Inside the Ring: New Candidate for Deputy Secretary of Defense

A new candidate has emerged for the deputy secretary of defense post being vacated by Paul Wolfowitz. He is Lewis "Scooter" Libby, currently the chief of staff and national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Other candidates include Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and Gordon England, the current Navy secretary.



That's the whole short article, here's the link anyway:
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050324-114419-7900r.htm

They just keep recycling the f*ckheads, don't they?

:puke:

Some background:

When historians finally lift the curtain on the Bush administration, they will discover that Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby was one of the most important men pulling the levers. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been center stage for every one of the administration's national security scandals – the Iraq intelligence debacle, secret meetings about Halliburton contracts in Iraq, and the leaking of a CIA's agent's identity to the press – and doubtless others we have not heard of yet.

Such a role is not unusual for Libby, who has more titles in the Bush White House than can fit on a business card. Essentially Libby is Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney – an odd combination of H.R Haldeman and Harry Hopkins, seemingly managing every detail of the vice president's professional life.

For the past three years, that has meant scooting from scandal to scandal.
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=109719&printmode=1

Since taking over as Cheney's chief of staff, Libby has received flak on a number of fronts. He has been criticized for his role in defending Marc Rich, the billionaire financier convicted on racketeering and tax fraud charges who was pardoned by President Clinton (3); he has repeatedly been accused of being the anonymous White House official who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame (4); and observers charge him of working with Dick Cheney to firm up a number of discredited allegations that had been used to build the case against Iraq, including the assertion that a Hussein agent met with lead hijacker Mohamed Atta during the months leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (5)
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/libby/libby.php

(Good stuff about the Cheney/Libby relationship)
Cheney also made Libby his own chief of staff and national security advisor. A hard core neo-conservative who had worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 on a controversial draft strategy that called for global US military dominance that was strongly denounced by the Republican foreign policy establishment at the time, Libby later served as general counsel to the Cox Commission, a Congressional body convened to investigate alleged Chinese spying and acquisition of advanced-weapons technology. Its final report was almost universally derided as flimsy, exaggerated and inaccurate by both technical and China experts.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EJ01Aa01.html

And for some semblance of balance, here is the Dept. of State Bio:
http://fpc.state.gov/8488.htm

It's NOT Kucinich?

My money is on Cambone.

WTF makes the difference?

Hard-core neocons all of them. Some said that the neo-cons were on their way out, and that Wolfie's nomination for the WB was to get him out of the way. Wishful thinking. They're consolidating power, not losing it.