Whiggate Update

WHIGGATE.org is no more

2009-07-18T18:44:00.007-04:00

This blog will continue to sit here (probably inactive) in whatever "in perpetuity" means on Blogger at http://whiggate.blogspot.com, but I did not renew the whiggate.org domain name this year for the convenience of the two or three people a month it might help to stumble here. The cost wasn't worth it.

When I started this blog in July 2005, and bought the domain name, I really thought that the White House Iraq Group would be recognized as the key to the entire illegal entry into the Iraq War. I thought that maybe the American people would care that we were lied to and that an illegal war was carried out in our name. I thought that maybe the New York Times really was more than a government mouthpiece (if you do the check that I've been doing for years -- or click here -- you will see that the "Paper of Record" still doesn't come up with a single hit on the Group in its news pages, but only in Frank Rich editorials and letters to the editor).

Here's a link to the first time I used the WHIGgate name, thinking it might help bring down that whole tribe of war criminals while they still held power. Now I think we should just ignore them and thank their mythical god that they will spend the rest of their lives believing in a universe where an eternity in hell is a possibility.

If you've stumbled here, come visit at TrueBlueLiberal.org

Article I:CREATING A SECRET PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR WAR AGAINST IRAQ, or Whiggate approaches its logical conclusion

2008-06-12T00:06:00.007-04:00

Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 detailed articles of impeachment by reading them aloud for four hours on the floor of the House on the night of June 9th.
You can read the whole horrifying litany of the crimes of the Bush/Cheney years by reading the full text here, but I'm going to cut and paste all of Article I, because the White House Iraq Group takes pride of place in this first of 35 crimes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ARTICLE I

CREATING A SECRET PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR WAR AGAINST IRAQ

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed," has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, illegally spent public dollars on a secret propaganda program to manufacture a false cause for war against Iraq.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has engaged in a years-long secret domestic propaganda campaign to promote the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This secret program was defended by the White House Press Secretary following its exposure. This program follows the pattern of crimes detailed in Article I, II, IV and VIII. The mission of this program placed it within the field controlled by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a White House task force formed in August 2002 to market an invasion of Iraq to the American people. The group included Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas E. Calio, and James R. Wilkinson.

The WHIG produced white papers detailing so-called intelligence of Iraq’s nuclear threat that later proved to be false. This supposed intelligence included the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger as well as the claim that the high strength aluminum tubes Iraq purchased from China were to be used for the sole purpose of building centrifuges to enrich uranium. Unlike the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, the WHIG's white papers provided "gripping images and stories" and used "literary license" with intelligence. The WHIG's white papers were written at the same time and by the same people as speeches and talking points prepared for President Bush and some of his top officials.

The WHIG also organized a media blitz in which, between September 7-8, 2002, President Bush and his top advisers appeared on numerous interviews and all provided similarly gripping images about the possibility of nuclear attack by Iraq. The timing was no coincidence, as Andrew Card explained in an interview regarding waiting until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

September 7-8, 2002:

NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Vice President Cheney accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past 14 months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.

CNN: Then-National Security Adviser Rice said, regarding the likelihood of Iraq obtaining a nuclear weapon, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

CBS: President Bush declared that Saddam was "six months away from developing a weapon," and cited satellite photos of construction in Iraq where weapons inspectors once visited as evidence that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms.

The Pentagon military analyst propaganda program was revealed in an April 20, 2002 [should read 2008], New York Times article. The program illegally involved "covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recruited 75 retired military officers and gave them talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC, and according to the New York Times report, which has not been disputed by the Pentagon or the White House, "Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon."

According to the Pentagon's own internal documents, the military analysts were considered "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who would deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions.” In fact, they did deliver the themes and the messages but did not reveal that the Pentagon had provided them with their talking points. Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and Fox News military analyst described this as follows: "It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.'"

Congress has restricted annual appropriations bills since 1951 with this language: "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

A March 21, 2005, report by the Congressional Research Service states that "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda."

These concerns about "covert propaganda" were also the basis for the GAO's standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

"The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual -- the essential fact of attribution is missing."

The White House's own Office of Legal Council stated in a memorandum written in 2005 following the controversy over the Armstrong Williams scandal:

"Over the years, GAO has interpreted 'publicity or propaganda' restrictions to preclude use of appropriated funds for, among other things, so-called 'covert propaganda.' ... Consistent with that view, the OLC determined in 1988 that a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for 'publicity or propaganda' precluded undisclosed agency funding of advocacy by third-party groups. We stated that 'covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties' would run afoul of restrictions on using appropriated funds for 'propaganda.'"

Asked about the Pentagon's propaganda program at White House press briefing in April 2008, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino defended it, not by arguing that it was legal but by suggesting that it "should" be: "Look, I didn't know look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this look, DOD has made a decision, they've decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. And I don't think that that should be against the law. And I think that it's absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk to people."

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But, of course, the New York Times still has not verified the existence of the White House Iraq Group by mentioning it in its news pages.
I certainly don't expect them to run any long excerpts from these 35 articles of impeachment, but you can read them here if you made it through Article I without smashing your computer screen.

Walter Pincus still digging for WHIG information

2008-06-09T14:31:00.005-04:00

Without the reporting of Walter Pincus in the Washington Post, we might never have learned about the the White House Iraq Group. His key article, "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence," written with Barton Gellman and printed on page A1 on August 10, 2003, was the first that I know of to spell out the structure and members and methods of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and call it by its name and abbreviation.

Today Walter Pincus is still digging for information about this group. In "Records Could Shed Light on Iraq Group," published today, he highlights the omissions in last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar exaggerations -- they did not seek out any "less formal" White House communications, obtain White House records, or interview President Bush or Vice President Cheney, because "such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report."

One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

Pincus then goes on in today's short article to recap the key known members and activities of the White House Iraq Group, enhanced with some of Scott McClellan's recently-added revelations (or confirmations), before concluding:

WHIG's records would shed much light on whether, as Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence panel, put it: "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent."

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..... you can also read the transcript of a short interview between Bill Moyers

and Walter Pincus on the subject of WHIG by clicking here.

..... and, in case you're wondering, No, The New York Times still has not mentioned "White House Iraq Group" or "WHIG" (in this new meaning) in its news pages. Can the Group have really existed without the Paper of Record having printed an official record of its existence?

WHIG of the Week Scott McClellan (Part Two, The Video)

2008-06-06T09:22:00.005-04:00

I just watched more of Bill O'Reilly than I've seen in my life in watching this video, "O'Reilly Goes Ballistic on McClellan," but you can skip right to the 3'29" marker to hear the section that's most relevant to the purposes of the WHIGgate Update blog.

Here's the transcript of the section about "catapulting the propaganda" using the White House Iraq Group, as transcribed in Crooks and Liars:

Bill O’Reilly: You said they used propaganda and that is a loaded word.
Scott McClellan: The White House Iraq group, the White House Iraq Group was set up, it’s a marketing arm for selling the a war. That was a specific purpose that I talked about in the book
BO: Because they fervently believed that the guy was a danger and could hand his weapons off.
SM: No because the President had a bigger driving motivation which was to transform the middle east.
BO: You telling me that President Bush didn’t believe they had the,
SM: No, he did too. He believed that too.
BO:That’s not propaganda then, that’s not propaganda.
SM: It is when you package it all together—over sell it and over state it to the American people. That is propaganda.

Propaganda may be a loaded word in O'Reilly's mind, but Scott McClellan gets his definition of the word directly from his former boss:

... third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)
-- George W. Bush, 24 May 2005 (text and stage cues from the whitehouse.gov transcript)

You can see a video of the Catapult the Propaganda quote here.

If you can stand watching the whole interview video, it's also interesting to see the way that O'Reilly goes on about how "everyone" believed Iraq had WMDs because they read it in The New York Times; I just wish that Scott would have pointed out how Judith Miller of the Times was being used as a tool -- perhaps the key tool -- in the catapulting the propaganda about Saddam's scary aluminum tubes.

"WHIG of The Week" Returns With a New WHIG, Scott McClellan

2008-06-05T14:32:00.007-04:00

OK. I know that WHIGgate.org has been very inactive lately, but the fact is that it started with high hopes (and what turned out, of course, to have been false hopes) that the American people and their representatives in Congress and the "independent" flag-waving American mass media would come to their senses and hold the war criminals of the Bush Administration responsible for waging a war of aggression on manufactured evidence. The White House Iraq Group seemed like the perfect frame in which to tell the story of those lies, and the way they were sold to us.

Despite the fact that we seem to be OK with being lied to, I couldn't help posting this new entry for nobody to read when I ran across the following question and answer in the transcript of a Washington Post Book World online discussion from May 30:

Rhode Island: Hi. I hope this question doesn't sound confrontational. My understanding is that you didn't become press secretary until a year or so after the Iraq war began. Can you tell us about what your role was before that? Were you privy to high-level discussions in the lead-up to the war? Thanks.
Scott McClellan: I became press secretary on July 15, 2003, a few months after the initial invasion. Prior to that, I served as the principal deputy press secretary. I was not involved in the policy-making on Iraq or in developing the overall marketing strategy for selling the war to the public. I did fill in for my predecessor at times, and even participated in some White House Iraq Group, or WHIG meetings. WHIG was set up as the marketing arm for selling the war to the public.

I'm not sure that I've seen the White House Iraq Group referred to by name and by its WHIG designation so clearly by a White House official who took part in their meetings. I find it very impressive that the author of What Happened was not responding to a specific question about the Group or its role; Scott McClellan brought the names up unprompted, and followed up with the perfect one-sentence definition: "WHIG was set up as the marketing arm for selling the war to the public."

When America's Paper of Record, The New York Times, still has not mentioned the "White House Iraq Group" in its news pages [only in Frank Rich's columns], then it's not surprising that even some of us who track down these scattered references begin to doubt the group's existence and/or importance. Scott's nonchalant confirmation of its name and its role is striking (but not as striking as the continuing silence from the "liberal" Times). WHIGgate Update will come roaring back with another post if the Times ever writes about the Group in its news pages [click here to see if they do], but don't hold your breath. We don't expect to see anything until we're well into the Obama administration and they can treat this Bush-regime story in quaint historical context, not as a crime that demands immediate prosecution.

Impeach Cheney First

2007-07-11T12:25:00.000-04:00

Of course the figure who hovers above the White House Iraq Group and its orchestrated lies is the man who was Lewis Libby's boss.
Being next in line for the presidency, of course he has to be removed before any sane person can even think about impeaching George W.:

Sign the petition at ImpeachCheney.org

What Has Happened to the Sanctity of the Meaningless Internet Sidebar Poll??

2007-06-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

I wish I had made a screenshot a few days ago, because the last time I looked at the summer sidebar poll, the only votes were for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich, with the Democratic hopefuls running in that order. Now Joe Biden has suddenly jumped from last to first, showing either a great groundswell of support for the Senator from Delaware, or the work of one dedicated fan who knows how to vote more than once on Pollhost.
Here's a screenshot from the morning of June 2.

Is it time to reset the results and start from scratch, or should we just live with the fact that in the electronic age, election fraud is going to be as common on meaningless internet preference polls as it is in Florida, Ohio, and American Idol contests?

Why Do Many UMass Students Oppose Honoring Andrew Card?

2007-05-16T13:25:00.000-04:00

Why do 31% of readers responding to this poll in The Massachusetts Daily Collegian answer Yes to the question "Should the University of Massachusetts rescind its offer to give Andrew Card an honorary degree?" at its commencement in Amherst on May 26th? Why are hundreds marching to deliver a petition to that effect to Chancellor Lombardi's (empty) office?

The issue is summed up simply in this paragraph from Christine Morretti's May 7 article in the Collegian. After listing many of Andrew Card's accomplishments in and out of the current Administration, she states:

[...] much of Card's political history is mired in the Iraq war, and his association with the White House Iraq Group (acronym - WHIG, but I doubt the Whig party would approve of the Bush presidency at all).

Card was instrumental in the organization of WHIG, which was designed to sell fear and distrust to the American people, and sway our minds toward the war in Iraq. According to a 2002 CNN report, this group was used to push an "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the United States, including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud.'" Indeed, many people on this campus would have Card labeled a propagandist and a war criminal.

If more people knew about the actions of the White House Iraq Group -- if the New York Times had yet mentioned WHIG's existence and actions in its news pages (Click here to see that there is still nothing but Frank Rich columns about WHIG in the paper of record) -- wouldn't even more University of Massachusetts students (and other Americans) be against bestowing honors on one of the group's leaders?

The first WHIGgate Presidential Poll in today's sidebar

2007-05-02T20:41:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure that I've made up my mind yet, but it's never too early to start expressing an opinion. I'm sure that nothing will change between now and November 2008.

In France this week, published opinion polls are illegal [see correction below]. If we lived in Avignon or Tours, we would have to spend this week reading about something other than the constant tracking polls during the final days of the presidential horse race. We would have to wait until Sunday to cast our vote for Ségolène Royal, and to see whether our countrymen had agreed with us or chosen Nicolas Sarkozy to occupy the Élysée Palace for the next five years.

Unfortunately, we can't include Ségolène in our sidebar poll. Being born in Senegal somehow disqualifies her from occupying our Oval Office. You'll have to choose between one of the seven alphabetically-arranged also-rans to your right.

Fortunately for us, there is never a shortage of meaningless horse-race polls in the U. S. of A.!

-------------------------
UPDATE 4 May 2007: The law changed, or I was mistaken, because the French press is full of polls like these today showing Sarko in the lead in advance of Sunday's voting.

Required viewing for New York Times "reporters"

2007-04-26T09:17:00.000-04:00

Look, I know it's TV Turnoff Week, but how could I resist watching a show on Channel 13 last night that started off with these opening paragraphs from Bill Moyers?

BILL MOYERS: Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.
Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

This 90-minute special edition of Bill Moyers' Journal from April 25, 2007 "Buying the War", which has a full transcript online here, was a good introduction or review for anyone interested in how and why the leading lights of the mainstream press were either dupes or collaborators in the march to invade Iraq. He did not (like the New York Times) ignore the group that gave this blog its raison d'être, the WHIG.

BILL MOYERS: As the WASHINGTON POST'S veteran reporter Walter Pincus would later report, the propaganda machine was run by the president's inner circle — officials who called themselves the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG.....
You wrote that WHIG included Karl Rove, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mary Matalin, Condi Rice, Steven Hadley, Lewis Libby and they were in charge of selling the war.
WALTER PINCUS: Selling the war. Yeah.
PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): Good evening. A long year has passed since enemies attacked our country.
BILL MOYERS: Their chief salesman had the best props at his disposal [spoken over a clip of Bush with the Statue of Liberty behind him on the 1st anniversary of 9/11/01]
PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): …and we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.
WALTER PINCUS: They created that link.
BILL MOYERS: The marketing group?
WALTER PINCUS: The marketing group. And the link was a twofold link. One, he had weapons of mass destruction. And two, he supported terrorists. And they repeated it everyday. anybody who watches-- television these days knows you sell a product, not just by saying it once, by saying it over and over again with new spokesmen two, three times a day and it sinks into the public.
BILL MOYERS: But is there anything unusual about an administration marketing its policy?
WALTER PINCUS: It's, I think each administration has learned from the other, and with this group is just the cleverest I've ever seen-- and took it to new heights.
NORM SOLOMON: The TV, radio, print, other media outlets are as crucial to going to war as the bombs and the bullets and the planes. They're part of the arsenal, the propaganda weaponry, if you will. And that's totally understood across the board, at the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department.
COLIN POWELL (9/26/02): A proven menace like Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction
PRESIDENT BUSH (Discussion with Congressional Leaders, 9/26/02): The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons
DONALD RUMSFELD (DOD Press Briefing 9/26/02): We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.
PRESIDENT BUSH: The regime has long standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.
BOB SIMON: Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Repeat Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Just keep it going. Keep that drum beat going.
And it was effective because long after it was well established that there was no link between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq and the Saddam regime, the polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that Al Qaeda-- that Iraq was responsible for September 11th.

The Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast networks all come under fire in this show (as do the easy targets of the flag-waving cable news networks and saber-rattling pundits). The only heroes are two reporters for Knight Ridder (Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay) who saw the holes in the government's stories with basic fact checking rather than high-level cocktail party access to the lies of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
The New York Times STILL has not mentioned "WHIG" or the "White House Iraq Group" in its news pages even though one of their reporters, Judith Miller, has been exposed as their chief tool (or maybe even an honorary member of the Group).
When the White House Iran Group feeds their reporters information from "Important High Level Administration Sources" (i.e., Liars), maybe the Times editors should think about the following quotation from a Knight Ridder editor before uncritically printing government "information" about Iranian WMDs on their influential front page.

BILL MOYERS: Knight Ridder's early skepticism was a rarity inside the beltway bubble…..
JOHN WALCOTT: A decision to go to war, even against an eighth-rate power such as Iraq, is the most serious decision that a government can ever make. And it deserves the most serious kind of scrutiny that we in the media can give it. Is this really necessary? Is it necessary to send our young men and women to go kill somebody else's young men and women?

crossposted on TrueBlueLiberal.org

Spread the Word -- Next Week is TV Turnoff Week -- April 23-29, 2007

2007-04-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

You won't see an ad for TV Turnoff Week on the tube, so spread the word any way you can in the next week; click on the link to get more information and ideas from Adbusters.org, and think about reading and signing their Media Carta.

But the most important thing is simply to turn it off.

"The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult – yet also how life-changing – a week spent unplugged can really be." --Adbusters.org

Enjoy a book.

Help celebrate Poetry Month 2007 with a short sonnet of Shelley's on the permanence of political power

2007-04-04T19:36:00.000-04:00

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Published by Leigh Hunt, The Examiner, 1818)

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Happy Poetry Month from True Blue Liberal.

What could possibly be more interesting . . .

2007-03-03T12:42:00.000-05:00

. . . than continuing to track the hucksters who sold a gullible Congress and "American Public" the Iraq War with fairy tales of mushroom clouds?

H.Res. 505, calling for investigation of the White House Iraq Group, almost makes it out of the International Relations Committee

2005-11-10T08:46:00.001-05:00

From GOP Whitewash of White House Continues on The Huffington Post:

The Republican majority on the House International Relations Committee today again refused to investigate its own party. Barely.
With a 4-member advantage on the IR committee over the Democrats, the GOP managed to hang on to a 25 to 23 vote win, defeating H.Res. 505, Rep. Dennis Kucinich's attempt to actually investigate the secret activities of the WHIG, his Resolution of Inquiry (ROI) to look into the White House Iraq Group.
More than 100 House Democrats joined Kucinich in cosponsoring this resolution, even before it never made it to the floor!
Only 2 Republicans stood up for finding out the truth--Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. [...]

ONLY? The fact that any Republicans supported any Resolution by Kucinich is enough to strike fear into the electronic pump that replaced "Dick" Cheney's heart. And the fact that a Resolution by Kucinich got unanimous support from the Democrats on the Committee must be striking some fear into those in the stay-the-course pro-war wing of the Donkey Party.
Of course, because this Resolution had the audacity to mention the White House Iraq Group by name, the WHIG Subsidiary that publishes what used to be America's Liberal Paper of Record, failed to mention these proceedings at all.

A quick numerical update on a couple of WHIG questions

2005-11-07T21:50:00.001-05:00

63 -- The current number of Congressional co-sponsors for Dennis Kucinich's H.RES.505 (Title: Requesting the President of the United States and directing the Secretary of State to provide to the House of Representatives certain documents in their possession relating to the White House Iraq Group.)

1--Number of indicted White House Iraq Group members so far.

0 -- The number of news articles mentioning the name "White House Iraq Group" or "WHIG" in the pages of The New York Times.

How much pressure can any group of Representatives expect to put on the White House to release these documents if America's "liberal" paper of record doesn't even acknowledge the group exists outside the three recent mentions by Frank Rich and one letter to the editor?

Even though I wasn't in the New York area in 1971, I started reading the New York Times regularly when I was in high school because they were the paper that released the stolen Pentagon Papers on the front page, even though they needed to fight for their right to publish up to the Supreme Court, because they felt the American people needed to know the truth about the lies that led us into Vietnam. Is their historical legacy vis à vis this current war going to be that they were the Yellow Journalists screaming "Remember the Maine!" When the FUCK are they going to do something dramatic to atone for their phony WHIG-generated "weapons of mass destruction" stories that may have tipped the balance for a number of intelligent readers on the Iraq war question? When are they going to apologize to these readers who had learned over the years to trust the Times in matters of foreign policy? And they can't get off the hook by just blaming Judy Miller, but examining their employee's role in serving as a knowing or unknowing conduit for White House Iraq Group propagandists is probably the best place for them to start.

Another WHIG (Hadley) and his actions during that key week in early September 2002

2005-11-04T10:04:00.000-05:00

Though "White House Iraq Group" and "WHIG" have yet to appear in the New York Times' news pages, they do often print key nuggets about the actions of individual WHIGs, like this mention of Stephen J. Hadley, and his meeting with General Pollari on 9/9/2002 (the day after the Judy Miller/Dick Cheney Iraq War Product Launch in the media, and three days before the Bush Product Launch at the UN). Here is the end of today's article, "Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified" by Elaine Sciolino and Elisabetta Povoledo.

 [...]a three-part series in La Repubblica, [...] said General Pollari had knowingly provided the United States and Britain with forged documents. The newspaper, a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also reported that General Pollari had acted at the behest of Mr. Berlusconi, who was said to be eager to help President Bush in the search for weapons in Iraq.
Mr. Berlusconi has denied such accounts.
La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.
"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."
At the time, Mr. Hadley took responsibility for including the faulty    information in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address. 

This particular piece of the pre-war yellowcake puzzle might make much more sense to Times readers when considered in the framework and timeline of the White House Iraq Group, which is why this blog finds it so frustrating that that pre-existing narrative scaffolding is never used by the Times.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Hadley;yellowcake;Plamegate

The James Carville & Mary Matalin show wouldn't even be cute if they were played by Tom Cruise & Britney Spears in the post-Whiggate TV miniseries

2005-11-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

The second post to appear on Whiggate Update ended with the words: "So what did Mary's husband James Carville know about WHIG's activities? And when did he know it?"

Today Arianna Huffington gives a much fuller appraisal of James Carville's role in actively drawing attention away from Mary Matalin's friends and co-workers "Scooter" and "Dick". Arianna ends a current blog entry, "Why the Dems Need James Carville to Take a Long, Long Vacation", on the Huffington Post with these words: "It's time for him to take a long, long vacation from the spotlight. And he should take his Cheney/Libby-apologist, WHIG-war-salesman-wife with him."

Read it.

September 8, 2002 ... September 8, 2002 ... Hardball is catapulting the propaganda back over the White House walls

2005-11-03T22:31:00.000-05:00

OK, if you're looking for proof that this True Blue Liberal is less than a true blue American, then here's your proof, and my confession: I don't have access to cable or satellite television, so I can't see Chris Matthews on MSNBC; I don't even currently have a television, but after reading this entry by Arianna Huffington on Chris Matthews and the Power of Repetition, I almost want one (not really, but it is good to see that the tube is being used to catapult some propaganda back over the walls).

Sunday Sept. 8, 2002 was a red letter day in the White House Iraq Group’s efforts to market the war. That was the day the administration’s war salesmen scored one of their biggest propaganda coups.

That morning, the New York Times ran a front page story co-written by Judy Miller about how Saddam was trying to get a hold of aluminum tubes to be used in building nuclear weapons.

Perfectly timed to coincide with this planted (and bogus) info, the administration blanketed the Sunday shows with its big guns -- who all used the New York Times’ credibility to bolster their case against Saddam and scare the American people.

[...]
Over the last two weeks, Hardball’s Chris Matthews has been relentless in repeatedly bringing the significance of Sept. 8, 2002 -- and its larger implications -- home to his audience.

It’s been crusading journalism at its best. Making a crucial point by repeating the story -- and the facts -- again and again and again.

[...]
He is acting as a village explainer, using the dramatic example of Sept. 8, 2002 to simplify, clarify, and make memorable a very complex set of facts.

“Stories,” says Harvard professor Howard Gardner, “are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal”. A journalist’s arsenal, too. Matthews should keep telling this one until the public takes it to heart -- and the White House war salesmen are forced to come clean.

The date in September 2002 that stands out in my mind is four days later, one day after the first anniversary of The September 11, when George W. Bush used that anniversary, in New York City, to desecrate the memory of those who died by going to the United Nations and calling for war against Iraq, based on the bogus intelligence that had been broadcast and amplified in the WHIG's media echo chamber on the previous weekend. As I said in my last entry, September 2002 is where all the real story is told. The outing of Ms. Plame Wilson in 2003 was just part of the cover-up.

WHIG of the Week -- Nicholas E. Calio, WHIG in charge of herding groups of rubber-stamp-wielding legislators in the march to invade Iraq

2005-11-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

Often dismissed in the phrases "et al.," "and the rest," and "others", with the likes of The Professor, Mary Ann, and James R. "Jim" Wilkinson, Nicholas E. Calio nevertheless did play some role in the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), and every one of the WHIGs will get their shot at being WHIGGATE Update's WHIG of the Week®. So it's the week for Nick (known to his fans as "The Quiet WHIG") to take his turn in the spotlight. That spotlight is best shown not on current events around the White House Iraq Group in the Senate or the House, but on the events of September 2002, when Nicholas E. Calio's role, as Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, was to make sure that members of Congress (including dupes like John Kerry who should have known much better) were bullied into voting war powers to the President using the GOP's most effective weapon (until the coffins started coming home), beating war drums right before an election for electoral gain. Here is a rare published quotation from WHIG Calio in a Detroit News article, "Iraq Debate Turns to Rage" (26 Sept 2002):

 "We ought not politicize this war," Daschle said in blunt remarks on the Senate floor less than six weeks before the midterm elections. "We ought not politicize the rhetoric about war and life and death."
{...}
The head of Bush's legislative team, Nicholas Calio, said there will be no apology because "there has been no attempt on (Bush's) part to politicize the war."
{...}
Speaking of a debate over legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security, Bush said: "The House responded, but the Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people. ... ." 

Another reason why it's important to go back to September 2002 again and again, when the WHIGs were first launching their "new product" and beating the war drums loudly, is that there is a continuing serious attempt in the Administration, and among their media dupes and apologists, to spin our collective memories of that time, to try to convince us that we "all" thought Saddam had nukes and poison germ bombs (and that he planned 9/11, and sent those mysterious anthrax letters). We didn't all believe these White House lies. Some of us were willing to listen to Blix and El Baradei. Some of us were willing to leave working UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq rather than threatening them with US Cruise Missiles and Smart-Brand Bombs. Some of us knew the WHIGs were lying all along, even though we didn't yet know the name of their little club.
Near the end of the same Detroit News article, they solicit a quote from a local Detroit Congressman who is never easily fooled or bullied:

Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, when asked whether Bush is politicizing the war, remarked, "is the sky blue?"
"That's all Bush and the vice president are speaking about at fund-raisers and speeches in the states with hotly contested races," Conyers said in a statement. "The White House has not been able to cite any major change in circumstances about Iraq different from six months ago that all of a sudden has created a sudden crisis. Why now, just before the election?"
Daschle's comments drew the support of several other Democrats, some of whom spoke in unusually harsh terms.
"It is despicable that any president would attempt to use the serious matter of impending war as a tool in a campaign year," said Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W. Va.

Despicable, but it worked.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Calio

Democrats Force Senate Into Closed Session to Discuss Iraq War (& the Role of the White House Iraq Group)

2005-11-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Here, from a link on Talking Points Memo, are excerpts from Harry Reid's prepared remarks as the galleries were cleared, the lights were dimmed, and the Senate went into closed sesson this afternoon:

"[...]They [i.e., we, the American people] also deserve a searching and comprehensive investigation about how the Bush Administration brought this country to war. Key questions that need to be answered include:

How did the Bush Administration assemble its case for war against Iraq?

Who did Bush Administration officials listen to and who did they ignore?

How did senior Administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people?

What was the role of the White House Iraq Group or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics?

How did the Administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the Administration's assertions?

Why has the Administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements.

"Unfortunately the Senate committee that should be taking the lead in providing these answers is not. Despite the fact that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine many of these questions more than 1 and ½ years ago, he has chosen not to keep this commitment. Despite the fact that he restated that commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing.
"At this point, we can only conclude he will continue to put politics ahead of our national security. If he does anything at this point, I suspect he will play political games by producing an analysis that fails to answer any of these important questions. Instead, if history is any guide, this analysis will attempt to disperse and deflect blame away from the Administration.
"We demand that the Intelligence Committee and other committees in this body with jurisdiction over these matters carry out a full and complete investigation immediately as called for by Democrats in the committee's annual intelligence authorization report. Our troops and the American people have sacrificed too much. It is time this Republican-controlled Congress put the interests of the American people ahead of their own political interests."[emphasis added]

Maybe tomorrow The New York Times, in reporting the facts of this dramatic action by the Senate Democrats this afternoon, will finally be forced to print the words White House Iraq Group and WHIG in its news pages.

Give 'em Hell Harry!

True Blue Liberal

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Harry Reid;Plamegate

Until further notice (or indictment), the phrase "Senior White House Advisor" should always be replaced with the words "Karl Rove"

2005-11-01T08:56:00.000-05:00

from The Washington Post, "Trial Could Pit Libby's Interests Against Bush's":

"A senior White House adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic, said the Bush team believes it dodged a bullet when Fitzgerald charged only Libby on Friday and then pointedly said in his news conference that the indictment should not be read as a condemnation of the war or its run-up."

Just once I'd love to see a sentence start with these words in the Post or the Times: "Karl Rove, speaking on the assumption that we would respect our 'promise' to protect his anonymity, ..." Is there ever anything that any anonymous senior advisors in any Administration (Republican or Democratic) reveals anonymously to their embedded media partners that isn't either a) a self-serving lie, or b) self-serving spin?

Just asking.
True Blue Liberal

"The WHIG Conspiracy" on Daily Kos

2005-10-31T14:34:00.000-05:00

While not using the term WHIGgate, this post in the Daily Kos brings up the same point that we've been pushing since mid-July.

[...]It was suggested that continuing with "Plame Affair" would minimize the damage to Bush by limiting it to a leak, which happens all the time in Washington, DC. Thus, a broader more encompassing name that demonstrates that Plame was part of a bigger picture in the selling of the war.
After reading the comments, the name that was suggested (and seemed to get a good deal of support) was The WHIG Conspiracy. [...]

The full post is worth reading for the list of pros and cons of the name change from "the Plame Affair" to "the WHIG conspiracy", for the poll about the name's suitability to the current scandal, and for the reader comments.
My only disagreement with the writer of the post is their feeling about the "-gate" suffix:

[...]The meme avoids the redundant "-gate" suffix. In a post-Monicagate world, adding -gate to the end of this scandal could only serve to trivialize it in the public's mind. Though, just for the record, my personal favorite of any "-gate" suggestions I've read for what to call all this was "Wargate".

I have a similar problem with the word "Conspiracy". I think it allows our opponents to dismiss everyone who talks about the WHIGs as "a conspiracy theorist," you know, that group that tends to have interesting theories about tinfoil-hatted gray aliens abducting Lee Harvey Oswald's twin from the grassy knoll.
In any case, we're in total agreement that the media has been extremely deficient in telling the story of the White House Iraq Group, and that Congress (except for a couple of members) has abdicated its constitutional responsibility to question the actions and lies of this White House.

--True Blue Liberal

WHIG of the Week -- I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby , Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney and the First Indicted WHIG on this First Day of Fitzmas

2005-10-28T13:13:00.000-04:00

On the first day of Fitzmas, the grand jury gave to us ...
one Scooter on crutches (why did Dick hobble him with a lead pipe?)

Isn't it bad enough that he was named after Phil Rizzuto and that this is his view in the mirror every morning, and then he has to make daily genuflections to the man who makes Mike Myers' fictional Dr. Evil look like Mother Teresa? If it weren't for the whole illegal invasion of Iraq thing, you might almost feel sorry for him.

Who's next?

Are you able to sleep on Fitzmas Eve?

2005-10-27T14:45:00.000-04:00

Or do you find yourself tossing and turning with excitement and anticipation?

Will you be satisfied with just a turdblossom and scooter pie under the Fitzmas tree?

Or is your little heart set on a dick and a chimp?

"True Pretenses", or, the measured right-wing response to the call for Congressional inquiry into the actions of the White House Iraq Group

2005-10-27T11:08:00.000-04:00

I haven't been able to find anything written on the Right about the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), and for good reason. No publicity about the Group can be good for the Right's arguments about war aims. This blog entry is the very first thing that I've found written anywhere on the Right side of the internets about the group that gave this blog its raison d'être.

First, of course, is the typical Rovian ad hominem attack on your attacker as shown in the title of this blog posting: Conservatives Are Always Right :: Socialist Anti-American Pansy Demands Inquiry into "WHIG". After more obligatory name-calling about the "Socialist, anti-American, pro-bin Laden pansy who is incapable of any kind of rational thought or comprehension" (a.k.a. Dennis Kucinich), Mr/Ms Conservativesarealwaysright quotes from the Wikipedia definition of WHIG for the benefit of his/her readers ("... One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the US, including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud'"), and dismisses attacks on the group with this gem:

"That's it. That's the problem: A group worked to drive support for the Iraq war based on true pretenses." [emphasis added]

To which I would add a helpful quote from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10e):

pretense, or pretence \\ n (15c) 1: a claim made or implied; esp : one not supported by fact 2 a : mere ostentation : PRETENTIOUSNESS {confuse dignity with pomposity and ~ --Bennett Cerf} b : a pretentious act or assertion 3 : an inadequate or insincere attempt to attain a certain condition or quality 4 : professed rather than real intention or purpose : PRETEXT {was there under under false ~s} 5 : MAKE-BELIEVE, FICTION 6 : false show : SIMULATION {saw through his ~ of indifference}

Pretenses have never been truer than the pretenses of the White House Iraq Group.

True Blue Liberal

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Kucinich;Plamegate

Another Congressman (one not named Kucinich or Conyers) is on the case of the White House Iraq Group

2005-10-26T10:22:00.000-04:00

Jerrold Nadler has this press release on his website:

In light of recent developments in the CIA leak investigation and other recent revelations, Congressman Jerrold Nadler today called for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to expand his investigation to include a criminal investigation to examine whether the President, the Vice President, and members of the White House Iraq Group conspired to deliberately deceive Congress into authorizing the war in Iraq. [...]
It is a crime to lie to Congress under several federal statutes. Congressman Nadler requested that Special Counsel Fitzgerald follow the leads he has already discovered and broaden his investigation to include charges of lying to Congress. In his letter to Acting Deputy Attorney General McCallum asking for a broadening of Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s investigation, Nadler cited the President’s infamous reference to African Uranium in the 2003 State of the Union Address, reports of the White House Iraq Group’s singular mission to sell the war at all costs, assertions made in the “Downing Street Memo,” and reporters’ own accounts of media manipulation. [...]

Now if we can only get Jerry Nadler's hometown paper, The New York Times, to pick up one of these press releases and talk about the White House Iraq Group in its pages. Today's search now turns up one more reference in a letter to the editor, but the WHIG has still not been mentioned in a news story in "The Paper of Record" (note to future historians: look somewhere other than the pages of the Grey Lady for "history's first draft" of the Bush II years).

--true blue liberal

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Nadler;Plamegate;downing street memo

Click here to urge your Representative to co-sponsor the WHIG Resolution of Inquiry

2005-10-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

Click the heading or the image to send a message to your representative about the Dennis Kucinich Resolution of Inquiry, or click here to read more at afterdowningstreet.org.

Please spread the word! Maybe even The New York Times will finally get the message that the White House Iraq Group is actually a news story, and that some of us actually still care about the fact that a war was started for base reasons with false information and is still being carried out in our names.

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Kucinich;Plamegate

Fitzgerald launches official website

2005-10-21T14:29:00.000-04:00

Dan Froomkin reports this afternoon that Pat Fitzgerald had just opened up his own website on the Department of Justice site with lots of room for more official documents (indictments?). I've added a permanent link to the site on the Whiggate Update sidebar.

Kucinich Uses Resolution Of Inquiry To Demand Documents From White House Iraq Group

2005-10-21T12:12:00.000-04:00

Kucinich Uses House Procedure To Demand Documents From White House Iraq Group
Kucinich Uses Resolution Of Inquiry To Demand Documents From White House Group That Developed Strategy To “Sell” War To The Public And Press

Washington, Oct 20 - Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) today introduced a Resolution of Inquiry to demand the White House turn over all white papers, minutes, notes, emails or other communications kept by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).

“This group, comprised of the President and Vice President’s top aides, was critical in selling the Administration’s case for war,” stated Kucinich. “We now know that the Administration hyped intelligence and misled the American public and Congress in their effort to ‘sell’ the war. After over 1,900 American troops have been killed in Iraq, it is long past time for this Congress to ask serious questions about WHIG and its role in the lead up to the war.”

A Resolution of Inquiry is a rare House procedure used to obtain documents from the Executive Branch. Under House rules, Kucinich’s resolution is referred to committee, and action must be taken in committee within 14 legislative days.

“For two-and-a-half years Congress has sat on the sidelines neglecting its oversight responsibility when it has come to Iraq,” continued Kucinich. “We owe it to the American people to hold this Administration accountable and to find out the truth.”

Well, we know how far the GOP (rhymes with slop) Overlords in Congress will let this resolution advance, but thank you Congressman Kucinich, for getting this on the record.

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Kucinich;Plamegate

Pitt's "Diary of a Plamegate Junkie" sounds a lot like the Diary of a Whiggate Junkie

2005-10-20T13:44:00.000-04:00

The only thing that would change slightly from the William Rivers Pitt "Diary of a Plamegate Junkie" and this WHIGgate junkie's diary (other than the fact that mine begins much earlier in the morning) is the 8:13am entry.

His 8:13 am - Pull up New York Times web site, scan for news of Fitzgerald indictment.

becomes

My 8:13 am - Pull up New York Times web site, fruitlessly search their database for any mention of the words "White House Iraq Group" in their correct sequence.

Otherwise, he describes my day (and the daze of millions of others) fairly accurately.

Source sez Judy was a WHIG || New York Daily News has better sources on WHIG than the New American Pravda (aka the NYT)

2005-10-20T08:22:00.000-04:00

If you want to really find out what went wrong at the New York Times, don't waste your time reading 10,000-word apologias in The Grey Lady. The New York Daily News explains it all for you in one sentence at the end of a snappy little article in yesterday's paper:
Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.
So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.
One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.
The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.
Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.
"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.
"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.
Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.
"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Official Newspaper of the WHIGs masquerading as the bastion of "The Liberal Media" (and that will henceforth be known as the New American Pravda), still has yet to mention the words "White House Iraq Group" or "WHIG" (in its modern context) in its news pages. Only Frank Rich's column of last Sunday broke their embargo on the name of the group that controlled their pre-invasion coverage of mythical so-called "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (a combination of words for which you will find 7,865 Times articles, not that they're trying to scare anyone, or do the WHIG's dirty work).

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;New York Daily News;Plamegate;Judy Miller;New York Times

A Turncoat Among the WHIGs? ( New York Daily News challenges that big unwieldy thing filled with Tiffany's ads for news leadership in Gotham)

2005-10-18T10:21:00.000-04:00

New York Daily News
- 18 October 2005

"Cheney may be target of probe"

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK, THOMAS M. DeFRANK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU:
"[...]At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.
In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.
Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.
'They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that,' a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.
Cheney was questioned last year by prosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.[...]"

The White House Iraq Group still hasn't been mentioned in Judy Miller's paper outside of Frank Rich's groundbreaking column on Sunday (would they let him write directly about the Times' conflicts of interest in this story?). Plus, the Times' Washington Bureau writers wouldn't know how to use the word "honcho" in a sentence, and they certainly wouldn't demean the standard response of an official government spokesthing by calling it "canned".
There are times when the Times' sober politesse is totally uncalled for.
If the tabloids smell blood in the water this could be fun ...

Separated at Birth? Casting begins for the Big WHIG Flick!

2005-10-18T07:53:00.000-04:00

You need to see this picture.

In times like these, maybe facts are not neutral

2005-10-17T22:50:00.000-04:00

Remember when the Downing Street Memo went from being ignored by the rightwingnuts to being routinely attacked by them as a forgery (without, of course, having any evidence other than their own repetitions to support that assertion)?
This note that has just appeared on the White House Iraq Group article in Wikipedia shows that we may finally be reaching the same tipping point again (I know it's probably a little schadenfreudistic of me, and certainly far from neutral, but I love watching wingnuts squirm):
The neutrality of this article is disputed.

U.S. Newswire : "Mr. Bush, Tear Down That Stone Wall..." : The DNC jumps on the WHIGgate bandwagon

2005-10-17T16:27:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the DNC's short summary of the WHIG involvement in "Plamegate"

"[...]WHAT AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW

What role did Vice President Cheney play in the conspiracy to out Plame and discredit Administration critics? Did Libby, Rove or other WHIG members tell Bush or Cheney their plans for dealing with Wilson's criticisms? When will President Bush keep his promise to hold Rove and Libby accountable for their actions?

95 DAYS -- Since The American Public Learned That A White House Official With Security Clearance Leaked The Identity Of A Covert CIA Operative.[...]"

The "W" Word finally sees print in the Paper of Record

2005-10-17T08:19:00.000-04:00

I've had no access to a computer or a phone for the last three days, so of course it was during this time that traffic on Whiggate Update decided to jump from an average of 5-6 to an average of 200-300 visitors a day, but more importantly, it was over this weekend that the "W" word finally received its first mention in the pages of the The New York Times. And, of course, by "W" word I don't mean Dubya (which, of course, begins with a "D"), I mean White House Iraq Group and its increasingly more well-known acronym, WHIG. Frank Rich's Sunday Opinion piece, "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby" jumped at me when I opened The Week in Review section of yesterday's paper, with the WHIG word not only prominent in the text, but in the sidebar. It was everything that their boring front page coverage of "who told Judy Miller what when" was not. Without getting bogged down in the details that sap the life and drama from these crimes, Frank Rich brought us back to the bigger story of how this is not the story of bob novak and judy miller and matt cooper, no matter how fascinating I'm sure they find themselves. This is the story of a war planned in secret and sold with false "facts" and talking points to the American public and the world through a gullible embedded press corpse. It's interesting that the two people on the Times staff who most clearly and most regularly see through the lies of our Leaders in Washington are not the embedded reporters and editors who are privileged to be on a first name basis with Scooter and Karl, but an economics professor, Paul Krugman, and a theater critic, Frank Rich (both of whom are muzzled from the vast majority of internauts by this idiotic new Times Select filter, which blocks their columns from those of us who refuse to spend a cent on internet content -- but this one is available at truthout.org).

Thank you Frank for uttering the magic words in the Times. I hope that thousands of lesser writers are shamed into following your lead.

--True Blue Liberal

WHIG of the Week, Vice President of Secret Locations, Richard "Dick" Cheney

2005-10-13T22:37:00.000-04:00

(Don't let those sweet puppy-dog eyes fool you!)

Raw Story has just posted a great up-to-date chronology of White House Iraq Group (WHIG) activities with information about the current status of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the group. Raw Story is not the first place that I've heard these leaks about Fitzgerald's interest in Cheney's involvement in the Plame leak investigation, but it's the first place that I've seen such a close association of his name with the little group that gave this blog its name and its raison d'être, a little group run by his boy Libby out of his office. It's the best link I've seen to suggest that Dr. Evil seems once again to be the man behind the curtain controlling the actions of lesser mortals. Read the whole chronology in "Vice President's role in outing of CIA agent under examination, sources close to prosecutor say ", by Jason Leopold, but here's the meat of the story about "Dick":

[...] Two officials close to Fitzgerald told RAW STORY they have seen documents obtained from the White House Iraq Group which state that Cheney was present at several of the group's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration “twisted” prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be.
Cheney was interviewed by the FBI surrounding the leak in 2004. According to the New York Times, Cheney was asked whether he knew of any concerted effort by White House aides to name Ms. Wilson.
Sources close to the investigation have also confirmed that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to determine Vice President Cheney's role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson, more specifically, if Cheney ordered the leak.
Those close to Fitzgerald say they have yet to uncover any evidence that suggests Cheney ordered the leak or played a role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson. Still, the sources said they are investigating claims that Cheney may have been involved based on his attendance at meetings of the Iraq group.
Previous reports indicate Cheney was intimately involved with the framing of the Iraq war.
[...]Wilson’s allegations threatened to chip away at the credibility of individuals such as Cheney, who, in dozens of speeches just a few months prior had said that Iraq was dangerously close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. It also threatened to ruin Miller’s credibility. It was then that Administration officials started to discredit Wilson.
Now Fitzgerald is trying to find out whether Cheney was involved.

Technorati tags:White House Iraq Group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Patrick Fitzgerald;Plamegate;Rovegate;Cheney

Still not a single word that's "Fit to Print" about the White House Iraq Group or WHIG

2005-10-13T09:10:00.000-04:00

After quoting yesterday's WSJ article, Dan Froomkin writes in WaPo's White House Briefing:

What Was the White House Iraq Group?

Remarkably little has been written about this critically important assemblage.

He goes on to point to and quote from the key Post article by Gellman & Pincus of 10 Aug 2003, but there is still not a single mention of this "critically important assemblage" in America's Paper of Record.

We'll keep checking, and let you know the minute the situation changes.

Is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's boss the true target of interest in the Plame investigation??

2005-10-12T14:40:00.000-04:00

The Huffington Post is reporting that Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal "... are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name."

WHIGgate gathering steam everywhere (except in Judith Miller's "Paper of Record")

2005-10-12T09:52:00.000-04:00

Here's Josh Marshall today in Talking Points Memo saying exactly (and succinctly) what we have been saying since this blog started:

If Karl Rove goes down in this investigation it'll be a disaster for the president, both in terms of the damage occasioned by such a high-level White House indictment and, frankly, because he needs the guy like most of us need legs.
But this WHIG thing is a whole 'nother level of hurt.
This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war -- the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out.

In TPM and The Huffington Post today, they are also quoting that subscription-only capitalist rag (DON'T GIVE THEM A CENT) The Wall Street Journal, which runs this paragraph in an article appearing there today:

"Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson's claims."

So now even the Wall Street Journal is out in front of The New York Times. Another search of newyorktimes.com today continues to show exactly zero hits for the words "White House Iraq Group" in their correct order. Will the fact that the WSJ has now joined the LAT and WaPo in talking about the WHIG finally shame the NYT into doing the same?

(update 10:33am -- Howard Kurtz's Media Notes today, "The NYT Pinata," talks about the same Times silence in more depth, starting with this line: "Everyone seems to be beating up on the New York Times these days. Not so much for what it's written, but for what it hasn't, in the Judy/Scooter/Karl/Valerie imbroglio." And remember kids, it's easier to to say "WHIGgate" than "Judy/Scooter/Karl/Valerie imbroglio"?)

(Thanks to CP for pointing out JM on the WHIG in TPM)
Technorati tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;patrick fitzgerald;Plamegate;Rovegate

Are these indictments going to be big enough to make Tom DeLay giggle with glee about once again having his scandals pushed from the headlines?

2005-10-06T12:32:00.000-04:00

Click here for TPMCafe today || "22 indictments in Plame leak case?"
The rumors of imminent action by Patrick Fitzgerald in the Rovegate / Plamegate / Whiggate case have been all over The Internets late yesterday and early today. If there really are 22 indictments, how many of the indictees will be members of the White House Iraq Group (and will the New York Times finally be forced to mention the existence of that group in print?)? Is it possible, as some gleeful rumormongers have hinted, that even Cheney and Bush will be implicated along with their faithful underlings?

We've got a catchy name for your conspiracy right here!

2005-10-03T15:26:00.000-04:00

"Role of Rove, Libby in CIA Leak Case Clearer"
by Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus,
Washington Post, 2 October 2005 :

[...] But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.
Lawyers involved in the case interviewed for this report agreed to talk only if their names were not used, citing Fitzgerald's request for secrecy.
One source briefed on Miller's account of conversations with Libby said it is doubtful her testimony would on its own lead to charges against any government officials. But, the source said, her account could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose.[...]

If Pat Fitzgerald is looking for a list of possible conspirators among "a group of senior Bush administration officials," he could do worse than starting HERE, and if you're looking for an overarching name for this conspiracy, might we suggest THIS ONE? (The outlines of this story might soon become so obvious that even the New York Times will finally be forced to print the words "White House Iraq Group" in their proper sequence.)

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;patrick fitzgerald;Plamegate

Honorary WHIG Judith Miller released from jail so she can testify against her friends

2005-09-29T23:27:00.000-04:00

Here's an excerpt of The ("Liberal") New York Times reporting on one of its own tonight:

[...]Ms. Miller was freed after spending more than 12 weeks in jail, during which she refused to cooperate with the [Plame leak] inquiry. Her decision to testify was made after she had obtained what she described as a waiver offered "voluntarily and personally" by a source who said she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality she had made to him. Ms. Miller said the source had made clear that he genuinely wanted her to testify.
That source was I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff*, according to people who have been officially briefed on the case. Ms. Miller met with Mr. Libby on July 8, 2003, and talked with him by telephone later that week, they said. [...]

*"And [The New York Times did not add] Mr. Libby is of course a key member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that in August and September of 2002 used Judith Miller and this newspaper to lend credibility to their claims about nonexistent Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction" as part of their creation of false rationales for war. Mr. Libby's boss, Richard "Dick" Cheney, was then able to point to this New York Times reporting about "WMDs" to back up the story that the WHIGs were making up out of whole cloth. We sincerely apologize for our role in these crimes against humanity."

The simple combination of four words "White House Iraq Group" has yet to appear anywhere within the pages of the New York Times (at least as revealed by a search of nytimes.com). When the "Paper of Record" finally catches up with the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and Newsday and CNN and Fox News and others and decides that the news about the White House Iraq Group is "Fit to Print", then WHIGGATE Update and True Blue Liberal will report that momentous event to you.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Judith Miller

"Turkish Women Blast [ex-WHIG] Karen Hughes With Iraq War Criticism" -- The Washington Post

2005-09-28T16:26:00.000-04:00

Click Here for the article in today's Washington Post, but here's an excerpt:

[...]Six of the eight women who spoke at the session, held in Ankara, the capital, focused on the Iraq war.
"War makes the rights of women completely erased and poverty comes after war -- and women pay the price," said Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish women's rights activist. Vargun denounced the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, the activist mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in front of the White House Monday at an antiwar protest.
Hughes, looking increasingly pained, defended the decision to invade Iraq as a difficult and wrenching moment for President Bush, but necessary to protect America.
"You're concerned about war, and no one likes war," she said. But, she said, "to preserve the peace sometimes my country believes war is necessary." She also asserted that women are faring much better in Iraq than under the rule of deposed president Saddam Hussein.
"War is not necessary for peace," shot back Feray Salman, a human rights advocate. She said countries should not try to impose democracy through war, adding that "we can never, ever export democracy and freedom from one country to another."

It's funny (or not so funny) how residents of the Bush White House Bubble and Echo Chamber® only hear the truth when they leave the country and are forced to listen to people other than each other (or their puppet masters, "Dick" and "Don"). I wonder if any of her Turkish questioners knew that this new State Department Spokesmodel was, despite her Soccer Mom persona, a very key member of the team that brought the Bush Regime to power and of the White House Iraq Group that sold this war to the American people (and frightened Democratic congresspeople) with false information about WMD's and mushroom clouds and rosy scenarios about flower-throwing Iraqis and oil-financed war bills?

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Karen Hughes

Got Plans for the Weekend?

2005-09-23T11:15:00.000-04:00

Honorary WHIG of the Week, Former FEMA Director (and current war profiteer) Joe Allbaugh

2005-09-08T12:20:00.000-04:00

No, Joseph Allbaugh is not an honorary WHIG of the Week so we could run this picture and make the obligatory joke about his hairline being a disaster area (though he is living proof that looks don't count if you want to be counted in among the in crowd at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), or to point out the fact that his old boss obviously had a crush on him.

He and his college roommate and current FEMA chief Mike "Brownie" Brown are in the news this week because of the massive failures of FEMA in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but it's not even that connection that this blog is interested in, though it is the reason he came to our attention.

We're more struck by how he's just one more piece of the tight inbred nexus of war dreamers, planners, sellers, and profiteers who gave us the current quagmire in Iraq that will still be a disaster long after we're celebrating Fat Tuesday again in the Big Easy. Here's Josh Marshall writing in The Hill on October 1, 2003 (around the time we realized that the "Mission" was not quite as "Accomplished" as we had been told by the guy dressed up like a Naval Aviator for his aircraft carrier photo opportunity).

The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003=The Hill.com
[...] Remember Joe Allbaugh? He’s part of what they used to call President Bush’s Iron Triangle — Allbaugh, Hughes and Rove.
In chronological order, he was Bush’s chief of staff when Bush was governor of Texas, his campaign manager when he ran for president and his Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director after that.
So you could say they were pretty close.
A couple weeks before the beginning of the war, Allbaugh left his job at FEMA to get into the business of securing pricey Iraqi reconstruction contracts for high-flying clients.
Allbaugh’s new firm is called New Bridge Strategies. But it’s actually an outgrowth of Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. [...]

Haley Barbour, of course, is now the Governor of Katrina-ravaged Mississippi. Surely a coincidence, but a coincidence that would have some poetic justice if it weren't for the human lives lost and ruined.

Marshall's article goes on to talk about connections between Iraq War II profiteers and others with close WHIG connections like the Chalabi family and Pentagon Iraq Group (PIG) leader Doug Feith. The real reason for giving Allbaugh this honor on this dishonorable week for FEMA is because the membership in the White House Iraq Group may not be limited to those names in the few published accounts about the group. Why wouldn't the third leg of Bush's unattractive Iron Triangle be privy to the actions of the other leg, WHIG Hughes, and the hypotenuse, WHIG Rove? The fact that Allbaugh attempted to sell those connections to make a buck between the Tigris and Euphrates (when he should have been concentrating on the Mississippi) is probably not a crime in Bushite Corporate America®. But it probably should be.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;FEMA;Allbaugh

Please contribute to Katrina's victims through the NAACP Disaster Relief Fund

2005-09-03T11:41:00.000-04:00

Click here to give your contribution for Katrina relief through the NAACP. George W. Bush will have trouble taking credit for their aid, since he is still the only President in their history not to have addressed the organization.

WHIG of the Week -- Andrew H. Card, Jr. , White House Chief of Staff and Product Marketing Expert

2005-08-19T11:54:00.000-04:00

Andrew H. "Andy" Card, Jr., automobile industry lobbyist turned chief assistant to the CEO of BUSHCHENEYCo, Inc. (click for official bio here), could very well be remembered in the history texts and quotation anthologies of our future (assuming, optimists that we are, that we have a future) for two things: 1) the interruption of his boss's reading of My Pet Goat pictured to the right, and 2) the fact that he said to Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times that "you don't introduce new products in August." That quote certainly seems relevant to this blog, which is getting a slow start in its first summer month of operation, but still planning to get the term "Whiggate" injected into the political dialogue of the nation in September. The article that included Andy Card's famous nugget of marketing wisdom is also a good recap of the way the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) worked in July and August of 2002 to implement the objectives of the Downing Street Memo (DSM) in the cynical runup to September 11 and 12. Though WHIG wasn't mentioned by name in this front page article (the mention of the group still has yet to make its first appearance in the Times!), three of its other prominent members are mentioned (Rove, Hughes, and Rice) in this early report on the most cynical product launch of the 21st century.

Click here for the full text on SF Indymedia for free, or here if you want to pay to read the whole thing for a fee from the New York Times, or just keep scrolling down if you want to read a lenghy block from this key reference:

"BUSH AIDES SET STRATEGY TO SELL POLICY ON IRAQ
Saturday, September 7, 2002 Pg. A1, A6

By Elizabeth Bumiller

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 – White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

The rollout of the strategy this week, they said, was planned long before President Bush’s vacation in Texas last month. It as not hastily concocted, they insisted, after some prominent Republicans began to raise doubts about moving against Mr. Hussein and administration officials made contradictory statements about the need for weapons inspectors in Iraq.

The White House decided, they said, that even with the appearance of disarray it was still more advantageous to wait until after Labor Day to launch their plan.

“From a marketing point of view,” said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, “you don’t introduce new products in August.”

A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush’s speech on Sept. 11 to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.

“Everybody felt that was a moment that Americans wanted to hear from him,” said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political advisor. Sept. 11 will also be a time, Mr. Rove said, “to seize the moment to make clear what lies ahead.”

Toward that end, in June the White House picked Ellis Island in New York Harbor, not Governors Island, as the place where President Bush is to deliver his Sept. 11 address to the nation. Both spots were considered, White House advisors said, but the television camera angles were more spectacular from Ellis Island, where the Statue of Liberty will be seen aglow behind Mr. Bush.

“We had made a decision to that this would be a compelling story either place,” said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. “We sent a team out to go look and they said, ‘This is a better shot,’ and we said O.K.”

In the same way, Mr. Bush’s Sept. 11 remarks, about 10 minutes in length, are to serve as the emotional precursor for a tougher speech about Iraq that the president is to deliver to the United Nations General Assembly the following day.

[***]
White House officials said they began planning more intensively for the Iraq rollout in July, even as Mr. Bush was busy responding to the summer’s corporate scandals. Advisors consulted the Congressional calendar to figure out the best time for Iraq hearings while Ms. Hughes, even as she was driving back to Texas, discussed with Mr. Bush the outlines of his Sept. 11 speech.

By August, with Congress out of town and the United Nations not convening until September, White House officials decided to wait out the month, even as final planning continued by phone between advisors in Washington and at Mr. Bush’s ranch in Texas.

“There was a deliberate sense that this was not the time to engage in his process,” Mr. Rove said. “The thought was in August the president is sort of on vacation.” [...]

"Sort of" like now, and every other August of his pampered life. Let's hope they don't have any new products planned for rollout in two weeks.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Iraq;Andrew Card

Who is this "Senior Official Involved in Policy Since the 2003 Invasion"? Could s/he be a WHIG?

2005-08-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

"U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq"
from The Washington Post, 14 Aug 05:

'What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,' said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. 'We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.'

Think Progress lists 21 Administration officials implicated in the Plame leak --- Look at all those WHIGs!

2005-08-12T22:22:00.000-04:00

Study and bookmark this database at http://www.thinkprogress.org/leak-scandal.

Living without it over the next few months would be like going to a baseball game without a scorecard, or an opera without a libretto!

WHIG of the Week -- Stephen J. Hadley, National Security Advisor and member of the White House Iraq Group, meets with Cindy Sheehan

2005-08-11T12:12:00.000-04:00

We summed up last week's WHIG of the week with the transcript of a conversation between Jim Wilkinson and a woman from Texas named Brenda in which all the White House Iraq Group talking points were ably parroted. This week our WHIG of the week was the presidential surrogate sent out to placate the woman who is being called "... the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement," by Rev. Lennox Yearwood, leader of the Hip Hop Caucus. "She's tired, fed up and she's not going to take it anymore, and so now we stand with her." That quote comes from a story on CNN.com as does this summary of her meeting with Stephen J. "Steve" Hadley.

CNN.com - Soldier's mom protests near Bush's ranch - Aug 6, 2005

Sheehan, 48, didn't get to see Bush, but did talk about 45 minutes with national security adviser Steve Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin, who went out to hear her concerns.

Appreciative of their attention, yet undaunted, Sheehan said she planned to continue her roadside vigil, except for a few breaks, until she gets to talk to Bush. Her son, Casey, 24, was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004. He was an Army specialist, a Humvee mechanic.

"They (the advisers) said we are in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the world's a better place with Saddam gone and that we're making the world a safer place with what we're doing over there," Sheehan said in a telephone interview after the meeting. [emphasis added]

Compare that summary of Whig Hadley's remarks above to Whig Wilkinson's remarks quoted last week.

Here's a short first-hand, and slightly more opinionated, account of the meeting taken from a post by TXSharon on Daily Kos:

Like something out of a movie, a caravan of suburbans, vans, and cars swooped upon us and with synchronized precision, SS agents got out of the vehicles and surrounded us. It was eerie, frightening, and thrilling! Two men who appeared quite important walked up to Cindy. Stephen Hadley, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs played good cop and sat on the pavement looking up at Cindy. Joseph W. Hagin, Deputy Chief of Staff was the bad cop so he sat in one of the chairs we had brought. They went through the same old trite bullshit party line spiel we have all heard a million times! The only problem is that Cindy is fully informed, intelligent, quick-witted, calm and focused, and disarming in her honesty and directness. Effortlessly, she made them look as foolish as they are!

Hadley reminded her that the Iraqis could now vote. She showed him Casey's pictures, told him that she had give birth to him after carrying him for nine months. That she had nursed him for over a year. She said a few more things about Casey then asked Hadley if he thought she had gone through all that so Iraqis could vote. She cried just a little and everyone was quite touched. We applauded for her several times during their meeting.

The Rosa Parks analogy might not be as farfetched as it first appears. Rosa Parks hasn't always been "ROSA PARKS." She wasn't always a heroine of American history. She was a woman who wanted to take a seat on the bus. She started her life as one of millions of African Americans subjected to apartheid regulations that many white Americans saw as reasonable, or at least traditional and acceptable. She never could have anticipated how she would become a symbol for millions because of her ability to show a clear injustice in simple terms. And the White House Iraq Group, with all its abilities to fix intelligence, stay on message, catapult propaganda, and create media echo chambers, may be no match for one mother who wants to know why her son died.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Hadley;Cindy Sheehan

A humorous metaphorical interpretation of the workings of the White House Iraq Group, or How Many Bushies Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?

2005-08-11T08:48:00.000-04:00

This was in my e-mail this morning. For the purposes of Whiggate Update, we could just as well call it How Many WHIGs Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb, but to honor the initial creative vision of the original anonymous jokester, I'll just cut and paste it here without edits:

HOW MANY BUSHIES ARE NEEDED TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB?

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed.

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either responsible for changing the light bulb or for darkness.

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Haliburton for the new light bulb.

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, throwing the switch that turns on a light illuminating a banner that reads " Lightbulb Change Accomplished", whether or not it has been changed.

7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally in the dark.

8. One to viciously smear #7.

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light bulb changing policy all along.

10. And finally one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

tags:bush jokes;WHIG

It's not too early to start promoting the events of September 24-26 in DC. If Cindy can go to Crawford in summer, we can march on the Mall in the fall

2005-08-10T23:29:00.000-04:00

Around other blogs on this, Cindy Sheehan, week, I've seen some commenters questioning what they can do to support her, or to show their opposition to the war that killed her son (and the sons and daughters of many other American, British, Polish, Iraqi, Romanian ... mothers). Someone even mentioned the possibility of organizing a massive march on Washington, as if they didn't know that this one is already in the advanced planning stages .

This march against the war has been in the preparation stages by United for Peace and Justice for awhile, but the word doesn't seem to be spreading quickly enough.
This group did a wonderful job on the major marches in New York City right before the current war began on February 15, 2003 in the neighborhood of the UN, and a month later, after the war began, marching from Herald Square to Washington Square Park. Hundreds of thousands of us have wonderful memories of both those days (even if we were ignored by the media, and by a President who called us a focus group unworthy of his attention).

Even if you can't make it yourself, you can help them spread the word on your blogs and webpages and emails. There are banners here. Please consider adding one to your sidebar for the next month and a half.

crossposted from True Blue Liberal blog

Aluminum tubes, Judith Miller, and the White House Iraq Group's successful creation of a media echo chamber (& a war that has killed 1,825 Americans)

2005-08-09T20:28:00.000-04:00

I don't want to give you long excerpts to excuse you from reading this whole article by James Moore from The Huffington Post, "Judy and the Little Tubes of Terror", but I can't resist giving you a couple of paragraphs as an appetizer.

The timing was a thing of pure political beauty. President George W. Bush was only a few days away from speaking to the United Nations’ General Assembly about Iraq’s renewed efforts to acquire banned weaponry. And, in a month, the president was going to Congress to seek a resolution approving of a war against Iraq. A Sunday morning story, September 8, 2002, in the New York Times made the U.N. speech and the congressional debate much easier for the White House.
Under the headline, “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” a 3603 word story by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller detailed the administration’s case against Saddam Hussein related to weapons of mass destruction. America was about to be scared. Citing “administration officials,” “Iraqi defectors,” and “intelligence sources,” Gordon and Miller wrote that Iraq had attempted to buy the type of aluminum tubes needed for the construction of a gas centrifuge to develop nuclear materials.
[...]
To create the beginnings of war hysteria and nuclear phobia, the White House Iraq Group had planned to immediately execute a tactic that created a media echo chamber. The same Sunday morning that the tubes story was splattered on the front page of the Times, the Bush administration dispatched the vice president, the national security advisor, and the secretary of state, to elevate the buzz on the network talk shows. A false story had been planted, was given credibility by a leading publication, and then the people who benefited from the one-sided information appeared on national television to corroborate the value of their bad evidence. [...]

Please read it all! I'm also adding this article as a reference to the sidebar of Whiggate Update because it's such a great summary of how this Group operated.

But why hasn't Judith Miller's Liberal Paper of Record, as an atonement for its indispensible role as a dupe or an accomplice in the actions of the White House Iraq Group's echo chamber, yet mentioned the White House Iraq Group or WHIG even once? Does the lack of a single hit on their Website of Record mean that the White House Iraq Group never really existed? Doesn't it deserve at least a few drops of ink after all the WHIG lies about aluminum tubes that the Grey Lady was duped into printing? We'll keep checking, and we'll update you the minute they finally break their silence about their former employers.

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Judith Miller

WHIG of the Week -- James R. "Jim" Wilkinson, Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications and Presidential Propaganda Catapulter

2005-08-04T13:51:00.000-04:00

In the earliest versions of the Gilligan's Island theme song, the Professor and Mary Ann are dismissed in the phrase "... and the rest"; in any list of the members of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), two names, Nicholas E. Calio and James R. Wilkinson, fade against the prominence of Rove, Rice, Card, Hughes, and Matalin. Maybe I was too hasty in replacing their names with an et al. in the sidebar of Whiggate Update. Maybe their days of fame are still to come.
Our WHIG of the Week shows his qualifications as a team player in this Bullet Point Answer to a Bullet Point "Question" about Iraq during James R. "Jim" Wilkinson's "Ask the White House" session of February 6, 2004:

Brenda, from Fort Worth, Tx writes:

Something to ponder... Osama Bin Laden attacked the United States and killed many innocent victims on 911 without the use of weapons of mass destruction or chemical warfare.

That act cost the United States and it's citizens billions of dollars, not to mention the families that lost loved ones on that horrible day.

With that memory, how can Americans be upset with President Bush's decision to pursue Saddam Hussain? September 11 proved to Americans that it does not take weapons of mass destruction or chemical warfare to cripple the United States.

Mr. Hussain has the proven ability to gather forces to pursue deadly interests in the United States and has continued to be a threat to our safety.

I commend Mr. Bush's decision to pursue and capture Mr. Hussain.

I am anxious to see the day that Bin Laden is brought to justice. Until then, it is nice to know that we finally have a president that is making a positive impact on the safety of the United States.

Blessings, Brenda Lungrin

Jim Wilkinson

Brenda, thanks for your question[sic].

As President Bush said after September 11, the war on terror is a different kind of war against a different kind of enemy. And as the President said today, he will not take risks with the lives and security of the American people by assuming the goodwill of dictators.

The decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision. September 11 taught us that we must confront threats to our Nation before it is too late.

Saddam repeatedly defied the international community -- ignoring the demand of the United Nations and 17 UN resolutions.

He had large quantities of WMD that he failed to account for.

Saddam stonewalled inspectors, played cat and mouse games with the UN, and then threw the inspectors out of Iraq.

Saddam used WMD on his own people and against his neighbors.

Saddam was a threat to the stability of the region, and a threat to his neighbors.

War was President Bush's last option. That's why he exhausted diplomatic options, to include giving Saddam Hussein one more warning, and yet another UN resolution. Given this final chance, Saddam chose defiance, and he chose war.

Saddam Hussein and his regime were a threat to our nation, and our nation is safer with his regime out of power and with Saddam sitting in a jail cell.

Removing his regime was the right decision then, and it is the right decision now.

It was their story in September of 2002 when they launched their new product (and only the WHIGs and their bosses knew for sure that they were lying), and it was their story in February 2004, even after everyone but "Brenda" from "Fort Worth" knew they were telling untruths. Big lies and corporate PowerPoint presentations require constant repetition ("Saddam stonewalled inspectors..", "He had a large quantity of WMD...","...our nation is safer with his regime out of power... ", "War was President Bush's last option.") and you have to give Jim Wilkinson a lot of credit for repeating these points as single-mindedly as his simple-minded boss who told us in a moment of candor, "... you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." Jim is a very consistent team player for the WHIGs. This particular "question" and answer is an archetype of all the public WHIG statements about the invasion of Iraq (wouldn't you love to know what they were saying in private? We know Patrick Fitzgerald would).
Here are a couple of actual questions. How much longer will the American people consent to being treated like idiots? Or can they continue to treat us like idiots as long as they want ... as long as they can keep us scared?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Wilkinson

The Raw Story Interview in which Ambassador Wilson ties the White House Iraq Group to the Plame leak and false intelligence about Iraq

2005-08-03T08:32:00.000-04:00

The Raw Story Interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson is worth reading in full, but here's the exchange most applicable to the purpose of this blog, linking the White House Iraq Group to fixing of intelligence mentioned in the Downing Street Memo, and to the criminal public exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson (in order to discredit the evidence that Ambassador Wilson found in Africa that cast doubt on their mushroom cloud fairy tales):

Ambassador Wilson:"...a meeting was held - sometime in March of 2003 - in the offices of the Vice President at which it was decided to do a "work up" on me. A work up means to run an intel op to glean all the information you can about me. My understanding is that at a minimum, [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby was at this meeting.
But in retrospect looking at this, the natural group [of people] who would meet to discuss something like this would be the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).

Raw Story: Right, and the group includes Karl Rove as part of that main group of six.

Wilson: Yes, that would include Rove. I believe it is Rove, Karen Hughes, Libby, and others.

Raw Story: Also: Andrew Card, Mary Matlin and James Wilkinson as well as others who advised then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley.

Wilson: That would be the natural group because they were constituted to spin the war, so they would be naturally the ones to try to deflect criticism. Now, some of those people would have very high security clearances....

Please read the whole interview between Larisa Alexandrovna and Joseph Wilson, because it reinforces a simple chronology of the events, and raises new questions about the possible roles of others, namely Judith Miller and John Bolton, in this affair.

TAGS:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Joseph Wilson

Another Hughes/Plame/WHIG article from March 2004

2005-08-01T09:08:00.000-04:00

Click here for a short Salon article from 29 March 2004 about our WHIG of the week and the links between the White House Iraq Group member Karen Hughes, the Fitzgerald subpoena of WHIG records, and the outing of Valerie Plame.
And as long as we're giving updates, we should point out the the words "White House Iraq Group" still elicit zero hits at the "liberal" New York Times website. We'll keep checking.

[update 8/2/05 @ 4:00pm: The link to the Salon article seems to be dead and I can't find an alternative link to it at the moment. WTF is the story with key WHIG documents going missing? The Washington Post article of 8/10/2003 comes and goes too, but the link to its Truthout copy seems to be stable.
update 8/3/05 @ 8:00am: The Salon links up above have been updated.]

WHIG of the Week -- Karen Hughes, our brand new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs

2005-07-29T08:46:00.000-04:00

Click here for the Buzzflash article:"Karen Hughes, Queen of the Spin-Doctors and Captain of the White House Smear Campaign", which has a short summary (with references) of her involvement in fulfilling the goals of the Downing Street Memo by helping to sell fixed Iraq intelligence and attacking war critics Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson.

But this week I guess we should wish her well in her new job. While fellow WHIGs Rove and Card and Libby and Hadley were getting raises this week, she was getting a new title:

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)

".... with no discussion and no debate ...." Thanks again Congress, for proving once more that it's not only the mainstream media that's at fault when it comes to sweeping the truth of our current crisis under the rug ...

crossposted at True Blue Liberal

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Karen Hughes

Whiggate Update. Were there members of the White House Iraq Group working outside of government, undercover in the press?

2005-07-28T14:47:00.000-04:00

And is it possible that one of these outside, informal members of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) is already in jail for her key role in the fixing of intelligence and selling of the current quagmire to the American public?

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 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]

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).

crossposted at True Blue Liberal

Tags:WHIG;WHIGgate;Judith Miller

Whiggate Update. Fitzgerald has been well aware of the importance of the White House Iraq Group since January 2004

2005-07-28T13:59:00.000-04:00

So where's the paper of record that carries all the news that's fit to print? If Newsday carried the following article about the grand jury subpoena's of WHIG meeting documents in March 2004, and the Washington Post ran the definitive article on WHIG in August 2003, why does a search of Judith Miller's paper show zero hits for the phrase "White House Iraq Group"? Could it just be that, as with the Downing Street Memo, the mainstream media are just a little behind the blogosphere in addressing a question that seems to have major importance for questions of war and peace and governmental truthfulness? Or could it be something else?

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?

Just asking,
True Blue Liberal

Check this space soon for news from Whiggate.org!

2005-07-27T15:00:00.000-04:00

This isn't a blog yet, but it will be a blog when "Rovegate" ends with Karl Rove's long-awaited frogmarch and we start asking which of the WHIGs will be the next in line in the amphibian parade from the White House. In the meantime, please go to the oft-updated True Blue Liberal blog.

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.

Won't this be fun?
True Blue Liberal

Tags:white house iraq group;WHIG;WHIGgate;Rovegate;Plamegate;Iraqgate;treasongate