FBI investigating intelligence leaks to Iran

ABC Online ^ | Wednesday, 26 May , 2004 | Tanya Nolan

[Atlantic Friend]

Yes, as there was a German army after the Versailles Treaty, or a French Army after 1940. Outmanned and outgunned, unable to defend effectively the country.

[Peach]

I read that this morning; it's going to be interesting to see who is arrested.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[nuconvert]

Bump

[Tailgunner Joe]

Vincent Cannistraro told the Financial Times The Valerie Plame "was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear program."

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So how did a legitimate and effective Iraq planning office get painted as a dire "cabal?" As incredible as it may seem, it began with conspiracy-theorist Lyndon LaRouche, a self-styled Democratic Party presidential aspirant who claimed in March that a "cabal" of pro-Israel conservatives he called the "Children of Satan" were running a rogue intelligence operation at the Pentagon. Their mission: fabricate intelligence and drag the United States into a needless war, all at Israel's bidding. It was all very dark, murky and conspiratorial. If responsible journalists had been doing their job, the story never would have crept from the LaRouche Website into the light.

Instead, like a virus jumping from animals to humans, the story erupted in a May 6 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh, a former New York Times investigative reporter, pumped it up into a full-blown feature of 5,500 words. He quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency officers who had never set foot in the Pentagon office or had any direct dealings with it and used sources such as Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who in 1995 was cited as a witness for a convicted terrorist leader. "Hersh was briefed on this office and told all about it, but he wrote it anyway," an administration official says. Since Hersh's piece, the virus migrated to Newsweek, Time, Britain's Guardian newspaper and now has become the subject of an inquiry by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. "They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal," Hersh wrote breathlessly....

In the world of the conspiracy theorist, the real "director" of the special-plans office was not Luti but Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the long-deceased political philosopher Leo Strauss, according to Hersh. Strauss was a longtime University of Chicago professor who died in 1973. Taking LaRouche's lead, Hersh painted Shulsky as the secret leader of a cabal of American Jews whom he alleged were perpetrating a massive fraud on the American people....

Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper called Luti's office a "shadow, right-wing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force." But the real crime of the OSP was to listen to defectors who had been brought out of Iraq by the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmad Chalabi, the Guardian and others alleged. In late September, Time magazine "revealed" that INC Washington representative Francis Brooke was "in weekly contact" with Luti by phone. - SOURCE

"September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they're in heaven." - Vincent Cannistaro - New Yorker FR Thread Larouche mag

[JasonC]

Hersh's article is a ridiculous smear of Straussians, incoherent and uninformed.

As for Shulsky, he teaches Thucydides on political realism. Plus he has lots of practical experience from dealing with Soviet arms control negotiators - boring and exasperating but hardly flashy. Prudence, political moderation, and skepticism about politically motivated claims - gosh, it is a secret formula to rule the world for sure. The Protocols redux. Amazing how it has all been hidden for so long in the pages of the first real history book ever written.

[Fedora]

Thanks! LaRouche seems to have gone from being a blatantly anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist in his early years to a more subtle one mentoring the left in its anti-Bush conspiracy theories. His unauthorized biography of Bush quotes Cannistraro a lot, too. He seems to network with Philip Agee/Victor Marchetti types of allegedly disgruntled intelligence agents, as do Hersh and some of his fellow yellow journalists, so it makes sense Hersh would draw from LaRouche's conspiracy theories. I would imagine that during the Reagan-Bush administration when the government was prosecuting LaRouche, he made a point to seek out anti-Bush elements in the CIA--holdovers from Carter and earlier administrations--which probably brought him into contact with some of these guys like Baer coming out of the woodwork now.