Cheney Could Not Recall Key Events About His Role in CIA Leak

By GottaLaff

My friend Jason Leopold wrote up a piece on Dickless McHeartstent's 2004 interview with the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case. As usual, Jason's reporting is well worth a read:

A month before Valerie Plame Wilson's covert status as a CIA operative was revealed, Vice President Dick Cheney told his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and his press secretary, Cathie Martin, that Plame Wilson worked at the spy agency.

But according to a 28-page summary of Cheney’s May 8, 2004 interview with the special prosecutor probing the leak, Cheney did not recall having that conversation.

"Cheney has no recollection of Cathie Martin entering his office at some point while Scooter Libby was present and advising both of them that [Plame Wilson] was employed by the CIA," states the interview summary, released late Friday by the FBI after a lengthy court battle between the Bush and Obama administrations and the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). [...]

Cheney described the CIA's decision to dispatch Ambassador Wilson to Niger as "amateur-hour" and he disparaged the CIA's handling of Iraq intelligence, which Cheney, Libby and others in the Office of the Vice President pressured agency analysts to manipulate in an attempt to portray Iraq as posing an immediate threat.

Cheney said he could not recall playing any role in the campaign to attack Wilson. But former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his memoir, What Happened: Inside The Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, that the White House’s behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Wilson heated up in June 2003. “The vice president and Libby were quietly stepping up their efforts to counter the allegations of the anonymous envoy to Niger...," McClellan wrote. [...]

In fact, Cheney stated that he did not recall more than two-dozen key events he was involved in [...]

That's just a nibble. Go devour the whole piece here.

And after you do, you won't have an appetite for days.

LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search

For a fan of photography like me, this is freakin' Christmas!!! Life was an incredible magazine.

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.

We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.