Free Republic

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said. The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal...

Vindicating Larry Franklin ELI LAKE January 16, 2007 When President Bush announced the new Iraq strategy Wednesday evening, acknowledging that Iran was effectively at war with us in Iraq by supplying terrorists with advanced improvised explosives, my thoughts turned to Lawrence Franklin. Nearly a year ago, Judge T.S. Ellis III, sentenced this Pentagon Iran analyst to almost 13 years in a federal prison after he pleaded guilty to discussing classified information with two former lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The case, which is thus far the Bush administration's only successful anti-leaking prosecution, illustrates the strategic confusion of...

They say all roads lead to Rome. Well, this one certainly does. It's a road that starts in Paris, at the door of Iranian arms dealer and Mossad double agent Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man known to the CIA as an "intelligence fabricator". It's a road that runs through Niger uranium mines, past a Genoan fascist organization operating as a parallel Italian intelligence network with ties to Rocco Martino, and down the streets of Milan, where a CIA operative, now considered a fugitive at large by Italian authorities, once operated. Ultimately, however, it is a road that does not end in...

A controversial Iranian ex-spy said he has discussed with the Pentagon using some of Saddam Hussein's hidden cash to launch a peaceful revolution against Tehran's clerical regime, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday. Manucher Ghorbanifar told the weekly he has been meeting with senior defense officials to discuss unseating Iran's Islamic regime, and said he knows how to find 340 million dollars in Saddam's cash. Ghorbanifar said he proposed using half the cash to finance an Iranian resistance and giving the other half to the US government, Newsweek said. A Defense official told Newsweek that any discussion about regime change with Ghorbanifar...

Iran-Contra Figure Re-emerges as Middleman for Iraq Information to U.S. Government PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, October 15, 2003 (10-15) 11:54 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- A central figure in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s has passed allegations to the Bush administration that $150 million in enriched uranium was smuggled from Iraq into Iran five years ago and some may remain hidden in Iraq. The information was relayed to the administration through a conservative author, Michael Ledeen. And Ledeen is now accusing the CIA of failing to aggressively check the allegation because of a long-held distrust of Manucher Ghorbanifar,...

<p>The CIA and the Iraq Survey Group failed to pursue information that Iraq smuggled uranium to Iran five years ago, according to a former State Department official.</p> <p>The former Reagan administration official, Michael Ledeen, said in an interview that the CIA also blocked the Pentagon from pursuing contacts with an Iranian informant who provided information that "saved lives" of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.</p>

CIA and Pentagon split over uranium intrigue Mistrusted arms dealer's tangled tale of nuclear smugglers and a hidden Baghdad laboratory sparks bitter spat Julian Borger in Washington Friday October 17, 2003 The Guardian (UK) A bitter row has broken out between the CIA and Pentagon over reports that Iraqi uranium was smuggled to Iran, demonstrating that the rifts between the US agencies are as deep as ever. The tangled tale of contraband, radiation sickness, two shifty middlemen, secret meetings and demands for cash is the stuff of Hollywood, though it might make a better comedy than an action movie. Yet...

It took two months and the threat of public exposure before the Central Intelligence Agency moved to pursue a tip about enriched uranium stored in Iraq, some of which may have been smuggled to Iran, says a terrorism expert who brought the tip to the American government. The expert, Michael Ledeen, holds the freedom chair at the American Enterprise Institute and is the author of “The War Against the Terror Masters.” He says that even when the CIA finally had a meeting with a source of the tip about two weeks ago, the agency was unwilling to follow up by...

<p>A central figure in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s has passed allegations to the Bush administration that $150 million in enriched uranium was smuggled from Iraq into Iran five years ago and some may remain hidden in Iraq.</p> <p>The information was relayed to the administration through a conservative author, Michael Ledeen. And Ledeen is now accusing the CIA of failing to aggressively check the allegation because of a long-held distrust of Manucher Ghorbanifar, a middleman in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra swap of arms for hostages.</p>

<p>A central figure in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s has passed allegations to the Bush administration that $150 million in enriched uranium was smuggled from Iraq into Iran five years ago and some may remain hidden in Iraq.</p> <p>The information was relayed to the administration through a conservative author, Michael Ledeen. And Ledeen is now accusing the CIA of failing to aggressively check the allegation because of a long-held distrust of Manucher Ghorbanifar, a middleman in the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra swap of arms for hostages.</p>

<p>Pentagon officials met over a three-day period in late 2001 with a long-discredited Iranian who was a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal, Defense Department officials said Friday.</p> <p>Manucher Ghorbanifar sat in on a series of meetings in Europe between two defense officials and two other Iranians who the Bush administration had been told had information useful to the United States in its then-fledgling global war on terrorism, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. The meetings occurred not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said.</p>