Conyers to question Libby on forged letter linking Saddam to 9/11.

Things do come back to haunt Libby. How quickly we forget this..

Raw Story:

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued letters of inquiry Wednesday to Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, regarding a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.The Michigan Democrat also sent letters to senior former Bush intelligence officials, including Robert Richer, former CIA Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations, who claimed that Cheney's office pushed the CIA to develop a phony letter to aid their argument for a preemptive strike on Iraq. The letters were copied to RAW STORY.

"I have become very concerned with the possibility that this Administration may have violated federal law by using the resources of our intelligence agencies to influence domestic policy processes or opinion," Conyers wrote Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. "The law specifically provides that "[n]o covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media."


PDF copies of the letters are also available at the links below:

To Rob Richer
To former CIA Director George Tenet
To John Maguire, Director of Congressional Affairs
To A. B. Krongard
To I. Lewis Libby
To John Hannah, Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs

Notice the name A.G. Krongard. Krongard, nicknamed Cookie, was the Executive Director of CIA. At the House oversight committee hearing about Blackwater, Cookie was being investigated allegations of improper interference by Krongard's brother, Howard, aka Buzzy, who was on the Blackwater's advisory board. So, you know what happened: Buzzy bailed from his job and Cookie crumbled and bailed.

Conyers needs to trace back to the beginning of the development of the WHIG group in connection to the Saddam/ 9/11 propaganda:

In August 2002, now former Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities." It was the marketing arm of the White House whose purpose was to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public.

In Vanity Fair in July 2006 that it discussed the development of the WHIG group and beginning of the Iraq propaganda:

The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed by Craig Unger

The Marketing Campaign


Until this point, the American people had been largely oblivious to the Bush administration's emerging policy toward Iraq. But in August 2002, just as Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans formally set up shop in the Pentagon, White House chief of staff Andrew Card launched the White House Iraq Group to sell the war through the media. The plan was to open a full-fledged marketing campaign after Labor Day, featuring images of nuclear devastation and threats of biological and chemical weapons. A key piece of the evidence was the Niger dossier.

Test-marketing began in August, with Cheney and his surrogates asserting repeatedly that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." Making Cheney seem moderate by comparison, a piece by Ledeen appeared in The Wall Street Journal on September 4, suggesting that, in addition to Iraq, the governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia should be overthrown.


But the real push was delayed until the second week of September. As Card famously put it, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was perfect.

The opening salvo was fired on Sunday, September 8, 2002, when National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The smoking-gun-mushroom-cloud catchphrase was such a hit that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all picked it up in one form or another, sending it out repeatedly to the entire country.

At roughly the same time, highly placed White House sources such as Scooter Libby leaked exclusive "scoops" to credulous reporters as part of the campaign to make Saddam's nuclear threat seem real. On the same day the "mushroom cloud" slogan made its debut, The New York Times printed a front-page story by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller citing administration officials who said that Saddam had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." Specifically, the article contended that Iraq "has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."