The hole in the vice president's office left by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is so big it has to be filled by two people: the guy who served as the conduit for Ahmad Chalabi's false intel, and one of the co-drafters of the torture memo. Knight Ridder was the first to note those roles of John Hannah and David Addington, respectively.
Both men are also named in Libby's indictment, reports Newsday: "prosecutors say Libby met with Addington outside Cheney's office about July 8, 2003, and asked whether the CIA would have paperwork if an agent's spouse took an overseas trip, as Wilson did. A few weeks earlier, the indictment says, Libby spoke with his 'principal deputy' -- believed to be Hannah -- about CIA 'complications' if they discussed Wilson's trip."
Of Hannah, now assistant to the vice president for national security affairs, KR reports:
On June 26, 2002, the [Iraqi National Congress] wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff identifying Hannah as the White House recipient of information gathered by the group through a U.S.-funded effort called the Information Collection Program. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the letter and previously reported on it.
The letter, written by Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC's Washington office, identified 108 articles in leading Western news media to which it said the INC had funneled the same information that it fed to Hannah, as well as a senior Pentagon official. The information included a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, that he had visited 20 secret nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq. ...
Haideri, however, showed deception in a CIA-administered lie detector test three days before The New York Times article appeared, and was unable to identify a single illicit arms facility when he accompanied U.S. weapons inspectors to Iraq in January 2004, Knight Ridder reported in May of last year.
Addington, now the vice president's chief of staff, "has been a key player behind widely criticized U.S. policies that have led to torture and other abuse of detainees held in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch," reports KR. Quoting Malinowski:
This was somebody who worked very hard to make sure the advice of senior military officials and national security professionals on the question of interrogation policies was ignored.... The result was an unmitigated disaster for the United States.