That's what I was thinking while I was reading WaPo's Angler series about the VEEP. Imagine the damage that he could do.
We do know that Cheney salted the Defense Department with his cronies, some of who had been repeatedly investigated for leaking classified information to foreign entities. And at some point, Cheney learnt of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' case, and he learnt that Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others were involved in criminal activity involving heroin trafficking, terrorism, and the nuclear black market.
Cheney did nothing. If Cheney isn't a foreign agent himself, then he surely, knowingly, harboured some foreign agents in his administration.
Maybe the best way to get to Cheney, and Libby, is through the Sibel Edmonds case. As a bonus, we'll pick off a few others in the process.
Call Waxman. Demand public open hearings:
DC phone: (202) 225-3976
LA phone: 323 651-1040
fax: (202) 225-4099
Capitol switchboard phone: 800-828-0498
Here's Sibel (SE) describing her case to Chris Deliso (CD):
SE: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it.
But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.
CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SE: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.
Cheney, in loco presidentis, knew all of this was going on, and he did nothing. In fact, Eric Edelman, from Cheney's own office, is a participant in the criminal ring. Was Cheney a party to it as well? Did he use this information, for example, to blackmail Douglas Feith into providing false intelligence that sold the war? Eric Edelman currently has Doug Feith's old job at the Pentagon, and is no doubt doing Cheney's bidding there. I'm not confident that we'll get a better outcome than when Cheney was using Feith.
Of course, Cheney isn't the only person who knows the details of Sibel's case and did nothing, Everybody Knows (youtube), but if Cheney wants to play president, then the buck stops with him. And covering up and enabling treason? Well, that's impeachable.
Assuming, arguendo, that Cheney wasn't aware of these activities all along, we can only speculate about when he became aware that some of his senior officials were involved in treason. Knowing Cheney, his first questions at his first briefing on the first day of office was probably 'Who is bribing who? And why?' If so, he would have definitely learned that a special prosecutor was soon to be appointed to investigate claims, backed up by FBI wiretaps, that Dennis Hastert and other congressfolk had been bribed by the people involved in Sibel's case.
At that first briefing, Cheney may not have learnt about the claims against Feith, Perle and others. We don't specifically know (AFAIK) how much information was flowing up the chain of command at that point. Let's be charitable and say that the information about the ongoing counter-intelligence operation was being suppressed at a lower level.
And let's presume that Cheney, famous for planting his agents throughout the bureaucracy, didn't ever hear any whispers about the underlying crimes in Sibel's case until she was fired in March 2002.
But by March 2002, former Attorney General John Ashcroft was involved in Sibel's case, FBI Director Robert Mueller was involved, the highest levels of the State Dept and the Pentagon were involved. It's impossible to think that Cheney, with his coterie of spies in every agency, wasn't fully aware of every detail in Sibel's case.
Apparently President Cheney wasn't too concerned with this treason by Feith and Perle, and they proceeded to sell, launch and lose a war together. As Doug Feith noted in his recent 'Free Libby' letter, Feith and Libby worked together for "several hours," every day. Thick as thieves.
Open public hearings into Sibel's case can help us get to the bottom of this sordid mess. Sibel guarantees that we'll see Hastert, Feith, Perle and Grossman in prison by the end of the process, and we might even snare Libby, Cheney and others in the process.
Let's keep our fingers crossed for John Conyers' hearings into Libby's commutation on Wednesday, but if the outcome is less than satisfying, or if you feel like we are getting away from the core issues:
Call Waxman. Demand public open hearings:
DC phone: (202) 225-3976
LA phone: 323 651-1040
fax: (202) 225-4099
Capitol switchboard phone: 800-828-0498
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