Entsteht da gerade Bush`s Watergate:

verfasst von CRASH_GURU, 21.10.2005, 09:44

-->The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/the-most-important-crimin_b_9183.ht
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If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few
functionaries of the vice president's office or the White House, we are
likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of
widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap
laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same
powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.

We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that
someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a
false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former
diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to
both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover
CIA agent wife.

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in
American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age
of innocence. The investigator's prosecutorial authority in this present
case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting
the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it
to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would
simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak
when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of
forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an
Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to
find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the
forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the
fraud was being uncovered by Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As
much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports
with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and
written about for the past 25 years.

We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son
of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of
the republic. Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes
committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a
handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The last thing most of us
believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people
we have elected but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose
to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this
place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law
cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under
the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death
rattles of history's greatest democracy.

Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a
copy of the Italian government's investigation into the break-in of the
Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents. The blatantly
fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to
get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a December 2001 meeting
in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and
Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy's intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio
Martino, the Italian defense minister.

If Fitzgerald is examining the possibility that Ledeen was executing a plan
to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq? Ledeen has long
ties to Italian intelligence agency operatives and has spanned the globe to
bring the world the constant variety of what he calls"creative destruction"
to build democracies. He makes the other neo-cons appear passive. He brought
the Reagan administration together with the Iranian arms dealer who dragged
the country through Iran-Contra and shares with his close friend Karl Rove a
personal obsession with Machiavelli. Ledeen, who is almost rabidly
anti-Arab, famously told the Washington Post that Karl Rove told him,"Any
time you have a good idea, tell me."

The federal grand jury has to at least consider whether Ledeen called Rove
with an idea to use his contacts with the Italian CIA to hatch a plan to
create the rationale for war. Ledeen told radio interviewer Ian Masters and
his producer Louis Vandenberg,"I have absolutely no connection to the Niger
documents, have never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled
them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said
anything about the subject." It is strictly coincidence then that some
months after he and his neo-con consorts and Italian intelligence officers
met in Rome that the Niger embassy was illegally entered and nothing was
stolen other than letterhead and seals. And equally coincident that forged
papers under those letterheads were slipped to Elisabetta Burba, a writer
for an Italian glossy owned by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister,
and a backer of the Bush invasion scheme. Unfortunately for the pro-war
neo-cons, even an Italian tabloid would not publish the fake documents and
turned them over to the CIA and US government in Rome.

The other American attendees at Ledeen's Roman Holiday are also worthy of
scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking classified US
government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin faces prosecution next
year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold
Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked the Office
of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterized as a
"counter-intelligence shop," OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a manner
that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered data
that said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or ignored the facts and
then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode
also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush
administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller about
the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.

No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside the
CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to Niger to
investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed only to pick
up the phone and call the vice president's chief of staff Scooter Libby, who
would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for even Republicans to
believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching a plan to
discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were
not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an
even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who
defrauded the government and the public.

I have seen the spawn of Rove's tortured mind and watched a hundred of his
political scams unfold and I am confident I know how this one played out.
Rove might have brought it up with his fellow big brains in the White House
Iraq Group, a propaganda organization set up to disseminate information
supporting the war. There was likely a consensus to move the plan to smack
down Wilson out of the White House. Rove always keeps a layer of operatives
between himself and the person he gets to pull the trigger. Libby was
probably told to manage it out of the VP's office to protect the president
because Karl always takes care of his most prized assets. Libby then likely
ordered John Hannah and possibly David Wurmser to call the ever-friendly
Judy Miller at the New York Times and columnist Robert Novak to give them
Valerie Plame's identity. Rove knew that Miller would call Libby of Aspen
for confirmation and his old friend Novak was certain to call Rove who, as
an unidentified senior White House official, would confirm the identity on
background only. Because Novak is a partisan gunslinger, he wrote more
quickly than Miller and when she saw the firestorm his story created, she
backed off and has since been trying to cover for herself and Libby.
Miller's later claim that she cannot remember who gave her the"Valerie
Flame" name is as much dissembling as Rove's unconvincing argument that he
"forgot" he met with Time reporter Matt Cooper. Karl Rove can remember
precinct results from 19th century presidential elections. He neither
forgets nor forgives.

There you have it, Mr. Prosecutor. To quote an unreconstructed former
Republican presidential candidate,"You know it. I know it. And the American
people know it." We expect you also to have sufficient evidence to prove all
of this. There are many of us who are on the verge of losing faith in our
democracy. We are convinced that there are people within the highest
ramparts of American government who are willing to put our country at great
risk to advance their geo-political vision. We want our country back. And
all we have left is the power of the law. From what we know, you are the
right man come forth at the right time.

Prove to us we still live in a democracy and a nation of laws.

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gesamter Thread:

• Entsteht da gerade Bush`s Watergate: - CRASH_GURU, 21.10.2005, 09:44
  • The Unravelling - politico, 21.10.2005, 10:10
    • Re:Gut so!! - LOMITAS, 21.10.2005, 10:22
      • Bis 2007 - politico, 21.10.2005, 12:03
        • Was folgt dann? (o.Text) - Aleph, 22.10.2005, 11:01
  • Re: Und das noch hinterher - schöne Suppe die da köchelt (o.Text) - LOMITAS, 21.10.2005, 10:26
    • Und das noch hinterher? Das war einmal. - prinz_eisenherz, 21.10.2005, 13:15
      • Re: Riskieren? - dottore, 21.10.2005, 13:56
        • Re: Hofberichterstattung statt kritischer Journalismus - Per_Jakobsson, 21.10.2005, 14:52
          • Gilt leider auch für Wissenschaft! - Aleph, 22.10.2005, 11:11
      • Re: Und das noch hinterher? Das war einmal. - CRASH_GURU, 21.10.2005, 14:17