Cheney and Libby Take Page from Nixon Playbook 
The reason the Watergate burglars broke into Democratic National Headquarters in 1972 was that Nixon was paranoid about losing the election to McGovern, the anti-war candidate. (Nixon was worried that DNC chairman Larry O'Brien had dirt on Nixon's ties to organized crime and gambling in Havana in the 1950s, as well as his role in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion while he was VP under Eisenhower.)
In the end, Nixon won by a landslide in 1972, so the break-in was hardly worth the risk. What ultimately brought down his administration was not the sloppy break-in by a few second-rate crooks, but rather the cover-up and obstruction of justice by Nixon and his inner circle.
Now the current White Hoouse thinks they can one-up the Nixon boondoggle:
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
KEYWORDS: Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Watergate
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