| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 10:49 pm Post subject: SCANDAL OF THE LOBBY ZIONIST AIPAC: A PERFUME OF WATERGATE |
| SCANDAL OF THE LOBBY ZIONIST AIPAC: A PERFUME OF WATERGATE
Italian Parliament finger four forgers - Ahmad Chalabi , Francis Brookes, Dewey Clarridge, and Michael Ledeen.
Original french at http://news.stcom.net/modules.php?name=AvantGo&file=print&sid=1603
July 22, the democratic group of the American Senate held a capital hearing to evaluate the extent of the political implications and of safety caused by the disclosure with the press of the identity of the secret agent Valerie Plame. They also examined the behavior of the White House and president Bush which, while refusing to seek and sanction the persons in charge, worsened the damage.
Hearing was chaired by the deputy Henry Waxman and the senator Byron Dorgan, director of Senate Democratic Policy Committee. For Waxman, the revelation of the identity of Limes constitutes not only "one treason and an affront indefensible in its opposition and towards those which work on the lines of face to protect America", but also "an indefensible violation of our national safety". Deputy, which had voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq on the basis of what proved to be lies and half-truths as for the weapons of destruction massive (ADM) Iraqi, clearly implied that the Plame scandal is also a history of lie "Today, says it, we know the truth. I was misled, as the American people were misled, and it is the husband of Valerie Plame, the ambassador Joe Wilson, who contributed to restore the truth.
"Until now, the White House did not provide any credible proof of an agreement of uranium sale between Iraq and Niger", which however constituted one of the key parts of is saying Iraqi threat nuclear "It seems rather than the advisers of the President launched a smear campaign (...) We have only one partial information on what occurred in the hours and the days which followed [ the publication of the article of Wilson bringing back the conclusions of its mission to Niger ] (...) but we know that a secret memorandum of the State Department exposing the identity of Valerie [ Limes that Karl Rove, to advise nearest of the President, spoke about the identity of Mrs. Wilson with the chronicler Robert Novak and the journalist of the magazine Time Matthew Cooper; and that Lewis Libby, head of cabinet of the office of the vice-president, also spoke about Mrs. Wilson with at least a journalist "According to Waxman, the White House gave a report on eleven escapes on the subject.
Various former analysts of the services of information deposited in front of the senators and all underlined at which point it is serious to reveal the identity of a secret agent. That endangers not only the agent, but all the network of people with whom it is in contact, clandestinely, in foreign countries where the information is collected.
"the consequences are much more serious than I imagined it at the beginning", declared the deputy John Conyers. Appointed the Louise Slaughter asked the witnesses if they had already intended to say, during their professional life, that the White House had revealed the identity of a secret agent. Larry Johnson, former analyst with the CIA, was categorical: "With large never! It is without precedent. "
The former officer of the military information (DIA) Patrick LANG insisted on the importance of the factor confidence in the recruitment of foreign citizens to become advisors of the CIA In the event of escape, it is all their confidence towards the United States which is blamed "When not only community of the information, but the elected government (...) of the first country in the world decides, deliberately and apparently for transitory political reasons and without interest, to reveal the identity of a secret agent, the new one makes the effect of a shock in the whole world (...)" One cannot make confidence with the Americans", is said one never does it. "
Larry Johnson contradicted the assertions of the republican Party according to which Plame was not really a clandestine agent since it worked at the HQ of the CIA with Langley, or that it is it which had organized the mission of her husband in Niger. These untrue assertions were repeated by various republican members of Parliament.
For the former treating officer of the CIA Jim Marcinkowski, the refusal of high persons in charge for the government to take their responsabilities following this rupture for confidence, created large a faintness with the power station "They played hide-and-seek with the truth and to semantic plays for more than two years, at the expense of the safety of the American people", he has said.
While were held these hearings, one learned in the New York Times that the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald considers the possibility of accusing of perjury Karl Rove and Lewis Libby because of contradictions in their testimonys and of obstruction of justice.
The White House hopelessly tries to bury the business of uranium native of Niger
EIR learned from several sources in Washington that the White House makes its possible to prevent three bodies of press from revealing the origins of the falsified documents of the government native of Niger, intended to make believe that Saddam Hussein sought to obtain significant quantities of uranium native of Niger to produce nuclear weapons. After having taken knowledge of these documents, appeared in Italy at the end of 2001, Dick Cheney asked the information agencies to check information, which was to lead to the mission of the Wilson ambassador in Niger in February 2002.
A news service, a chain of American television and a newspaper have each one surveyed into the origin of the forgeries. Last year, the emission of CBS, "60 minutes", cancelled at the last minute the diffusion of a special sequence on the business of uranium native of Niger to cover the "scandal" which had just burst concerning the military service of George W Bush. The two other media are about to finish their investigations, and according to our sources, the White House exerts pressures so that they extinguish the business.
In Italy, the Parliament comes to conclude a study on the origins and the consequences from the forgeries, and according to certain sources, the report/ratio mentions among the principal suspects Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes.
Let us recall that Ledeen works like "consultant" near the service of Italian information SISMI since long years (since the beginning of the Eighties and the bursting of the scandal around the P2 cabin). To December 2001, at the time where the documents natives of Niger were transmitted to the SISMI, it went to Rome in company of Harold Rhode and of Lawrence Franklin of the Pentagon, officially to meet Manucher Ghorbanifar, large protagonist of the Business Iran-Countered. Franklin is at the present time accused to have transmitted secret information to the AIPAC like with a person in charge for the embassy of Israel.
The fact that Clarridge, Chalabi and Brookes (related to Iraqi National Congress (Inc)), are mentioned is particularly interesting. With the end of the year 2001, the tsar of the counter-terrorism of the White House was the General (Cr) Wayne DOWNING. He proposed to take Clarridge for assistant. Brookes came from Rendon Group, a cabinet of "public relations" that the Pentagon engaged to promote Chalabi and the Inc.
Which is the role of the White House in these forgeries? Did the government only exploit the information to arrive to its ends, or a group of néo-conservative around Cheney it took part in their manufacture? No one will not be astonished by the current efforts of the White House to prevent this business from bursting at the great day.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/aipacledeen.html | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:52 pm Post subject: The Vice President Lied About What He Knew |
| http://www.counterpunch.org
The Vice President Lied About What He Knew
Cheney and the Cover Up
By JASON LEOPOLD
Did Vice President Dick Cheney help cover-up the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson in the months after conservative columnist Robert Novak first disclosed her identity?
That's one of the questions Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is likely trying to figure out. It's unclear what Cheney said to investigators back in 2004 when he was questioned-not under oath-about the leak, particularly what he knew and when he knew it.
The five-count criminal indictment handed up by a grand jury last month against Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, sheds new light on a pattern of strategic deception by the Vice President and the White House to defuse an inquiry into who leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the press. Months after Plame's identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, Cheney continued to hide the fact that he and his aides were intimately involved in disseminating classified information about her to journalists.
What the Vice President denied knowing
The indictment against Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, clearly states that Cheney and Libby discussed Plame's undercover CIA status and the fact that her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, traveled to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from the African country in early June of 2003.
Yet the following month, Cheney and then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer asserted that the vice president was unaware of Wilson's Niger trip, who the ambassador was, or a classified report Wilson wrote about his findings prior to the ambassador's July 6, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times.
We now know, courtesy of the 22-page Libby indictment, that Cheney wasn't being truthful. Cheney did see the report; he knew full well who Wilson was. He also knew that the CIA arranged for Wilson to travel to Niger, and he personally sought out information about Wilson's trip to Niger, was briefed about the fact-finding mission, and even obtained classified information about Plame's covert CIA status. He also came to know one other important nugget: that Plame may have recommended her husband for the trip.
Cheney's public campaign and that of other White House officials to discredit Wilson and strategically lie about the Plame leak started on Sept. 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press."
During the interview, Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or anything about his trip.
"I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in response to Russert who quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson-I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back... I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came..."
"The CIA did," Russert said, interjecting.
"Who at the CIA? I don't know," Cheney said. "He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back."
What happened once Cheney received information on Plame and Wilson in June 2003 remains unclear. But the indictment illustrates-in no uncertain terms-that the vice president's office staged a concerted effort to undermine Wilson for questioning the veracity of the Niger claims.
Fitzgerald has eyed Cheney in seeking to ascertain who ordered the leak, as previously reported. While the Vice President stands accused of no wrongdoing, his role may come into greater focus during a trial.
In an interview with the syndicated radio program "Democracy Now," Wilson argued that Cheney may have been lying to Russert when he said he didn't know about the ambassador's Niger trip.
"While we've never met, he certainly knows who I am and should know unless his memory is flawed and faulty," Wilson said during the Sept. 16, 2003 interview. "There were at a minimum three reports that had been generated shortly after the Vice President had asked the question, 'what do we know about this?'"
The Vice President certainly must have known Wilson during his tenure as secretary of defense during the first President Bush's administration. In the weeks leading up to the first Gulf War, Wilson served as the acting U.S ambassador on the ground in Baghdad. In fact, Wilson was the only line of communication between Washington and Saddam Hussein. The White House held daily briefings with Wilson, and Cheney sat in on a majority of those briefings.
White House suggested investigation was waste of time
In hindsight, it now seems that the White House, including President Bush, attempted to steer reporters away from covering the Plame leak by saying the "leaker" would never be found.
On October 7, 2003, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that the White House ruled out three administration officials - Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as sources of the leak - a day before FBI questioned the three of them - based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.
The very next day, however, Rove was questioned by FBI investigators and said that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak's column was published - a lie, it appears - based on Time reporter Matthew Cooper's emails which stated that Rove told Cooper about Plame.
Bush told reporters the same day he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.
"I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush said. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea."
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) responded to the president's statement in the New York Times.
"If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?" Lautenberg asked. "Would he say that about a bank robbery investigation?"
Facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs to Justice Department officials, Bush said that the White House could invoke executive privilege and withhold some "sensitive" documents related to the leak case. Democrats speculated that the White House had something to hide.
Classified leak or truthful rebuttal?
Unable to keep emails from investigators, the White House mounted a defense. They would seek to distinguish between "unauthorized leaks" and something perfectly legal: "setting the record straight."
On Oct. 6, 2003, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak's source, McClellan tried to explain the difference between unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the record straight" about Wilson's public criticism of the Administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq.
"There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out," McClellan
said.
"There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that it was not the vice president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger."
Wilson, it turned out, had never said that the vice president's office had sent him to Niger.
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in early 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2005 8:32 pm Post subject: CIA v. Cheney |
| CIA v. Cheney
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 09 November 2005
Allegations keep cropping up in the press that CIA professionals are undermining the administration. In at least one sense, I suppose, this is true. For when an administration embarks on a war justified by little or no intelligence, speaking truth can be regarded as treachery. The country could use more of that kind of "treachery."
Vice President Cheney in Trouble
Cheney's current situation has the makings of a Greek tragedy in the way he is about to self-destruct. The tragic flaw of overweening arrogance - the Greeks called it hubris - did not begin with Euripides. Nor will it end with the inexorably approaching demise of the vice president and other leaders of the current US administration.
Richard Nixon's first vice president, Spiro Agnew, aside from his fulsome rhetoric, was hardly a heroic figure. So when his petty crimes were brought to light, he left the White House quietly by the side door. This is not Dick Cheney's style. And it is probably too late now for that kind of denouement. He is far more likely to press the self-destruct button, and perhaps even bring President George W. Bush down with him. Absolute power does indeed corrupt absolutely. Small wonder that Republican stalwart, and national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who has worked closely with Cheney over the years, now says "I do not know Dick Cheney."
Patriotic truth-tellers are coming out of the woodwork. For example, Larry Wilkerson, who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has made public his conclusion that Cheney was the main author of this administration's policy of torturing detainees "as appropriate and as consistent with military necessity." Leaks in the dike are proliferating. Perhaps worst of all, from the president's point of view, is the fact that Karl Rove has pulled his finger out of the dike - preoccupied as he is in avoiding indictment and jail. Katrina-type flooding is threatening the White House.
For Cheney, the disclosures regarding the network of overseas prisons run by the CIA, together with his dogged opposition to Congressional restraints on interrogation techniques, may prove the last straw. There are signs he might be foolish enough to pull the strings on genuine-investigation-averse Pat Roberts (R, Kan.), chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to gather a posse to "bring to justice" the administration sources who gave chapter and verse to the Washington Post's Dana Priest for her detailed article on the prisons last week. If Roberts launches an investigation, he is likely to round up first the usual suspects in the CIA, for which Cheney has such deep distrust. But none of this would help.
Cheney, Wilson, Plame
L'Affaire Cheney-and-the-Wilsons would never sell as a novel. It is nonetheless fascinating as a "now-running" tragic drama in which the main player is once again done in by hubris. The affair is most important, though, as a harbinger of things to come. It provides a case study of how Cheney, in a self-destructive way, lashed out at the CIA when he became convinced that Agency officials were deliberately undermining his attempts to conjure up "intelligence" to justify war on Iraq. It is a telling lesson - and worth a short review, starting with a query that has troubled more than one questioner.
"It just doesn't parse," they complain, "if Vice President Dick Cheney was aware from the start of the very fragile nature, regarding both provenance and substance, of the report on Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, what was he thinking when he asked the CIA to look into it?" The Agency rank and file and Cheney were no friends. He was already having a very hard time muscle-wrestling CIA analysts into seeing "evidence" of a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, to enable the administration to provide "evidence" for the campaign to associate Saddam Hussein with the attacks of 9/11.
There is ample evidence that the vice president saw the reluctance of CIA analysts to jump on that bandwagon as recalcitrance - indeed, as sabotage. They continued, for example, to pour cold water on a report that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, even though the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" (Wilkerson's word) kept citing that spurious report as evidence of Iraqi ties to 9/11. The CIA ombudsman testified to Congress that, in 32 years of experience in Agency's analytical ranks, he had never before witnessed such "hammering" on intelligence analysts to hold their noses and give their blessing to dubious evidence. On this issue, at least - as opposed to the issue of (non-existent) "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, Agency analysts refused to allow themselves to be corrupted - until their director, George Tenet, caved in for Colin Powell's (in)famous UN speech of February 5, 2003.
It is worth recalling that, before Tenet caved, CIA analysts were receiving outside encouragement from the likes of Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who saw the whole game for what it was and gratuitously told the press that the evidence of Iraq-al-Qaeda ties was "scant," while "cabalist" Rumsfeld was saying the evidence was "bulletproof." Scowcroft was fired almost a year ago from his position as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Being right does not help.
So, Again, the Question
In the face of such recalcitrance, why would the vice president ask CIA officials, of all people, to investigate other dubious "evidence" of nefarious activity by Iraq?
Answer: He did not anticipate what they would do. Nothing was further from his mind. He set in train something he never intended. Cheney was hoisted on his own petard.
When the cockamamie story of Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger first came to the attention of CIA analysts in Washington, they threw it into the circular file for very good substantive reasons. First and foremost, with an international consortium led by the French tightly controlling the export of uranium mined in Niger, the chances were virtually nil that the Iraqis could bring this off. As the Silberman-Robb Commission makes clear, it was the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, not the CIA, that wrote up the analytical report that found its way onto Cheney's desk.
Why did Cheney ask his CIA briefer what he thought of the DIA analysis?
Answer: He was in the habit of "hammering" on CIA analysts - during his "multiple visits" to CIA headquarters, for example - to beat them into submission so they would serve up the politically correct answer on such matters.
In sum, in my opinion, it probably did not occur to the vice president that the CIA would take his query so seriously as to send a highly qualified person down to Niger who, in turn, would be able to give the lie to the report. I can vouch from personal experience that, when the vice president of the United States expresses interest in more information on a specific report, the Agency will hop to and pursue the matter aggressively, as it should. A mite too aggressively, in this case, for Cheney's objectives.
Enter the Nonproliferation Division
The Nonproliferation Division of the Directorate of Operations, in which Valerie Wilson was working, was told of Cheney's query and asked former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who during his earlier service in Africa became intimately familiar with the mining industry in Niger, to travel to Niger to check out the report. Wilson's findings were duly reported and disseminated. (When the vice president asks the bureaucracy a question, you can count on it being answered one way or another.) At the time, Wilson did not know that the Iraq-Niger canard had been woven out of whole cloth by forgerers. Still, his account should have put the last nail in the coffin into which that dead duck should have been thrown.
It is a safe assumption that Cheney was not pleased, to put it mildly, when he learned that the CIA had responded quickly by sending Wilson to Niger.
It was not pure paranoia. In Cheney's mind, Wilson had three main things against him.
Rather than following the customary ex-ambassador routine of grousing privately over cocktails in Georgetown parlors, Wilson had been drawing on his considerable substantive expertise in speaking out strongly - often publicly - against the planning for and execution of the war with Iraq;
As the diplomat who faced down Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War (for which former president George H.W. Bush had called him "an American hero"), Wilson enjoyed particularly wide respect and credibility; and
Baffled by President George W. Bush's citing of the worn-out and discredited Iraq-Africa-uranium fairytale in his State of the Union address in January 2003, Wilson had been making not-so-discreet inquiries as to why the president chose to repeat the fable. Did he perhaps have better evidence? The answer was no.
Wilson concluded, correctly in my opinion, that the administration had shown itself prepared to twist intelligence to "justify" attacking Iraq and that it had little else upon which to base the conjuring up of the "mushroom cloud" that deceived Congress into voting for war. Several months into the war, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (much less of the "reconstituted" nuclear weapons development program repeatedly advertised by Cheney) had been found. And the "explanation" offered by the Cheney/Rumsfeld "cabal," namely, that patience was needed because Iraq is the size of California, was wearing thin. The Iraq-Niger story was about all they had left.
Then, a Double Whammy
It was bad enough for the administration when Wilson's op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003; and worse still when this consummate ambassador permitted himself to tell Washington Post reporters that the Iraq-Niger affair "begs the question regarding what else they are lying about." But when Cheney learned that the former ambassador's wife, Valerie Wilson née Plame, worked in the Nonproliferation Division that sent Wilson off on the mission to Niger, the vice president would almost certainly have seen deliberate sabotage by the CIA
I believe Cheney smelled a rat, the rat of deliberate defiance - in Cheney's eyes a mutinous attempt to deny him the kind of "intelligence" he knew would be required to deceive Congress. Mrs. Wilson is a veteran CIA operative trained to spot a spurious report a mile away. Cheney could only assume that she would have recognized the Iraq-Niger canard for what it was, and sent her husband to Niger to give the lie to the report. Policymakers immersed in the world of politics often have difficulty distinguishing between honest efforts by intelligence professionals to pursue the truth on the one hand and insubordination/sabotage on the other.
The Iraq-Niger fish story had already begun to stink. Tenet had insisted on deleting it from the president's "mushroom-cloud" speech on October 7, 2002, just three days before Congress voted to approve war. Yet the White House was acutely embarrassed when it had to retract the story after it had found its way into the president's State of the Union address the following January. As for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, although he used a plethora of spurious material in his UN speech of February 5, 2003, the Niger story smelled so bad that it did not meet even that low threshold. And it did not help a bit when Powell was asked why the president had repeated the story in late January, while he (Powell) chose not to use it just a week later; Powell damned the president's words with very faint praise, saying they were "not completely outrageous."
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Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), was a CIA analyst for 27 years. His responsibilities included daily briefings of the vice president and other senior officials. Ray now works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
