| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 11:10 pm Post subject: Israel and the Neocons, The Libby Affair and the Internal Wa |
| Israel and the Neocons, The Libby Affair and the Internal War
By James Petras
Who were the fabricators of war propaganda, who was Libby protecting? And
not only the "fabricators of war", but the strategic planners, speech-makers
and architects of war who acted hand in hand with the propagandists and the
journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all
these high- level functionaries, propagandists and journalists?
Continued
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11385.htm | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 7:02 am Post subject: Whistleblower Armageddon: Can GOP Stop the Revelations? |
| Whistleblower Armageddon: Can GOP Stop the Revelations?
by Valtin
Sun Jan 22, 2006 at 05:55:02 PM PDT
In Al Gore's January 16 speech, he laid out a programmatic five points to address the threats to our freedoms. Somewhat surprisingly, the number two demand was:
... new whistleblower protection should immediately be established for members of the executive branch who report evidence of wrongdoing, especially where it involves abuse of authority in the sensitive areas of national security.
(see Washington Post transcript)
Why the emphasis on whistleblower protection? Because the bureaucracy is imploding, with defections within the government, threatening to unveil a tsunami of revelations that will possibly link the Plame scandal, Sibel Edmonds's case, the Abramoff scandals, with the build-up to the Iraq war, if not the 9/11 attack itself.
Tinfoilhatters, hold onto those hats, because your day may be almost here...
Valtin's diary :: ::
Sibel Edmonds, besides being an incredibly brave woman, is an ex-FBI, post-9/11 translator who sought to bring some very strange and incriminating documents to the attention of her bosses, and later key member of Congress. She was stopped in her attempt, and had an arcane but draconian law asserting "state secret privilege" plastered on her, preventing her from saying anything concrete about what she knows. She went to the federal courts to remove the gag order, only to have Judge Reggie Walton -- the same judge "randomly" assigned to the Libby case -- reject her motion. So we don't know what were in those documents... yet.
Well, then, what's the Edmonds case all about? Daily Kos blogger, Necons Will Ban Me, had an excellent diary on Edmonds that attracted a lot attention back on 1/6/06:
Evidently the American Turkish Council, AIPAC, the Usual Neocon Suspects (Feith/Perle/Wolfowitz/Libby) and specific high-ranking individuals including former Turkish ambassadors Eric Edelman and Marc Grossman are deeply involved in global arms smuggling, drug-dealing, money-laundering and black market nuclear sales to terrorists. Individuals involved in this crime nexus were instrumental in the outing of Valerie Plame in an effort to sabotage the work of CIA front Brewster Jennings - which was seen as increasingly threatening to them.
The bottom line seems to be that a group of influential lobbyists, high-ranking officials and diplomats in Turkey, Israel, the United States and the 'Stans --with the neocons at the center of all of it-- are caught up in a very large, fantastically lucrative and staggeringly corrupt scheme to facilitate precisely the ills (terrorism, arms proliferation, drug smuggling) these countries all claim to want stopped.
Now, as I was poking around on the Internet, I came across an interview Edmonds gave to the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel in May 2004. Notice the conclusion of Edmonds' statement, when asked, "What is Al Queda?"
This is a very interesting and complex question. When you think of al-Qaeda, you are not thinking of al-Qaeda in terms of one particular country, or one particular organization. You are looking at this massive movement that stretches to tens and tens of countries. And it involves a lot of sub-organizations and sub-sub-organizations and branches and it's extremely complicated. So to just narrow it down and say al-Qaeda and the Saudis, or to say it's what they had at the camp in Afghanistan, is extremely misleading. And we don't hear the extent of the penetration that this organization and the sub-organizations have throughout the world, throughout their networks and throughout their various activities. It's extremely sophisticated. And then you involve a significant amount of money into this equation. Then things start getting a lot of overlap-- money laundering, and drugs and terrorist activities and their support networks converging in several points. That's what I'm trying to convey without being too specific. And this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign, and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money.
Now, where is there a big scandal unfolding surrounding a gigantic lobbying and money laundering operation, where some of this money could get into someone's political campaign? Hmmmm... "And people don't want to be traced back to this money." Hmmmmm...
Oh, yeah! Jack "Indian Guide" Abramoff!
Time magazine reports the Bushies "scrambling to find photos of President Bush and Abramoff"? (link is from 1/9/06 NY Daily News) Why so scared of a picture or two? Surely the Rove machine can explain them away. Or is there something much bigger behind the Bush-Abramoff connection? Bigger even than the Susan Ralston connection. While this is very speculative, could it be something that connects them to the Edmonds grouping, financed with both Al Queda and Abramoff money? Or were the Abramoff millions (billions?) used to buy the U.S. elections? Or both? Or more?
Am I crazy? Well, why did the Associated Press report on September 27, 2001, that terrorists from the 9/11 hijackings were seen on Abramoff's SunCruz gambling boats in Florida a week prior to 9/11? And Atta's known to have jetted to Vegas prior to 9/11. The confluence of mob money, deep cover, and assassination/terror/drug money/money laundering is well covered in the political classic, UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott's book, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina.
AP
In Florida, Michael Hlavsa, chairman of SunCruz Casinos gambling cruise company, said two or three men linked to the hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach. One name on the passenger list from a Sept. 5 cruise was the same as one of the suspected terrorists, Hlavsa said. SunCruz Casinos turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators...
After Gore's speech, Sibel Edmonds e-mailed The Brad Blog:
The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition [Edmond's organization] applauds Mr. Gore for his nonpartisan speech which very eloquently and sincerely expresses our core American values based on the notions of liberty and justice.
As stated by Mr. Gore, without whistleblowers the public would never know of the many abuses of constitutional rights by the government. Whistleblowers, Truth-Tellers, are responsible for the disclosure that President George W. Bush ordered unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens....
Hundreds of national security whistleblowers, patriotic government employees, have brought to the public's attention cases of agency wrongdoing only to find themselves fired, stripped of their security clearance, and/or deprived of meaningful work, simply because they were courageous and patriotic enough to place the security of our nation above their own career security and interests.
....our legislative branch has failed to provide these patriots with any protection.
The U.S. government has been adept at running off-the-books political operations for decades now. Some of these operations became known: Watergate plumbers, Iran/Contra, etc. Many must be unknown. It seems possible that the whole War on Terror business is the work of one of these operations, spread across countries, and aimed at consolidating the dream of endless war to better consolidate the dicatorship of the war machine. These operations oftentime utilize connections with organized crime, drug operations (hmmm... Afghanistan's back in the opium business, uh, "bigtime"), special ops, and dubious local politicians and warlords.
Do I sound extreme? Tinfoil crazed? You may also wish to see the documentaries, "The Fog of War" (Errol Morris, Oscar best documentary) and "Why We Fight" (Eugene Jarecki; this picture was the 2005 winner at Sundance).
With all the secrets this administration is trying to hold onto: Plamegate, Niger forgeries, Abu Graib photos, NSA illegal wiretapping orders, Bush and Abramoff, the testimony of Sibel Edmonds, and much more; how much longer before it all comes out? Many good people in the state bureaucracy have been fighting a guerilla war against the forces of corruption and evil within this government. Al Gore has taken up the cudgels, and it should devolve upon us honest bloggers to take this demand and make it a mainstream meme on both our blogs and in the mainstream media.
There's no guarantee we can win. But the time is growing short before this government will move to stifle all dissent. One major economic downturn, accompanied by any strong showing of social fightback, and they will let loose their dogs of domestic war.
"When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril." -- Harry S. Truman
(on masthead at nswbc.org)
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/22/19552/5785 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject: Prosecutor Says Libby Seeks to Thwart Criminal Case |
| Prosecutor Says Libby Seeks to Thwart Criminal Case
By Neil A. Lewis
The New York Times
Saturday 18 February 2006
Washington - A federal prosecutor has said I. Lewis Libby Jr., former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is trying to sabotage the criminal case against him by insisting through his lawyers that he be given sensitive government documents for his defense.
In a court filing on Thursday night, the prosecutor said requests by Mr. Libby's lawyers for documents, including the daily intelligence briefs given to the president for nearly a year, were "a transparent effort at 'graymail.' "
The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said the requests for a large amount of sensitive information beyond what they had been given was unjustified. Mr. Fitzgerald told the federal judge hearing the case that defendants like Mr. Libby had an incentive to derail their trials by asking for sensitive documents that the government might not want discussed openly.
Graymail is the practice of discouraging a prosecution from proceeding by contending that a defendant may need to disclose classified or sensitive information as part of a full defense. Such an approach can force the government to choose between dropping the prosecution or allowing the information to be disclosed at a trial.
Before 1980, some officials escaped prosecution by threatening to disclose unspecified secrets in open court. Congress enacted the Classified Information Procedures Act in 1980 to ensure that the government was not surprised by any disclosures at trial.
If the defense intends to use classified information, it has to inform the government, and then the two sides argue before a judge in secret on whether the information is needed for full defense. If a judge decides that the defendant is entitled to the information, the government has to decide whether to accept the likelihood that the information may be disclosed in a trial or drop the prosecution.
John D. Cline, a lawyer in San Francisco and an authority on the classified-procedures law who is representing Mr. Libby, challenged the accusation that the defense was engaging in graymail. Mr. Cline said the 1980 law made graymail impossible because the government knew exactly what information the defense was seeking, and a judge must rule on whether it is necessary to the defense case.
"We are working lawfully and properly through the C.I.P.A. procedures to obtain documents essential to Mr. Libby's defense," he said. "All we want is a limited number of key documents that Mr. Libby either wrote or reviewed during the most critical period in this case."
Mr. Libby is charged with five felony counts, accusing him of lying to investigators about his role in the disclosure of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Wilson. His lawyers have said they intend to mount a defense built on the idea that he was dealing with issues far more momentous than the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity to reporters. To that end, they have asked Mr. Fitzgerald to turn over many documents from the vice president's office and the C.I.A.
Mr. Libby's lawyers have asked Mr. Fitzgerald to give them the President's Daily Brief for 277 days beginning in May 2003. They have said those documents "are material to establishing that any misstatements he may have made were the result of confusion, mistake and faulty memory resulting from his immersion in other, more significant matters, rather than deliberate lies."
Mr. Fitzgerald called the request "breathtaking" and noted that the daily brief was "an extraordinarily sensitive document." He said the disclosure of part of the Aug. 6, 2001, daily brief to the Sept. 11 commission was the sole instance of a daily brief's being publicly disclosed.
In addition, the lawyers have asked Mr. Fitzgerald to provide information that he obtained from reporters about other officials who might have spoken to them about Ms. Wilson.
------- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2006 7:30 am Post subject: Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments |
| Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 28 March 2006
It may seem as though it's been moving along at a snail's pace, but the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials.
These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the investigation.
In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation.
The sources said late Monday that it may take more than a month before Fitzgerald presents the paperwork outlining the government's case against one or both of the officials and asks the grand jury to return an indictment, because he is currently juggling quite a few high-profile criminal cases and will need to carve out time to write up the indictment and prepare the evidence.
In addition to responding to discovery requests from Libby's defense team and appearing in court with his attorneys, who are trying to obtain additional evidence, such as top-secret documents, from Fitzgerald's probe, the special prosecutor is also prosecuting Lord Conrad Black, the newspaper magnate, has recently charged numerous individuals in a child pornography ring, and is wrestling with other lawsuits in his home city of Chicago.
Details about the latest stage of the investigation began to take shape a few weeks ago when the lead FBI investigator on the leak case, John C. Eckenrode, retired from the agency and indicated to several colleagues that the investigation is about to wrap up with indictments handed up by the grand jury against Rove or Hadley or both officials, the sources said.
The Philadelphia-based Eckenrode is finished with his work on the case; however, he is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution next year against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators regarding his role in the leak.
Hadley and Rove remain under intense scrutiny, but sources said Fitzgerald has not yet decided whether to seek charges against one or both of them.
Libby and other officials in Cheney's office used the information they obtained about Plame Wilson to undermine the credibility of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. He had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire yellow-cake uranium, the key component used to build a nuclear bomb, from Niger.
The uranium claim was the silver bullet in getting Congress to support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and the country barely had a functional weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq Survey Group.
Wilson had traveled to Niger more than a year earlier to investigate the yellow-cake claims and reported back to the CIA that intelligence reports saying Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger were false.
On Monday, though, attorneys close to the leak case confirmed that Fitzgerald had met with the grand jury half a dozen times since January and recently told the jurors that he planned to present them with the government's case against Rove or Hadley, which stems from an email Rove had sent to Hadley in July of 2003 indicating that he had a conversation about Plame Wilson with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.
Neither Hadley nor Rove disclosed the existence of the email when they were questioned by FBI investigators or when they testified before a grand jury, the sources said, adding that Rove testified he found out about Plame Wilson from reporters and Hadley testified that he recalled learning about Plame Wilson when her name was published in a newspaper column.
Rove testified before the grand jury four times. Rove testified before the grand jury four times. He did not disclose the existence of the email during his first two appearances before the grand jury, claiming he simply forgot about it because he was enmeshed with the 2004 Presidential election, traveling around the country attending fundraisers and meetings, working more than 15 hours a day on the campaign, and just forgot that he spoke with Cooper three months earlier, sources familiar with his testimony said.
But Rove and Libby had been the subject of dozens of news stories about the possibility that they played a role in the leak, and had faced dozens of questions as early as August 2003 - one month after Plame Wilson was outed - about whether they were the administration officials responsible for leaking her identity.
The story Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, provided to Fitzgerald in order to explain why Rove did not disclose the existence of the email is "less than satisfactory and entirely unconvincing to the special counsel," one of the attorneys close to the case said.
Luskin did not return numerous calls for comment. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council said she could not comment on an ongoing investigation and has vehemently denied that Hadley was involved in the leak "because Mr. Hadley told us he wasn't involved."
In December, Luskin made a desperate attempt to keep his client out of Fitzgerald's crosshairs.
Luskin had revealed to Fitzgerald that Viveca Novak - a reporter working for Time magazine who wrote several stories about the Plame Wilson case - inadvertently tipped him off in early 2004 that her colleague at the magazine, Matt Cooper, would be forced to testify that Rove was his source who told him about Plame Wilson's CIA status.
Novak - who bears no relation to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the journalist who first published Plame Wilson's name and CIA status in a July 14, 2003, column - met Luskin in Washington DC in the summer of 2004, and over drinks, the two discussed Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame Wilson leak.
Luskin had assured Novak that Rove learned Plame Wilson's name and CIA status after it was published in news accounts and that only then did he phone other journalists to draw their attention to it. But Novak told Luskin that everyone in the Time newsroom knew Rove was Cooper's source and that he would testify to that in an upcoming grand jury appearance, these sources said.
According to Luskin's account, after he met with Viveca Novak he contacted Rove and told him about his conversation with her. The two of them then began an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails for any evidence that proved that Rove had spoken with Cooper. Luskin said that during this search an email was found that Rove had sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley immediately after Rove's conversation with Cooper, and it was subsequently turned over to Fitzgerald.
"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the email to Hadley immediately following his conversation with Cooper on July 11, 2003. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."
Luskin wound up becoming a witness in the case and testified about his conversation with Viveca Novak that Luskin said would prove his client didn't knowingly lie to FBI investigators when he was questioned about the leak in October 2003, just three months after Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
The email Rove sent to Hadley, which Luskin said he found, helped Rove recall his conversation with Cooper a year earlier. Rove then returned to the grand jury to clarify his previous testimonies in which he did not disclose that he spoke with journalists.
Still, Rove's account of his conversation with Cooper went nothing like he had described in his email to Hadley, according to an email Cooper sent to his editor at Time magazine following his conversation with Rove in July 2003.
"It was, KR said, [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized [Wilson's] trip," Cooper's July 11, 2003, email to his editor said. "Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The email characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "
It is unclear whether Rove was misleading Hadley about his conversation with Cooper, perhaps, because White House officials told their staff not to engage reporters in any questions posed about Wilson's Niger claims.
But Fitzgerald's investigation has turned up additional evidence over the past few months that convinced him that Luskin's eleventh-hour revelation about the chain of events that led to the discovery of the email is not credible. Fitzgerald believes that Rove changed his story once it became clear that Cooper would be compelled to testify about the source - Rove - who revealed Plame Wilson's CIA status to him, sources close to the case said.
If any of the people named in this story believe they have been unfairly portrayed or that what was written in this story is untrue, they will have an opportunity to respond in this space.
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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.
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