<my words. The blockquote ended up placing my link in it instead of the comments from that link which follow this quote by me.

Apologies.

Evidence presented by prosecutors during Libby’s trial has detailed Cheney’s role in directing Libby and others to selectively leak or declassify intelligence information to discredit Wilson, other administration critics, and the CIA, while defending the Bush administration’s actions.

One such instance was when Cheney — with the direct approval of President Bush — instructed Libby to leak to the press portions of a still-classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Such a disclosure, Cheney and Libby hoped, would prove that the CIA had provided the White House with erroneous intelligence. Later, Cheney directed Libby to leak portions of a highly classified CIA debriefing of Wilson upon his return from Niger — which Cheney and others mistakenly thought was a CIA cable.

The Times’ Miller testified that during a June 23, 2003, meeting with Libby — the first time that she said Libby had shared information with her about Plame — he “appeared to be agitated and frustrated and angry” about what he described as a “perverted war of leaks” initiated by the CIA against the White House.

The main justification for invading Iraq had been that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. But with inspectors unable to find any evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, the White House blamed the CIA for faulty intelligence. Senior CIA officials, in turn, said that the White House had often misrepresented accurate intelligence information.

It was during that volatile time, on July 6, 2003, that Wilson wrote his New York Times op-ed alleging that the administration had distorted intelligence information about Iraq’s purported attempt to procure uranium. When Cheney and Libby learned that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, and might even have played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission, they perceived his allegations as one more effort by the CIA to shift blame away from the agency.

Four days later, on July 10, 2003, Mary Matalin, a senior aide to Cheney at the time, warned Libby that Wilson was a “snake” and that his “story has legs,” Deputy Special Prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg said in court at Libby’s trial.

The 2003 timeline is the problem, not Pelosi’s recollection. Go ahead. Push hard. Cheney tried to headhunt Congress over Sen.Shelby’s leak of the 9-11 intercepts, even though it appears Shelby was acting on their implied outcome to provide an opportunity in waging battles over airwaves for intimidative purpose.

Matalin then suggested a course of action, according to Zeidenberg: “We need to address the Wilson motivation. We need to be able to get the cable out. Declassified. The president should wave his wand.”

Two days later, on July 12, 2003, Cheney and Libby flew together to the Norfolk naval base in Virginia, where they attended ceremonies to christen the USS Ronald Reagan.

On the way home on Air Force Two, the two men sat alone in a front compartment as Cheney counseled Libby on what to say to the press. One bit of advice: Provide reporters with details of the CIA debriefing of Wilson’s Niger mission.

The vice president told Libby that the president had waved his wand.

Upon landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Libby and Cathie Martin, a press aide to Cheney, searched for a private room so that Libby could call Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and other reporters. Later from home, he also spoke to Judith Miller.

It was toward the end of conversations with both reporters that Libby told them that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, Miller and Cooper testified.

Before the trial, Cheney denied that he ever authorized anyone to provide information about Plame to the media — or that he even suggested such a thing. But FBI agent Deborah Bond testified that on the return trip from Norfolk, the vice president might indeed have talked with Libby about revealing Plame’s CIA connection to the press. “Mr. Libby told us he believed they may have talked about it but he wasn’t sure,” Bond told the court.

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0215nj1.htm

What I understand about “jihad” is that most people don’t really have a clue what the word means. It doesn’t refer primarily to warfare any more than “patriotism” refers primarily to warfare, although warfare can be motivated by either. I understand that radical Islamists and their dysfunctional interpretations of jihad represent a very real threat. I also understand that to some extent this has become the far right’s new boogey man, now that the menace of global communism is not such a credible menace.

I was 51 years old on 9/11. My illusion of safety wasn’t destroyed by that event because I didn’t have an illusion of safety to begin with. I was born in the shadow of WW-2. I remember seeing the first hydrogen bomb tests on television. During my childhood nuclear annihilation seemed like an any-day-now possibility. My family sweated out the Cuban missle crisis because my father was an Air Force major, a pilot, and still in the ready reserves. My own childhood ended with a year on the ground in Vietnam. It sometimes surprises me that we’ve lasted this long.

Second I will state IMHO, calling it ‘terrorism’ or us ‘terrorists’, is naive and shows a poor understanding of terrorism.

Thirdly, do you understand jihad?

Fourth, how old were you on 9/11?

In Russia government make media say what they want – even if lie.
In USA “mainstream media” try make government what they want – even if lie..
…..eventually they become same thing?!

I Igor produce Obama Birth Certificate at http://www.igormaro.org

DON’T ASK QUESTIONS YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER TO!!

That would be my bet on what Congress stuck to..they knew what the answers would be ..so they didn’t ask the right questions deliberately.

Same as the 9/11 commission ..they didn’t ask the questions that would have mattered to get the real truth..therefore ..white wash

If there is another commission and any dems are complicit ..does anyone here really believe we will get truth?????????

Truth lies with truthful questions.

We will never see truth with a commission..we never have and we never will!

All we have to do to be OK with this is to get comfortable with the idea that we ourselves have become terrorists on the most personal level imaginable.

We can accomplish this by using the same convenient rationalizations that any terrorist uses: The persons targeted for terror are our evil enemies, and the end justifies the means.

Then how did Jane Harman lodge a protest about waterboarding with the CIA if specifics were not being given? Great analysis.

What’s wrong with waterboarding?

I guess then it would depend on the question and the “mission” at hand.

Did Rahm okay Panetta’s smackdown of Pelosi?
Washington Post:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/05/what_did_rahm_know.html

And NYT finally admits it spiked story of Acorn/Obama connection:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-vadum/2009/05/18/nyt-finally-admits-it-spiked-obama-acorn-corruption-story

Little noted thusfar by the newspapers of record in the United States, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the al-Qaeda operative tortured for the United States by the Egyptian secret police, died in a Libyan prison this past weekend of what has been called a “suicide.”

For those who only vaguely remember al-Libi’s name, al-Libi is the al-Qaeda person picked up at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and extraordinarily rendered to Egypt to be tortured at the United States behest. Al-Libi is the one reported to have linked al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in a false confession that was the result of this torture that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda in bomb making, poisons, and deadly gases. President Bush used this “evidence” in a speech on October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati in his push to get Congressional approval of the resolution authorizing the President to go to war in Iraq. Al-Libi later disavowed that “evidence,” but by then we were in Iraq. When the al-Libi torture was revealed, the comment was made that the people at the highest levels of the U.S. government (Condi Rice and Dick Cheney) did not doublecheck this “evidence” but took it at face value. Why? Because, this false confession was consistent with their vision of the world.

As former Vice-President Cheney continues his “torture apology tour” asserting that “torture works” in the way the French General Massu defended the torture he ran in Algeria during the Algerian War (nothing new under the sun for anyone with a memory), it is clear that the al-Libi case is a difficult one for these apologists for torture. Al-Libi’s false confession that was exploited as propaganda to lead us into the Iraq War confirms to us that torture works only in the sense that it breaks the person tortured. As has been repeated so many times, a person tortured will say anything to get the torture to stop. Tying al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in a false confession was al-Libi’s way to stop the pain.

But to have al-Libi say that in giving evidence in a criminal prosecution would be terribly inconvenient for many present and former operatives and members of the United States government. After all, al-Libi’s words found their way into former Secretary of State’s Colin Powell’s infamous presentation to the United Nations in the run up to the Iraq War.

In what had happened in his body and mind, al-Libi truly was the “man who knew too much.” That is why it is totally appropriate that Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the circumstances of his “suicide” in a Libyan prison. It is clear that having al-Libi truly disappeared is too convenient for too many people who have besmirched American honor in a perversion of rule of law that came from panic and improvisation.

Let us fully investigate how good old Muammar Gaddhafi got al-Libi into his prison system from CIA detention and what were the circumstances of al-Libi’s death. It smells of the “car accident” or “fell out the jail window” type of deaths that dissidents have had in other countries in Africa. Except this time, the person is an encumbrance from lawless leaders of America, not some tin-pot dictatorship.

If we insist, they will prosecute these lawless leaders. We need to insist. I am tired of the dithering and I am tired of these thinly veiled efforts to make evidence disappear and people disappear to hide their tracks. Bring light. Bring light and let the chips fall where they may.

Let us be clear. At 53 years of age, I simply never imagined I would have to write these kinds of things to Americans about torture by our government in my life. Torture under guise of “we do it to our soldiers in training” is torture. That torture is not just waterboarding, but the full panoply of actions that we are learning has been done to people in our names. Bring al-Qahtani out of his hole in Gitmo and let us see the before and after footage on him in case you doubt he was tortured. Moreover, an alleged common law defense of necessity as recently suggested by an author here would at best be very narrow. It is not the kind of broad necessity doctrine that would have the effect of making torture legal because someone can argue necessity. It does not work that way. Moreover, our treaty law would trump mere common law and thus such a defense.

They are grasping at straws (but they are powerful). Please stop the nonsense by high-level civilians and generals desperate to avoid prosecution. It is time they take the fall and not the grunts who did their bidding. Keep our honor clean.

Benjamin Davis is a professor at the University of Toledo College of Law