What is the Deep Scandal?
It’s all coming to a head now. It looks like Cheney will have to resign and may face criminal charges. More will be known tomorrow.
It is rumored that the indictments that will be announced on Wednesday will have more to do with obstruction of justice and perjury than with outing an intelligence agent. Old hands who have lived through presidential scandals nod sagely and say things like this:
Some are claiming that the forgery of the Niger documents is what was being hidden in the Plame scandal. Certainly a serious crime, but one for which they must have had enough deniability.
Remember the extent to which Cheney blocked the release of notes from the energy policy meetings with energy industry leaders? The media claimed that Cheney was trying to cover up the fact that he wrote the energy policy on spec from the industry. But really, that was common knowledge and only shocking to the naïve. I suspect that what was being covered up was the promise Cheney made to the oil companies that he would find a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
It may be that the desperation that fueled Cheney to out Plame and incapacitate Brewster Jennings came out of fear that the CIA was on the trail of the Big Crime: 9/11. That is of course not to say that the CIA would ever bring the truth about 9/11, but they might have been able to use it for blackmail.
For a couple of differing perspectives on the role of the CIA and the Niger forgeries see Justin Raimondo and Xymphora. Raimondo takes it at face value that the documents were forged in consultation with the Neocons, but Xymphora thinks that the CIA, furious at Bush and Cheney, set the Neocons up by passing off poorly forged documents knowing that they would be snapped up. The Neocons fell into the trap and must be furious now.
It is rumored that the indictments that will be announced on Wednesday will have more to do with obstruction of justice and perjury than with outing an intelligence agent. Old hands who have lived through presidential scandals nod sagely and say things like this:
“As usual, it’s not the act itself but the cover up that brings someone down,” says retired political science professor George Harleigh, who worked in the Nixon administration. “It’s a sad lesson that those in power never learn.”I’m not sure that’s true, though. It may be that the cover-up is worse than the surface crime, but the cover-up is usually initiated to conceal much worse crimes that never reach the surface. The Kennedy assassination haunts Watergate the way the October Surprise, drug trafficking and who knows what else haunt Iran-Contra.
Some are claiming that the forgery of the Niger documents is what was being hidden in the Plame scandal. Certainly a serious crime, but one for which they must have had enough deniability.
Remember the extent to which Cheney blocked the release of notes from the energy policy meetings with energy industry leaders? The media claimed that Cheney was trying to cover up the fact that he wrote the energy policy on spec from the industry. But really, that was common knowledge and only shocking to the naïve. I suspect that what was being covered up was the promise Cheney made to the oil companies that he would find a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
It may be that the desperation that fueled Cheney to out Plame and incapacitate Brewster Jennings came out of fear that the CIA was on the trail of the Big Crime: 9/11. That is of course not to say that the CIA would ever bring the truth about 9/11, but they might have been able to use it for blackmail.
For a couple of differing perspectives on the role of the CIA and the Niger forgeries see Justin Raimondo and Xymphora. Raimondo takes it at face value that the documents were forged in consultation with the Neocons, but Xymphora thinks that the CIA, furious at Bush and Cheney, set the Neocons up by passing off poorly forged documents knowing that they would be snapped up. The Neocons fell into the trap and must be furious now.
posted by Donald Hunt at 9:33 PM
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