshu, a century ago, his readers would swear that the lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, paedophilia, and corpse-robbery advance the plot. Well, there is no plot. There’s a blizzard blanketing a Japanese country inn, a young man called only “the apprentice” who’s helping run the joint in the absence of the proprietor, and an overflow of stranded travelers bunking down in tight quarters. The natural hot spring located within the inn means that the nubile and pre-nubile girls can shuck their matted furs so that The Apprentice has something more interesting to look at than fat middle-aged ladies and itinerant “lacquer tappers” with brownish teeth. Libby’s writing would be pleasingly spare if it said anything, but the descriptions of the inn, the snow, the dead bodies, and so forth provide meager padding between the sex scenes.

The hair-raisingly prurient parts of this book have been excerpted extensively elsewhere, so I’ll not repeat them. However, Libby appears more than approving of the explicit education that the very young girls in “The Apprentice” receive. Not in typical school subjects, no, but from instructors whose teaching tools include caged bears (yes, bears, trained to couple with children), wooden dildos, and incestuous relatives who painstakingly instruct little girls to “satisfy many men in a night.”

The fictional output of such Republican luminaries as Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich, and I. Lewis Libby underscore the truth of the proverb, “Those who really have it ["it" meaning sexual prowess] don’t talk about it.” Some men, such as Libby and Neil Bush, have labored under the delusion that any sexual peccadilloes taking place in Asia will stay in Asia. “The Apprentice” neatly lays that myth to rest. Unless you really go for this kind of stuff, I wouldn’t recommend wasting hundreds of dollars on one of the few copies available.

I paid $4 plus surface-mail shipping, but the price has skyrocketed since Libby was indicted on five counts by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and resigned from Vice President Cheney’s office. Gee, lucky me

Bob in AZ

wonder which award Addington is a contender for at the CSP

The Freedom Flame award
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/1317.xml

Or the Sacred Honor Award
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/1332.xml

Keeper of the Flame award recipients. Cheeeeeney’s name can be added to the list
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/1358.xml

Cheney’s interview (page 21)
(U)The Vice President described himself as a long time admirer of the CIA and its people and programs, but he characterized their performance in the Wilson matter as “amateur hour.” His mindset about the entire issue led him to wonder to himself about what was going on out at Langely”

With “admirers” like Cheney the CIA must be asking who needs enemies.

Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?
Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Act V Scene 1