New book with many bombshells - on sale tomorrow: "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency"

[sabra]

http://www.bartongellman.com/



LATEST NEWS

* Up-to-the-minute news and blog posts about 'Angler'
* 9/14: Read the first of two days of excerpts from 'Angler' in The Washington Post
* 9/15: Bart appears on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight
* 9/16: 'Angler' goes on sale in bookstores, and Bart holds a live chat with readers


...

More than two thirds of Angler is new material, never published before. Highlights include:

* The week that Cheney nearly led Bush off a cliff, keeping him unaware of a dispute that threatened his presidency. White House and other top officials speak on the record about an episode that one of them describes as nearing “Watergate territory.”

* Why a top official sent a BlackBerry message, just after leaving the Oval Office, saying he told the president “he was being misled” by Cheney and his allies.

* How Cheney killed a State Department proposal to close secret CIA prisons, deleting it from the agenda of an NSC meeting.

* Cheney’s work with Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon to slow-roll an emphatic order from Bush on the handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In one scene, their tactics send a cabinet-rank official, cursing, out the door of the Situation Room and leave another one at the table in tears.

* Intelligence gathering by Cheney’s office about policy rivals, including requests for NSA transcripts of their intercepted conversations with foreign officials.

* The vault in Cheney’s wing of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that served as the command center of a major intelligence program, the first to be conceived and controlled by a vice president.

* What Cheney told a top congressional Republican about Saddam Hussein—a claim, undisclosed until now, that the GOP leader now says Cheney “knew to be untrue.” Speaking on the record, the Republican leader says Cheney will be remembered for “the biggest foreign policy blunder of modern times.”

* On the record interviews with three Cheney advisers who describe his real motives for -- and private doubts about -- pressing the war with Iraq.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[leveymg]

2. Um,the "first (intelligence program) to be conceived and controlled" by a VP?

Mr. Gellman seems to have altogether forgotten Iran-Contra and Vice President G.H.W. Bush. If you want to get into Langley lore, what about Vice President Nixon's role planning the Bay of Pigs?

As a matter of fact, every one of these bullet points stinks of presidential plausible deniability and an attempt to protect Bush by putting it all on Cheney.

The excerpt I read in the NYT a couple days ago about the 2004 face-to-face showdown between the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Addington cabal and Comey-Goldsmith over the Program had some interesting color.

[Vadem]

3. The Washington Post started a 2-day excerpt on Sunday ...

From the Post:

"This is the first of two stories adapted from 'Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,' by Barton Gellman, an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. The book expands on a four-part series on Cheney by Gellman and former Post investigative reporter Jo Becker that ran in The Post in June 2007. Gellman and Becker, who is now with The New York Times, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for the series, which was also titled 'Angler.'

***

For full coverage of 'Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,' including documents, a timeline of key events in the development of the NSA surveillance program, and a live discussion with Barton Gellman, visit www.washingtonpost.com/cheney ."

[MadrasT]

4. I will be at Barnes and Noble when the doors open tomorrow.

:kick: and R.

[nichomachus]

6. Not me

I've stopped buying these books. I find I get halfway through them and become so depressed I can't go on. It's kind of hard to read about the effects of fires when you're still trapped in a burning building.

[MadrasT]

9. I know what you mean. I just feel like I have to know. It's like

not wanting to watch a train wreck, but not being able to turn away...

[bleever]

5. Anyone thinking of the fire in the EEOB a while back?

Hm?

[nichomachus]

7. He doesn't need no stinking fire

Remember, he has a commercial shredding truck come to his house about once a month.

[DemoTex]

8. Yeppers. It was the first thing to come to my mind when I saw "vault."

Cheney .. evil personified.

:scared:

[roguevalley]

10. he should send Nancy Pelosi an autographed copy