The day Cheney was rocked to the core

By Jim Lobe

February 7, 2004’ Asia Times online

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB07Aa03.html

WASHINGTON - If United States Vice President Dick Cheney was
hoping that the cold, crisp air of Davos and his private audience
with Pope John Paul II late last month would revive his spirits,
as well as his standing in the polls, he must be deeply
disappointed.

Since returning home, he has faced a seemingly unrelenting
succession of disclosures and attacks that appear to get worse
with each passing day. What the albatross was to the ancient
mariner, Cheney is fast becoming to George W Bush’s re-election
chances.

Just consider what happened to Cheney Thursday: the early morning
edition of the Wall Street Journal ran an article - first reported
by Newsweek - on how Justice Department investigators had asked
Halliburton Company for documents relating to US$180 million in
allegedly illegal payments by a consortium of companies, including
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, in connection with
the construction of a big natural-gas plant in Nigeria in the late
1990s, while Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive officer.

When the Los Angeles Times hit the news stands a couple of hours
later, Cheney was right there on the front page with the headline:
"Scalia was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows." Antonin
Scalia is a Supreme Court Justice who was Cheney’s guest on a
recent and rather costly (to the taxpayer) bird-hunting trip to
Louisiana, and who also will soon hear a major case on government
secrecy in which the vice president is the defendant.

Legal ethics experts quoted in the story, of course, zeroed in on
the question of whether Scalia might best recuse himself from
hearing the case, but there were also suggestions that perhaps
Cheney could have exercised slightly better judgement. "It is not
just a trip with a litigant. It’s a trip at the expense of the
litigant," noted one law professor.

Finished with the morning papers, Cheney may have tuned in to
watch Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet
deliver a passionate defense at Georgetown University of the
official intelligence community’s performance in the runup to the
Iraq war, only to find himself a target, if only inferentially.

While Tenet didn’t say anything explicitly about Cheney, he
certainly didn’t do much to dispel the increasingly strong
impression in Washington - among Democrats, it’s become a
conviction - that, of all of Bush’s senior advisers, Cheney and
his staff worked hardest to hype what the intelligence community
was saying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged
weapons of mass destruction programs.

While the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam wanted
nuclear weapons, Tenet declared, it also made clear as of late
2002 that Saddam had none, and that he probably would not have
been able to make one until some time between 2007 and 2009, at
the earliest.

That assertion, of course, raises a major question. If the
intelligence community agreed that Saddam had no nuclear weapons,
where did Cheney get the information that would substantiate his
statement on the very day that the US launched its invasion last
March: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons."

The answer, according to Democratic members of the Congressional
intelligence committees, who have become increasingly outspoken in
recent days, is that Cheney and his staff had an independent
source of "intelligence" outside the formal intelligence
community. Lodged in the Pentagon’s policy shop under Under
Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the now- notorious Office of
Special Plans "cherry-picked" raw intelligence, interviewed
"defectors", and produced its own talking points and analysis that
were "stovepiped" straight to Cheney’s office, notably John
Hannah, his top Mideast staffer, and I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his
powerful chief of staff.

When asked about this theory by a Georgetown student on Thursday,
Tenet answered artfully, asserting: "I can tell you with certainty
that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from
one person and one community - me ... The rest of it, I don’t
know."

In the legal profession, Tenet’s reply is called a negative
pregnant, an apparent denial that suggests that further
questioning may be fruitful. Indeed, Republican Jane Harmon, the
ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, noted in a CNN
interview on Thursday evening that, in speaking of "one
community", Tenet was effectively confirming that the Pentagon-
Cheney channel, that provided a much more alarmist view of
Saddam’s capabilities, may well have been at work

But if Cheney felt displeased by Tenet’s performance, things only
got worse - much worse - later in the afternoon when United Press
International (UPI) reported what has been rumored ever since
Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the
investigation into the "outing" as a CIA officer by "two senior
administration officials" of Valerie Plame, shortly after her
husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an
article in the New York Times charging that the administration
knew that its reports of Saddam’s alleged attempts to buy uranium
yellowcake in Africa were bogus.

Quoting "federal law-enforcement officials," UPI’s intelligence
correspondent Richard Sale reported on Thursday that the two main
suspects were none other than Libby and Hannah. One official
reportedly told Sale that Hannah was being advised "that he faces
a real possibility of doing jail time" in order to pressure him to
implicate higher-ups - presumably Libby, if not, perhaps, Cheney
himself.

A 1982 law makes deliberately revealing the identity of covert
intelligence officers a felony punishable by as many as 10 years
in prison. If either Hannah or Libby were officially named as
suspects or actually indicted, the impact on Cheney’s credibility
and electability would be devastating.

According to recent polls, Cheney’s approval ratings, hovering
around 20 percent, are already far below Bush’s, which have
themselves sunk below 50 percent for the first time in his
presidency. Even Halliburton, whose public image has become so
tarnished that it has launched a controversial television ad
campaign to boost its image, last week listed Cheney’s association
to the company as a "risk factor" for its shareholders.

Republicans in Congress, particularly on the intelligence and
foreign relations committees, find themselves having to devote
more time and political capital to defending the vice president,
and even some influential Republican donors have privately
suggested that Cheney bow out. Speculation about possible
replacements - most recently, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
(the Republican convention is in New York City, August 30 to
September 2.) - is growing steadily. Of course, there’s always
another day.