The triumphant neo-conservative claim trumpeted throughout U.S. media on Nov. 14—that links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had been "conclusively proven" by a memo from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee—rapidly went the way of all previous such cooked claims from Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington. But more, this claim had, by Nov. 17-18, boomeranged into its opposite: a Defense Department denial of the claim itself; an eruption of official demands to investigate who passed this classified document to the waiting neo-con press; the likely revival of the Intelligence Committee probe which had been shut down on Nov. 7 "to save Cheney's neck"; and the escalation of "Cheney-gate" itself, by the exposure of what appear to be "plumbers' " operations to steal sensitive documents from the Cheney faction's opponents.
The boomerang was part of what Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche called "the start of the hot phase" of his Presidential campaign—focussing on the Jan. 13 Washington, D.C. Democratic primary and other events in the nation's capital—and of his drive to force Cheney out of office. LaRouche told National Public Radio in St. Louis in a Nov. 18 interview, "Cheney is the guy we've got to be rid of, because we can not be going into this policy of nuclear preventive war, which is the policy the United States will be dragged into, if we don't get him out before the next election."
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At the same time that the CIA was demanding a full probe of the leak, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and vice-chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), were also calling on the DOJ to probe the Feith leak—and to investigate, as well, the theft of a Democratic staff memo from the panel's highly secure offices. The theft and leaking of that staff memo had been used by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) as the pretext for his Nov. 7 order to shut down the panel's probe of intelligence abuses by senior Bush Administration policymakers in the run-up to the Iraq war. It had been surfaced by radio host Sean Hannity and promoted by Fox TV as "proof" that the Democrats were playing "partisan politics" with a probe that has increasingly centered on Vice President Cheney, the leading war-hawk in the Bush White House.
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In a Washington Post op-ed on Nov. 18, Senator Rockefeller sharply rebutted the charges of partisan politics, and accused the Republicans of attempting to shut down a legitimate and vital probe into how the Executive Branch abused the intelligence system, by "pilfering" a confidential staff memo meant for his eyes only. Rockefeller wrote, "There is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is driving the intelligence, rather than the other way around. This has added to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying facts."
Rockefeller next tackled the issue of the staff memo and the leak: "Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into these matters, my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate Intelligence Committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the investigation."
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http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3046chnygte_plmbrs.html
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