Indictment rocks Bush administration (BBC)

[ticapnews]

The indictment - and resignation - of Lewis Libby, chief-of-staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, is a wound in the side of the president.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4386076.stm

It raises serious questions about how the Bush administration sought to justify the war against Iraq and brings into scrutiny the possible role of Mr Cheney in the unlawful disclosure of a CIA agent.

Some will say that something is rotten in the state of the administration. It certainly sounds a discordant note when put against the rallying call of then Governor George Bush when he was running for the presidency after the Clinton years had culminated in a Senate impeachment trial. He would, he always declared at the end of his speeches, bring "dignity back to the White House".

He has not only been Mr Cheney's chief-of-staff. He has been an integral part of a central core of officials who drove the policy toward Iraq. Irve Lewis Libby Jr, known to his friends as "Scooter" (a name given to him as a baby by his father), is as close to Dick Cheney as Karl Rove is to George W Bush. The difference however is that Libby's vision is international. Rove is almost entirely concerned with domestic analysis.

He was one of a group of right-wing Republicans, known as the neo-conservatives, who reacted against the liberal agenda of the late 20th Century and founded something called The Project for the New American Century. Basically this called for a huge increase in US power and influence around the world and it has been seen as the origin of many of the policies of the Bush team. The current case concerns Iraq, one of those policies.

[lebkuchen]

1. Wolfie couldn't bring it upon himself to mention PNAC

though he came close.