The Case for Impeaching Dick Cheney

1. Espionage and Treason: The Valerie Plame Affair
Cheney’s chief aide, Scooter Libby, was the fall guy for the Valerie Plame affair, but Cheney was almost certainly the mastermind. Plame’s CIA network, operating under the front company Brewster Jennings, was tracking nuclear proliferation rings in the Middle East, and her exposure resulted in the arrests and deaths of agents in this network. From Sibel Edmonds’ testimony, we now know that corrupt U.S. officials were engaged with Turkish, Pakistani and Israeli agents in selling American nuclear secrets. The exposure of Plame’s network now seems to involve more than retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson.

And if Edmond’s allegations are correct, the nuclear smuggling ring funneled nuclear technology to the black market network run by Pakistani nuke scientist A.Q. Khan, with North Korea, Libya and Iran as principal beneficiaries. It would be hard to imagine a greater crime against national security. The relevant U.S. Code espionage statute, (18 USC Sec. 794, see below*), mandates the death penalty or imprisonment for these offenses.

2. Torture
Cheney has publicly argued for allowing CIA agents to use torture against prisoners in secret detention centers, and most likely issued directives permitting waterboarding and other abusive practices. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States, and the Constitution makes such treaties the law of the land, and their violation a criminal offense.

3. Illegal surveillance
Cheney has been the leading advocate for extra-constitutional surveillance, including illegal CIA and Pentagon spying on American citizens, outlawed since Watergate. The procedures include warrantless wiretaps, “National Security Letters” issued by the FBI and DOD to fish through bank accounts and other private records without court approval. After Congress outlawed the Orwellian TIA (Total Information Awareness) program, it has gone underground, and a massive database on all American citizens, Main Core, is being populated in secret, effectively abolishing the 4th Amendment.

9/11
The ostensible justification for all these high crimes and misdemeanors is the “national emergency” ensuing from 9/11. But there is compelling evidence that, at the very least, the 9/11 attacks were abetted and allowed to happen, and Dick Cheney was the crucial kingpin in this atrocity. Most suspicious is the unprecedented failure of air defense to impede the attacks (in the year prior to 9/11, USAF jets had scrambled to intercept aircraft that had lost transponder signals or veered off course a total 67 times, and the average response time was between 15–20 mins.).

1. PNAC and "the new Pearl Harbor"
In 2000, Cheney is signatory to the PNAC’s (Plan for a New American Century) manifesto, calling for a global American military empire, and virtually praying for “a new Pearl Harbor” to catalyze the revolution.

2. Cheney delegated emergency defense powers
On May 8, 2001, four months prior to 9/11, Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of “[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies…” This included all “training and planning” which needed to be “seamlessly integrated, harmonious and comprehensive” in order to “maximize effectiveness.” This mandate created the Office of National Preparedness in FEMA, overseen by Dick Cheney.

3. 9/11 War Games:
The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one “live-fly” exercise as well as simulations that placed “false blips” on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney’s management:

4. Cheney and the Secret Service
While Bush sat reading “My Pet Goat” to elementary school children in Florida for 30 minutes after the attacks were acknowledged, Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11.

5. Norman Mineta’s testimony: the Stand Down
Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, Former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta related his experience in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operation Center) as the attack unfolded:

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President...the plane is 50 miles out...the plane is 30 miles out....and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

Mineta explains that while he had not known it at the time, he had surmised that the standing order the young man asked about must have been a stand down order.

Over 3000 Americans and foreign nationals were murdered on 9/11. An untold number have been kidnapped and tortured under "extraordinary rendition," many of them innocent of any crime or connection with terrorism. In 2006, the Bush administration successfully ramrodded a law through Congress giving all members of his administration retroactive immunity for war crimes. Impeachment hearings, with no possibility of "executive privilege," would surely provide enough evidence to rescind the legislated immunity.

*18 USC Sec. 794
(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.

Sibel Edmonds update

A follow-up article in the London Times:

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets...

She (Edmonds) says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file...

The freedom of information request had not been initiated by Edmonds. It was made quite separately by an American human rights group called the Liberty Coalition, acting on a tip-off it received from an anonymous correspondent...

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US...

Edmonds: “This gag was invoked not to protect sensitive diplomatic relations but criminal activities involving US officials who were endangering US national security.”

Sibel Edmonds vs. The MSM Iron Curtain

Any remaining doubt that the American MSM (Mainstream media) has degenerated into the functional equivalent of Pravda and Izvestia in the late Soviet Union — submissive oracles of Orwellian obfuscation--has been banished by the recent case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in January of this year.

A U.S. citizen and former Turkish language translator hired by the FBI after 9-11, Ms. Edmonds turned whistleblower after reading intercepts indicating a network of foreign intelligence agents was dealing with corrupt U.S. State department and intelligence officials in narcotics trafficking and smuggling of American nuclear secrets to Middle Eastern figures with connections to 9-11. Like any bureaucracy, the FBI fired her and denied her allegations. Edmonds filed suit, and presented her case in unclassified hearings before Senators Charles Grassley (Rep.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, (Dem.). Both have publicly attested to her credibility, along with several knowledgeable FBI officers. And a senior official of the Justice Dept., Glenn Fine has stated: "We found that many of Edmonds' core allegations relating to the [espionage allegation] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.”

In 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft slapped Ms. Edmonds with a “states secret privilege” gag order, and In 2004 took the unprecedented step of retroactively classifying all the documents and testimony that she had given the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are legitimate national security motives for keeping FBI and CIA employees from becoming blabbermouths, but the Sibel Edmonds scandal trumps these concerns morally and legally — a treasonous and criminal rogue enterprise embedded in our government that may have transmitted nuclear know-how into the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists needs to be exposed and investigated. For the last seven years, her case has been widely disseminated in alternative newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and the blogosphere. Like Erin Brockovich, the heroine of the eponymous true-story film, Ms. Edmonds has refused to be intimidated, shut up, and go away.

And it may take Hollywood to tell her story, because the MSM has gagged itself and erected an iron curtain of silence around her revelations.

In January 2008, the major media blackout finally lifted when the London Sunday Times published an article thoroughly laying out her case, including some of the information she was prohibited from discussing by Ashcroft — that the smuggling-spy ring included citizens of Turkey, Pakistan and Israel, and that prior warnings from FBI agents about an imminent terror attack by Osama bin Laden had been suppressed. She also named an American official — former undersecretary of State Marc Grossman — as a central figure in these machinations (he denies all).

Another central figure is former Pakistani ISI General Mahmoud Ahmad, infamous (except in the U.S.) for wiring $100,000 to lead 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta shortly before the attacks, and who was in Washinton visiting top American intelligence and political figures the week before. As Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo asserts, “The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony.”

The London Times story was picked up by newspapers in many countries, including Ha’aretz in Israel, The Daily Times in Pakistan, and The Daily News in Turkey — all nations whose agencies were implicated in the story, and some where freedom of the press is a far more restricted and dangerous affair than, ostensibly, in the cradle of free speech itself, the United States, where the sum total of major media coverage remains absolute zero. The NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, none of the second or third tier papers, CNN, MSNBC, Fox... a perfect vacuum, excepting the unbridled reporting on Antiwar.com, BradBlog.com, and the online editions of the foreign newspapers above.

There is something rotten to the core here, and it’s not in Ankara, Islamabad, or Tel Aviv.

Edmond’s allegations are directly related to the accounts of other FBI whistleblowers — Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright — who have implicated high-level FBI bureaucrats in spiking field investigations that were homing in on the 9/11 plotters. So far, none of them have suffered even a slap on the wrist — rather, a few have even been promoted. In the face of patent negligence, malfeasance, and perhaps worse — outright treason involving the security of our people against terrorism — it is up to the Fourth Estate to take up where habitual government secrecy and bureaucratic CYA stymie the necessary housecleaning. But it appears the press in Turkey, Israel and even Pakistan is more honest and vigorous than our pathetic lapdogs.

Those who believe we are getting anything resembling the truth about the crucial dangers threatening our society — from electoral fraud to nucelar proliferation — from our press lords are as deluded as the babushka who trusted Pravda to give an honest accounting of Uncle Joe and his KGB thugs. For inquiring minds hungry for the uncensored news about the United States, the online editions of British and foreign newspapers, and many websites publishing these feeds, are the only fully reliable sources. But I have found one good use for the Washington Post , New York Times and other major dailies — excellent tinder for my fireplace.

See these online articles for more complete information about Sibel Edmonds:

For sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets, London Times

Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11, Antiwar.com