Irak Krieg und Leak Gate - alle Spuren führen nach Jerusalem

verfasst von CRASH_GURU, 31.10.2005, 08:27

-->October 26, 2005
Background to Betrayal
Behind the CIA leak investigation
by Justin Raimondo

Has I. Lewis"Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, made a
deal with CIA leak investigator Patrick J. Fitzgerald - and turned on his
boss in return for leniency?

It sure looks like it. Or else how is it that Scooter suddenly discovered
his notes of a"previously undisclosed" conversation held with Cheney on
June 12, 2003, in which the vice president was the first to tell him that
Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA? Prior to Scooter's
eleventh-hour revelation, he had been telling the grand jury that he got the
information from journalists.

That makes at least three neocons"turned" by the Bulldog. Libby follows
John Hannah, the VP's national security adviser, and David Wurmser, Cheney's
Middle East expert-in-residence, down the well-trodden path to collaboration
with the special counsel.

All roads lead directly to Dick Cheney.

What crime, however, has been committed? New light has been shed on this
mystery with the breaking news that Fitzgerald is homing in on the question
at the heart of his investigation - who forged the Niger uranium documents,
and how did they get passed off as reliable enough information to be
referenced in the president 2003 State of the Union address? UPI's Martin
Walker confirms what I reported in this space last Wednesday:

"The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now
widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started
the investigation, according to NATO intelligence sources.. NATO sources
have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of
investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from
the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as
yet unpublished, report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the
affair."

The key to finding out who outed deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame has
always been the motive. Why would anyone in the U.S. government deliberately
expose the identity of an agent working in the vitally important realm of
nuclear proliferation - identifying not only Ms. Plame, but also her
co-workers at"Brewster Jennings and Associates," the CIA front company
whose real function was to scour the world for evidence of rogue nukes and
other weapons of mass destruction? In busting up the Agency's operations
designed to prevent the spread of WMD, whoever outed Plame was taking a very
big risk - but why?

In investigating what led to the outing of Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald
discovered that a fraud had been perpetrated on the American people and the
Congress of the United States. In detailing the case for war, the
administration based much of its argument that Saddam was close to acquiring
nuclear weapons on a cache of documents that purported to show an agreement
between Iraq and the African nation of Niger to purchase"yellowcake"
uranium. The president referred to this, albeit obliquely, in his 2003 State
of the Union address. A few weeks after that speech was delivered, however,
the White House was forced to retract its statement - because the documents
turned out to be forgeries.

Now we discover - and Fitzgerald no doubt knows more about this than
anyone - that it wasn't an error, another dreaded"intelligence failure,"
that had allowed the Niger uranium forgeries to be marshaled along with
similarly bogus intelligence as"evidence" of Iraqi WMD; it was a deliberate
act of deception, carried out at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
A series of articles in La Repubblica exposes the provenance of the
documents, shows how they were funneled to U.S. policymakers, and maps their
course all the way up to the White House. Go here for an English translation
of the firstinstallment. Here is the Italian version of Part II, and here is
the translated version.

Authors Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo describe how SISMI, the Italian
intelligence agency, was a party to faking the documents. Italian Prime
Minister Berlusconi was keen to put SISMI at America's disposal in the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and SISMI's chief, Nicolo Pollari,
was eager to make himself - and Italy - indispensable to the warlords of
Washington. Pollari's initial attempts to pass off the Niger uranium
forgeries as authentic evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions didnot, however,
meet with success. Whereupon Pollari took advantage of the developing split
between the State Department-CIA professionals, who tended to be skeptical,
and the Cheney-Pentagon-neoconideologues, who were looking for any
evidence - however dubious -of Iraq's WMD, and the Italians developed a
strategy to legitimize the forgeries in the eyes of the White House.

The Italian strategy was to enter the factional conflict on the side of the
Cheney-ites. As a liaison to those circles, Defense Minister Antonio Martino
recommended"an old friend of Italy," one Michael Ledeen - neoconservative
ideologue and veteran of"parallel intelligence" work from his days as
broker of the Iran-Contra"arms for hostages" deal. Just as Ledeen acted as
the middleman in effecting the transfer of Israeli arms to Iran in exchange
for the hostages, so he apparently played a similar role as a go-between in
Niger-gate. Using Ledeen as their Washington intermediary, the Italians
succeeded in circumventing the CIA and getting the unvetted forgeries to the
White House via the good offices of both Condoleezza Rice and the Pentagon's
Office of Special Plans.

La Repubblica also reports that Pollari traveled all the way to Washington
to sell these tainted goods, and, on Sept. 9, 2002, met in secret with
then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

This meeting came at a turning point in the debate within the administration
over whether to include the Niger uranium claims in the president's public
arguments for war: the CIA and the State Department both insisted that the
claims were highly dubious. They won in the case of the Cincinnati speech,
where the reference was deleted at CIA director George Tenet's insistence,
but, in the interim between that and the 2003 State of the Union, the War
Party managed to gain the upper hand - with the help of Pollari and his
allies in the administration. The documents - or, at least, the allegations
contained therein - made their way directly to the White House via the
disinformation superhighway constructed by Pollari, Hadley, Ledeen, and the
gang down at the Office of Special Plans.

In short, SISMI knew the documents were fakes but pushed them to help the
White House gin up a war. The question is: who else knew? As we go up the
chain, from the low-level criminals who prepared and disseminated the
documents, to the second-and-third tier American officials who received
them, finally ascending to the inner sanctum of the Office of the Vice
President and the National Security Council, we have to ask: Did Hadley
know? Did Libby? Did Cheney?

There are all sorts of undercurrents swirling around this vortex of deceit
and double-dealing: a key link is Larry Franklin, the Pentagon's top Iran
analyst who recently pled guilty to charges of handing over sensitive
information to Israeli"diplomats." Franklin met with Ledeen, Pollari,
Martino, and the ubiquitous Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome - where else? - in
December of 2001. A number of Iranians participated in this conclave, and
the American delegation also included Harold Rhode, a Middle East scholar of
rabidly neoconservative views who worked in the Office of Special Plans (as
did Franklin). These unauthorized"back channel" meetings caused
consternation at the State Department and the CIA, but continued unabated
and apparently without consequences for the participants - until now.

The more one looks at the outing of Valerie Plame and the exposure of
Brewster Jennings, the more it looks like a covert action aimed at what were
once the eyes and ears of the U.S. intelligence community in the realm of
WMD. That's why this two-year investigation was launched to begin with, and
why it is being pursued so relentlessly - because, at a time when nuclear
terrorism is held up as the principal threat to our security, the Plame leak
involves nothing less than an attack on what is arguably the most vital of
our defenses. Which raises the question: A covert action - carried out by
whom?

If we look at the individuals involved, we see that many have links to
Israel, Iran, and the Iraqi National Congress, including:

John Hannah: Juan Cole details Hannah's career and points to his strategic
position as a key link in the neoconservative network that dragooned us into
war:

"It is possible that Wilson posed a special danger to Hannah, since Hannah
was at the center of the 'cherry-picking bad intelligence' effort that led
Cheney to maintain that Saddam and Bin Laden were Siamese twins and that
Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons and within 3-5 years of
having an atomic bomb.. Hannah had fingers in all three rotten pies from
which the worst intel came - Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office
of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and
fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress."

Hannah is former head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), the educational arm of the American Israel Political Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), the principal pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., whose two top
lobbyists - longtime AIPAC powerhouse Steve Rosen, and Iran analyst Keith
Weissman - have recently been indicted [.pdf] for spying on behalf of
Israel.

David Wurmser: A professional fabulist, as Raw Storyreports:

"Those familiar with information provided to Fitzgerald say that shortly
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by
Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment,
a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head
a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence
documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United
States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to
launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that
Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

Wurmser culled much of his material from the professional fraudsters of the
Iraqi National Congress.

Wurmser is also the primary author of"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the
Realm," a 1996 policy paper prepared for then-Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu."A Clean Break" argued for regime change in Iraq as a means of
knocking out Syria and extending Israeli influence throughout the region.
Prior to serving on Cheney's staff and as an aide to John Bolton at the
State Department, Wurmser was a member of a two-man team, the
Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, which, last we heard, was being
investigated for leaking sensitive U.S. secrets to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress, and thence to the Iranians. The Israelis, too, are
involved, as the Washington Post reported a year ago:

"Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives
involved in defense issues, including Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode and others at the
Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about
Richard Perle of the defense board and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and
principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney's office,
according to sources familiar with or involved in the case. 'The initial
interest was: Do you believe certain people would spy for Israel and pass
secret information?' said one source interviewed by the FBI about the
defense officials."

Michael Ledeen: The first president of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA), which describes its goal as"to inform the
American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role
Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the
Mediterranean and the Middle East." Ledeen played a key role in the
Iran-Contra affair, utilizing his Israeli and Iranian contacts. His
allegiances have always been rather suspect, as journalist Stephen Green
relates:

"In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the
Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor
was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs,
Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's
habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified
materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the
CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as
correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as an
agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel."

Ledeen was first identified as an active player in Niger-gate in this space,
and the La Repubblica piece confirms it. Whatever charges are filed by
Fitzgerald this week, the latest revelations ought to provide plenty of
grist for the prosecutor's indictment mill - which we should not assume to
be exhausted after this week.

As the architects of a campaign to lie us into war saw their narrative of a
nuclearized Saddam come under challenge, they returned fire - and hit a CIA
agent, blowing her cover and sabotaging an important U.S.
intelligence-gathering operation. Perhaps, as I speculated in my last
column, they had special reason to fear Plame and the capability of her
colleagues at Brewster Jennings to track down the provenance of the Niger
uranium forgeries. In any case, the neocons' act of retribution backfired
badly - to what extent we will learn shortly.

If the activities of this cabal were encouraged and, in part, directed by
agents of a foreign power - the Israelis, the Iranians, or both - that
wouldn't be too surprising. After all, that is one of the great dangers of
becoming an Empire: foreign ambassadors and native-born courtiers with an
interest in pursuing various foreign agendas are expected to crowd around
the throne, demanding an audience. They bribe, flatter, cajole, and
otherwise inveigle their way into the policy debate, seeking to exert as
much control as they can over what are, for them as well as ourselves,
life-and-death decisions. It's no wonder agents of influence would seek to
foment a war seen as serving their interests - what's frightening, however,
is that the U.S. government finds itself so vulnerable to manipulation.

A two-way transmission belt of treason has been operating in Washington for
years, and Fitzgerald is moving to shut it down. On the one hand, fraudsters
like Chalabi have been hanging around the Imperial City, spreading tall
tales and whooping it up for war, in hopes that American troops would
'"liberate" their country - and, not coincidentally, turn it over to
Chalabi's tender mercies. On the other hand, aside from broadcasting lies
(via sock-puppets of Judy Miller's ilk), they vacuumed up bona fide
intelligence - vital U.S. secrets - which Washington leaked like a sieve.
This is the sort of treasonous tradeoff our highest officials have been
engaged in. And for that they will pay the price.

As of this writing, we don't know what specific charges Ftizgerald will
bring, or against whom. However, the aforesaid is the backdrop, if you will,
to the action, as the curtain rises on what promises to be the most
sensational courtroom drama since the trial of Alger Hiss.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I have to add that this piece analyzing the La Repubblica article, by Laura
Rozen, which appears on The American Prospect's Web site, is interesting,
but in an important sense it is misleading: the focus is entirely on the
Hadley-Pollari meeting. No mention is made of the Office of Special Plans,
nor does Ledeen's name come up at all. I find this puzzling, especially
considering this excerpt from the Rozen piece:

"What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the
newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about
Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA,
but seemingly directly into the White House."

Since the OSP - and certainly Ledeen - are specifically named as the
conduits through which the White House received the forgery-based
"evidence," Rozen's omission is inexplicable.

The Washington rumor mill is churning so furiously and loudly that I'm
hearing it here in San Francisco: my sources tell me anywhere from five
indictments - Libby, Rove, Hadley, Hannah, and Mary Matalin - to possibly
just one. A Thursday morning press conference will reveal all. Maybe.

-Justin Raimondo

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• Irak Krieg und Leak Gate - alle Spuren führen nach Jerusalem - CRASH_GURU, 31.10.2005, 08:27