Mother Jones: A Cheney Cover-Up?

[marmar]

A Cheney Cover-Up?

Someone in the White House tried to deep-six Philip Zelikow's anti-torture memo. Welcome to the latest Bush-era whodunit.

—By Nick Baumann and David Corn

Wed May 6, 2009 5:00 AM PST


Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?

On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Zelikow notes that Cheney's office did not have the authority to request that his memo be deep-sixed: "They didn't run the interagency process. Such a request would more likely have come from the White House Counsel's office or from NSC staff." But that request did not reach him in written form. "It was conveyed to me, and I ignored it," Zelikow recalls. But he suspected that Team Cheney was probably behind it.

Zelikow, who is scheduled to testify before a Senate judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday Wednesday, also notes that his memo was not the only one raising questions about the administration's legal rationale supporting so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques": "There were a number of papers, mainly arguing for alternative legal frameworks." But his memo, he adds, was "a more direct assault on own interpretation of American law." .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/did-cheneys-office-coverup-torture-wrong-memo

[opihimoimoi]

1. Ever so slowly the wheels of Justice rolls on...Cheny is shakin and shittin

Let the Truth set us free from BS CRAP and Dirty Tricks

[glitch]

2. Nah, Cheney's fine.

His body double is nervous though.

[opihimoimoi]

3. I hope its all exposed soon...the man is a WAR CRIMINAL and should be prosecuted

[glitch]

4. Yeah I know. I don't see how we can move forward without putting this all behind us.

And the way to do that is through it. I do think American's are strong enough to face it.

I actually believe we won't recover, ever, if we neglect our responsibility to bring these treasonous war criminals and treasury looters to justice. Bandaids don't work on gut wounds.

[opihimoimoi]

6. This whole mess reminds of the days of Watergate and how the Truth came slowly

to the surface...resulting in exposure of a massive coverup...

"All the Presidents Men" Woodward, Bernstein

This Bush/Cheney exposure is gonna be much more JUICY

[Mnemosyne]

5. KnR. n/t

[leveymg]

7. Zelikow is right up there with Cheney as one of the neocon Founding Fathers

I just can't believe that anyone who's taken a look at Zelikow's background buys his act. See,

Philip D. Zelikow
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_D._Zelikow

There's a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel.<1> Here are just a few of them:

* He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.

* A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."

* The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group <2>, a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice's mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.

* Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age <3>under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel - The National Commission on Federal Election Reform - with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)

* After the 2000 election, Zelikow and Rice were reunited when George W. Bush named him to his transition team for the National Security Council. Rice reportedly asked Zelikow to help organize the NSC under the Scowcroft model, which was insular and steeped in Cold War worldview.

* Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke says he briefed not only Rice and Hadley, but also Zelikow about the growing al-Qaida threat during the transition period. Zelikow sat in on the briefings, he says.

* A month after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, President Bush appointed Zelikow to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is chaired by Scowcroft.

* Zelikow's regular job, the one he'll return to after the commission releases it final report in late July, is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center is dedicated to the study of the presidency, and maintains contact with the Bush White House, which fought the creation of the commission.

Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a "clear conflict of interest." And she suspects he is in touch with Bush's political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.

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Along with the 1997 Likud Party document "A Clean Break", and PNAC's "A New Pearl Harbor", Zelikow's "Catastrophic Terrorism" is a road map to 9/11 and the Iraq War.

I always thought PZ was a player. I didn't realize he's actually an architect, along with Cheney, Libby, Feith, Wurmser, Perle and Wolfowitz.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/catastrophicterrorism-foreignaffairs-1198.pdf
Foreign AffairsNovember/December 1998, Volume 77, Number 6
CATASTROPHIC TERRORISM: Tackling the New Danger
By Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow

IMAGINING THE TRANSFORMING EVENT

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. But today's terrorists, be they international cults likeAum Shinrikyo or individual nihilists like the Unabomber, act on a greater variety ofmotives than ever before. More ominously, terrorists may gain access to weapons of massdestruction, including nuclear devices, germ dispensers, poison gas weapons, and even computer viruses. Also new is the world's dependence on a nearly invisible and fragilenetwork for distributing energy and information.

Long part of the Hollywood and TomClancy repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism has moved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen next month. Although the United States still takes conventional terrorism seriously, as demonstrated by the response to theattacks on its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August, it is not yet prepared for thenew threat of catastrophic terrorism. American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes its adversariestoward unconventional alternatives.

The United States has already destroyed one facility in Sudan in its attempt to target chemical weapons. Russia, storehouse of tens ofthousands of weapons and material to make tens of thousands more, may be descending into turmoil. Meanwhile, the combination of new technology and lethal force has made biological weapons at least as deadly as chemical and nuclear alternatives. Technology is more accessible, and society is more vulnerable. Elaborate international networks havedeveloped among organized criminals, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and money launderers, creating an infrastructure for catastrophic terrorism around the world. The bombings in East Africa killed hundreds.

A successful attack with weapons of massdestruction could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the devicethat exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetimeand undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a beforeand after.

The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.

_________________________________________________________________



The Friends of Phil Zelikow (Able Danger Debunkers)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/15/123554/807
Mon Aug 15th, 2005 at 09:35:54 PDT

More on the developing story about the US Army surveillance unit, codenamed Able Danger, that detected the four primary 9/11 hijackers inside the US, and the decision by Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission staff director, to withhold this information from the Commissioners before the 9/11 report was published in July 2004.

leveymg's diary :: ::
On Saturday, the Washington Post's Dan Eggen laid out the defense being offered by Zelikow for his failure to tell the Commission about the staff's multiple interviews with a DIA officer who worked on the Able Danger, and that a second officer has come forward to confirm that account. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...