Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on her nomination yesterday, she was easily approved. And thus with no discussion and no debate, Hughes takes over the least noticed, least respected and possibly most important job in the State Department. Her formal title is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. In plain English, her job is to fight anti-Americanism, promote American culture and above all to do intellectual battle with the ideology of radical Islam, a set of beliefs so powerful that they can persuade middle-class, second-generation British Muslims to blow themselves up on buses and trains.
Presumably, President Bush selected Hughes for this task because she was very good at running his election campaigns. And indeed, in the testimony she gave last week to a nearly empty room, she sounded like she was still running an election campaign. ... (Anne Applebaum / Washington Post / 27 July 2005)
crossposted at True Blue Liberal
Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Karen Hughes
from The Crisis Papers "Rove-Plame Scandal Leading to Deeper White House Horrors?" By Bernard Weiner, 19 July 2005:
"Why Judith Miller is not testifying apparently goes to the heart of Fitzgerald's case. There are reasonable grounds for wondering whether Miller might have been aiding, inadvertently or consciously, Rove and the rest of the WHIG to help move the country toward war with Iraq. For example, she may have been told by Administration officials about Plame and her CIA job, and helped spread that word to other journalists, who then contacted Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Cooper over the weekend revealed that it was Libby who was the second of the 'two senior administration officials' who leaked Plame's identity.The Times owes it to the nation to go far beyond apologizing for the fact that they were hijacked by WHIGs and Chalabi to sell the Iraq War with false intelligence. It needs to fully investigate and clearly tell the story of the White House Iraq Group. Their silence on this issue is more deafening than that of others. A search of their website shows zero hits for the phrase "White House Iraq Group". I'll keep checking and let you know on the big day when they finally catch up with the Washington Post (August 2003) and Newsday (March 2004).
The New York Times already has apologized for running several of Miller's pre-Iraq War stories that were based on faulty weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence; much of that concocted intel was provided by Ahmed Chalabi, the sleazy Iraqi exile leader who hitched his wagon to the Pentagon neo-cons to get his forces back into Iraq in the wake of a U.S. invasion. Those Miller stories helped provide the imprimatur of New York Times prestige that other media outlets then picked up on, helping create a nationwide zeitgeist of imminent threat from Iraq.
Indeed, Dick Cheney squared the circle by using Miller's stories as 'evidence' that even the hallowed New York Times had determined that Iraq had, or soon would have, nuclear weapons of mass destruction. [emphasis added]
crossposted at True Blue Liberal
Tags:WHIG;WHIGgate;Judith Miller ¶ 7/28/2005 02:47:00 PM 0 comments
Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed - White House Implicated Over CIA Agent Outing
By Tom Brune
Newsday Friday 05 March 2004
Grand jury to review call logs from Bush’s jet in probe of how a CIA agent’s cover was blown.
WASHINGTON -- The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.
Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat [sic] posed by Saddam Hussein.
And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.
The three subpoenas were issued to the White House on Jan. 22, three weeks after Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel in the probe and during the first wave of appearances by White House staffers before the grand jury.
The investigation seeks to determine if anyone violated federal law that prohibits officials with security clearances from intentionally or knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover agent.
White House implicated
The subpoenas underscore indications that the initial stages of the investigation have focused largely on the White House staff members most involved in shaping the administration's message on Iraq, and appear to be based in part on specific information already gathered by investigators, attorneys said Thursday."
[...]The subpoena with the second production deadline sought all documents from July 6 to July 30 [2003] of the White House Iraq Group. In August [2003], the Washington Post published the only account of the group's existence.
It met weekly in the Situation Room, the Post said, and its regular participants included senior political adviser Karl Rove; communication strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; policy advisers led by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley; and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Wilson alleged in September that Rove was involved in the leak but a day later pulled back from that, asserting that Rove had "condoned" it.
Hughes left the White House in the summer of 2002. Matalin, who left at the end of 2002, did not return a call for comment. Matalin appeared before the grand jury Jan. 23, the day after the subpoenas were issued. ... [ emphasis added]
So what did Mary's husband James Carville know about WHIG's activities? And when did he know it?
We need to control the language of the current scandal. We can't let it be reduced to "Rovegate" or "Plamegate," because that story will end when Turdblossom and/or Scooter are escorted from the West Wing. "Iraqgate" belongs to Reagan and Bush the First and their arming of Saddam, "Wargate" is too general (and probably a video game) ... I still like "Whiggate", because I think that as soon as you start explaining who the WHIGs are (they make Nixon's Plumbers looks like penny-ante thieves in comparison), you've easily linked the war aims expressed in the Downing Street Memo, the White House Iraq Group's conspiracy to falsify and sell the reasons for war, and the outing of Valerie Plame to cover up those falsifications, all in one narrative. "Rovegate"suggests a deceptively simple isolated short story, which ends when the long-awaited frogmarch finally takes place. "Whiggate" forces you to ask, Who's next? Andrew Card, "Scooter" Libby, Condi, McClellan, "Dick" Cheney ... ? It has the feel and power of Watergate to reach farther and farther up the ladder, with the end target being obvious. Also, we can make up t-shirts that say "W stands for Whiggate."
If you are interested in participating in making this a Group Blog on the Whiggate scandal, then you can leave a comment below or contact trueblueliberal (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Rovegate;Plamegate;Iraqgate;treasongate ¶ 7/27/2005 03:00:00 PM 0 comments
