If the special prosecutor is looking at the Niger forgeries, or their origin, my guess is it’s because they are narrowly relevant to the charges he intends to bring – perhaps because they help establish a motive for the plot to get Wilson. But it’s hard to believe Fitzgerald’s team has managed to follow the much more tangled (and interconnected) roots of the various plots to take America to war in Iraq …
Back to Main
October 26, 2005
WB: All Roads Lead to Rome
Comments
Somehow when all is said and done I wouldn’t be surprised to find either Brits or the Israeli at the heart of this.
Posted by: Lupin | Oct 26 2005 7:14 utc | 1
The forged Nigerean documents that provided the basis for a brilliantly effective disinformation campaign are the same documents that Sy Hersh argues were deliberately crafted to be easily debunked. So how can it be argued that the dark actors who forged the documents were trying to sabotage the cabal, not help it?
Here’s my theory: the documents were indeed intended to be so bad as to expose the cabal to ridicule once they were put in the public eye – and in a sane world that would certainly be the case.
Yet remember that this is only a year after 9/11, and Bush/Rove has managed to whip everyone into such a bloodthirsty frenzy that any ‘evidence’, no matter how specious, is grist for the warmonger mill. Throw in an ultra-compliant media that takes the Administration at its most illogical word (e.g., al Quaeda = Saddam), and suddenly even the fakest of forgeries is accepted as genuine – with barely a peep of protest.
Whoever tried to set up the neo-cons could not apppreciate just how Wonderland the political atmosphere had become, and must have watched in horror as such an obvious fraud became accepted hook, line and sinker as irrefutable fact.
i have probably read hersh’s stovepiping article 50 times.
cheney admin 101. as a result i have pondered many a time
over the idea of the cia creating the docs. but i just don’t get the logic of them pushing for the investigation if that’s the case. well, we’ll know soon enough. but i do appreciate billmon’s tendancy to underestimate the big tamale.he’s got a tin hat meter that allows him to hold back, not spew all over the carpet. keep things in perspective. at times such as these i wish we had a shakespeare.what a farce. comedy of errors.
Posted by: annie | Oct 26 2005 7:46 utc | 5
oops. I should have posted here, not One Step Left to Take, on the Niger forgeries, etc. (but I recommend following the links in that post to Nur-Al-Cubicle’s translations of the two La Rep. articles.)
anyway, Hersh claimed rogue CIA agents made those docs, and the only reason that idea makes sense to me is the knowledge that Ghorbanifar was considered a poor source, and they wanted to discredit Ledeen and Franklin’s meeting with him.
Pollari tried to pawn the docs on the CIA, but they refused them, and then he went directly to the White House…and Cheney’s stovepiping and refusal to heed any caveat’s from the CIA may have been their way of saying to Cheney “you’re a dumbass.”
However, I think that claim from Hersh is wrong. I think he was fed that info. He says, basically, that it’s hearsay. He’s not always 100% right in all his info.
But, regarding the whole lead up to the invasion, both MI6 and the CIA have seemed to be claiming they just threw their hands in the air and said…they want their war and they’re gonna get it, no matter if it’s based upon forgeries. That’s even the tact they’re taking regarding Tenet’s “Slam Dunk” claim…as a sarcastic or cynical remark..as in, whatever you say, George.
who knows.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 7:58 utc | 6
Another good read- Nick Turse on Democracy Now!
Here’s his article on TomDispatch with the list of those who opposed Bush and resigned, willingly or not, and links to further information about them.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 8:24 utc | 7
Billmon sez
I can’t resolve the contradiction, other than by assuming the forgers tried to create an easily exposed fraud, but failed
That might very well be the case, these guys were thinking four or five moves in advance, at least in the beginning. I am reminded of the documents that were leaked to CBS which led to the Rather hullabaloo. Maybe they wanted to use them to deflect criticism later on and smear somebody else….like maybe the Italians if they didn’t buy in 100%…..
Or maybe it is just hucksterism on a different level, Italians have sold the Coliseum to gullible americans on many occasions. How hard would it be to sell them some real important documents like these?
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 26 2005 8:30 utc | 8
The Italians used to have a reputation for being a Mickey Mouse type of organization. Geez, how many governments have they had since the big one was the polite put down. When did they get invited to join the A Team, by A Team I don’t mean the good players but those action/adventure Mr. T heros from the mid 1980s TV show? For sure Mr. Berlusconi who called our W the Boss has something to do with it.
Posted by: christofay | Oct 26 2005 8:36 utc | 9
Billmon called it: the most ridiculous story to come out of the secret world since Ollie North and Bob McFarlane flew into Tehran bearing a Bible and a chocolate cake baked in the shape of a key
— which reminded me of this 1988 conspiracy theory and follow-up
Posted by: Wolf DeVoon | Oct 26 2005 8:58 utc | 10
What a web. It does make some sense that the docs (cia produced or not) might have been used by the Italians for various and sundry purposes (political & or monetary). It is strange that the cia had little interest, initially, unless they were suspect (for any number of reasons, especially if they had the word on x-agents involved). And it makes total sense that the whitehouse would jump all over the docs, being starved as they were (by the cia) for something more substantial (threatening) to put before the public. Clearly, the administration was hell bent on invasion, but lacked the “threat to america” diminsion necessary to link, in the publics mind, the spector of 911. Tenent must have become aware that because the cia (institutionally) wasnt playing ball with the administration that he needed to do something to politically get back into the game, least the cia become totally bypassed (&obsolete) — so he reverses some protocal and throws the bone, slam dunk, providing just enough cover to bail. Whats not so mysterious, is the motivation for outing Plame, in that the anomosity toward the agency (in spite of Tenet), for its failure to be politicised, must have so enormous that the double shot of Wilsons debunking being joined at the hip (&more) physically with wife agent Plame was enough of an insult and a threat to their agenda — that they seized the opportunity and ignored the consequence. A Stalanesqe demonstration, one step shy of an actual assination was to be a crown jewel of neo-con prowess, and too much to resist. One thing sure now after 21/2 years after the fact is the entire WMD threat meme is defunct, a shell fabrication plain and simple from square one. Never thought I’d think of the cia as a part of the reality based community, but I guess they were(are).
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 26 2005 9:27 utc | 11
Italian secret services have an history of dark connections and parallel agendas, coupled with a certain “national” ineptitude in making things work. It’s pretty much impossible to double-guess them because, in the past, they did all sort of weird stuff… for logical and illogical reasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was simply another tale of stupidity: someone makes a living out of selling information, that month he’s a bit short, and given the political debate at the time is about getting Saddam, he comes up with a little scheme to make some money, fast. Who cares if they’re bad forgeries: SISMI is happy because their boss (Silvio B.) is in cahoot with GWB to cook up a little oil war, idem for the Brits… he gets the money and everybody’s happy, it’s a win-win situation!
The CIA position is unconsistent probably because of the internal and external pressures, office politics, the Tenet situation, etc…
Never attribute to malice what can be best explained by stupidity.
BTW, I find intriguing that people are still arguing on the CIA (or MI6) position at the time, when every decent newspaper reported that heavy political pressure was put in place over them. It seems more and more like Tenet and the top CIA brass were not used to an aggressive, confrontational White House, coming from the Clinton years of trust in the agency professional capabilities (as in “you know your stuff, if you tell me Sudan has something I’ll fire those rockets”). Tenet was trying to keep hold of his job, so he folded. MI6 was so disgusted that they leaked like mad to the BBC (of all people!) that everything Tony and his buddy were saying was utter rubbish. Even the Daily Mail, a paper I wouldn’t pack chips with, was full of insider-fed info. The intelligence community knew very well what was going on, and they didn’t like it.
Giacomo-
Berlusconi’s association with P2 makes it hard to put down something to stupidity when he’s so associated with a fascist organization that, like the OPS during the run up to the Iraq invasion, has functioned as a parallel and sometimes overlapping agency to SIMSI.
P2 is one “conspiracy” that has been proven in a court, and Banco Ambrosiano and Roberto Calvi and Gladio…
Funny how Calvi, his secretary, the judge who was first investigating this situation all ended up dead within a very short time span. It is stupid to jump off a bridge after your secretary has just jumped out of a window, I guess.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 10:54 utc | 14
I don’t see that this issue is necessarily all that complicated, if you apply Ockham’s Razor: the simplest explanation, and therefore the most probable one, is that the Niger forgeries orginated with Italian intelligence and their intention from the first was to provide political cover the Bush administration’s rush to war. It it hardly a secret that Berlusconi envied Blair’s position as chief sycophant but, unlike Blair, it was politically impossible for him to offer anything as substantial as troops for Iraq. Maybe a propaganda victory for the Bushites seemed like the next best thing. The poor quality of the documents in themselves prove nothing, Blair’s WMD dossier proved equally vulnerable to serious scrutiny. It just so happened that in the political climate of the time almost no one was willing to subject arguments advanced by the Bushites to such scrutiny. The question of whether the Bushites knew the documents were fake is mere scholasticism. People as ideologically inflexible as the neocons don’t distinguish between conventionally understood truth and falsehood, only between what conforms to their ideological prejudices and serves their agenda and what doesn’t.
Posted by: Lexington | Oct 26 2005 10:56 utc | 15
. . . speaking of the Brits, they’ve been awfully quiet throughout. Perhaps some of thier reporters could start asking questions again. If indictments come down, how could they not?
Posted by: DonS | Oct 26 2005 12:09 utc | 16
I agree with Night Owl’s comments. I think Sy Hersch nailed it a long time ago. Here’s the relevant text from the New Yorker:
“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”
Posted by: Timone | Oct 26 2005 13:28 utc | 17
“However, while my dueling forgeries theory was plainly wrong…”
Intentionally misled perhaps? As Josh Marshall explains, the original document existed and a second separate text transcription based on the original document also was being circulated.
(October 25, 2005 — 02:59 PM EDT // link)
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006829.php
“According to two sources familiar with the documents and reports in question, those early Italian reports were text transcriptions of what we’d later learn were the forged documents. In other words, they were the phony documents. Not facsimiles or xeroxes or whatever you want to call them. But copies of the text that the documents contained.
When US government officials say we didn’t have the documents until long after Wilson’s trip, you need to treat it like a Scott McClellan non-denial denial. No, they didn’t have the documents, only transcriptions of the documents.”
Posted by: O. B. Servant | Oct 26 2005 15:07 utc | 18
okay, I have to go to work now. CNN just reported that there will be no indictments announced today.
The Washington Note has the day wrong, but I heard that if there are sealed indictments, that would go to a judge, not be released to the public today.
so, here’s the scenario from the note:
1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and “filed” tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 15:26 utc | 19
Am I crazy, or does it not seem likely that Valerie Plame herself was in the middle of all this? I don’t mean to suggest she was in on creating the forgery trap, but she may very well have been in a position to have very intimate knowledge of all this. I mean, it’s been established that she was a CIA NOC in the DO working on weapons of mass destruction. How much of a stretch is it, then, to assume she had some very damaging knowlege about all this? And how much of a stretch is it to assume that maybe she was about to go public, thus the pre-emptive outing by the White House? Maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know if outing yourself is something that can even be done without serious consequences.
Posted by: park | Oct 26 2005 15:36 utc | 20
@park
A NOC go public and blow her own cover ? A NOC out herself and blow her own cover ? With all the myriad direct and indirect consequences that entails ?
I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but I’d consider going cold turkey if I was you 😉
Posted by: Outraged | Oct 26 2005 15:50 utc | 21
As the Marriage of Figaro guy said, I laugh to keep from Crying.
So here’s Indictment Bingo…or a MoA betting pool with pixels for chits. Closest one gets to gloat.
My bingo card:
Michael Ledeen
Fred Fleitz
Dick Cheney (unindicted co-conspirator?)
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 16:18 utc | 24
Here’s a crazy PF Pretzel Flyer (and a slight variation on anna missed’s thesis)……
What if, post-stovepiping, the craptacular docs were used to fool only one person living in the White House?
And what if that person wasn’t Laura?
…dang, that wasn’t supposed to happen…
bingo, part2:
Paul Wolfowitz
Jame Guckert (I wish)
Bill Luti
Lewis Libby
Karl Rove (aka Ham Sandwich)
Rhodes
Franklin
Ari Fleischer
And another Fitzmas eve distraction (inspired by beq)
Fitzmas Haiku
(5-7-5-syllables)
Neo-con worldview
Reality-free-based lies
Will burn their asses.
maybe b needs to start a fitzmas fidget thread.
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 16:25 utc | 26
And finally, the link to the bingo card inspiration:
Backup Brain
Posted by: fauxreal | Oct 26 2005 16:27 utc | 27
Raw Story has this:
– Rove indicted on perjury and obstruction
– Libby indicted on perjury, obstruction and outing a covert agent
– two more indicted who are not working in the White House
Let us hope this only the first shoot. I`d love him to continue with a new jury in a wider field.
Look, I ain’t sayin’ we’re getting a lump of coal for “Fitzmas”, but, uh, we’re getting a lump of coal for Fitzmas. I just can’t see anything really helpful coming out of this, except for liberals shitting themselves about the “Karl Rove frog-march” for all 10 seconds til he gets a pardon. Then what?
It’s not like Iran-Contra has damaged Reagan’s legacy except amongst those who already disliked him. His successor got elected anyway. All the cronies lived to fight another day. And I dare-say, Iran-Contra was a far worse crime than this.
Posted by: Rowan | Oct 26 2005 16:41 utc | 29
“However, while my dueling forgeries theory was plainly wrong…”
Intentionally misled perhaps?
Unquestionably — the Senate Whitewash Committee report clearly was crafted to obscure the fact that the entire Niger story rested on the crudely forged docs from the very beginning. And everything would have gone fine if the actual documents hadn’t finally ended up in the hands of the State Department skeptics, who promptly tore them apart.
The real untold story — at least within the intel bureaucracy — is why the discovery of the forgery didn’t kill the entire Niger/Africa claim. Obviously, it’s because the cabal didn’t want it to die. But how did they keep the lid on? And what kind of fingerprints did they leave in the process? There must be plenty, since Pat Roberts seems absolutely determined to stonewall “Phase II” of the Whitewash Committee’s investigation.
In hindsight, you can also see how critical Blair’s “dodgy” dossier was to the cabal’s efforts, since it seemed to provide independent confirmation from a supposedly reliable intelligence partner. But who ran the stovepipe on the London end? I suppose I should sit down and read the Hutton and Butler reports from beginning to end, if only to try to figure out what they were most anxious to cover up. But I don’t have the time.
Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 26 2005 16:45 utc | 30
@Posted by: Timone | Oct 26, 2005 9:28:04 AM
It may seem “far out”, but it sure fits the entire story line/plot in a work of fiction by Don DeLillo-“Libra”, where rogue CIA agents still pissed about Bay of Pigs set such machinations in motion. Their plan is only to fake an assassination attempt on JFK, but their plot gets out of control.
you know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction…
Posted by: Uppity Gal | Oct 26 2005 16:45 utc | 31
once there was watergate,
then monica, now miss plame.
too much justice fools
Posted by: slothrop | Oct 26 2005 16:56 utc | 33
Regarding who ran the stovepipe on the London end, I’d bet David Kelly could shed some light, if he were alive.
Posted by: park | Oct 26 2005 16:59 utc | 34
Oh heh Billmon! Sorry- well, you see what I was saying. The whole angle of Sy Hersh’s work, the old CIA agents b.s.ing at the Christmas party…after reading that book by DeLillo, it just hit me- damn, that just *might* have happened. DeLillo probably cooked up the idea after “meeting” a self-described old spook in a bar.
Well, as you have said- Who knows?
Thanks for this blog. It’s a first stop every single day.
Posted by: Uppity Gal | Oct 26 2005 17:09 utc | 35
Niger tea leaves ::
E. Burba is the Italian journalist (Panorama) who brought the docs to the US embassy in Rome.
Whooping It Up
In Beirut, even Christians celebrated the atrocity.
(note: = 9/11)
BY ELISABETTA BURBA
Wall Street Journal, Saturday, September 22, 2001.
snippet:
Once back at the house where we were staying, we started scanning the international channels. Soon came reports of Palestinians celebrating. The BBC reporter in Jerusalem said it was only a tiny minority. Astonished, we asked some moderate Arabs if that was the case. “Nonsense,” said one, speaking for many. “Ninety percent of the Arab world believes that Americans got what they deserved.”
Link
–from opinion journal’s list of this kind of news and its debunking:
Link
Posted by: Noisette | Oct 26 2005 17:20 utc | 36
@ Rowan,
Lump of coal, you say?
endless sea of boiling oil
w in hell.
Posted by: beq | Oct 26 2005 17:35 utc | 37
My bingo card includes Libby and Rove, with Wurmser and possibly Hadley. I predict Cheney will resign in the not too distant future for reasons already explained on another thread.
These indictments are the excuse to remove the neocons, not the reason; powerful elements of the government (CIA, militaty) and the Republican party (corporate wing, deficit hawks, foreign policy realists) want them out and have them surrounded. The Italians have signed on, which is why Berlusconni’s controlled media released information now that that the Italian govt had to have known all along. Pat Roberts can stonewall in Congress, but the CIA has their counterparts in Italy who can provide the information Roberts is blocking. Cheney has to know this. Good bye, Dick.
Fauxreal, maybe we need a Neocon Haiku site; after all, the uni-bomber had one and he was crazy. Here is mine, a variation on yours:
Neo-cons world view –
Freebased ideology –
Will burn their asses.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 26 2005 18:03 utc | 38
Lump of coal for us
for bush et al, the fittest
punishment to be
Posted by: Rowan | Oct 26 2005 18:08 utc | 39
aargh. i don’t like coal, too much residue
i’m having a lot of trouble opening certain links from this site. anyone else having this problem?
i want cheney ground into a ham sandwich.
Posted by: annie | Oct 26 2005 18:58 utc | 40
Here’s something to distract y’all:
“the uni-bomber had one and he was crazy”
Was he? I understand the guy may have had some sort of clinical psychosis but wasn’t his reaction to the way the world was going as sane as many of the others that get the big tick of good idea?
Where do we start? Right back in the 60’s where someone had to bomb a village to save it? Further back in the 40’s where USUK decided to let the concentration camps fester a bit longer so as not to divert resources/public attention from the main game?
We could go on because the examples are legion but what always had a weird fascination for me about the Unabomber was that his campaign ran so long before anyone noticed his existence.
When you add that to the extremely small circle of people begrudgingly indicted for Oklahoma City and the mess made of the Atlanta Olympics bomb investigation, is it any wonder that the the WTC murderers were somewhat taken aback at the reaction to their efforts?
Maybe they believed the land of the free propaganda deep down because there seems little doubt that the US establishment had a reluctance to interfere with citizen’s democratic right to express themselves by blowing up other citizens?
At Oklahoma once it became apparent that this was domestic terrorism you could practically feel the change in attitude from the media.
Atta and co didn’t realise that sections of the US establishment waiting for this to happen for a long time, had been impatiently kicking investigations to one side when their domestic nature was revealed.
I would like to see the murderers responsible for the Iraqi carnage held to account but if one is pragmatic, most of the people likely to be killed in that conflict are already dead, so more importantly what do we do to prevent this from happening again in 20 years?
Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 26 2005 19:19 utc | 41
“i want cheney ground into a ham sandwich.”
You can’t make chicken salad with chicken shit,
but you can sure make ham salad with it. 😉
Posted by: beq | Oct 26 2005 19:29 utc | 42
Sotto voce:
Italy denies role in fake documents on Iraq
Posted by: L’Ombra | Oct 26 2005 19:41 utc | 43
Here’s an exc. art. to further Discredit the NeoNuts. It infuriates me that this is coming out now, rather in pre-election ’00. Turns out that Colby was ousted as Head of CIA & Dada Bush put in ‘cuz Dada went along w/NeoNuts & Colby opposed them. Wasn’t Colby assasinated? Anyhow, this is best art. I’ve read w/background on NeoNuts & their opposition to a CIA that wasn’t as extremist as they. link
Posted by: jj | Oct 26 2005 19:42 utc | 44
Cheney ham sandwich
surprisingly tasty – yum!
I give it B +
Posted by: Rowan | Oct 26 2005 19:48 utc | 45
Everyone should be Aware that this is a very Dangerous Time Domestically. The Pirates will be flush from the success of ousting the NeoNuts, while still worried about their problems w/overseas sales. Their Assault on Us wil probably be significant – & Europeans as well.
Just what I’ve read in last 48 hrs:
-NYT taking over & wrecking whatever is left of Village Voice.
– Attempt to Destroy Organic Food & small organic farms to be acted on today.
– Attempt to deny us info. on COOL – Country of Origin Labeling – on food, so we don’t even know what filth we’re eating from god knows what DDT infested country.
– Blair moving to destroy state schools, turning them over to Fundies, Economic & Religious (see Guardian today)
– France turning 15% of their Utility System over to the Pirates. (see Independent yesterday) What they’re not telling people is that under one of the Pirates Rule the World papers they signed (GATS?) if part of a system if owned by the Pirates, govt. Cannot stop the Pirates from stealing the rest of it. So, even though France passed a law limiting the % of the utility the Pirates can steal, wreck & otherwise destroy, that law is not worth the paper it is written on…
And nobody is taking on these Cannibals…There’s way too much emphasis on Foreign Affairs – this stuff is Just as Bad.
Posted by: jj | Oct 26 2005 20:09 utc | 46
If … the Sismi chief’s visit to Hadley opened up a stovepipe for pushing the Niger documents into the White House, why didn’t the cabal use them?
My own feeling about this is that White House didn’t use them because they were never meant for the White House to use.
There has been more than a suggestion here and there that the White House may have been behind the embassy break in and the forgeries, which were designed to compel the CIA to at least allow the uranium claims. Knowing full well the docs were fake, the White House would never site them explicitly.
The way things played out, Bush was able to rely on MI6 buying the into the load and, at a sufficient distance from the White House and any CIA analysts who might leak the nature of these documents, claim that British Intelligence “learned,” that Saddam had been a very, very baaaad man in Africa. The key is making the Brits the dupes while still scaring the bejeesuz out of the American public with nuke-talk. Win-win, I say.
Bad forgeries do seem hard to reconcile, though you have to think that if they were good, then things would look fishy, too.
It’s a theory. But, hell, what isn’t about this story?
Here’s something to distract y’all:
“the uni-bomber had one and he was crazy”
Was he? I understand the guy may have had some sort of clinical psychosis but wasn’t his reaction to the way the world was going as sane as many of the others that get the big tick of good idea?
Hehe, I read the Unibomber’s manifesto in the New York Times and was actually quite impressed with it. Some commentators acknowledged the guy’s obvious intelligence, but the predominant trend was to dismiss it as “incoherent” and a “rant” because, after all, the guy did blow people up. I thought this would be a guy I’d really like to spend an evening talking with over a bottle of scotch however. If he wasn’t a psychopath, I mean.
Thing is under different circumstances, had he turned his talents in other directions, the Unibomber could have made a constructive contribution to the discussion of where the world was going and why. The whole thing was a tragedy all around.
Posted by: Lexington | Oct 26 2005 20:31 utc | 48
Look, I ain’t sayin’ we’re getting a lump of coal for “Fitzmas”, but, uh, we’re getting a lump of coal for Fitzmas. I just can’t see anything really helpful coming out of this, except for liberals shitting themselves about the “Karl Rove frog-march” for all 10 seconds til he gets a pardon. Then what?
Naw, it won’t be a lump of coal — more like one of those cheap Chinese-made toys that amuses the kids for about 45 minutes on Xmas morning, and then clutters up your attic until you finally take it to the Goodwill.
Posted by: Billmon | Oct 26 2005 21:35 utc | 49
Good point, Debs. A spiritual teacher I read long ago (Krishnamurti? Can’t recall.) once wrote that our asylums are populated with many souls who are not really crazy but whose psyches are too fragile to deal with the “real” world’s craziness.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 26 2005 22:32 utc | 50
fleshing out that stein article jj linked to which brings up team b & the compromising of cia intel, i recommend (and have recommended it a couple times previously) joseph trento’s book prelude to terror: the rogue cia and the legacy of america’s private intelligence network. stein’s paragraph
CIA Director William Colby rejected the Team B idea and was fired. Colby’s successor as head of the spy agency, George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father, accepted it.
makes it sound as if colby was fired b/c he didn’t support the “a team b team” experiment, but trento writes that it was the culmination of other problems w/ colby, prior to b team, that led to his being booted by president ford.
colby was seen as being too cooperative w/ the church investigation
Colby was unwilling to cover up for the DO in Chile, despite his sponsorship of [Ted] Shackley. In fact, Colby earned the enmity of his CIA colleagues when he admitted to a House committee that even more embarrassing secrets had not yet emerged. Morale at the CIA was at an all-time low. DO veterans leaked stories to journalists that Colby was probably a Soviet mole. President Ford realized that Colby intended to comply with all requests for information, with the exception of the names of American agents. The establishment – both Republicans and Democrats – now faced serious, embarrassing revelations.
colby had a row w/ james jesus angleton, still bent on finding a soviet mole in the agency who he thought was involved in the kennedy assassination, and eventually fired him in december of 1974, though it took angleton another nine months to fully leave.
Angleton’s final departure from the CIA came at about the same time Gerald Ford decided that Colby’s open approach to the investigations had to end. Ford fired Colby…
…
Ford had thought about replacing Colby with Elliot Richardson, the forthright public servant who had stood up to Nixon and resigned as attorney general rather than fire Archibald Cox as special prosecutor during Watergate. But Donald Rumsfeld and others convinced Ford that, with the CIA under seige by Ford’s attorney general, the last thing they needed was a reformer to head the CIA. Henry Kissinger, who needed someone at the CIA to stave off Richard Helm’s very real threat [to take down Kissinger if he was convicted in the crimes in Chile], drafted the telegram to Beijing offering George H.W. Bush the top CIA job. Bush’s appointment was announced on November 3, 1975, along with the surprise sacking of Colby.
on the “a team b team experiment”, trento writes
William Colby, still DCI at the time, understandably was not happy with the whole idea. He intuitively know that to allow critics to gain access to the estimates he would politicize a process that was supposed to be apolitical and strictly empirical. After President Ford fired Colby…Admiral [George W.] Anderson [chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board] kept pressing the new CIA Director, George Bush, to set up the outside team. Bush, the first politician to hole the job, authorized the competition in June 1976. Hank Knoche, Bush’s top deputy, said Bush was in love with the idea. Knoche, a career bureaucrat, signed off on the experiment and “lived to regret it.” What Bush approved and Knoche agreed to was revolutionary in American Intelligence. For the first time, outsiders, many already skeptical of the CIA’s work, would be given fre access to National Intelligence Estimates going back to 1959. They would be given access to all of America’s classified knowledge about the Soviet military.
CIA professionals had two major worries about the experiment. One was that conservatives on the B Team might leak highly classified material to the press in order to promote their cause. The other was that the CIA’s reputation for impeccable strategic research would be forever damaged. In the end, both of these fears came true.
…
In the A Team B Team Experiment, Bush allowed the conservatives a foot in the CIA door and at the same time discredited the liberals and their work inside the Agency. These conservatives would one day control the policies and practices of the intelligence community under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They would report in the early 1980s that America was falling behind the Soviet Union militarily and would encourage the massive buildup of American military hardware that occurred under Reagan. Under the elder Bush, they would encourage the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and under the younger Bush support the unproven missile defense system and another war in Iraq.
Posted by: b real | Oct 27 2005 4:20 utc | 51
Was Berlusconi behind the pre-Iraq war yellow cake story?
Posted by: L’Ombra | Oct 27 2005 15:37 utc | 52
Was Berlusconi behind the pre-Iraq war yellow cake story?
Posted by: L’Ombra | Oct 27 2005 15:38 utc | 53
NUR part 3
The role of Silvio Berlusconi’s diplomacy advisor, Gianni Castellaneta, has been key in mediating the relations between Italy with the parallel conduit [“Stovepipe”—Nur] that Dick Cheney creates with financing from Ahmed Chelabi’s Iraqi National Congress to funnel intelligence “edited” by the Office for Special Plans which is then distributed to the media by the “Iraq Group,” which is seen in action in the Judith Miller-New York Times affair. But has anyone heard Castellaneta utter one word? And who has ever offered Mr. Castellaneta a public forum to allow him to do so?
Posted by: annie | Oct 27 2005 16:52 utc | 54