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Pressure on Cheney over
smears, ‘outing’ of CIA wife

White supremacist leader found
guilty of murder solicitation

ACLU discloses documents in
challenge to PATRIOT Act

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Pressure on Cheney over smears, ‘outing’ of CIA wife

By Andrew Buncombe

Washington, DC, May 2— Vice-President Dick Cheney was under mounting pressure last night after he and his senior officials were accused of smearing a former ambassador and outing his wife as an undercover CIA officer in a deliberate act of revenge hatched inside the White House.

In a row which began with off-the-record comments he made to The Independent on Sunday last year, a former diplomat, Joe Wilson, said Cheney oversaw a group of neo-conservatives who decided to try to damage his reputation. Because of Wilson, the White House was forced to admit that a key claim in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address — that Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons - should not have been made.

The controversy over what happened next could prove to be the most damaging yet to engulf the Bush administration. A criminal inquiry is investigating the unveiling in the press of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent -- a serious felony under US law. If one of Cheney’s senior officials were charged, the damage would be huge.

Should the vice-president be personally implicated — which Wilson believes he is — the outcome would be devastating for both Cheney and Bush as they campaign for re-election.

Wilson has made his allegations in a newly published book, The Politics of Truth, subtitled “Inside the lies that led to war and betrayed my wife’s CIA identity.” In it he writes: “I am told ... that the office of the vice-president — either the vice-president himself or more likely his chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby — chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a work-up on me. As I understand it, this meant they were going to take a close look at who I was and what my agenda might be.”

The former diplomat has claimed elsewhere that it was also at this meeting that the issue of his wife’s identity and her role as a covert CIA operative was discussed. Wilson said he believed it was very unlikely that Cheney was not aware of this.

In an exclusive interview in his office in Washington, just a quarter of a mile from Cheney’s, he said: “I find it difficult to believe that a chief of staff would be undertaking something like this without — at a minimum — the vice-president’s knowledge.” Wilson stopped short of asking for Cheney’s resignation, but said: “If he [did not know] about it, he should be saying so. The leak took place at the nexus of national security, policy and politics.”

His struggle with the White House dates to a mission in early 2002, at the request of Cheney’s office. He was sent to the west African state of Niger, where he was once ambassador, to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium to develop nuclear weapons. The claims were based on a document obtained by Italian intelligence services, which had passed the information to Washington.

In less than a week, Wilson proved that the claim was false and that the document must be a fake. Returning to Washington, he reported this to a debriefer from the CIA. Later, experts from the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed the document was a crude forgery.

But when Bush and his senior officials continued to make the claim — first publicized in the British Government’s September 2002 dossier on Iraq — he felt it was his duty to speak out. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, in which he asked that he not be identified, and subsequently in a signed piece in The New York Times, Wilson pointed out that it was inconceivable that senior US and British officials were not aware of his findings.

After he went public, his wife was identified as a CIA operative by the syndicated right-wing columnist Bob Novak, a veteran Washington journalist with close links to the Republicans. It was her suggestion to send Wilson to Africa, claimed Novak, who said in his column he had been provided with the information by “two senior administration officials.”

The leaking of an intelligence officer’s identity is a criminal offense. An FBI team is investigating the leak and has called a grand jury to hear evidence and question potential witnesses. Earlier this year it was reported that Libby and numerous other officials from Cheney’s office had been questioned by the FBI. Wilson alleges that it was Bush’s senior political adviser, Karl Rove, who was responsible for “pushing” the story of Plame’s CIA position, and that a senior national security council official, Elliott Abra, may also have been involved.

The White House has been very careful in its remarks on the affair, insisting that Rove, Elliott and Libby were “not involved in leaking classified information.” It has stopped short of an outright denial. One reason the White House may have been keen to smear Wilson is because it knew his allegations would be taken seriously. In the run-up to the first Gulf War he helped to secure the release of US citizens taken hostage by Saddam Hussein. He was the last US official to meet Saddam while he was in power.

Wilson told the IOS that his wife still worked for the CIA, but that her work had been severely disrupted. He said that she might also be at risk from anyone who wished to harm her because of her previous undercover work.

“It has been irredeemably changed,” he said, adding that his wife felt she had been a victim of the political ambitions of senior officials within the administration.

Source: Independent (UK)

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White supremacist leader found guilty of murder solicitation

Compiled by Shawn Gaynor

May 4 (AGR)— White supremacist leader Matthew Hale, whose gospel of “racial holy war” was linked to a follower’s deadly shooting rampage five years ago, was found guilty Apr. 26 of trying to have a federal judge killed.

Hale was convicted on three charges of obstructing justice and one count of soliciting the murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, a federal judge, who ruled against him in a trademark case.

He was acquitted of a second count of soliciting the murder of a federal judge.

Hale never testified during the two-week trial, and chief defense counsel Thomas Anthony Durkin called no witnesses, saying the prosecution’s evidence was the weakest he had seen in a major case.

The defense argued that Hale never asked anyone to kill the judge and that the FBI used an informant to draw him into a murder plot.

In the trial, prosecutors focused on one tape of a brief, veiled exchange recorded Dec. 17, 2002, when FBI informant Anthony Evola, posing as a follower, showed up unannounced at Hale’s East Peoria home. Lefkow had issued her order a month earlier.

“Are we gonna exterminate the rat?” Evola can be heard asking Hale on the tape, which Evola testified meant Lefkow.

“Well, whatever you want to do, basically,” Hale replied.

Moments later, Hale added: “My position has always been that, you know, I’m going to fight within the law and, but, ah, that information’s been provided if you wish to, ah, do anything, yourself, you can. So that makes it clear.”

“Consider it done,” Evola said.

During the trial, jurors heard more than a dozen tapes of Hale using racial slurs, including one in which he laughs about the 1999 shooting rampage by one of his followers, Benjamin Smith. Smith targeted minorities and killed two people, including former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong.

Ben Smith, a former member of Hale’s group, traveled in Illinois and Indiana shooting blacks, Asians and Jews during the 1999 Independence Day weekend. Smith killed two people and wounded nine others before killing himself.

The jury found Hale, 32, had solicited Anthony Evola, his security chief, to kill Lefkow because she had ruled against his organization, the former World Church of the Creator, in a trademark infringement lawsuit. But the jurors acquitted Hale of charges alleging he solicited Jon Fox, a former member of the World Church, to kill Lefkow.

The obstructing justice counts state Hale obstructed justice when he solicited Lefkow’s murder, when he sent her a letter falsely claiming he did not possess materials bearing the trademarked terms “Church of the Creator” and when he instructed his father on what to say when testifying before a federal grand jury.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said during a news conference “Today’s message is that we will not wait for the trigger to be pulled,” he added.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Weisman said he believed jurors saw that Hale knew much about the law and was being careful not to step over the line, which shows he meant it when he wanted a federal judge killed.

As for possible retaliation by Hale’s followers following the verdict, Fitzgerald responded, “We will take action should anyone try to do anything violent.”

Sherialyn Byrdsong, widow of Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, who was killed during Smith’s 1999 rampage, released a statement on behalf of the foundation named after her late husband:

“We are thrilled about the verdict in the case against Matthew Hale. We are all human beings, created in God’s image, placed together on this planet to love, respect and esteem one another. I hope that the lesson and message of this trial is that peaceful co-existence should be all of our goals.”

Hale, who renamed his organization the Creativity Movement, has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center since his January 2003 arrest.

Hale’s group follows the “The White Man’s Bible,” written by the group’s founder decades ago, which prosecutors say preaches “racial holy war” and urges followers to take the law into their own hands if the government intervenes. Hale often shortened “racial holy war” to “RAHOWA” in signing off letters to followers.

Those followers have largely scattered since Hale’s arrest 15 months ago. Under an order issued by Lefkow, any members of the group who can be identified will be held responsible for a $200,000 fine for flouting her order to stop using the name World Church of the Creator.

No sentencing date has been set in Hale’s case. Solicitation of murder carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Hale could also get a maximum of 10 years on each of three counts of obstruction of justice.

Federal prosecutors in Chicago say the conviction in white supremacist Matthew Hale’s murder-solicitation trial sends an important message.

Just a few days after Matt Hale’s conviction, the FBI says it’s keeping a closer eye on hate groups that communicate on the Internet.

Agents tracking the groups say they’re just making sure the fine line between free speech and inciting violence isn’t crossed.

Monitoring the Internet is nothing new for law enforcement who insist it’s all in an effort to stop violence before it starts.

Sources: AP, ABC, NBC

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