Cheney To The Stand

John Prados

January 30, 2007

John Prados is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington. His current book is Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA.  

Every day, more of the sordid tale of Vice President Dick Cheney’s no-holds-barred effort to get his way on the Iraq war is coming out.

Months ago, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, blasted the Bush administration for its resort to a “cabal” led by Cheney. Now we are getting chapter and verse from the prosecution of another chief of staff, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Cheney’s front man until he was indicted for obstruction of justice. Testimony at Libby’s trial in U.S. District Court shows exactly how the cabal operated, in this case attempting to smear Iraq war critic Ambassador Joseph Wilson by blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, until then an undercover officer for the CIA.

When the conspiracy to discredit Wilson began to fray, Cheney took the lead in trying to shore it up. Whatever it took, Cheney was ready to give. This is becoming crystal clear at the trial, where a parade of Bush administration and CIA officials are testifying. News stories have referred to Cheney, sometimes even attributing a leading role to him, but they hardly do justice to the record revealed by trial testimony.

The story begins with Wilson, who blew the whistle on the administration’s phony Niger uranium claim a couple of months after Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At first Wilson spoke to officials about getting the record corrected. When that didn’t work, he gave material to a columnist for a piece that appeared in The New York Times in early May. Libby assistant Eric Edelman drew attention to the column but no one in the OVP—the Office of the Vice-President—much cared because, according to the testimony of Cheney’s then-public affairs aide Cathie Martin, Times columnists write stuff like that all the time. Wilson upped the ante, giving more material to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus for a story that paper printed on June 12, 2003. From that moment the former diplomat was never out of Cheney’s crosshairs.

Both Martin and former CIA officers show that the OVP had advance knowledge of the Pincus story and began moving to identify Wilson the day before it appeared. Libby demanded the information from CIA’s Iraq point man, Robert Grenier, and actually called him out of a meeting with agency director George Tenet to get it. His first question was whether it would be alright to put this out in public. Grenier got agency PR chief Bill Harlow on the phone, and Libby handed off his end to Martin. At that point she learned Ambassador Wilson’s identity and that Wilson’s wife worked at CIA. When Martin entered Cheney’s office to give this information to the vice-president, Libby already knew it.

In the days after this exchange the “Sixteen Words” Iraq deception in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address became a hot issue, while Wilson’s account of his futile Niger trip stood without contradiction. On June 23, Libby began openly counterattacking, calling in Times reporter Judith Miller to complain of “highly distorted” and selective leaking from the CIA, bringing up Wilson as well. Libby also mentioned Mrs. Wilson’s CIA connection. According to Miller’s personal account of this episode in The New York Times (October 16, 2005), Libby claimed: that Cheney did not know Joe Wilson; that the vice-president had no idea what Wilson had done; and that the CIA did not report it to him. These statements correspond exactly to the talking points that the OVP developed when Wilson went public on July 6, revealed in a trial exhibit.  These were emailed to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for use in countering Wilson.

On his copy of Wilson’s July 6 New York Times op-ed, Cheney scribbled questions to raise. The most leading of these suggested that Valerie Plame had sent Wilson “on a junket.” Libby then had breakfast with Judith Miller on July 8. He treated Miller to a lengthy diatribe on Wilson, offering more information on Valerie Plame, plus details that could only have come from mining the record and pressuring the CIA for information. Libby claimed that Wilson’s reporting cable “barely made it out of the bowels of the CIA.” And, he told Miller, charges of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq contained in the still-classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) were even stronger than what appeared in the sanitized version the administration had released previously.

That summer day was critical to this entire enterprise. OVP counsel David Addington, by his own testimony, advised Libby that the president can use his constitutional powers as commander in chief (that again) to declassify even if statutes exist that govern this very action. Libby then closeted himself with Mr. Cheney and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and decided to declassify portions of the NIE, which brings us to Libby Trial Exhibit no. 523, a fresh set of talking points dictated by Cheney himself during a break between Capitol Hill events on July 8. The talking points included reference to the NIE. Note that the president was out of the country, on a trip to Africa—this act was unilateral by Cheney. The CIA was not informed of the NIE declassification for nine days. Cheney told Libby to call reporters, effectively taking his own press aide out of the loop.

Meanwhile Hadley assistant Robert Joseph also claimed, again deceptively, that CIA had accepted the phony charge for the Bush speech. Security adviser Condi Rice promptly went over the cliff, telling reporters the language had only been in the Bush speech because of the CIA. Again it was Cheney, Libby and Hadley who worked into the night to concoct George Tenet's statement in which the CIA took the blame for the deceptive “sixteen words.” Cheney then dictated more talking points to guide Fleischer in his interactions with the press. He also gave Libby, instead of his press aides, the action with reporters and planned the press conference where White House communications director Dan Bartlett would release the NIE and attempt to explain the phony charges in the State of the Union address, previewing the show for conservative columnists at a luncheon at his own official residence. George Bush, stuck in darkest Africa by Condi Rice’s gaffes, went along meekly. 

There can be no question that Cheney was the puppeteer in this entire production. This is not the same role as previous vice presidents, even activist ones like Al Gore or Walter Mondale—indeed Mondale said recently that had he taken such liberties, President Jimmy Carter would have made him resign. At a minimum it is clear Cheney believes he can substitute his judgment for the president’s. Cheney not only reinforces Bush’s worst traits, he sandbags the president into even more extreme positions. Where this will lead when it comes to Iran or North Korea should send shudders up the spine.

Cheney has gone out of his way to make sure no one got to the bottom of this affair. Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, related new key details of this in an interview with McClatchy newspapers  last week. During the previous Congress, the committee attempted to conduct a “Phase II” investigation of how the Iraq intelligence was manipulated to bring on the war, but was stymied at every turn by obstacles thrown up by the Republican majority, led by then-chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. Rockefeller told reporters that Cheney’s interference with committee business “was just constant” and that it was “not hearsay” that Cheney had induced Roberts to drag out the inquiry.

Cheney himself continues to push the line that “obviously” only flawed intelligence was at issue on Iraq, and as he told Newsweek last week , “we should not let the fact of past problems in that area lead us to ignore the threat we face today.” Cheney is himself to testify at the Libby trial. It is a good bet that he hopes questioning will stay away from these areas.