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the full, and as yet unpublished, report of the Italian parliamentary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-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
