Posted on 10/04/2005 6:36:49 AM PDT by OXENinFLA
Since "Free Republic is an online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web. We're working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption, and to champion causes which further conservatism in America.", I and others think it's a good idea to centralize what the goes on in the Senate (or House).
So if you see something happening on the Senate/House floor and you don't want to start a new thread to ask if anyone else just heard what you heard, you can leave a short note on who said what and about what and I'll try and find it the next day in THE RECORD. Or if you see a thread that pertains to the Senate, House, or pretty much any GOV'T agency please link your thread here.
If you have any suggestions for this thread please feel free to let me know.
Here's a few helpful links.
C-SPAN what a great thing. Where you can watch or listen live to most Government happenings.
C-SPAN 1 carries the HOUSE.
C-SPAN 2 carries the SENATE.
C-SPAN 3 (most places web only) carries a variety of committee meetings live or other past programming.
OR FEDNET has online feed also.
A great thing about our Government is they make it really easy for the public to research what the Politicians are doing and saying (on the floor anyway).
THOMAS where you can see a RECORD of what Congress is doing each day. You can also search/read a verbatim text of what each Congressmen/women or Senator has said on the floor or submitted 'for the record.' [This is where the real juicy stuff can be found.]
Also found at Thomas are Monthly Calendars for the Senate Majority and Senate Minority
And Monthly Calendars for the House Majority and Roll Call Votes can be found here.
THE WAR DEPARTMENT (aka The Dept. of Defense)
thanks for the pings - I appreciate them...
Is this something NEW or is it just that group of Sherrod Brown, Lynne Woolsey and Kendrick Meek???
Those three get up about every other night and say the same things over and over...about how Bush purposely lied to go to Iraq...and we have to come home NOW...
9:30 a.m.: Convene and begin a period of morning business. Thereafter, resume consideration of H.R. 3010, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill.
Previous Meeting:
The Senate convened at 9:30 a.m. and adjourned at 6:53 p.m. Two record votes were taken.
Who's behind that .. Conyers or Rengal?
THE VALERIE PLAME INCIDENT -- (House of Representatives - October 25, 2005)
[Page: H9076] GPO's PDF
---
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Speaker, I have here a letter which I wrote last month, which is addressed to United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is currently conducting an investigation with regard to who it was who revealed the name of Valerie Wilson, who is and was an undercover operator for the Central Intelligence Agency, which I will enter at this point into the Congressional Record.
CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES,
Washington, DC, September 15, 2005.
Re request to expand investigation.
U.S. Attorney PATRICK FITZGERALD,
Justice Department,
Washington, DC.
DEAR UNITED STATES ATTORNEY FITZGERALD: We hereby request that you expand your investigation regarding who in the Bush Administration revealed to the press that Valerie Wilson, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). We believe that expansion should include investigating the Administration's false and fraudulent claims in January 2003 that Iraq had sought uranium for a nuclear weapon, which the Administration offered as one of the key grounds to justify the war against Iraq.
President Bush made two uranium claims, one in his State of the Union Address to Congress and another in a report that he submitted to Congress concerning Iraq, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made three other uranium claims. We request that you investigate whether such claims violated two criminal statutes, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001 and 18 U.S.C., Sec. 371, that prohibit making false and fraudulent statements to Congress and obstructing the functions of Congress.
You have broad discretion to conduct this investigation. The issues we raise are directly related to your current investigation and clearly fall under your authority. The desire to discredit the information provided by Ambassador Wilson regarding the lack of evidence to support the Administration's contention that Iraq sought uranium from Niger is the nearly-universally accepted motive behind the leak of Mrs. Wilson's identity. In order to fully investigate the disclosure of an undercover CIA agent's identity, it is clear that you should fully investigate the reasons for that disclosure.
As we outline below, we believe that members of the Administration may have violated laws governing communications with Congress with respect to assertions about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Ambassador Wilson's efforts to publicly contradict these assertions seem to be the reason for the undercovering of Mrs. Wilson's identity. It is very likely that you would encounter these assertions during the course of your investigation, and thus their legality should be the subject of your investigation.
THE ADMINISTRATION'S CLAIMS ABOUT IRAQ SEEKING URANIUM WERE FALSE AND FRAUDULENT
The uranium claims of the Administration in January 2003 that Iraq had sought uranium for a nuclear weapon were shown to be false because, after intensive post war investigations, the Iraq Survey Group found no evidence that Iraq had sought the uranium. In the months prior to the war, weapons inspectors of the United Nations (U.N.) conducted extensive inspections in Iraq and found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program. The Administration has never produced any legitimate actual evidence that Iraq had sought the uranium.
The uranium claims were also fraudulent because although some in the American intelligence community (including the C.I.A.) may have agreed at the time with the British opinion that Iraq had sought uranium, numerous people with the Administration did not tell the whole truth consisting of the contrary views held by the best informed U.S. intelligence officials. C.I.A. Director George Tenet told the White House in October 2002 that C.I.A. analysts believed the reporting on the uranium claim was ``weak'' and thus the Director told the White House that it should not make the claim. Later that same day, the C.I.A.'s Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence sent a fax to the White House stating that the ``evidence [on the uranium claim] is weak.'' The National Security Council (N.S.C.) believed in January 2003 that the nuclear case against Iraq was weak. Secretary of State Powell was told during meetings at the C.I.A. to vet his U.N. speech of February 5, 2003 that there were doubts about the uranium claim and he therefore kept it out of his speech for that reason. The U.S. government told the U.N. on February 4, 2003 that it could not confirm the uranium reports.
Furthermore, the original draft of the State of the Union Address stated that ``we know that [Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa,'' but after the White House consulted with the C.I.A., the White House changed the speech to refer to the British view rather than the American view. The final draft stated that the ``British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' The parties involved stated that they had no discussions about the credibility of the reporting and the reason for the switch was to identify the source for the uranium claim.
However, in response to the uproar over the op-ed article by Ambassador Wilson, C.I.A. Director Tenet issued a statement in which he admitted that C.I.A. officials who reviewed the draft of the State of the Union Address containing the remarks on the Niger-Iraqi uranium deal ``raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with [White House] National Security Council colleagues'' and ``[s]ome of the language was changed.'' Tenet stated that ``[f]rom what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct--i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa.''
What this tells us is that although Administration officials, informed by the highest ranking members of our own intelligence operation, knew that the claim of Niger uranium going to Iraq was ``weak'' and could not be confirmed, they were still determined to use it in the President's address to Congress and fell back on the dubious language of the British report. The Administration clearly sought to cover up their own officials' doubts about Iraq's nuclear capabilities and hide those doubts from the Congress and the U.S. public.
MOTIVE
A motive for making such false and fraudulent uranium claims would have been to thwart Congressional and U.N. efforts to delay the start of the war. Pending at the time that the Administration made its uranium claims in January 2003 was a Congressional resolution, H. Con. Res. 2, submitted by five members of Congress on January 7, 2003, which expressed the sense of Congress that it should repeal its earlier war resolution to allow more time for U.N. weapons inspectors to finish their work. On January 24, 2003, a few days prior to the State of the Union Address, 130 members of Congress wrote to the president encouraging him to consider any request by the U.N. for additional time for weapons inspections. On February 5, 2003, 30 members of Congress submitted another resolution, H.J. Res. 20, to actually repeal the war resolution.
Had it not been for the uranium claims in the State of the Union Address, which sought to squelch congressional concern over the impetus for the pending war, the number of sponsors for H.J. Res. 20 would have been far greater. The influence of the uranium claims can be seen in the fact that 130 members of Congress signed the letter before the State of the Union Address, but only 30 sponsored H.J. Res. 20, which was introduced after the speech. The Administration's uranium claims thwarted the congressional efforts to delay the start of the war since the Administration used the claims to allege that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program--despite the failure of the U.N. inspectors to find such a program--and thus falsely assert that Iraq posed an immediate threat that needed to be nullified without further delay.
Concerning the importance of the uranium claims, the report Iraq On The Record, produced by the Minority Staff of the House Committee on Government Reform, states: ``Another significant component of the Administration's nuclear claims was the assertion that Iraq had sought to import uranium from Africa. As one of few new pieces of intelligence, this claim was repeated multiple times by Administration officials as proof that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.'' A nuclear-armed Iraq was a key reason, if not the most important reason, used by the Administration to justify the need for a preemptive war against Iraq. Rather than allow the U.N. inspectors to finish their inspections, the results of which might have fueled further congressional efforts and resolutions to stop the war, the Administration commenced the war in March 2003.
[Page: H9077] GPO's PDF
THE ADMINISTRATION'S FALSE AND FRAUDULENT URANIUM CLAIMS ARGUABLY VIOLATED CRIMINAL LAWS CONCERNING COMMUNICATIONS WITH CONGRESS
The criminal statute, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001, prohibits knowingly and willfully making false and fraudulent statements to Congress in documents required by law. The two uranium claims in the State of the Union Address and the report to Congress concerning Iraq were false and fraudulent, and are in documents that the White House submitted to Congress. See House Document 108-1 and House Document 108-23. The law required the president to give such reports. Article II, Section 3 of the constitution requires presidents to give State of the Union Addresses. Section 4 of Public Law 107-243, which is the Congressional resolution authorizing the war against Iraq, requires the president to give reports to Congress relevant to the war resolution and the president submitted said report on Iraq pursuant to that law. Thus 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001 was evidently violated.
The criminal statute, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 371, prohibits conspiring to defraud the United States and is applicable since the Supreme Court in the case of Hammerschmidt v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924) held that to ``conspire to defraud the United States means primarily to cheat the government out of property or money, but it also means to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful government functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.'' Senior Administration officials arguably violated Section 371 because their uranium claims had the effect of obstructing or interfering with the function of Congress to reconsider its war resolution and to allow further time for U.N. weapons inspections. If the whole truth had been told, Congress may well have withdrawn the war resolution or delayed the start of the war to allow further U.N. weapons inspections, which would have shown what we now know; that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not sought the uranium. However, it should be noted that Section 371 does not require proof that the conspiracy was successful.
Additionally, the Downing Street memos should be part of the investigation as to whether one of the several ways in which the Administration deliberately ``fixed'' the facts and intelligence on uranium included its switch of the language in the State of the Union Address to justify the war. These documents provide valuable insight into the mindset of the Administration the summer preceding the Iraq invasion.
CONCLUSION
The above matters are clearly related to your current investigation. Ambassador Wilson's op-ed article focused on the uranium claim made in the 2003 State of the Union Address and he concluded that ``intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.'' You are investigating whether any laws were violated when Administration officials--in order to discredit Wilson's claim and/or to retaliate against him--leaked to the press the fact that his wife was a CIA agent. As set forth in this letter, Wilson's original charge that the Administration ``twisted'' the evidence concerns matters that are just as criminal as the Administration's attempts to discredit Wilson and his charge by revealing the identity of Mrs. Wilson as a CIA operative.
Justice Department officials in Washington certainly have the same type of conflict of interest in this matter as they did in the CIA leak case, which resulted in current your assignment. (See 28 CFR, Sec. 45.2(a) prohibiting Department employees from matters in which they have a conflict of interest).
Thank you for your attention to this request. We look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Maurice D. Hinchey, William D. Delahunt, Bernard Sanders, Pete Stark, George Miller, John Conyers, Jr., Richard E. Neal, Martin Olav Sabo, Marcy Kaptur, Xavier Becerra, Hilda L. Solis, Cynthia McKinney, Doris Matsui, David Wu, Louise Slaughter, Charles B. Rangel, Ed Towns, Jim McDermott, Raúl M. Grijalva, Michael M. Honda.
Albert R. Wynn, Sam Farr, Lynn C. Woolsey, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Cannon, Jerrold Nadler, Carolyn B. Maloney, Jim Moran, Donald M. Payne, Peter J. Visclosky, Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, Dennis J. Kucinich, Neil Abercrombie, Jim McGovern, Maxine Waters, Luis V. Gutierrez, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Barbara Lee, Frank Pallone, Jr., Wm. Lacy Clay, José E. Serrano.
Mr. Speaker, the purpose of this letter is to recognize, first of all, the importance of the investigation as to who it was who revealed the identity of Mrs. Wilson as an operator for the Central Intelligence Agency. Whoever did so violated Federal law, which went into effect in 1968.
[Time: 20:15]
That is a very important question. An even more important question is why that was done. And so in the context of this letter, I and the other 39 Members of the House who signed this letter are asking that this investigation be conducted more deeply, be conducted further into the question as to why that revelation was made.
To recount the events here, back in late 2002, the administration was making claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And on the basis of those claims, it was preparing a final push asking the Congress to support a war against Iraq.
Included in those weapons of mass destruction were references to uranium which allegedly had been imported from Niger in West Africa into Iraq for the purposes of constructing a nuclear weapon. The Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence operations within the Federal Government expressed serious doubts about the accuracy of that information with regard to enriched uranium coming out of Niger into Iraq.
Nevertheless, the administration continued to press the case, telling the intelligence agencies over and over again to go back and look again, go back and look again, when the intelligence agencies found that they had no evidence, no substantial evidence whatsoever, that that uranium had been imported into Iraq from Niger.
Finally, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a retired ambassador, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger to investigate whether there was any prospect whatsoever that enriched uranium had been sent from Niger into Iraq. Mr. Wilson conducted a thorough investigation. He came back and reported to the Central Intelligence Agency that no such information was found.
The CIA informed the White House. Nevertheless, the administration continued to assert weapons of mass destruction, including the potential for the creation of a nuclear weapon. Those assertions were made directly to the Congress. It is against the law, it is against Federal law, a criminal violation of Federal law, to misinform the Congress of the United States and to intentionally mislead the Congress.
We believe that that has been done, and that if it had not been for the assertion of nuclear weapons and the belief that there were nuclear weapons being made in Iraq, that this Congress likely would not have passed the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. If that had not taken place, that resolution had not been passed, we would not be seeing today nearly 2,000 American service men and women having been killed in Iraq; tens of thousands of others seriously wounded; hundreds, tens of thousands, perhaps as much as 100,000 Iraqis killed, many of them women and children, innocent civilians.
And so this question as to why that revelation was made is seriously important. Furthermore, we need to look into the issue of why this misinformation was given to the Congress, and that ought to be done by the Congress. This House of Representatives ought to be conducting hearings now that we know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to our invasion, and that whatever evidence there might have been was flimsy and weak and not anything to be based on.
Why was that done? That is a question of great seriousness presently before this House of Representatives, and it is not being addressed. The most important question of human rationality is why, why something was done? Was it as a result of a cabal that existed within the administration between powerful people who were determined to present information that would mislead the Congress in the way that they did? Because the Congress was misled, unquestionably so.
The Government of the United States is supposed to be open and transparent. Decisionmaking should be subject to powerful checks and balances. That has not been done, and it must be done. This Congress must fulfill its obligations under the Constitution to investigate these breakages of Federal law.
Check #71 & 72. for what I heard while I was tuning on my computer to ping y'all last night.
I think that's a typo and should be 1986.
This is what perked up my ears last night.
I'm betting the dems are going to use this frame of thought to try and impeach Pres. Bush.
They'd best be careful with that, don't you think?
Weren't those same assertions made by Clinton, and other countries in the world...???
And, didn't Putin say that he KNEW that Saddam was going to try to attack the USA???
I do not understand how the dems can possibly feel that they have anything on which to impeach President Bush...
Also, in his State of the Union Address...he said the British have evidence...no Niger mentioned...and the British are STILL standing by the information....
WHERE are the "LIES"??
BTW...The Senators should all get together and tell Byrd he is to darn senile to be a Senator....but they will make him poet laureate of the Congress...he can keep his office.
Tx, why is Specter running the show on this?
I have no clue....but, I must say that I just saw Byrd just slap him clear across the room...demanding a vote...after Specter, as manager(?) didn't want to....
This Senate is really a joke nowdays, isn't it??? It is like it has no direction...no discipline...my goodness they spend so much time talking about NON-GERMANE items..they never get things done (except behind closed doors...and then come out and dump 3 dozen amendments down without a roll call vote..so WE never get a chance to voice our opinion on things..)
I was just going to get on before your question...and post that I bet right now, there are more dem Senators writing their "na na na boo boo" speeches for "when" Rove and Libby are indicted...then even thinking about the bill they are working on..
Except Landrieu of course...she is busy writing her next whiney speech about her poor, poor LA.
I really think this is the latest dems talking point. I've just heard two dem talking heads to Rush's show talk about how the White House knew the yellow cake info was false and used it to manipulate the public.
I agree
Thing is ... The President never mention the Niger report and didn't base his speech on it .. he refered to British reports... which were found to be true
Yeah, but the dems don't care about that. And I doubt they'll mention that.
9:30 a.m.: Convene and resume consideration of H.R. 3010, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill.
10:00 a.m.: Proceed to a vote on the motion to invoke cloture on H.R. 3010.
Previous Meeting:
Wednesday, Oct 26, 2005
The Senate convened at 9:30 a.m. and adjourned at 7:52 p.m. Six record votes were taken.
Frist up talking about Miers now.
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