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Vice President Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney's chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration's most radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the office of the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where he will start a risk-consulting business.
or spend more time with his copy of "Idiot's Guide of Things not to Leak to
Steve Clemons"; and so he can write a new book, "Me and Rummy: How it feels to be fired by George W. Bush."
Wikipedia:
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith appointed Wurmser and veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof as a secret two-man Pentagon intelligence unit. One of their products, days after the attacks, was a memo that suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq." In the memo, U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.[3]
On September 4, 2004, the Washington Post reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators had questioned Wurmser, along with Feith, Harold Rhode, and Paul Wolfowitz about the passing of classified information to Ahmad Chalabi and/or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. [4]
The Worm made even some conservatives blanch with his last Cheneygram:
a conservative friend of Wurmser's,...: "He thinks there's a purge going on, and that people are out to get him."
In June, Wurmser's name appeared in a front-page New York Times story. In that account, based in part on reporting that first surfaced in Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note, Wurmser was alleged to have told thinktanks and conservative policy analysts that Vice President Cheney disagreed with President Bush's decision to use diplomacy to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. According to the Times, Wurmser said "that Mr. Cheney believed that [Condi] Rice's diplomatic strategy was failing, and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take military action."
Reflecting Wurmser's close ties to the Israeli military establishment and Israel's right-wing Likud bloc led by Bibi Netanyahu, Clemons reported that Wurmser was colluding with Israel to force a showdown: "Cheney is planning to deploy an 'end run strategy' around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument," wrote Clemons. "The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, mudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff ... to mount a small-scale conventional strike" on Iran's nuclear facilities, thus forcing a U.S.-Iran confrontation in its wake.
Wurmser is definitely in the Bush administration's Deck of Cards/52 most wanted. I hope some day he will have to answer for his deeds. At least he's gotten canned for his hyperassholicity, I would assume.