Vice President Cheney Can Be
Removed From Office Now!

In his webcast of July 2, Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche made it clear, once again, that the only effective way to stop the "chicken-hawk" drive to expand the war against Iraq into Iran, and elsewhere, is to expose Vice President Dick Cheney for his impeachable crimes, including lying to the President about intelligence.

"The reason we went to a war in Iraq," LaRouche said, "was because the Democratic Party was neutralized, by the belief that Cheney had the evidence, that Iraq was getting nuclear weapons. Cheney knew there were no such nuclear weapons. Cheney knew the story about Niger 'yellow cake' going to Iraq was a fraud. And yet, with that knowledge, he pushed that argument, in order to convince the Congress to subside, and to allow the war to go ahead."

Yet, now that the "intelligence" about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq appears to be a fraud, those Democrats who are upset are not targetting Cheney, but going after President Bush instead. LaRouche's rivals for the Democratic Presidential nomination are acting like fools who are not in the real world. Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), as LaRouche pointed out in his webcast, is carrying out a shameful, Hamlet-like evasion, by targetting the President, instead of Cheney, on whom he had the goods. The same for Howard "Who?" Dean.

President Bush can't be impeached, LaRouche said, but Cheney can. "You can't impeach this President! You can't convict him of intent! He's not smart enough to know what his intent is!"

Indeed, on July 7, President Bush confirmed LaRouche's forecast by issuing a statement through his Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, that the President was unaware of the Niger forgeries, and he acknowledged that he should not have included the reference to Iraq attempting to purchase uranium in Africa in his Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address.

LaRouche is the only candidate for the Democratic nomination who has been dealing with the real world—and now, LaRouche's insistence that Cheney is the key culprit, is producing results. A "smoking gun" has appeared—not in some bunker in Baghdad, but in the pages of establishment newspapers, and on a string of television news shows.

The 'Smoking Gun'

On July 6, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV appeared on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press," and had interviews published in the New York Post and Washington Post, and an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he disclosed that he had been the senior diplomat sent to Africa, to check on the story of Iraq's alleged attempt to purchase uranium "yellow cake" from Niger, and that he had not only reported that he had found no basis for the story, but was certain his results were reported to Vice President Cheney.

According to his account, Wilson went to Niger in February 2002, at the request of the CIA, which told him that Vice President Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. Wilson spent approximately ten days in Niger, interviewing people on the scene, and determined that "it was highly doubtful" that a transaction of Niger selling uranium to Iraq, had ever taken place. He briefed the U.S. Ambassador, and, once he arrived back in Washington, provided his evaluation to the CIA and the State Department African Affairs Bureau. "There should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission," Ambassador Wilson wrote in the New York Times (see excerpts below).

This was March 2002, after which the debunked report appeared in the British government's Sept. 24, 2002 dossier, President Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address, and, less directly, a "Meet the Press" interview by Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003, just days before the Iraq War was launched.

Questioned by reporters, Wilson says he considers it "inconceivable" that Cheney, who had originated the inquiry, was not briefed on the results of his trip to Niger. "Someone in the Vice President's office had to know," he told CNN on July 7. "If they'll lie about things like this, there's no telling what else they'll lie about," Wilson was quoted in the July 6 New York Post.

The "what did Cheney know" controversy was further fueled by reports that the Vice President and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had made frequent excursions to CIA headquarters, to interrogate analysts directly on their work product related to the Iraq WMD program and links to al-Qaeda. Former CIA officials have told EIR that the Cheney-Libby visits to Langley were unprecedented, and represented a clear attempt to pressure the intelligence agencies to come up with intelligence to fit their own pre-set policy of going to war with Iraq. Greg Thielmann, a respected officer at the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau, told ABC News' "Nightline," July 9, that the Administration practiced "faith-based" intelligence analysis—i.e., made policy decisions and then sought out intelligence to fit the action.

On July 8, the Los Angeles Times published a commentary by Robert Scheer on the Wilson revelation, titled "A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied." Scheer began: "They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office."

LaRouche Told You So

Meanwhile, those who are pursuing the President, rather than Cheney, have come up with their hands empty, just as LaRouche said they would.

The question thus is, who misled the President? That's the question that takes the honest investigator directly to Cheney, who first raised the question of the Niger sale, and sought the answer—which he then proceeded to ignore!

Those who have had the good sense to follow LaRouche, know he identified the crucial role of Cheney in manipulating the war against Iraq, and called for his resignation, at least as early as September 2002. While a full record of LaRouche's campaign against the chicken-hawks appears on his Presidential campaign website, www.larouchein2004.com, the following highlights are crucial:

Sept. 20, 2002: LaRouche issued a statement, "Iraq Is a Fuse, But Cheney Built the Bomb," in which he identified the "Cheney doctrine of 1990," demanding a U.S. world empire, as the real source of the just-issued policy of pre-emptive war, contained in the document The National Security Strategy of the United States. LaRouche concluded by calling for Cheney's resignation.

October 2002: LaRouche's call for Cheney to resign was aired frequently on Washington, D.C. radio, in ads taken out by an associate.

March 25, 2003: LaRouche issued a statement entitled "War, Hitler and Cheney," charging that Cheney has de facto usurped control over the government, and politically castrated the Democratic Party leadership. "Whatever wrong the under-qualified President Bush has done," LaRouche wrote, "he remains the poor patsy from whom the pack of Cheney-Rumsfeld lackeys have managed to gain almost anything they wished, so far. However, this would not have been possible had the Democratic Party itself not fallen under the top-down control of the same behind-the-scenes forces which control Dick 'Lady Macbeth' Cheney."

April 9, 2003: LaRouche's campaign issued a pamphlet entitled The Children of Satan: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's No-Exit War, (download PDF version)to mobilize Americans against the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal—followers of the late fascist philosopher Leo Strauss. It was these "Straussian" circles, the pamphlet documented, who instigated the war. Some 800,000 of these pamphlets are now in circulation, and have caused major reverberations from Washington, to New York City, to London and Zurich.

June 7, 2003: LaRouche's campaign issued a statement entitled "LaRouche Says Charges Against Cheney Constitute Grounds for Impeachment," in which the charges of Cheney's role in the Niger "yellow cake" story were spelled out, and the candidate was quoted saying, "Let there be no mistake about it. The nature of these charges constitute hard grounds for impeachment. The question has to be taken head on. It is time for Dick Cheney to come clean. I want to know exactly what Dick Cheney knew and when he knew it. The charges are grave and specific and leave no wiggle room. Determining who knew what and when is, at this time, an urgent matter of national security."

One month after that statement, the other Democratic Presidential candidates are still silently dodging the issue, in part due to their own complicity in allowing the needless and, perhaps now endless war to occur, and, in part, because they have allowed themselves to be gagged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a neo-conservative "Trojan Horse" in and around the Democratic Party national leadership (see article in this section).

Despite the continuing cowardice of the other Democratic candidates, LaRouche's own leadership, in pressing for Vice President Cheney to say what he knew and when, is gaining momentum. The fact that former Ambassador Wilson revealed his "smoking gun" just days after LaRouche's July 2 international webcast, is but one indication that LaRouche's continuing role in leading the "counter-coup" against the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang, is creating the conditions for others to step forward with more damning proof that the Vice President lied to the President, to the Congress, to the American people and to the international community—to win support for the Iraq War.

LaRouche also observed, on July 10, that a similar fate is now befalling British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who, along with Cheney, lied repeatedly, to win British backing for the Iraq invasion. "If Cheney falls, Blair will soon fall. If Blair goes, Cheney is not far behind," LaRouche forecast.