Posted on 07/20/2005 6:23:03 AM PDT by Perlstein
"DAMN, that was a good article. If it hasn't already been posted as its own thread, please do so. It's a "must read". ~ Ichneumon
Thanks, I agree. I checked to see, and found that it had been on the Bloggers & Personal section of FR (see below). That's probably why I missed seeing it. I usually only look at the posts in the News/Activism section.
Anyhow - I've sent it out to everyone I know and asked them to pass it on, too.
Spy Valerie And The Rogue CIA
Posted by Cecily
On Bloggers & Personal 07/18/2005 9:13:30 PM EDT · 16 replies · 318+ views
"Finally, a word about attitudes of State and CIA offices who serve in the Middle East. A retired senior officer tells me that--almost without exception--spooks and diplomats who serve in Arab countries and even in Israel come back "pro-Arab."
You can have sympathy for the legitimate concerns of the Arabs without being anti-Israel. Wouldn't heavy doses of tough "love" and straight talk do more to help the Arabs than taking on board their pathological lies about and hatred of the Jews and Israel?
Not only that, but he outed himself on his own website back in 2000 (it's still in the internet archive). His "private sector" experience also included a construction project in Argentina right when they were installing their Canadian nuclear plant. Right after that he "joined" the CIA. His current resume omits the Honduras and Argentina details.
Didn't these people just out themselves as working for the CIA?
If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened.
“My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”
For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”
In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.
“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?”
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon. [My comment: Hence all the sudden media hype about Watergate]
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
According to Goss' supporters, the agency has been out of control, recently leaking negative stories to the press to undermine the White House.
"The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics," said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. "And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem."
Even the moonbats got it right:
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?SourceThe real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown. Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.“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.”
Did a google on Greg Theilmann who was with the INR and is probably the one that wrote the State Dept. memo, and this story came up with his name in it (he apparently was in a pissing contest with Bolton over the reports), but also something supporting my theory:
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.Long read, but informative. Thielmann was up to his neck in this, he was pissed because Bolton rejected his input and kicked him out of the meetings.“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.”
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”
Interestingly enough, Thielmann is now touring the anti-war circuit with none other than Joe Wilson.
Bingo...we have a winner!
"The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics," said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. "And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem."
June 16, 2003 (same time frame) Former Bush NSC terrorism assistant, now Kerry NSA Rand Beers resigned a position as NSC special advisor to the president on terrorism several weeks ago. He has now signed on with the Kerry campaign as national security adviser.
Rand now works for...{drum roll please}...Joe Wilson's apparently bogus company, J C Wilson International Ventures.
We tied that to Elias Aburdene, Rock Creek LLC and Al Amoudi. There are even ties to the oil-for-food scandal. Fedora documents that here. Incidentally, Sandy Berger's name is on there as well. We started the research on this thread (post 28).
Of course the actual fact is the Wilsons have been shamefully partisan in their attacks on the WH.
They are liars.
Admit it.
Since you're going to embrace Cannistraro, let's look at what else he's said back during, oh, the Clinton administration:
February 6, 1999
excerpts:
Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials.
The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.
~snip~
(Oh, for context, let's toss in the part about Reno warning of an attack using WMD):
News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. "There's a threat, and it's real," Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons "are being considered for use."
~snip~
Since RAF bombers took part in air raids on Iraq in December, Bin Laden declared that he considered British citizens to be justifiable targets. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, said: "Hijazi went to Afghanistan in December and met with Osama, with the knowledge of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. We are sure about that. What is the source of some speculation is what transpired."
~snip~
Analysts believe that Mr Hijazi offered Mr bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets. Iraqi agents are believed to have made a similar offer to the Saudi maverick leader in the early 1990s when he was based in Sudan.
~snip~
And:
February 10, 1999
Vincent Cannistraro, former Chief of Counterterrorism Operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, has suggested a very sensible and quite clever explanation for what was going on at al-Shifa--why it turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory; why the US had compelling evidence linking it to VX; and why it can't be found now.
When US officials were obliged to defend their decision to attack the al-Shifa plant, after the Aug 20 strike, they revealed an Iraqi link to al-Shifa, as reported, for example, in the NYT Aug 25. US officials also revealed the existence of other sites in Khartoum thought to be associated with Iraq and VX production. Clinton chose al-Shifa as a target, because it was the only VX-related site not near a populated area.
Although the CIA did not know al-Shifa made pharmaceuticals, the State Dept did, because al Shifa was authorized by the UN sanctions committee to ship medicines to Iraq. Cannistraro suggested that Empta, manufactured at another Khartoum site, was stored, even perhaps packaged, at al-Shifa, to be sent to Baghdad, under UNSCR 986, looking to all the world like a pharmaceutical product.
That would explain how Empta could be found in a soil sample outside the facility-a leak/spill?; but also why extensive tests in the facility subsequently, including of the septic tank, did not detect it. It would also explain why Iraqi CW personnel had contact with a pharmaceutical plant. Moreover, Iraqi intelligence would think of something like that.
Indeed, Scott Ritter, in his Sept 3 Senate testimony [see "Iraq News," Sept 7], explained that Iraq was importing proscribed and dual use material under cover of UNSCR 986.
(Gosh Scott, what happened?)
Finally, given the proximity of Iraq's angry suspension of UNSCOM inspections, Aug 5, and the simultaneous terrorist assaults on the two US embassies, Aug 7, it would seem that in the Aug 20 strikes, the US, hit two targets--Osama bin Ladin, in Afghanistan, and Iraq, in Sudan, even as the White House has tried to blur that, with the claim that bin Ladin was linked to the al-Shifa plant. The White House did something similar in June, 1993, in that, when it struck Iraqi intelligence headquarters then, it did not clearly and fully explain the several reasons for the attack [see "Iraq News," Jan 27].
On the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Jan 21, 1998, over a year ago, as the second Iraq crisis began, Clinton, warning of the danger Iraq posed, said, "Think how many can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax, and think about how it's not just that Saddam Hussein might put it on a Scud missile, an anthrax head, and send it on to some city he wants to destroy. Think about all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores. . . . This is a serious thing with me, this is a very serious thing. You imagine the capacity of these tiny amounts of biological agents to cause great harm; it's something we need to get after."
Clinton understands the danger, but apparently does not want to address it in the only way that it can be properly addressed--by getting rid of Saddam.
(what?!)
Clinton also said on that program, justifying the seemingly tough line he was taking then, "What's the issue? Weapons of mass destruction. What's the answer? The U.N inspectors." And he also said that he did not have sex with that woman. It is all of a piece.
"Iraq News" has learned what precipitated the earlier rash of articles about Bin Ladin and Iraq [see "Iraq News," Jan 27].
A senior Iraqi intelligence official, Farouk Hijazi, newly appointed as Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, did visit Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan in December, as several of those articles reported.
There has been more reporting on bin Ladin and Iraq. All of it included the suggestion that Iraq is coordinating with bin Ladin on CBW terrorism.
Imagine...what a difference a change in administrations makes. And it matters not to the left what the real facts are and that we have been unmercifully attacked. No, you and your ilk only care for political expediency. It is sickening.
The only ones twisting intelligence for partisan reasons are the leftists and that includes the glamorous Wilsons.
Gee, too bad these buys weren't nearly as concerned when Kerry outted a CIA agent this year. The list of DNC transgressions in this regard is a looong one. But these guy didn't say a peep.
A partial list is here:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1445413/posts
Rand now works for...{drum roll please}...Joe Wilson's apparently bogus company, J C Wilson International Ventures.
We tied that to Elias Aburdene, Rock Creek LLC and Al Amoudi. There are even ties to the oil-for-food scandal. Fedora documents that here. Incidentally, Sandy Berger's name is on there as well. We started the research on this thread (post 28).
yet they throw themselves into the game...
CIA Influenced or Infiltratred Contractors
June 23, 2003: Nuke program parts unearthed in Baghdad back yard
47. AI-The Central Intelligence Agency - F02
... Table of Contents. The CIA Is Responsible for the Terrorist Attacks on America ... 1-800-414-5043 by fax, or by email at customerservice@gale.com. COLLEGE PROFESSORS ONLY ...
www.galegroup.com/pdf/samples/toc17254.pdf [Found on Yahoo!]
72. Don't let them silence dissent at Columbia!
... recruiting at Birzeit, Abu-Lughod replied, "The CIA has historically recruited at Columbia, but that's ... centers for the political left," and many college professors "hate America." ....
www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/522/522_04_Columbia... [Found on Yahoo!]
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