D.C. Madam Wants Washington Clients to Testify
Also on Palfrey’s list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials.
“I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever,” Palfrey told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross in an interview to be broadcast Friday on “20/20.” “I’ll bring in every last one of them in if necessary,” she said.
That has long been the standard of any scandal evolving procurement of escort services. Arrest the person that renders the service, but not the client especially when those clients are financially well off and have a certain level of power. “That’s very hypocritical,” she says. “Why aren’t these people under arrest? Why just me?”. Some have expressed frustration with ABC for not releasing the list. I’m not familiar with all the legal fine points regarding the public release of those names especially in advance of any formal charges, but it might be that releasing their names now might complicate legal action against them later. Little doubt that they will find their way in the public arena eventually.
Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro, David MacMichael, and W. Patrick Lang are right to tear into George Tenet and the way that Tenet allowed his desire to be a Bush Team player to interfere with his better judgment, but Tenet’s tenure is more accurately told in shades of grey rather then black and white. Pardon me from noting a bit of insight by a Republican. William Buckley writes in The Waning of the GOP
Meanwhile, George Tenet, former head of the CIA, has just published a book which seems to demonstrate that there was one part ignorance, one part bullheadedness, in the high-level discussions before war became policy. Mr. Tenet at least appears to demonstrate that there was nothing in the nature of a genuine debate on the question. What he succeeded in doing was aborting a speech by Vice President Cheney which alleged a Saddam/al Qaeda relationship which had not in fact been established.
It isn’t that Tenet now doubts the lethality of the terrorists. What he disputed was an organizational connection which argued for war against Iraq as if Iraq were a vassal state of al Qaeda.
Tenet’s view of events doesn’t stand out because of it’s surprising revelations, but because it collaborates the testimony of other insiders that have told the same story. Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
And what happened at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting is one of O’Neill’s most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O’Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as “Why Saddam?” and “Why now?” were never asked.
Then there was Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff Ex-Powell aide assails Bush’s foreign policy
But what he saw in the first Bush term “was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations, perturbations.”
“What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues.” He was equally unsparing of a top former Rumsfeld aide, Douglas Feith, saying, “Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.” Alluding to Defense Department tensions with the State Department following the Iraq invasion, Wilkerson said Feith had been “given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves.”
And remember national security expert Richard Clarke whom the Right worked overtime and Sundays trying to discredit, Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link?
Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
Of course the national debate, if one wants to call it that soon evolved into the notion that Bush and the Right had peered into their crystal ball and come up with some all encompassing counter-terror strategy that Iraq was part of and it was all just too complex for us mere thinking American to comprehend. So after Bush with the continuing help of his supporters opened the Iraq School for the Next Generation of Terrorists, it was and remains such a revolutionary and complicated approach to national security that the average American will never grasp its width and depth. There is a link between Saddam and Iraq, there is no link , its been a seesaw of lies and distortions of convenience Tony Snow Returns: ‘There Has Been No Attempt To Try To Link Saddam To 9/11?
Snow responded, “Wait a minute, Chris. The president has been saying exactly that all along. I don’t know what the headline is.” He insisted “there has been no attempt to try to link Saddam to September 11.”
Here’s Bush during his major Iraq policy speech, just prior to Congress’ vote on the Iraq authorization in Oct. 2002:
We know that Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy: the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.
It is not unusual at all to come across people on the net or in everyday conversation that still believes there was a connection solely based on Bush and Cheney’s public statements in late 2001 through 2002.
So Much for Sampson’s “Aggregator” Myth
A senior Justice Department official, who did not know of Gonzales’s delegation of authority until contacted by National Journal, said that it posed a serious threat to the integrity of the criminal-justice system because it gave Sampson, Goodling, and the White House control over the hiring of senior officials in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, which oversees all politically sensitive public corruption cases, at the same time that they held authority to hire and fire U.S. attorneys.
As emptywheel was quick to notice this side-long management style allowed Bush-Cheney-Gonzales to drop strong hints that they wanted certain things done and certain people given the boot, but left the actual booting to underlings – to avoid the bright light of something that is a bastard step child to modern Republicans, accountability.
“It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.” -Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye 