October 30, 2005 journal, the WHIG conspiracy on the Potomac resulted in a bloody war.

They are now eating yellowcake. When they refer to the B-us-h crime family, which family are they referring to, his immediate family or the official political prefabricated ...... family?

This will teach Joe Wilson not to question an official conspiracy to fool American people. <http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101605Z.shtml> It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby By Frank Rich, New York Times Sunday 16 October 2005, “There has not been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by mani-cally chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was Today on NBC, where the image of President B-u-s-h manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove. As with Ms. Stewart, B-u-s-h's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery B-u-s-h, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the de-tective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled. That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by un-masking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's invest-igation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. B-us-h, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney. Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Be-cause the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Mill-er's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigat-ion believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the Wh-ite House Iraq Group." Very little has been written about the W-hite House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, 7 months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spin-meisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq. Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On Jul 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest-a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed aro-und the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in Aug." The official introdu-ction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Che-ney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in 3 August speeches, des-cribed Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The v. president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefar-ious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national secu-rity journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the Wh-ite Ho-u-se Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage." The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Wash-ington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administ-ration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, "be-cause anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a B-us-h radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apo-theosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war. Throughout those crucial 7 months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of B-u-s-h's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over-with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had re-ported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us. It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that pre-ceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as B-u-s-h's brain, he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr.Fitzgerald. "Bush's Brain" is the title

of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Carl Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we’ve learned in "B-u-s-h's Brain," bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to B-u-s-h foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. B-u-s-h stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern. THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House ells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war. <wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Matalin>

Mary Joe Matalin (born September 19, 1953) is an American political strategist and con-sultant of Croatian origin. She is known for her work with the Republican Party. She was an assistant to George W. B- and counselor to vice president Dick Cheney. Curiously, she is married to James Carville, political strategist for the Democratic Party. Both Matalin and Carville have gone on record saying that they don't talk politics at home. The best example of contention among the two, aside from appearances on talk shows, is the 1992 movie The War Room. In the 1992 political campaign both Matalin and Carville were staffing opposite campaigns. Matalin wrote All's Fair: Love, War and Running for Presid-ent with Carville. Like Carville, she was a host of CNN's Crossfire political debate show, and in 1993, she hosted Equal Time, which aired on the CNBC business televisionchannel.

Matalin, a colleague of Karl Rove, worked for Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House. She attended meetings of the White House Iraq Group, a secretive internal White House task force convened in August 2002 (9 months before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq).

WHIG was charged with a task of educating the US public about the threat from Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction. Matalin resigned her responsibilities as of 31 December 2002.[1] Although Matalin left the WhiteHouse more than six months be-fore the leak that triggered the Valerie Plame scandal, she is reported to have testified be-fore the grand jury of Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. (Notes and records of WH-IG meetings were subpoenaed by Fitzgerald in January 2004.)” end. I believe the president

Vise president and all the gang are guilty of the highest crimes and should be imprisoned.