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One Step Left To Take
So now at least 2000 US soldiers were killed in the war on Iraq. A negligible number in any major armed conflict. Probably 100,000 Iraqis died because of this war. That is a less negligible number. Today GW Bush will hold another "major speech", lauding this war and preparing the next one on Syria – let’s wag the dog.
Meanwhile I find an interesting thought in what Bush 41 is up to. He knows his son screwed up big time in Iraq. He may well assume or know that his son had a say in outing Plame. What to do to save the family honor?
There comes the mouth of Bush 41, Brent Scowcroft, saying in a New Yorker interview "The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney". Next comes the mouth of Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, writing about "The White House cabal", "led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" and explaining how Collin Powell "cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet" the cabal dropped in the Oval Office. Why are these guys talking now?
Next we get the NYT piece Cheney Told Aide of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report hanging the Plame case noose around Cheney’s neck. Who leaked this and what is the interest behind the leak? Like usual the NYT does not answer the important questions.
All this piling up on Cheney does miss the responsibility of his boss. Bush 43 had trust in his people and they did trust him. There was not a word about conflict in the White House in 2002/2003. Are we really to believe that he did not know about the Niger documents? Was he calm and undisturbed when his "16 words" had to be retracted? It was his first loss after a long string of success, but it did not bother him a bit? He did not ask any questions about this screw up?
The Bush family reputation is on the line. There is the real possibility, that the Plame affair could get 43 into even deeper dog poop. Bush’s father sends his personal cavalry and suddenly the buck stops at Cheney’s desk?
Let us hope that Fitzgerald sees through this and takes enough time to build the case for the next step. He already climbed the ladder from Hannah to Libby to Cheney – one step left to take.
b-
just yesterday (or is it now two days ago…what time is it, anyway?) when I was reading those same articles (Wilkerson, the new “leak” about Cheney, and, yes, Scowcroft…I said…okay, this is the strategy.
Jr. was “out of the loop” — it’s better to portray him as someone who was kept in the dark…because he’s so..what..dumb? religious? so focused like a laser beam on terrorism, so loyal…take your pick, according to how you see him…And it is true that Cheney spent an unprecedented amt of time at the CIA stovepiping intel.
So let Cheney (and Rumsfeld, b/c the torture issue is not over yet)…take the hit thru what they now call the Whigs (but what was earlier called the OSP? ) –or are the Whigs the “public face” of the OSP? That’s the one Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski outed in the American Conservative and subsequently in Salon.
and, btw, fwiw, fyi, blah blah…Sharon put together a similar group to bypass Mossad at the same time. how coincidental.
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
Here’s a preface to the La Republicca articles referenced in the post above, which are ESSENTIAL reading right now, imo.
Here’s a translation of the first day’s article from Nur-al-Cubicle. Here’s the second article translated by the same.
here’s an interesting bit-
Thielmann recounts the events of autumn 2001 in generalities. But the precise date may prove revealing: it is October 15, 2001. On that day three events are woven together to produce an astounding coincidence: Nicolò Pollari is appointed to head SISMI by the Italian government on September 27, after serving as Number Two at CESIS (a coordinating intelligence agency at Palazzo Chigi). Silvio Berlusconi is finally invited to the White House by George W. Bush. October 15 marks the date of the first CIA report on the evidence assembled by the Italians.
And from the earlier WMo. article:
The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington.
Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S. government channels only days after it occurred. On Dec. 12, 2001, at the U.S. embassy in Rome, America’s newly-installed ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Amb. Sembler had heard about it.
BooMan makes a further connection on the front page of the Tribune (The Conspiracy the MSM Won’t Touch). He notes the Sept. 12, 2002 article in Berlusconi’s rag about the yellow cake…published 3 days after Pollari’s meeting with Hadley.
booman sez- September 12, 2002, perhaps not so coincidently, was also the day Bush gave his speech at the United Nations, where he famously said:
“With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.”
From Laura Rozen’s report on the new articles-
In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.
…so, they tried in 2001 and 2002. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began, days after 9-11, to try to blame that event on Iraq…and apparently Ledeen and Ghorbanifar and Pollari were only trying to help…
(and Annie…this goes back to the issue of the two break-ins at the Niger Embassy around Christmas?)
BooMan also notes that even back then, the Scowcroft Republicans (real politickers?) went against the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq, later in his post.
And there’s the bit back in March about the head of MI6 stating on a BBC doc that-
Sir Richard briefed Mr Blair that the quality of intelligence sourcing for some claims made in the run-up to the publication of the intelligence dossier was developmental, adding: “The source remains unproven.” Nevertheless, Mr Blair told MPs two weeks later: “The intelligence picture they paint is one accumulated over the past four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative.”
..and also based on lies…oh, Blair forgot to include that part.
Makes me wanna watch The Grifters…what a perfect set up and the marks were the American people.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 7:39 utc | 34
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