Meanwhile, a government watch group in Washington DC is escalating its calls for Vice president Dick Cheney to be investigated for his alleged confirmation of leaked classified information. The group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, charges that in a Jan. 9, 2004 interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Cheney referred to a story that appeared in right-wing Weekly Standard that discussed a Defense Department memo that included a list of CIA, NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency raw reports regarding possible links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. In the interview, Cheney called the Standard’s story “the best information out there.” Those comments conflicted with the Pentagon’s press release on the Weekly Standard story, issued months before the Cheney interview, stating that news reports that characterized the contents of the memo were “inaccurate” and excoriated the leak as “deplorable and maybe illegal.” The Pentagon also stated that leaking such information does “serious harm to national security.”