CHENEY-"Behind Cover-up": Rice lawyer says he believes VP tried to have anti-torture memo destroyed

[kpete]

Wed May 6, 2009 5:00 AM PST

Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?

On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Zelikow notes that Cheney's office did not have the authority to request that his memo be deep-sixed: "They didn't run the interagency process. Such a request would more likely have come from the White House Counsel's office or from NSC staff." But that request did not reach him in written form. "It was conveyed to me, and I ignored it," Zelikow recalls. But he suspected that Team Cheney was probably behind it.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/did-cheneys-office-coverup-torture-wrong-memo
via:
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/06/rice-lawyer-says-he-believes-cheney-tried-to-have-anti-torture-memo-destroyed/

[Duer 157099]

1. That is SO hard to believe! n/t

[seafan]

2. And because Cheney couldn't destroy Joe Wilson's NYT article, he went for Wilson's wife.

This criminal Dick operates in the same, comfortable ways.


And he still walks free.

[Supersedeas]

3. Miers and Bartlett were at WH Counsel's office and Hadley was at NSC at the time, no?

[cpompilo]

4. Let the backstabbing begin.

Oh- and please pass the popcorn.

[Mist]

5. Does anyone other than Zeilkow refer to this memo he wrote? Might it be mythical? As a way of

distancing himself from at least some of the crimes of the WH admin. he served for years.

[Fresh_Start]

6. He kept copies and hopefully know the distribution

if this was email, its likely that the system even logged who read the memo.

[Mme. Defarge]

9. Makes you wonder ...

if he can't produce his own copy of it. That's the kind of thing I would have mailed to myself and left it unopened in order to prove the date of it.

[lovuian]

7. Boy it really looks like there is a war going on between

Cheney and Bush
Cheney looks to be the fall guy

[Winterblues]

8. What a dilema..Who do we believe Cheney or Zelikow

:think: IMO it is a toss-up and really the odds are they are both Lying..

[Senator]

10. K&R

[bobthedrummer]

11. kick

[bobthedrummer]

12. bttt