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For six months, things have been quiet regarding the Plame Affair. Now, suddenly, they are bright hot. President Bush himself was implicated in Scooter Libby's testimony as a source authorizing leaks of classified information.
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It is absolutely no surprise that the major news media in the US declined to mention Lawrence Wilkerson's interview last week with NPR, in which he described his experience in a White House where the Vice President's office controls and modifies the flow of information to fit its warped view of reality, including the issuance of memos that tacitly inspired abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Listen to it, i insist.
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Vice Presidential aide Scooter Libby was indicted on five counts, including obstruction of justice and perjury.

You know, i feel a little weird about these kinds of charges, in the absense of an indictment for a crime that actually brought about the investigation. So far, you only have one person charged for crimes that would not have occurred except in response to an investigation. That's not to minimize the seriousness of the accused infractions -- they are all felony counts -- but it still feels vaguely dissatisfying.

Of course, that's because it's not over, this is not the final statement, but probably just a prelude. Given the very serious stuff that's come to light in just the last week or so -- the involvement of Steven Hadley and Ahmed Chalabi in the actual forgery of the Niger yellowcake documents, and the possible involvement of figures in the AIPAC espionage scandal in the outing of Valerie Plame -- Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may have decided there's more serious digging to do.
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Oh, my, the investigation of Patrick Fitzgerald into the CIA leak case (aka Plamegate) has apparently expanded to actions of the Bush Administration before the Iraq invasion.

A few days ago Justin Raimundo wrote that "an ex-CIA source" told him the special prosecutor had been looking into the forgery of the Iraq-Niger Yellowcake documents. It seems now pretty-well established that the ultimate source of these documents was Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who aspired to take over when Saddam Hussein was outed and who had many friends among the neocons and in the White House.

With only one source reporting this i was hesitant to write about it, but now it is being reported by MSNBC too.

To use legal jargon, the White House is in deep doo-doo.
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For a couple of years now I've read hints and rumors about an ongoing full-scale war between the neoconservatives and the FBI-CIA. The flap over the mass media outing of undercover spook Valerie Plame by members of the Bush Administration is but one tendril of evidence that points to such a war. Allegations of Dick Cheney strongarming people in the CIA to produce intelligence favorable to the Administration's goal of "regime change in Iraq" are another tendril.

Yet another tendril was filed in federal court on August 4. You can read a copy of a federal grand jury's indictment of Larry Franklin, Steve Rosen, and Keith Weissman on charges of espionage here.

Justin Raimondo posted an interesting analysis of that indictment here.

As I wrote in The American Conservative in June:
"Like a dorsal fin poking just above the water, the Franklin spy trial promises us a glimpse of a creature much larger than appears at first sight."
However, not even I imagined the monstrous scale of this submerged giant: the earliest I could trace its movements was back to just before 9/11, based on the reporting of UPI's Richard Sale. But 1999? Who woulda thought? And it isn't just the timeline that's disturbing: it seems that a number of apparently senior U.S. government officials are about to be dragged into this imbroglio of trouble and treason.

This was all about factional warfare going on inside the administration over U.S. policy toward Iran, and "how the deliberations would proceed" was and still is of vital interest to the Israelis. Pushing the Americans toward a confrontation with Tehran, Israel and its American amen corner could care less how many laws they have to break in order to make sure they prevail. Trading in classified information, and leaking to "reporters for a national news organization" and even "a senior fellow at a Washington, D.C., thinktank," was all part of the game, and no doubt still is: what none of them realized, however, was that the feds were listening in on the other end.

... As the issue of Iran's alleged push to procure nuclear weapons takes center stage, AIPAC's efforts to sway U.S. policy – including stealing and leaking U.S. secrets in the service of their pro-Israel agenda – could not have been exposed at a more opportune time. Franklin's trial is scheduled for Sept. 6, although this new indictment could delay matters, but one thing is clear: When these people are finally brought to trial, it is the War Party that will be put in the dock. All those mysterious government officials, not identified by name in the indictment, will be called to testify under oath: the same goes for reporters who laundered Franklin's ill-gotten secrets.
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To: the Boston Globe

In an opinion piece titled "Failures of Intelligence," dated July 26, 2005, your columnist Jeff Jacoby argued that

"When the enemy is an international terrorist organization or a violent and dictatorial regime, preemption must trump reaction."

In a nutshell, what Jacoby is saying is that we should "shoot first and let God sort 'em out." This argument is deplorable, dishonest, and racist, because it values American lives over non-American lives. It is dishonest because Jacoby is attempting to excuse an inexcusable error.

In his view, anything we do to minimize the deaths of our own people is acceptable; we need not even feel obligated to consider the consequences of errors made, to consider how many non-Americans are going to die. Now that Iraq is on the verge of a full-fledged civil war, with 25,000 Iraqi civilians dead in the last two years, we have to ask if they or the world are truly better off.

The argument that intelligence failures were errors and not lies, as Jacoby asserts, requires us to overlook evidence that the White House suppressed dissent in the CIA. This is what the complex Valerie Plame affair is about. CIA "intelligence" about Saddam's WMD programs was provided in an environment where dissenting CIA agents could expect retribution from the administration. Furthermore, there have been anecdotes alleging that intelligence which did not support the Administration's policy of "regime change in Iraq" was ignored or suppressed. Given these facts, it is not feasible to argue that the WMD claims were mere "errors."

Jacoby then tries to minimize these lies by arguing that Democrats said the same things first, as if those of us who opposed the war from the very beginning would have supported it instead if the lies came from a Democrat instead of a Republican. This war is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; many liberals support the war and many conservatives oppose it. This is also becoming clear as more Republicans voice opposition to the war.

"Shooting first and asking questions later" is reckless from the standpoint of homeland security as well, because it only adds to the growing list of grievances which people in the Arab world have against US meddling in their affairs.

Best regards,
Sabrina R______
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In emotionless English, [Richard] Dearlove [the head of MI-6] tells [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair and the others that President Bush has decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." Period. What about the intelligence? Dearlove adds matter-of-factly, "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

At this point, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirms that Bush has decided on war, but notes that stitching together a justification would be a challenge, since "the case was thin." Straw noted that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.

...The discussion at 10 Downing St. on July 23, 2002 calls to mind the first meeting of George W. Bush's National Security Council (NSC) on Jan. 30, 2001, at which the president made it clear that toppling Saddam Hussein sat atop his to-do list, according to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was there. O'Neill was taken aback that there was no discussion of why it was necessary to "take out" Saddam. Rather, after CIA Director George Tenet showed a grainy photo of a building in Iraq that he said might be involved in producing chemical or biological agents, the discussion proceeded immediately to which Iraqi targets might be best to bomb. Again, neither O'Neill nor the other participants asked the obvious questions. Another NSC meeting two days later included planning for dividing up Iraq's oil wealth.


from Proof the Fix Was In linked by [livejournal.com profile] antiwar_dot_com
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No evidence of weapons of mass distruction was ever found in Iraq, yet WMDs were cited as the reason for our "pre-emptive" strike. Without a threat to pre-empt, the invasion of Iraq looks like nothing but a move of imperial aggression. The president and former secretary of state and British prime minister and others who publically made the case were either (a) lying or (b) way off.

So yesterday a presidential commission blamed the CIA for massive intelligence failures regarding Saddam Hussein's alleged programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

After a year-long inquiry, the panel warned in a scathing report that the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, based on accusations that turned out to be false, had done damage to US credibility that "will take years to undo."

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commission said. "We simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude."

The panel warned that US intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of Iran and North Korea -- both locked in nuclear disputes with the United States -- may be "disturbingly" shaky. A chapter on the subject was classified.

from US intelligence 'dead wrong' on Iraq weapons: panel


Today, some fallout from the CIA. Agents' complaints and doubts were dismissed and buried by CIA leadership.

As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make

On the telephone that night, a senior intelligence officer warned then-CIA Director George J. Tenet that he lacked confidence in the principal source of the assertion that Saddam Hussein's scientists were developing deadly agents in mobile laboratories.

"Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'yeah, yeah' and that he was 'exhausted,'" according to testimony quoted yesterday in the report of President Bush's commission on the intelligence failures leading up to his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

... That was one among many examples -- cited over 692 pages in the report -- of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.

In scores of additional cases involving the country's alleged nuclear and chemical programs and its delivery systems, the commission described a kind of echo chamber in which plausible hypotheses hardened into firm assertions of fact, eventually becoming immune to evidence.

Doubts on Weapons Were Dismissed
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from a locked entry on the friend's list:

Poll: Public’s trust in Bush at low ebb
Many think he lied or exaggerated on WMD


A majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey results, which also show declining support for the war in Iraq and for Bush's leadership in general, indicate the public is increasingly questioning the president's truthfulness -- a concern for Bush's political advisers as his reelection bid gets underway.

...These doubts have affected Bush's reelection prospects. In a head-to-head matchup, Kerry beat Bush by 52 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Bush had more passionate support -- 83 percent of his backers said their support was strong, while 59 percent of Kerry supporters said so -- and retains an advantage over Kerry in dealing with Iraq and the war on terrorism. But the Democrat was seen as better able to handle the economy and jobs, education, and health care -- all top issues with voters this year.

The survey found a steep drop in public perceptions of Bush as a president and as an individual. In a sign that Bush has been set back by recent controversies over Iraqi weapons, his National Guard record and the federal budget, the number of Americans viewing him as a "strong leader" has slipped to 61 percent, down 6 points from December and the lowest level since the 2001 terrorist attacks.


You know, this both heartens me and frustrates me.

On one hand, I'm glad that the public is finally starting to get past the denial that they participated in and welcomed a brutal travesty last year.

On the other hand, were they friggin' blind!? There was one point last year at which I entertained, momentarily, the possibility that an invasion of Iraq might be justified. That was when I heard Tony Blair's speech to Parliament about the WMD. He was far more convincing than Powell or Bush. Maybe he actually believed that Iraq was some kind of threat.
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from Paul Krugman's essay America's Orwellian moment

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie [an associate of the AEI, mind--SS] published a book titled Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the CIA and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any pressure - after what happened to Valerie Plame, what would you do in their place? - but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top WMD analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the DIS [Defense Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.
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In his first public defense in the growing controversy over intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said Thursday that U.S. analysts never claimed before the war that Iraq was an imminent threat. The urgency of such a threat was the main argument used by President Bush for going to war.

In a speech clearly aimed at protecting the CIA from becoming a scapegoat, Tenet said analysts held varying opinions about whether Iraq possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons before the war. Those differences were spelled out in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate given to the White House, he said.

"They never said there was an imminent threat," Tenet said of the analysts. "Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

from CIA Boss: Iraq Never an Imminent Threat

Justin Raimundo has an interesting analysis of George Tenet's speech here (as posted in [livejournal.com profile] antiwar_dot_com:

ExpandRead more... )
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So far I've only seen one person comment about breaking news, so I suppose no one has noticed it.

Senate hearings were disrupted on Tuesday after a powder that initially tested positive for the poison ricin was found in a congressional mailroom, stirring memories of a deadly 2001 anthrax attack.

... He said field tests often come back with false positives, and the best way to test for ricin is with lab tests.

... Ricin is a potentially fatal toxin with no antidote but experts say it is hard to distribute, making the likelihood that anyone has been poisoned very small.

... Several airlines canceled flights to the United States, including to Washington, over the weekend due to security concerns. The three U.S. Senate office buildings, Hart, Dirksen and Russell, remained closed while unopened mail was collected and removed.

from Suspected Ricin Poison Disrupts Senate


And in other news,

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he does not know whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had been told it had no stockpiles of banned weapons, even as he offered a broad defense of the Bush administration's decision to go to war.

Even without possessing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein intended to acquire them and tried to maintain the capability of producing them in case international sanctions were lifted, Powell said in an interview. But he conceded that the administration's conviction that Hussein already had such weapons had made the case for war more urgent.

Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."

from Powell Says New Data May Have Affected War Decision (Washington Post)
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"We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, the regime's weapons of destruction programs."
--Scott McClellan, White House spokesperson.

"I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find."
--David Kay, former chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq.

"It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information. ... [Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the discrepancies between his warnings and Kay's findings] I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."
--David Kay

"We're misusing our influence. It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."
--Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense.

from Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure From Cheney Visits:

Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.

... Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, [Douglas J.] Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.

"They were the browbeaters," said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. "In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."


from Sen. Robert Byrd, 24 June 2003:

On January 28, 2003, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg. 7] Yet, according to news reports, the CIA knew that this claim was false as early as March 2002. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since discredited this allegation.

On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." [Remarks to UN Security Council, 2/5/03, pg. 12] The truth is, to date we have not found any of this material, nor those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.

On February 8, President Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." [Radio Address, 2/8/03] Mr. President, we are all relieved that such weapons were not used, but it has not yet been explained why the Iraqi army did not use them. Did the Iraqi army flee their positions before chemical weapons could be used? If so, why were the weapons not left behind? Or is it that the army was never issued chemical weapons? We need answers.

On March 30, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during the height of the war, said of the search for weapons of mass destruction: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." [This Week, 3/30/03, pg. 8] But Baghdad fell to our troops on April 9, and Tikrit on April 14, and the intelligence Secretary Rumsfeld spoke about has not led us to any weapons of mass destruction.

Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or massaged to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States, it is clear that the Administration's rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism. But, upon close examination, many of these statements have nothing to do with intelligence, because they are at root just sound bites based on conjecture. They are designed to prey on public fear.

... This is the kind of pumped up intelligence and outrageous rhetoric that were given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote for war on October 11, 2002.

... Well, Mr. President, this is no game. For the first time in our history, the United States has gone to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a threat to our nation. Congress should not be content to use standard operating procedures to look into this extraordinary matter. We should accept no substitute for a full, bipartisan investigation by Congress into the issue of our pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq and its use.
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Secretary of State Colin Powell held out the possibility Saturday that prewar Iraq may not have possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Powell was asked about comments last week by David Kay, the outgoing leader of a U.S. weapons search team in Iraq, that he did not believe Iraq had large quantities of chemical or biological weapons.

"The answer to that question is, we don't know yet," Powell told reporters as he traveled to this former Soviet republic [Georgia] to attend the inauguration Sunday of President-elect Mikhail Saakashvili.

Powell acknowledged that the United States thought deposed leader Saddam Hussein had banned weapons but added, "We had questions that needed to be answered.

Powell: Possible Iraq May Have Had No WMD


So, to summarize:
Saddam: "No WMD in Iraq"
Kay: "No WMD in Iraq"
The UN: "No WMD in Iraq"
Powell: "No WMD in Iraq, I suppose"
Bush: "Who cares? I protected the American people."

Which leaves two questions that Bush must answer:

1. What were you protecting the American people from if there were no WMD in Iraq?
2. What questions did you need answering from Saddam that would not have been answered by way of UN weapons inspections?
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So, who wants to lay odds that we'll see attack-dog Ann Coulter loosed on former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill for having the bravery to speak out about his experience in the Bush Administration? O'Neill recently described Bush's demeanor during Cabinet meetings as detached, and akin to being "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

Rumsfeld says "his experiences in the administration were 'night and day' different from the detached president described by O'Neill."
Well, Rummy, of course the President pays attention to you. You're the one who makes people go boom.
see O'Neill Denies Charges on Book Documents

Meanwhile, the press and the White House are paying no attention to potentially more damaging administration accounts from Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski.

When General Zinni was removed as Bush’s Middle East envoy and Elliot Abrams joined the National Security Council (NSC) to lead the Mideast division, whoops and high-fives had erupted from the neocon cubicles. By midwinter, echoes of those celebrations seemed to mutate into a kind of anxious anticipation, shared by most of the Pentagon. The military was anxiously waiting under the bed for the other shoe to drop amidst concerns over troop availability, readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe off, gleefully anticipating the martinis to be drunk and the fun to be had. The other shoe fell with a thump on Feb. 5 as Colin Powell delivered his United Nations presentation.

It was a sad day for me and many others with whom I worked when we watched Powell’s public capitulation. The era when Powell had been considered a political general, back when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had in many ways been erased for those of us who greatly admired his coup of the Pentagon neocons when he persuaded the president to pursue UN support for his invasion of Iraq. Now it was as if Powell had again rolled military interests -- and national interests as well. from A strange thing happened on the way to the war.
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Iraqi intelligence officials seeking a last-minute deal with Washington to avert war appeared to have the backing of Saddam Hussein, a Lebanese businessman who relayed the offer to U.S. officials said on Friday. Imad Hage, who told U.S. officials of proposals to let Washington scour Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and hand over an al Qaeda figure, said the Iraqis were rattled by the threat of war and apparently chose him for his Pentagon contacts.

... Hage, an insurance executive educated in the United States, described the proposal as it unfolded to personal acquaintances in the Defense Department with the aim of reaching Richard Perle, an influential Pentagon adviser whom he himself met.

"I had met Richard through acquaintances in the past, and thought he'd be one of the people to pass it on to," he said of his March meeting with Perle, who he said seemed willing to at least hear the offer.

"He said he would meet with them but he needed approval of higher-ups in Washington," Hage said. "It came back that there was no interest in this proposal."

The White House said on Thursday it exhausted all peaceful opportunities before invading Iraq on March 20, without clarifying whether President Bush had been aware of the offer relayed by Hage.

from Saddam Seen to Have Backed Iraq Peace Envoys
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We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions [against Iraq] to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq...
--US Secretary of State Colin Powell, February 24, 2001, emphasis added.


Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] 14cyclenotes

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