[F14 Pilot]

PINGgggg!

[Atlantic Friend]

Interestingly, the British government seems to have invested much in bolstering its ties to Iran, too.

[piasa]

OK, it looks like the disloyal opposition has gotten all the mileage they can out of Abu Ghraib and their attack on Rumsfeld- the Former NSC guy Richard Clarke's book isn't getting much mileage since he turned out to be a flop so they are now moving to the next phase...

And guess who pops up yet again? Why yes, it's good ol' former NSC guy Vincent Cannistraro of Sami Al Arian fame...

[John Lenin]

Chalabi was used by all concerned for th Oil-for-Food scam. High ups in the US were in on it too. At least thats what they want us to think.

[Texasforever]

I have a feeling that the State Department and the CIA will not like the results of this investigation.

[JasonC]

Left the CIA in 1991. So he knows what about this? Nothing. And what did he himself think about the subject he now wants us to think was all an Iranian con? Read. The following is from what he said of Powell's pre-war public intel briefing.

"Well, the Secretary of State's speech relied heavily on material gathered by international intelligence agencies, including Australia's.

Ironically, while the Bush Administration wants this speech to galvanise the international community to go to war against Iraq, its own intelligence agency doesn't see war as the best way of insuring that the world is made safe from Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, last year the CIA chief warned the President that attacking Iraq could lead to catastrophe by provoking Saddam Hussein to use any weapons of mass destruction he had.

Nevertheless, intelligence photos and phone intercepts in particular were the most compelling parts of Colin Powell's presentation today.

So how solid is this evidence?

One person well placed to judge is the former head of the CIA's counter-terrorism unit, Vincent Cannistraro, who's also a former director of intelligence for the National Security Council.

Mr Cannistraro spoke to me a short time ago from his home in Virginia.

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: I was impressed. I think it was a compelling speech. Taken in totality, I think the speech makes a persuasive case that Saddam's engaged in concealing a program of weapons of mass destruction.

I think you could probably nitpick individual pieces of it, and there was certainly no one incident that would prove to be a smoking gun. But I think as taken as a, as a whole, it's a pretty clear pattern of deception by Saddam.

ELEANOR HALL: What was the most convincing evidence?

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: Well, there, there were a couple of pieces. I think the audiotape in which a conversation between two Republican Guard officials takes place and one talks about nerve agents. That certainly was a startling piece of evidence.

That, and the overhead photography of a chemical decontamination plant. That was also verified by a human source on the ground. When you had both a technical collection and human source collection reporting on the same ground event, I think that made it a very conclusive case.

... ELEANOR HALL: Do you believe that the case for war has been made?

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: No, I don't believe the case for war has been made. It is not a case that can be made that war is necessary now in order to stop Saddam. I mean, he's years away from a nuclear program.

He's essentially contained. He's under the microscope of the United Nations. He's being subjected to a pretty rigorous weapons inspection regime. And he can't really move. So I don't think we've made the case for going to war. That's more of a political judgement.

ELEANOR HALL: It's an interesting position that, that intelligence officers are, are in at the moment, isn't it? Because I remember the last time we spoke we were talking about the advice from the CIA to the Government. That in fact going to war against Saddam Hussein was a sure way to make him use any weapons of mass destruction that he may have.

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: And clearly that is the CIA analysis that he's unlikely, Saddam is unlikely to use his weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked, and then he, in that case, is likely to bring the house down upon him."

So, before the war his position was that our intel was compelling, particularly direct tapes, not third hand fed reports. But that we should leave Saddam alone, because if we attacked him he use WMDs on us.

[piasa]

from another thread:

"That he (Saddam) was promoting al-Qaeda is absurd," Cannistraro said. --- USA Today, July 13, 2003

And here's Vinnie singing a different tune during the Clinton administration:

"It's clear that the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq. The Iraqis have all the technological elements, the tradecraft that bin Laden lacks, and they have Abu Nidal." --- Vincent Cannistraro quoted in "Some Analysts Fear a bin Laden, Saddam Pairing," by John Walcott, The Charlotte Observer, February 14, 1999.

49 posted on 10/01/2003 1:17:03 PM PDT by browardchad

[Just mythoughts]

Interesting. One can only imagine what the full story really is.

[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