The Vast CIA-Left-Wing Conspiracy
The oldest story is from last Friday.
Not knowing any other way to try to get my blog-arms around all of this, I'll just start at the beginning.
If the Extreme Media thought it was in the crosshairs towards the end of the Fitzgerald investigation, just wait until Scooter Libby and his defense team get their turn:
Attorneys for Lewis "Scooter" Libby are likely to question whether the political bias of news outlets involved in the Leakgate case played a role in testimony by their reporters against top White House officials, reports the Wall Street Journal.
"Just wait until defense counsel starts examining their memories and reporting habits, not to mention the dominant political leanings in the newsrooms of NBC, Time magazine and the New York Times," warns the Journal in an editorial on Friday.
Or, as some might call it, "a little problem of credibility." And one that might get Mr. Libby off scot-free.
That blurb, just to clarify things, was an appetizer.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He asks former CIA Director George Tenet, whom President Bush retained in that job even though he was a Clintonoid holdover, two very pertinent, if also rhetorical, questions:
• Why did the CIA, under your direction, treat the Vice President’s query about Iraqi efforts to purchase yellowcake in Niger so casually?
• When Joe Wilson started blabbing in public about his CIA mission to Niger – and lying about what he reported to the CIA upon his return – why didn’t you say something rather than allow the President’s credibility to be shredded?
These are indeed rhetorical questions, but they still need to be asked, publicly and loudly and with the demeanor that answers are damn well going to be forthcoming, or else.
Jed Babbin vehemently concurs:
The American people need this matter investigated forthwith, and not - God help us - by yet another special counsel. The Senate Intelligence Committee should, immediately, investigate and get the following questions answered publicly as soon as possible:
1) What precisely does the CIA criminal referral that started the Fitzgerald investigation say? It should be declassified and published;
2) Who approved the criminal referral and why?
3) Was Pavitt the person who approved the Wilson mission? Who else approved the mission and how it was to be performed?
4) Why did they choose Wilson instead of someone qualified?
5) Why wasn't Wilson required to sign a confidentiality agreement?
6) Were his various op-eds vetted at CIA?
7) Who else, beside Vallely and his wife, knew Plame was a CIA employee, when did they know it, and from whom?
8) Who was Bob Novak's source? Was it Wilson? Pavitt? Someone else at CIA?
There are hundreds of other questions that should be answered publicly. Let's get ol' Joe in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, under oath and with the television cameras on. Let's see if he does as well as George Galloway did in front of Norm Coleman's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I have no doubt he'll fail to rise to even that standard.
On the other hand, perhaps the SIC isn't the best vehicle for such a probe. You know what I've always said about Republicans and congressional investigative oversight. Other, I suppose, than when they get buffaloed into playing Henry Waxman with "Big Oil" execs.
A second Newsmax post posits another line of inquiry: Was the CIA an honest broker of information that seemed, early on, to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks?
So, while the Wilsons were gleefully and seditiously carrying out their anti-White House sting operation on pre-Iraq war intelligence, "anonymous U.S. intelligence sources" were, perchance, covering up the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in order to prevent the case for war from being even further established - in essence, trying to "lie us out of war" that desperately needed to be fought.Since two Iraqi defectors first reported in November 2001 that radical Islamists had been trained at Saddam's Salman Pak terrorist camp to hijack airplanes using techniques similar to those employed on 9/11, the CIA has been working overtime trying to knock the story down.
The defectors weren't credible, Agency sources repeatedly told reporters.
"The probability that the training provided at such centers, e.g. Salman Pak, was similar to what al Qaida could offer at its own camps in Afghanistan, combined with the sourcing difficulties, leads us to conclude that we need additional corroboration before we can validate that this low level basic terrorist training for al Qaida occurred in Iraq," one CIA analyst told Knight Ridder news in January 2003.
Four months later, U.S. Marines overran the super secret facility that the Agency had dismissed as innocuous.
On April 6, 2003, CENTCOM spokesman, Brigidier General Vincent Brooks, told reporters that the Iraqis defending the camp were not run of the mill soldiers.
"The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," Brooks said.
"Some of them come from Sudan, some from Egypt, some from other places...It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations," the CENTCOM spokesman added.
The CIA's response? Certainly not the kind of intelligence review that would have gotten to the bottom of just what was going on at Salman Pak. In fact, at last report, the Agency accepted the alibi offered by Iraqi officials: that hijack classes staged aboard a parked airliner were actually hijack prevention exercises.
The Agency reacted the same way when Czech intelligence reported that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just months before the 9/11 attacks, dismissing the claim despite repeated Czech assertions that it was true.And when the London Telegraph reported in December 2003 that the interim Iraqi government had uncovered a document that put Mr. Atta in Baghdad in July 2001, anonymous U.S. intelligence sources told Newsweek the document was a probable forgery, citing an Iraqi document expert who hadn't laid eyes on the paper in question.
On another front, and a deliciously ironic one in light of recent developments, it turns out that the French government of Black Jacques Chirac had more than a little hand in the events that led to the famed Joe Wilson Niger/yellowcake junket:
In 2002 French intelligence forged the notorious document claiming that Saddam tried to obtain Niger uranium. The Italian middle man, Rocco Martino, later confessed to French involvement in open court. Rocco Martino might sound like a small-time mafia hood from the Sopranos. Actually, he works at times for Italian military intelligence. The truth about the French connection came out when Martino confessed in court that the French had given him the forged document to peddle to various intelligence agencies. The Italians and French have had a furious war of words ever since then about who was responsible for the forgery.
The FBI just leaked a claim that Rocco did it just for the money. That is very doubtful. The French naturally deny any responsibility, but the forged document was dropped on the public at exactly the time that Dominique de Villepin, then Foreign Minister, was in New York trying to make Colin Powell believe that France was prepared to help overthrow Saddam. The French forgery was a stink bomb, designed to be exposed in public as soon as Colin Powell publicly accepted it.
At the very same time the Niger forgery showed up, France’s Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was sand bagging Secretary Powell at the UN by pretending to support American efforts against Saddam – even as he got ready to pull out the rug in a surprise press conference. Reporter Kenneth Timmerman told Brit Hume for FoxNews that:
“Our Administration thought that the French were with us, that French had dispatched their top general to Centcom, Chirac had promised the President (to support the United States against Saddam). Villepin the foreign minister had promised Powell. They said they were with us, and they weren’t. ...”
“So then de Villepin goes outside at noontime. ... Powell is actually watching Fox News… as de Villepin goes on TV … And that’s when he announces to the world that France will never ever support the use of force against Saddam Hussein. ... Powell’s jaw dropped to the floor….”
It was a carefully planned ambush. Timmerman summed it up by saying that...
“Chirac lied to the President of the United States, and then he ordered his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to do the same thing with Colin Powell.”
And then, they pulled the plug.
That was the prelude; here is the punchline:
The French forgery about Niger led straight to Wilson’s bogus trip to Africa....
Didja catch that one line? France could very well have been selling yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein. That's certainly not something that they would have wanted to become public information, so they cultivate, or at least make common cause with, useful "assets" in the American government who share the French objective of destroying the Bush Administration to kill possibly two birds with one lie - that Bush "lied about Iraq's WMD." You have to admit, it sounds all too plausible.Joseph Wilson had intimate French connections for many years before his mint tea-sipping journey to Niger. In fact, he met his first wife at the French Embassy in Washington. His second wife, Jacqueline, to whom he was still married when he took up with Valerie Plame, was a former French diplomat. There is even a report that she was a “cultural attaché” in Francophone Africa, a post often used as cover for intelligence operatives, though this remains quite a murky point, as tradecraft suggests it should.
Today Wilson claims to be a business agent for “African mining companies.” But Niger’s mines are owned by a French consortium, which operates cheek-by-jowl with the Quai d’Orsay. Niger itself is a semi-colony of France. No uranium sales go on there without the full knowledge and consent of the French government. Valerie [Wilson] was quoted in a CIA memo as saying that “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts)...” Lots of French contacts, indeed. [emphasis added]
Especially in light of Wilson's earlier (1999) trip to Niger (via the American Thinker), the purpose of which was to....
...broker what I believe were ongoing sales of Uranium from Niger to other rogue nations including Iraq. Of course detractors note that since France controlled the mines, this would be impossible, but the findings of the Oil for Food Scandal are shedding a differing light on COGEMA.
In essence, what you had was a “cake” laundering operation, and the “washing machine” was the cache located at Al Tuwaitha. So long as the amount remained the same, no one would ever know. This is so simple (crooked cops do it with cocaine in the evidence room), etc.Of course there would be one caveat and this is key and not surprising. The IAEA would have had to have “blinked” once in a while.Scandalous? Yes, but that the IAEA might not have been so suspect if frustrated by the Bush Administration killing the Golden Goose, they showed their hand in October of 2004 by leaking the story of missing munitions at Al-Qaqaa. Make no mistake, the move was to defeat Bush and thus, get the ‘heat off” as a Kerry administration would have canned any further scrutiny into the Oil for Food Scandal. [emphases added]
My God, what a lucrative racket did grow up in and around Saddam Hussein, and what a large chunk of the Western left-wing establishment, both here and abroad, had a high stake in its preservation. And it all would have probably remained safely clandestine had it not been for twenty Islamikazes fifty months ago, and a different sort of president in the White House than the corrupt and morally bankrupt mafioso who preceded him, who had the quaint, antiquated notion that an act of war is an act of war and determined to take his oath of office seriously and defend the country against its enemies - foreign, at least. As the old saying goes, follow the money.
Right now I have to follow a prior commitment. When I return, we'll change the focus to our favorite stomping ground, Capitol Hill.
UPDATE 11/15: Screw it. After today's Senate GOP cave-in on the conduct of the war, what does it matter what babbling morons Dem senators made of themselves at the slightest of Republican pushbacks against their retreaded "BUSH LIED!!!!!" gambit? Heck, it finally worked. The squeaky wheel really does get the grease.
Pity the poor pathetic Pachyderms that, after November 2006, the freshly restored Donks won't use lubricant of any kind for what they do next....
posted by JASmius at 5:39 PM
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