One of the most effective ways to concentrate power is to convince people there are enemies lurking in the shadows. After Bush's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks (Bush was warned on August 6, 2001 of a potential Bin Laden strike), he invented the concept of the "Axis of Evil" to distract us from his personal incompetence. Bush included Iraq, Iran and N. Korea in his list.

We know today Saddam did not pose a threat to the U.S. or American people. He was a local thug and a brutal dictator, yet the world tolerates many similar leaders today. North Korea, while likely to possess a handful of nuclear weapons, does not present a theat to the U.S. or American people either. And, Iran had been moving toward greater openness and political tolerance until Bush made his irresponsible remarks.

The Axis of Evil is right in front of us -- Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove...

Writing in the NY Times (2.10.06), Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, quoted Judge Laurence Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission to investigate why the administration had been so wrong in their conclusion that Saddam Hussein had continued his work to produce WMDs. Silbeman says he was "stunned by the damage done to our critical intelligence assets by leaked information."

The Silberman commission reported in March 2005 that in monetary terms, unauthorized disclosures have cost America hundreds of millions of dollars; in security terms, of course, the cost has been much higher. Part of the problem is that the term "whistleblower" has been misappropriated. The sharp distinction between a whistleblower and someone who breaks the law by willfully compromising classified information has been muddied.

Goss, commenting about people who might be considered whistleblowers, wrote, "those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic. Nor are they whistleblowers. Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk. It is unconscionable to compromise national security information and then seek protection as a whistleblower to forestall punishment."

Yet it was Dick Cheney, working through his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, who leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, to discredit an accurate editorial about Saddam's lack of a WMD progam released by her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. We provide a comprehensive account of the treasonous activity below. Our thanks to Dr. Juan Cole, Informed Comment, for his invaluable work.

Cheney Authorized Libby to Disclose Classified Documents

Once upon a time, a former agent of Italian military intelligence named Rocco Martino, who had had some experience in the African country of Niger, came into possession of some forged, fraudulent documents.

These alleged Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium in 1999. In fact, the signatures were of Nigerien officials who had been in power a decade earlier, in the late 1980s.

So they were clumsy forgeries. Martino passed them on to the Italian magazine Panorama, which passed them to the US embassy. Tantalizingly, President George W. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, has an indirect connection to Italian intelligence.

Rove's chief adviser on Iran policy is Neoconservative wildman and notorious warmonger Michael Ledeen, who has a longstanding connection to the darker corners of Italian intelligence (below).

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney heard of the alleged uranium purchase. Cheney asked George Tenet to look into the allegation.

The issue went to the Directorate of Operations secret unit on counter-proliferation. Among the field officers there was Valerie Plame Wilson, who had spent her life fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction under cover of a dummy corporation.

Valerie Plame Wilson was married to former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who had served bravely as acting ambassador in Iraq in 1990, and when threatened by Saddam he showed up to a press conference wearing a hanging noose instead of a necktie. President George H. W. Bush highly praised him.

Joe Wilson had not only served in Iraq, he also had been ambassador to the West African countries of Gabon and Sao Tome, and spoke fluent French. Plame Wilson brought up the possibility of sending him as a private citizen to look into the plausibility of the report that Saddam had bought Nigerien uranium.

He went, and soon saw that the uranium industry in Niger was actually under the control of French companies and was strictly monitored. There was no possibility of corrupt Nigerien officials selling it off under the table.

A separate military mission led by Marine General Carlton Fulford, Jr, deputy commander of the United States European Command (EUCOM), went to Niger the same month, February 2002.

Fulford quickly came to the same conclusion as Wilson, that it was implausible that al-Qaeda or anyone else could secretly buy uranium from Niger. Wilson came back and wrote a report for Tenet, expecting that Tenet would pass it on to the high officials of the Bush administration. Wilson was amazed when the Niger uranium story was put into Bush's State of the Union address. Then, Scooter Libby wanted Secretary of State Colin Powell to make allegations about Saddam and al-Qaeda before the United Nations Security Council. Powell was also pressed by someone to bring up the Niger uranium story.

Powell is said to have exclaimed, "I'm not reading this bullshit!"

Libby appears to have been a big influence on the speech Powell gave, almost every detail of which was inaccurate, and at which United Nations officials who heard it openly laughed.

After the war, Wilson wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he revealed his mission and again called into question the Bush administration assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

Cheney was extremely upset by Wilson's op-ed. He saw it as an allegation that he had personally sent Wilson and then ignored Wilson's report. Or at least that was the spin. But Wilson had said no such thing in the article. He simply said that Cheney had asked Tenet to look into the story, which Cheney probably did.

Cheney was afraid that if the American public became convinced that there had been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war effort would collapse, along with all those billions of no-bid uncompetitive contracts for Halliburton.

Cheney, it has now come out, then authorized Libby to leak the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the press.

The NIE, which may have been produced under pressure from Cheney himself, had incorrectly suggested that Iraq was only a few years from having a nuclear weapon. In fact, Iraq did not have an active weapons program at all after the early 1990s when it was dismantled by the UN inspectors. The pre-war NIE in any case was just old bad intelligence, which was contradicted by David Kay's team on the ground in post-war Iraq, which just wasn't finding much.

Libby now began telling reporters that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, itself classified information, since she was an undercover operative.

Karl Rove engaged in the same routine. Apparently Cheney, Rove and Libby (and Bush?) believed that Wilson's credibility would be undermined if the Washington press corps could have it intimated to them that his story was a CIA plant.

Robert Novak used the information given him by the White House staff to out Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover operative. Her career was ruined. All her contacts in the global South were burned, and their lives put in danger. The CIA's careful project combating weapons of mass destruction collapsed.

The same administration that alleges it should be able to listen to our phone calls at will for national security purposes deliberately undermined US security for petty political purposes, making us all much less safe.

The likelihood is that the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Libby and Rove so far revealed are only the tip of the iceberg.