Cheney aide guilty of perjury & obstruction of justice

[Serge]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been found guilty on four of five counts in his perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Libby was convicted of:

- obstruction of justice when he intentionally deceived a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame;

-`making a false statement by intentionally lying to FBI agents about a conversation with NBC newsman Tim Russert;

- perjury when he lied in court about his conversation with Russert;

- a second count of perjury when he lied in court about conversations with other reporters.

Jurors cleared him of a second count of making a false statement relating to a conversation he had with Matt Cooper of Time magazine.

Libby, 56, faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and a fine of $1 million.

CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said, "He is virtually certain to go to prison if this conviction is upheld."

After the verdict was read, Libby was fingerprinted and released on his own recognizance.

Ted Wells, Libby's defense attorney, said he will file a motion for a new trial, or appeal the conviction if that motion is denied.

"We intend to keep fighting to establish his innocence," Wells said outside the courthouse.

Libby, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was not accused of exposing Plame. He resigned in 2005 after the grand jury indicted him.

Prosecutors contended Libby disclosed Plame's covert profession to reporters as part of a plan to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who alleged that the Bush administration twisted some intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Wilson, who conducted a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, wrote in a July 2003 New York Times editorial that he found no evidence Iraq sought to buy uranium from the African nation, as the administration claimed.

The jury was down to 11 members -- seven women and four men. A week ago, one of the jurors revealed that she had obtained outside information that prompted the judge to disqualify her.

The defense said it would accept 11 jurors to avoid having to start deliberations over with an alternate. The prosecution objected, but U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton overruled, and the panel has continued with one chair empty.

Testimony and evidence in the trial began January 23.

Cheney and Bush next..

[scubadiver]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6424319.stm

[Mark Gobell]

Concise, factual reporting from the Jewish Telegraph

[kathaksung]

My other opinion on this case: extortion.

469. Extortion on administration and CIA (2/25/2007)

So far, we saw from October 2006 to January 2007, there was a plot aimed to start Iran war in each month. When the old one went soured, there immediately came a new one.

To spread panic of nuclear terror, (because Iran is developing its nuclear project) there was N.Korea nuclear test, the murder of former Russian agent Litvinenko (died of Radioactive poison), China arresting N.Koreans for selling Uranium, Republic of Georgia arresting Russian for selling Uranium. To connect Iran to the civil war in Lebanon and Iraq, (Iran support Hazbollah and Iraqi Shiite) there was the assassination of the Lebanese Industry Minister, the execution of Saddam Hussain, the sudden seize of Beirut by Hezbollah. To hit Iran's economy, US banned the finance transaction between US banks and Iran's. Planned Paulson's arrest and the collapse of WANTA fund, the cutting oil supply to Europe, the bombing in Bangkok and the manipulation of stock market in Thailand and Hongkong.

The direct excuse to war on Iran is a dirty bomb attack in US. In Pat Robertson's words, it would be "a mass killing". The Feds planned "seven NFL football stadiums" bombing. Black Friday bombing, (after Thanks Giving day), ten big cities bombing, (Boston ad scary), of course, each time, they planned one for me.

It costs them a lot of resources. Will they stop and rest for a while? It seems their master won't allow them to take a break. The intimidation, or whipping, comes right away.

Re: "Mr. Cheney, please give us that 'stiff dose of truth'
Nicholas D. Kristof (NewYork Times columnist)

Because I.Lewis Libby is renowned for his caution, Mr. Vice President, it seems highly unlikely that he would have leaked classified information twice to reporters right after talking to you, unless you had sanctioned the leak. "
(2/8/2007 San Jose Mercury News)

"Closing arguments Tuesday in trial of former Cheney aide
By Michael J. Sniffen AP

The defense put in a hand-written note in which Cheney told the White House secretary to exonerate Libby in the leak and not sacrifice him to protect Bush's top political adviser - Karl Rove. "
(2/15/2007 San Jose Mercury News)

This is whipping on Bush administration. "If you don't act, the fire will extend to Cheney."

And more on CIA.
Re: "13 CIA operatives charged
By Craig Whitlock Washington Post

Berlin - German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 agency operatives in the kidnapping of a German citizen in the Balkans in December 2003."
(2/1/2007 S.J. Mercury News)

"Ex- CIA official pleads not guilty
By Allison Hoffman A.P.

San Diego - Foggo, (ex CIA's executive director) now retired, pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he used that information to direct classified supply deals to his best friend, San Diego defense contractor Brent Wilkes."
(2/15/2007 San Jose Mercury News)

"Italy indicts CIA agents
26 Americans accused of kidnapping Egyptian cleric

By Colleen Barry A.P. "
(2/17/2007 San Jose Mercury News)

These are all old cases happened 20 months ago or in 2003. Suddenly they emerged in this month, along with Libby's case. I interpret this as an extortion on CIA. "Go find excuse for Iran war, or create some events for it. Otherwise some of you will be in jail by us law enforcers."

Cheney left US for Japan and Australia on 2/19. Since then Libby's case and CIA case are silent in media. I think a new plot is created. Cheney goes to Asia seeking support for Iran war from Japan and Australia. As for CIA, there will be big events in Mid-east, or Europe, or both to justify an attack on Iran. We knew Madrid bombing, London bombing already.

I am afraid that Prince Harry will be a sacrifice in this plot. The news of his military presence in Iraq is unusually propagated. His death could have been an important justification for Iran war.

[Mark Gobell]

The Independent

How Blair has stood by Niger claim

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

Published: 07 March 2007

The now notorious Niger claim first surfaced in Britain, where the Blair government circulated the September 2002 dossier warning of the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The fallout from the flawed intelligence has claimed a slew of victims in Washington, including the scalp of the Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet.

Yesterday, almost four years after the Iraq invasion, the nuclear dossier led to the toppling of a central White House figure, when Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury.

However, despite the CIA's reservations over the central claim that Saddam was allegedly attempting to buy yellowcake from Africa for his nuclear weapons programme, and the White House having formally backed away from the report, the British Government still clings to its original position.

In the September 2002 document which laid out the case for war, the Government declared that as a result of intelligence, it judged that Iraq had "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it."

The report, which was picked up by President George Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union speech three months before the invasion, was used as a key piece of evidence to justify the war. But the alleged incriminating documents forwarded to the UN nuclear agency were found to be a crude fake.

In Britain, the claim was investigated as part of Lord Butler of Brockwell's 2004 review of the use of intelligence in the approach to the war. He accepted that the Government had its own, separate, intelligence for making the claim about Niger which he said was "not undermined" by the fact of the forgery.

Lord Butler also revealed the accusations against Iraq concerned not only Niger, but the war-ravaged, mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo.

He concluded: "On the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded."

The Government has refused all requests from opposition MPs since that time to reveal the intelligence on which the assessment was based. And with Tony Blair poised to leave office, it is unlikely to be made public until his successor decides whether to hold an independent inquiry into the mistakes made in Iraq.

[TonyGosling]

After the Libby trial, confidential sources are at greater risk as well
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2030944,00.html
Edward Helmore
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer

The trial of of 'Scooter' Libby last week marked the first criminal conviction connected to the Bush administration's prosecution of the Iraq war. But it also unmasked an often unseemly relationship between the Washington press corps and the White House.

Libby's case turned on whether he lied to cover up his involvement in a campaign to discredit anti-war critic Joseph Wilson, by leaking the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. The source of the leak has never been identified, but, in pursuing Libby down what was a tributary to the central issue, prosecutors may have transformed government/press relations by challenging the informal legal protections reporters and their sources share.

Leaking to the press to undermine an enemy is hardly new, nor is it unusual for papers to guarantee leakers' anonymity, but the trial revealed how unhealthy that relationship can become. By pushing reporters to reveal sources, even to the extent of jailing then New York Times journalist Judith Miller for nearly three months for withholding evidence in the case, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald shook the entire system.

The case may not have broken the bond entirely (reporters only revealed sources when the sources agreed) but freedom-of-speech advocates fear prosecutors in the US will see the case as a green light to use the same tactics in cases where confidential sources are at issue.

For the press, the trial also proved to be an unhappy opportunity to revisit its relationship with the Bush administration at a time when it was supplicant and willing to acquiesce to White House demands for pre-scripted questions as price of access.

'There is an all-too-unsettling nexus between the political and media elite,' said Jim Warren, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, last week. 'This [trial] was a nice little window into the mutual obsession with one another.'

Libby claimed he had learnt of Plame's CIA identity from NBC Washington reporter Tim Russert. But Fitzgerald showed that Libby had been told about Plame nine times before he spoke to Russert.

And Libby felt sufficiently comfortable with the NYT's Miller, one of the reporters who promoted pre-war claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when America most needed press scepticism, to direct her to identify him as a 'former [Capitol] Hill staffer' if she wrote a story outing Plame. When no story emerged from Miller, he expressed disappointment.

Overall, reporters did not fare well under the prosecutorial spotlight. Miller said she had lost a notebook and couldn't remember who had told her about Plame. Time correspondent Matt Cooper struggled to read his own notes. Bob Woodward, the Watergate reporter, apologised to his paper, the Washington Post, for failing to say for two years that former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had told him about Plame.

Bob Novak, the man who originally outed Plame in his column, refused to reveal for three years whether he had even testified in the case. It later emerged he had, in fact, talked to Fitzgerald and had named Armitage and Bush adviser Karl Rove as his sources on Plame.

A pardon may yet be coming Libby's way, and the Plame case was a poor substitute for any substantive trial on the origins of the Iraq war itself. The most significant result of Fitzgerald's efforts has been the damage done to the historical protection of press sources. As Bob Zelnick, a professor of journalism at Boston University, told the Post: 'It's going to take a long time for reporters and sources to figure out how to deal with each other in a way that doesn't risk contempt citations and imprisonment.'

[TonyGosling]

How an article in the 'IoS' led to the conviction of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby
By Raymond Whitaker in London and Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 11 March 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2347534.ece

A senior White House aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, faces a jail term this weekend - at the end of a chain of events that began with a report in The Independent on Sunday nearly four years ago.

Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, was found guilty by a Washington jury last week on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, and will be sentenced in June. He was declared to have lied to a grand jury investigating the leaking to the media of the identity of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

The apparent motive was to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, a retired US diplomat who had been sent to Niger in Africa in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had sought uranium to restart its nuclear weapons programme. Mr Wilson found there was no evidence for the allegation, which was based on forged documents, and said so in a report to the Bush administration.

In his autobiography, The Politics of Truth, Mr Wilson says that when the "Niger uranium" claim surfaced in Britain's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, he told the CIA to alert its British counterparts to the error. But then the same allegation was made by President Bush, who said in his January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The charge attracted little attention at the time, but six months later, with no WMD found, questions arose.

The IoS was told by a source that we would find someone in Washington who knew the truth about the Niger affair. That led us to Mr Wilson, who said his findings had been ignored by the US and Britain. He asked us to identify him in our report of 29 June 2003 only as a "retired ambassador to Africa who went to Niger". But in his book he says the IoS approach convinced him he had to go public; the following week he told the story in The New York Times, under the headline: "What I didn't find in Africa". In the ensuing furore, the then CIA director, George Tenet, had to take responsibility for the Niger claim appearing in the State of the Union address.

The ex-ambassador's article, however, made him a target for the White House. Within days the conservative columnist Bob Novak reported that Mr Wilson's wife was a CIA operative called Valerie Plame, and that she had suggested sending her husband to Niger.

It is illegal to identify undercover CIA agents, and a criminal investigation began. Yet even though this revealed that Karl Rove, Mr Bush's strategist, and Richard Armitage, then No 2 at the State Department, had given Ms Plame's name to journalists, Libby is the only man convicted; no further prosecutions are planned. As in the Watergate scandal, it was the cover-up rather than the crime that proved more damaging.

But while the Bush administration has admitted that the Niger claim was wrong and should never have been made, to this day the British Government insists it had "other evidence", obtained from a foreign intelligence agency, to support it. The Foreign Office hinted that this concerned the visit of an "Iraqi delegation" to Niger in 1999. But in August 2003 this newspaper interviewed Wissam al-Zahawie, the only Iraqi diplomat to have gone to the country that year. He said he had been investigated and cleared by the US and the UN.

In 2004 the Butler committee's report on Britain's WMD intelligence deemed the Niger claim "credible", but its reasoning was attacked as flimsy. Later information has further eroded the allegation, but the Niger connection has never caused as much controversy here as it did in the US.

[The Watcher]

Is Cheney about to be removed from office?

With Lewis 'Scooter' Libby being found guilty on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, it is going to be increasingly difficult for Dick Cheney to deny foreknowledge of the plan to shaft Jo Wilson, by releasing the name of his wife as a CIA operative. In reality of course most discerning investigators have more than a passing suspicion the Cheney & his long standing political buddy, Donald Rumsfeld, were far from surprised when the events of 9/11 went down.

Word on the deep vine, is that Cheney may remove himself from the firing line by faking a fatal coronary attack; after being pronounced dead, he will go join his buddy Ken Lay, under deep protection at a remote location in South America. As the realization of the 9/11 deception gathers pace and the calls grow louder for Bush, Cheney & Blair to face charges of war crimes, Cheney knows that the focus would likely be much greater on him than his intellectually challenged presidential puppet.

This would have the added benefit for the NWO, enabling them to slip their preferred 2008 presidential candidate into the VP role and giving him a PR kick-start over his Democrat opponent. Not that they are overly concerned, 'cos they know there is a great chunk of the US electorate that would no sooner vote for a woman than for a non-Caucasian! The belief of White Aryan Supremacy is never far from the surface once you get outside of New England. The Hilary/Obama candidacy race is a blatant attempt to sustain the PNAC driven White House, without having to resort to a third round of vote fraud!

When will Cheney fake the fatal coronary? Probably around the middle of the year, as this would also help take media attention away from the inevitable interest in the second anniversary of 7/7. They know very well that the rate of 9/11 awareness is accelerating and that closer inspection of the UK Government narrative will highlight the fact that it has more holes than a Swiss cheese.

The Watcher

[Mark Gobell]

The Plame affair began with Robert D Novak's article in the Washington Post on 14.7.2003.

Scooter Libby was eventually found guilty on 6.3.2007.

Exactly 1 day and 190 weeks later.