Author: Dean Pajevic

If you get MSNBC, turn it on now. At the top of his show, Chris Matthews said that he just learned that — against the advice of their staffers and counsel — both Vice President Dick Cheney and his top aide Scooter Libby withheld critical documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, as the committee was investigating pre-war intelligence.

I haven’t stopped to see if there are corroborating print stories, but would appreciate your help in finding out. At the moment, they’re airing a report about the Miers withdrawal. Matthews’ blockbuster lead surely comes after this.

Update [2005-10-27 17:17:58 by susanhu]: Thank you for the link, Maynard! From the National Journal:

Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers To Senate Intelligence Panel

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal

© National Journal Group Inc.

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources. …

This was an excellent interview by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday, with the honest, frank, informative responses that we’ve come to know that Larry Johnson will always provide.

Johnson revealed far more than I knew about the danger that Valerie Plame Wilson has faced.

And Johnson answered a question about the photograph of Valerie in Vanity Fair — the phot had given me concern, and I’m glad Larry responded as he did. Crooks & Liars has the video.

BLITZER: For more on the damage that may have been done by the leak,
I’m joined now by former CIA officer Larry Johnson. He was a classmate of the outed operative Valerie Plame at the CIA’s training school way back.

How many years ago was that, Larry?

LARRY JOHNSON, COUNTERTERRORISM EXPERT: Nineteen-eighty-five, September.

BLITZER: So, you were basically with Valerie Plame…

JOHNSON: Right.

BLITZER: … in that training. How long does that go, a year or so?

JOHNSON: For me, it went a year. For Valerie, she was on what they called the extended program, because she was young. She had just come out of college. She was 22.

BLITZER: So, they basically teach you how to be a spy. JOHNSON: They — yes. And they expose you to a whole variety of training, paramilitary activities, field tradecraft, the — the whole nine yards.

BLITZER: Did you get to know her quite well or not at all — you know, not at all during that year that you overlapped?

JOHNSON: I knew her well enough to know that she was a good professional. But she was a single 22-year-old. I was a married 30- year-old guy. So, we kept our distance. It was a professional relationship only.

But the thing that distinguished her at that time was, she was very mature, very professional, not at all a goof-off. And — and she took her job seriously.

BLITZER: Now, in order for any charges, an indictment, to really have weight, I think what everyone wants to know is, was there serious damage done to U.S. national security? And I have been trying to find out if the CIA actually did a postmortem, a damage assessment. You have been looking into that as well.

JOHNSON: Now, CIA did a postmortem. There’s no way that they could not have. They have not delivered any written report to Congress, to the House or Senate Intelligence Committees.

But what they done with this report, they had to do it internally, because…

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Is there a piece of paper there that’s written?

JOHNSON: Yes. There will be a written — there’s a written document within the CIA. There has to be, because every time that someone like this is outed, it’s not just the person. In this case, it’s the front company. It’s other NOCs who may have been exposed.

Continued below:

For all you blowhards! … Just joking. But, did you know that — just as there is the “tomb of the inflatable pig” in Paraguay, there are inflatable bras, and numerous other inflatable unmentionables — there’s also innovation in how you can inflate your tires? Treehugger suggests that you’ll pollute less — and save gas mileage — if you inflate your tires with nitrogen. Who knew. And it turns out that — it figures that a “blue” company would be hip to this — COSTCO puts nitrogen in the tires of its customers!

Want relief for your Pre-Indictment Stress Syndrome? How about Mr. Anonymous? How about the head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit in the late ’90s? How about the longtime CIA analyst who wrote “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, first as “anonymous” and then, coming out, as Michael Sheuer.

Just before BoomanTribune.com front-pager Larry Johnson appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room yesterday with Wolf Blitzer — and that transcript will be posted shortly — Blitzer first called on CNN’s national security correspondent, David Ensor.

Ensor assessed the impact of the outing of Valerie Plame to the war on terror and to the CIA. I was heartened by Ensor’s bare-knuckle condemnation of the outing of Valerie Plame, buttressed by his interview with Scheuer:

BLITZER: The Bush administration is feeling the fallout as top officials wait for possible indictments in the CIA leak investigation. But what about the fallout over at the CIA itself? Was the agency hurt by the outing of one of its operatives?

Let’s turn to our national security correspondent, David Ensor. He’s been looking into this story — David.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, just for starters, Wolf, the nation has lost the undercover services of a 20- year professional CIA officer.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice over): Forty-two-year-old Valerie Plame Wilson, mother of 5-year-old twins, is now the most famous female spy in America. Exposing her as a CIA undercover officer did damage to U.S. intelligence, U.S. officials say. They refuse to be more specific.

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER CIA ANALYST: To have someone exposed deliberately and, on top of that for political reason, I think, yes, it probably sent a chill throughout the clandestine service.

ENSOR: What made it worse is that she was not just an undercover officer. She spent part of her career as what’s known as a NOC, a spy with non-official cover. That is, without the protection of diplomatic status, working, officials say, to recruit foreigners who knew about murky international weapons deals involving weapons of mass destruction.

Continued below … all emphases mine)

Be careful what we wish for. This is terrible news.

Throughout the Miers brouhaha, there have been phenomena that have been very helpful to the Democratic party and to all of us:

1) the onus has been on the White House to vainly try to prove her credentials;

2) the bad guys were the conservatives who were bashing her every which way — and they were bad — as Arlen Specter just said, what happened to Harriet Miers was extremely disrespectful and shameful;

3) the nomination hearing would perhaps take up most of November and quite probably create all kinds of embarrassing sound bites for the White House and Senate Republicans, who would be in the daily, public spotlight of having to try to appear supportive;

4) I have a hunch she isn’t hardcore politically, and that would have been to the good. If she’d made it to the hearings, she’d have likely been confirmed. We would have had a fairly ignorant person on the Court, but she’d have law clerks up the ying yang to help her, and she’d get it eventually, and she’d tend to be more liberal over time; and

5) Sandra Day O’Connor would have remained on the Supreme Court as this all played out. This would have become particularly important had Miers stayed on as nominee into the Senate hearings, and taken up most of November — in one possible scenario, perhaps failing, and then forcing the White House into stalling and hemming and hawing until it eventually asked Miers to step aside.

Now we can expect, most likely, a very conservative choice.

And who will be the bad guys this time? Not the conservatives, whose nasty comments about Miers — Bork: “She can’t write except in cliches,”and on and on — Buchanan: “The president ran down the hall and grabbed the first woman he saw” — had dominated the news.

The bad guys this time will be us liberals who want “activist” judges.

Personally, I was enjoying the show, and relieved it wasn’t we who had to create the opposition this time.

And, please note that I am viewing this as the political game it is. We have zero power. We don’t have the White House, Congress, or the courts. It was such a relief, for once, to see the ‘wingers eating their own.

Now we’ll have to don our dented armor, mashed helmets and bent swords, bandage our wounds, and limp out to yet another in a seemingly endless string of very bloody battles.