Cheney's time is nigh!

The US prosecutors in the Valerie Plame case are getting closer to the top of the Bush Administration. As a quick refresher, the Valerie Plame case is an official investigation into the criminal revelations of the name of a CIA operative to the press.

Valerie Plame was the CIA agent. Her husband is Joseph Wilson, a former US Ambassador and a Bush administration critic who went to Africa on a fact finding mission that proved Bush was a liar when the latter claimed Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger. Someone (or more) in the Bush Administration is believed to have revealed his wife’s name to the press as an act of spite.

They now have Vice President Cheney in sight. The ABC reported:

The prosecutor in the CIA leak case said more than six months ago that he was not alleging any criminal acts by Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the leak of agency operative Valerie Plames identity.

Today, the prosecutor is leaving the door open to the possibility that the vice presidents now-indicted former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was acting at his boss' behest when Libby allegedly leaked information about Plame to reporters.

A new court filing presents handwritten notes of Cheney. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is using them to assert that the vice president and Libby, working together, were focusing much attention on Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a Bush administration critic.

Cheney’s notes ask whether Plame had sent Wilson on a "junket" to Africa. Subsequently, Plames supposed role in her husbands trip to Africa allegedly was leaked to the media by both Libby and by presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Cheney's notes on the margins of Wilson's opinion column in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, reflect "the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president," Fitzgerald said in the court filing late Friday.

Read here and here for more of above on the prosecutors closing in on Cheney.

I wonder whether a Vice President of the USA found guilty of a criminal act but refuses to resign would be subjected to impeachment like an errant President, or he just gets sacked by his boss? The last US VP to resign (for tax fraud) was also a Republican, Spiro Agnew. I hope they get Cheney.

This man had evaded the Vietnam War draft though the use of college and marriage deferments (5 times, it seems), but for all his notable absence from serving his country in a war, he has been the most bellicose member of the Bush Administration, who had eagerly sent 2400 young Americans to die in a faraway land, for the interests of a foreign country. I would deem him also as the man most guilty of causing the deaths of several thousands of Iraqi innocents.

He was also the former president of Halliburton, the company that has profited most from the war in Iraq through untendered contracts.