In Indictment's Wake, Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role

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October 30, 2005

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Vice President Dick Cheney makes only three brief appearances in the 22-page federal indictment that charges his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., with lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case. But in its clear, cold language, it lifts a veil on how aggressively Mr. Cheney's office drove the rationale against Saddam Hussein and then fought to discredit the Iraq war's critics.

The document now raises a central question: how much collateral damage has Mr. Cheney sustained?

Many Republicans say that Mr. Cheney, already politically weakened because of his role in preparing the case for war, could be further damaged if he is forced to testify about the infighting over intelligence that turned out to be false. At the least, they say, his office will be temporarily off balance with the resignation of Mr. Libby, who controlled both foreign and domestic affairs in a vice presidential office that has served as a major policy arm for the West Wing.
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A Leak, Then a Deluge

washingtonpost.com

A Leak, Then a Deluge
Did a Bush loyalist, trying to protect the case for war in Iraq, obstruct an investigation into who blew the cover of a covert CIA operative?

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; A01

Air Force Two arrived in Norfolk on Saturday morning, July 12, 2003, with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff aboard. They had come "to send forth a great American ship bearing a great American name," as Cheney said from the flag-draped flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

As Cheney returned to Washington with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the two men spoke of the news on Iraq -- the most ambitious use of the war machine Reagan built two decades before. A troublesome critic was undermining a principal rationale for the war: the depiction of Baghdad, most urgently by Cheney, as a nuclear threat to the United States.

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Jihad After The Quake

OutlookIndiaWeb Oct 24, 2005
Jihad After The Quake

While some fantasists want to see a 'window of opportunity' to improve Indo-Pak relations, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the situation on the ground recommends extra caution. KANCHAN LAKSHMAN Many in South Asia had hoped that the earthquake of October 8, 2005, which killed tens of thousands of people and affected millions on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) would put a halt, at least momentarily, to the terrorist campaign in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and allow for unhindered relief and rehabilitation operations. Some fantasists went so far as to see in this natural disaster a ?window of opportunity? for dramatic cooperation and an improvement of relations between India and Pakistan.[The official death toll of the quake in J&K has been pegged at 1308, which includes 1206 civilians and 102 SF personnel. At least 6622 people are injured while 12 Army and 21 Border Roads Organisation personnel are still missing. While at least 40,000 people have died in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), 38,007 people have died so far in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan].

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Argufying

Sep 30, 2005 Review Essay Argufying

The problem of Indian modernity and humanism needs to be examined afresh -- if Indian modernity is a way of viewing the world, we haven't scrutinised, enough, the gaze in the mirror. AMIT CHAUDHURI This article originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.Amartya Sen?s The Argumentative Indian is a civilised polemic about India; and it raises certain questions. For me, the most interesting of them is the implicit one: what need does the appearance of this book respond to, in writer and reader? This most banal of questions seems to lead to a (for me, at least) crucial discussion on culture.
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