One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.
United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.
In other words, trying to support the drive to war, Libby -- at Cheney's direction -- sought out reporters and lied to them. (And by extension to the public.)
At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told [NYT reporter Judith] Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.
In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.
Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons." But it also said U.S. intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations.
Iraq's alleged uranium shopping had been strongly disputed in the intelligence community from the start. In a closed Senate hearing in late September 2002, shortly before the October NIE was completed, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and his top weapons analyst, Robert Walpole, expressed strong doubts about the uranium story, which had recently been unveiled publicly by the British government. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise, called the claim "highly dubious." For those reasons, the uranium story was relegated to a brief inside passage in the October estimate.
As has already been reported, CIA Director George Tenet managed to get the claim excised from an October, 2002 Bush speech. The Pentagon asked the National Intelligence Council for a final, definitive call: Was it true or not?
The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.
Bush put his prestige behind the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address.
The whole article is worth a read [F6 note -- again, my next post, a reply to this post].
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary
U.S. officials asserted that Iraq had biological weapons factories in trailers, even after a Pentagon mission found them unsuited for that role. Photo Credit: By Pfc. Joshua Hutcheson Via Associated Press
From 'Biological Laboratories' to Harmless Trailers Two Iraqi trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops became a center-piece of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But shortly after the fall of Baghdad, an internal report showed the trailers had nothing to do with banned weapons.
By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A01
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.
"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."
Primary Piece of Evidence
The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team's reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.
"Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say," said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The technical team's findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies' public statements on the trailers. A day after the team's report was transmitted to Washington -- May 28, 2003 -- the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were "confident" that the trailers were used for "mobile biological weapons production."
Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply "mobile biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile biological facilities," and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.
By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group's first leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was "no consensus" among intelligence officials, the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.
Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.
Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon accepting the survey group's leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were "backsliding" on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team's findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group's leader.
"If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would certainly have given their findings more weight."
A Defector's Tales
Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.
The CIA's star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany's intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.
Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like."
The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flatbed trailer covered by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.
Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.
Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed Curveball's story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.
Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the "Jefferson Project," a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy Department's national labs.
The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs."
News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.
The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.
But the technical team's preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.
Key Components Lacking
Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team's findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group's nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.
That report said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen," the survey group reported.
The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.
The technical team's preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," on its Web site.
After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report's conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended for weapons?
In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.
"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the report's contents.
Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.
"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it."
Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Americans who tuned in for one of President George W. Bush's rare press conferences saw a cornered animal trying to squirm his way out of trouble by doing what he has always done - evading the truth.
Bush's attempt to showcase himself as a leader who could handle tough questions from the press corps fell just as flat as his unscripted town-meeting style appearance in Cleveland the day before.
His eyes darted from side-to-side as he fielded questions about his real reasons for invading Iraq. He stammered. Stalled. Used the word "uh" more times than a suspect caught red-handed. He still claimed his reasons for invading Iraq were just, even though those reasons have been proven wrong. He claims the war can be won, a view not shared by many of his generals. He claimed a lot of things - few of them true.
"President Bush exhibited symptoms of pathological prevarication," says Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth and who watched Bush's performances on Monday and Tuesday at my request. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all display traits of consistent evasion of the truth."
This isn't the first time I've asked Dr. Crossfield to study a politician. She watched several of former President Bill Clinton's press conferences and came to similar conclusions about Clinton disassociation with reality.
When studying a subject, she watches the eyes.
"Eye movement is difficult to control," she said. "You find that the eyes dart away in specific patterns when a person is not telling the truth. The President's eyes dart a great deal. He is not comfortable facing the truth."
Dr. Justin Frank, author of the book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, agrees with Dr. Crossfield.
"President Bush marches deeper and deeper into a world of his own," says Dr. Frank. "Central to Bush's world is an iron will which demands that external reality be changed to conform to his personal view of how things are."
Republicans reluctantly admit Bush has lost touch with the truth. Sen. Chuck Hagel says the President is "disconnected from reality."
Venture out beyond the Beltway and you find conservative Republicans shaking their head and wondering the same thing.
Dennis Dalbey cuts the hair of Camp Pendleton's young Marines, giving them the regulation haircut before they head to combat in Iraq. His barbershop on the Coast Highway near the base in California is covered with painted yellow ribbons, flags and "We support our troops" banners. But Dalbey, a Republican and a self-described conservative who voted for Bush, says he is fed up with the President's lies.
"Enough is enough," he says. "It's time to bring the boys home."
In San Marcos, retired Navy veteran Herb Ranquist, 77, sits in the local VFW hall and says Bush is a failure.
"I voted for him two times, and I wish I hadn't," Ranquist says. "It was probably one of the worst mistakes I ever made."
Dr. Crossfield says it doesn't take a degree in psychology or advanced training in spotting liars to realize the President plays fast and loose with the truth.
"More and more ordinary Americans see the evidence clearly every day," she says. "It is difficult to ignore."
Dr. Frank says Bush can't change his ways.
"Taking responsibility has always been hard for George W. Bush," he says. "Taking responsibility for inflicting harm on others, a major step in the development of maturity, is a step President Bush has yet to make. Instead, he persists in lying to himself."
Not that we needed another reminder of just how deceptive, devious and duplicitous the administration of President George W. Bush can be, but Thursday's revelation in court records that he ordered the leak of classified information to try and bolster his failed case for the Iraq war shows the rampant, business-as-usual dishonesty at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Now, before anyone says the release of court papers that show former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a federal grand jury that President Bush authorized him to give a reporter selected parts of a classified analysis called the National Intelligence Estimate is only one person's side of the story, let's examine an important fact - a White House that immediately denies anything that makes it look bad has not, in this case, denied what the court papers say.
"Under any circumstances, the president has the right to declassify information. Secondly, as the press is reporting, there is no indication in the court filing that either the president or vice president authorized the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity, or to insinuate otherwise is flat out wrong," said Republican National Committee Communications Director Brian Jones.
In the news biz we call that a "non-denial denial." The court papers didn't say a thing about disclosing CIA operative Valerie Plame's name, even though that's what Libby is gong to trial over. They did say Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave Libby permission to tell New York Times reporter Judith Miller that the NIE showed Saddam Hussein was trying to try weapons grade uranium from Niger - information that turned out to be wrong and which experts within the American intelligence community raised concerns over even before Bush and his boys started bandying it about as fact.
Libby's charges of obstruction of justice, of course, stem from the "outing" of Plame, who also just happened to the be wife of Bush critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the man sent to Niger to investigate the uranium claims and the one who said the information in the NIE was dead wrong. Miller used her position at The New York Times to sing the praises of the Iraq war and conservative columnist Robert Novak published Plame's name, saying he got the information from "administration sources."
Libby told the grand jury, Cheney ordered him to leak parts of the NIE to the press to discredit Wilson and said Bush approved the tactic. When the information got out, Bush bitched and moaned about leaks of classified information and promised a "full and complete" investigation to track down the leakers.
During a September 2003 speech in Chicago, after authorizing Libby to release the information, Bush said of the Libby investigation: "Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There's leaks at the executive branch; there's leaks in the legislative branch. There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."
Except Dubya knew damn well who leaked it. He ordered the release and can now hide under his Presidential authority to declassify information at will.
Legal experts say Bush, as President, has the "legal right" to declassify anything he wants but say declassifying sensitive information for political gain raises serious ethical questions.
"It is a question of whether the classified National Intelligence Estimate was used for domestic political purposes," Jeffrey H. Smith, a Washington lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for the CIA, told The Washington Post.
And while the information might have been "declassified" by Presidential order, the declassification itself was kept a secret. Libby said only he, the vice president and the president were aware that the information was no longer classified.
So let's see if we have all this straight. The President, through the Vice President, says it's all right for a staff member to give secret information to a reporter.
Except this secret information no longer secret because the President, using his secret decoder ring, has made it not secret.
But, in order to cover everybody's asses, the staff member cannot tell the reporter - or anyone else - that the previously secret information is no longer secret. That's still a secret.
This way, the President can go and tell everyone that he is sick and tired all this secret information, which isn't really still secret, is getting out and he can act publicly upset while being secretly pleased that the New York Times fell for his little, not-so-secret secret.
Maybe it's time to let the President of the United States in on a little secret the American public knows all too well.
George W. Bush is a liar.
And that's no secret. Hasn't been for a long, long time now.
In 1999, while I worked on a background piece on Harris County, Texas, judge Robert Eckels, some Houston politicians invited me to a fund-raising reception for then governor George W. Bush.
Bush, already mentioned as a front-runner for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2000, easily won a second term as governor the year before by building a very un-Republican like coalition of Hispanics and moderates.
Bush sipped a bottle of Corona as he walked among well-to-do Texans at the outdoor event, slapping some on the back. He approached and stuck out his hand.
"I'm George Bush," he said. The handshake, quick and limp, lacked any warmth or sincerity. The plastic smile looked phony. He moved on.
Later in the evening, I walked behind a group where Bush spoke with some of his cronies. They were talking about possible opponents for the GOP nomination. One member of the group suggested some opponents might use Bush's less-than-sterling past against him.
"Let 'em try," Bush said with swagger. "I'll fucking destroy them."
I recounted the story with my host as he drove me back to my hotel.
"That's our governor," he said. "Don't let the smile fool you. He can turn on you in a second. You don't cross George Bush."
The corpses from George W. Bush's political wars litter the landscape. Arizona Sen. John McCain threatened Bush's chances for the nomination in 2000 and became cannon fodder in a Karl Rove-orchestrated smear campaign. Democrat John Kerry's campaign disintegrated when he failed to respond to the Swift Boat veterans' campaign of lies and innuendo funded by Bush's cronies in Texas.
On Monday, Bush admitted to declassifying parts of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) just to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson's assessment that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to obtain weapons-grade uranium from Niger - a key part of the administration's manufactured rationale for invading Iraq.
"I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth," Bush said during an appearance at Johns Hopkins University.
"You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches. And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence matters, and so I did."
Like so much of what Bush says, it isn't true.
What Bush calls "the truth" was, in fact, a lie. Ambassador Wilson was right and the raw information in the National Intelligence Estimate was wrong. Detailed analysis from the Central Intelligence Agency had already called the claim that Iraq had sought weapons grade uranium from Niger "nonsense" and urged the White House to stop using the false information.
But Bush, who has never let facts stand in the way of his political agenda, continued to use the discredited information and told Vice President Dick Cheney to launch is disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson.
That campaign ultimately led to the "outing" of Wilson's wife as a covert CIA operative.
"After we liberated Iraq, there was questions in people's minds about the basis on which I made statements -- in other words, going into Iraq," Bush said Monday. "And, so, I decided to declassify the NIE for a reason. . . . I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches."
Once again, the President of the United States lapses into denial.
Americans no longer have questions about why Bush said what he said or did what he did.
They know the President of the United States is a liar. He proves that just about every time he opens his mouth.
No doubt about it. George W. Bush's lying, rotten, putrid, soulless destruction of a once-great nation called America is now open for all to see.
Bush is not just a liar. He's a serial liar who avoids truth at all costs because facts don't' support his perverted, twisted view of the world. Truth exposes his corrupt administration and lays bare his many crimes against the American people and the Constitution of the United States.
Impeachment? Nah. Too good for this lowlife. Arrest the son-of-a-bitch, lead him from the White House in chains, parade him down Pennsylvania Avenue and then lock him in stocks on the Washington Mall so everyone can see what happens when anyone thinks they are above the law of the land.
Turns out the trailers had nothing to do with biological warfare. Intelligence officers in the field knew it. They told the White House. Yet Bush ignored the truth and went before the American people to claim otherwise, trumpeting the trailers as "proof" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"I hate to admit it but it appears clear the President of the United States is a pathological liar," says political scientist George Harleigh, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administration. "His pattern of deception exceeds anything we saw in the Nixon era."
Members of Congress - Republican and Democrat - admit the same thing, shaking their heads in disbelief while talking privately with supporters and political strategists.
"The biggest threat any Republican running for election or re-election this year faces is not from the Democrats but from the President," says a GOP political consultant who, for obvious reasons, begs for anonymity. "George W. Bush is a major liability to Republicans in the mid-term elections."
When news broke last week that Bush personally authorized a White House campaign of leaks aimed at discrediting Ambassador Joseph Wilson - a campaign that led to the "outing" of Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative - Republicans scrambled for cover. Sunday talk show producers tried without success to find a Republican willing to go on the air and defend the President.
The only Republican who did appear - maverick Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter - didn't defend Bush's actions but called instead on both the President and the Vice President to come clean about their roles in the CIA leak debacle.
"Bush's actions clearly have left Republicans in uncomfortable, and untenable, positions," Harleigh says. "They don't want to alienate voters by aligning themselves too closely with an increasingly unpopular President but they also have to be careful not to alienate their GOP base."
Polls, however, shows the GOP base dwindling as more and more Republicans realize they've been had by the charlatan-in-chief.
Even die-hard Republicans find it harder and harder to defend their corrupt and morally-bankrupt leader, admitting privately that the Presidency of George W. Bush will go down in history as a monumental failure, surpassing the dark days of Richard M. Nixon.
"The Nixon administration has, for 30 years now, been the baseline to measure failure in the Republican Party," says Harleigh. "No more. George W. Bush has lowered the bar."
Market Data 
Markets 
