 Mellon, above, is using his position as Democrat staff chief on the Senate intelligence panel to undermine the leadership of Rumsfeld, Feith and Bolton.
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Posted on 07/30/2005 5:45:23 PM PDT by Sam Hill
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http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml
Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France
By Bruce Johnston in Rome
(Filed: 19/09/2004)
The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
Italian judicial officials confirmed yesterday that Mr Martino had previously been sought for questioning by Rome. Investigating magistrates in the city have opened an inquiry into claims he made previously in the international press that Italy's secret services had been behind the dissemination of false documents, to bolster the US case for war.
According to Ansa, the Italian news agency, which said privately that it had obtained its information from "judicial and other sources", Mr Martino was questioned by an investigating magistrate, Franco Ionta, for two hours. Ansa said Mr Martino told the magistrate that Italy's military intelligence, Sismi, had no role in the procuring or dissemination of the Niger documents.
He was also said to have claimed that he had obtained the documents from an employee at the Niger embassy in Rome, before passing these to French intelligence, on whose payroll he had been since at least 2000.
However, he reportedly also added that he had believed that the documents in question were genuine, and to have never suspected that they had been forged. "Martino has clarified his position and offered to deliver to the magistrates the documents which confirm his declarations," his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, told Ansa.
It was not possible to contact Mr Martino through his lawyer yesterday. Contacted by The Telegraph, Mr Ionta politely declined to comment, but did not deny that the questioning had taken place. The Interior Ministry in Rome, which had also expressed keen interest in the Telegraph article, refused to comment on the matter.
Mr Martino is said by diplomats to have come forward of his own accord and contacted authorities in the Italian capital following the earlier article in the Telegraph. They said he had written a letter of resignation to the French DGSE intelligence service last week.
According to an Italian newspaper report yesterday, members of the Digos, Italy's anti-terrorist police, removed documents from Mr Martino's home in a northern suburb of Rome on Friday afternoon.
"After being exposed in the international press, French intelligence can hardly be amused or happy with him," one western diplomat said. "Martino may have thought the safest thing was to hand himself over to the Italians." Investigators in Rome suspect that Mr Martino was first engaged by the French secret services five years ago, when he was asked to investigate rumours of illicit trafficking in uranium from Niger. He is thought to have then been retained the following year to collect more information. It was then that he is suspected of having assembled a dossier containing both real and bogus documents from Niger, the latter apparently forged by a diplomat.
In September 2002 Tony Blair accused Saddam of seeking "significant quantities" of uranium from an undisclosed African country - in fact, Niger. US President George W Bush made a similar claim in his State of the Union address to Congress four months later, using information supplied by MI6.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed doubts over some of the documents' authenticity, however, and declared them false in March 2003.
In July, the White House withdrew the president's claim, admitting that it was based on inaccurate information. British officials still say that their intelligence about Iraqi uranium purchases was supported by a second, independent source.
(Christopher) Mellon, a former Clinton administration official, is part of a network of liberal operatives within the Pentagon and CIA who reportedly are seeking to discredit and politically disable some of the nation's most important architects of the war on terrorism and their efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands. Mellon already was a SSCI staffer when the Clinton administration tapped him to work as a deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence), where he was responsible for security and information operations. In the C3I office, where he held a civilian rank equivalent to a three-star general, Mellon worked on intelligence-policy issues, or in the words of a former colleague, Cheryl J. Roby, "things like personnel, training and recruiting for intelligence." The office is under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for policy, a post now held by conservative Douglas J. Feith.
Clinton-era personnel reforms allowed officials of his administration to burrow into vital Pentagon posts as careerists, administration officials say, where they have been maneuvering to keep Bush loyalists out of key positions and/or undermine their authority while pushing their own political agendas that run contrary to those of the president. This network, Insight has discovered, extends to the Pentagon's outer reaches such as the National Defense University and far-flung academic and influential policy think tanks, or "CINC tanks," serving the commanders ("CINCs") of the U.S. military theaters around the world [see "Clinton Undead Haunting Pentagon," June 17, 2002].
Senate and Department of Defense (DoD) colleagues say Mellon has a beef against Feith and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under whom he served briefly until the new Bush administration made its full transition into office. Intelligence sources say he tried to keep conservatives out of key Pentagon posts and to undermine tough antiterrorism policies after 9/11. Back at the SSCI, Mellon's chief targets for criticism have been Feith and his like-minded State Department colleague, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who holds the nonproliferation portfolio. Both Feith and Bolton are strong supporters of President Bush's advocacy of "regime change" for rogue states and are considered to be among the most faithful advocates in the administration of his personal policy positions.
snip
In his first tour on the Senate intelligence committee, he served as an appointee of the late liberal Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.) when George Tenet, a Democrat who now is director of the CIA, was committee staff director. Mellon then took the C3I post at the Pentagon when William Cohen, the liberal Republican senator from Maine, became secretary of defense for Clinton.
******
"Viseon Names Christopher Mellon to Advisory Board
5/11/2004
Tuesday May 11, 11:17 am ET
DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 2004--Viseon, Inc. (OTCBB:VSNI - News), a global developer of broadband personal video communications solutions, today announced that Christopher Mellon, former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has joined the Viseon Advisory Board. Mr. Mellon is also an adjunct Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
snip
Mr. Mellon served on Capitol Hill, including 10 years as a staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and within the Defense Department for almost five years until April 2004.
******
Christopher Mellon
Christopher Mellon has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence since November of 1999. From June 1998 through November 1999, Mr. Mellon served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations. In that capacity he was responsible for policy and programmatic oversight of information assurance, critical infrastructure protection, security, counterintelligence, and information operations strategy and integration. Mr. Mellon went to the Pentagon as a member of Secretary Cohen's transition team on January 2, 1997. Following the transition, Mr. Mellon was appointed as the Coordinator for Advanced Concepts and Program Integration, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, concentrating on encryption and information assurance issues. From November 1997 to June 1998, he served as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Policy, providing advice on a range of intelligence issues. Before joining the Department of Defense, Mr. Mellon served for 12 years in a variety of positions on Capitol Hill including nearly 10 years as a professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Mellon received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics at Colby College. He earned his Masters Degree from Yale University in International Relations, with a concentration in finance and management.
******
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003 11:49 a.m. EST
Clinton Appointee Linked to Bombshell Anti-Bush Intel Memo
A former member of the Clinton administration is being linked to a bombshell Senate Intelligence Committee memo outlining a strategy to use Iraq war intelligence gathered by the committee to help drive President Bush from office in 2004.
In an editorial Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported:
"[Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V.] refuses to denounce the memo, which he says was unauthorized and written by staffers. If that's the case, at the very least, some heads ought to roll. A good place to start would be minority staffer Christopher Mellon, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton administration."
One of Mellon's former bosses, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, has been sharply critical of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Last week she accused the White House of trying cover up battlefield casualties and said Bush's decision to invade Iraq was "the antithesis of the rule of law."
The Journal recommended that until those responsible for the Democrats' decision to politicize intelligence are fired, the intelligence committee should be "shut down, cleaned out and reconstituted later, preferably after the next election."
On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia said that attempts by committee Democrats to undermine an American president during a time of war were "perhaps treasonous."
"If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin," Miller charged in a statement released by his office.
Still, elected Republicans both on and off the Senate Intelligence Committee have expressed nothing like Miller's outrage.
Instead of confronting Democrats over what may be the most serious breach of national security since the Clinton administration allowed a Democratic Party donor to provide missile guidance technology to China, Republicans have urged further bipartisan cooperation with Rockefeller and his staff.
Asked on Thursday what needed to be done to address the security breach, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said only: "The answer is simple. We go back to work. We have documents yet to review."
Thu, 25 Nov 2004 02:35:00 -0800
By Douglas Jehl
Republished from The New York Times
Chiefs of C.I.A.'s Europe and Far East divisions step down in wake of new management, headed by Porter Goss.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 – Two more senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service are stepping down, intelligence officials said Wednesday, in the latest sign of upheaval in the agency under its new chief, Porter J. Goss.
As the chiefs of the Europe and Far East divisions, the two officials have headed spying operations in some of the most important regions of the world and were among a group known as the barons in the highest level of clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations.
The directorate has been the main target of an overhaul effort by Mr. Goss and his staff. Its chief, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy resigned this month after a dispute with the new management team.
An intelligence official said that the two division chiefs were retiring from the agency and that there would be no public announcement. Neither could be named, the official said, because they are working under cover.
A former intelligence official described the two as “very senior guys” who were stepping down because they did not feel comfortable with new management.
In a memorandum to agency employees last week, Mr. Goss warned that more personnel changes were coming as part of what he described as an effort to rebuild the ability of the agency to perform its core mission of stealing secrets.
Last week, President Bush directed Mr. Goss to draw up detailed plans in 90 days for a major overhaul of the agency, to address shortcomings that have become evident with intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and prewar assessments of Iraq.
The directive included a call for 50 percent increases in crucial operations and analytical personnel, a goal that the agency had already set in a five-year strategic plan drafted in December under George J. Tenet, the previous director of central intelligence. Many of the agency’s top officials, including John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director, and A. B. Krongard, the No. 3 official, have stepped down or announced plans to do so since Mr. Goss took office in September. The upheaval has been most extensive in the operations directorate, made up of spies and spymasters who have made careers out of stealing secrets.
The clandestine service is a proud closed fraternity and one that sees itself as fiercely loyal and not risk-averse. It is also a group that has recoiled in recent weeks at the criticisms leveled at the agency, including comments this month from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who accused the agency of acting “almost as a rogue” institution.
Mr. Goss is a former spy and a member of the clandestine service who worked in Latin America in the 60’s. More recently, he was a Republican congressman and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he has made plain his view that the current crop of case officers is not bold enough.
What is playing out in the agency headquarters is no less than a clash of cultures on a scale not seen there. since the Carter administration, when Stansfield Turner, a retired admiral, took a half-dozen Navy officers with him to the agency in 1977.
Under Mr. Goss, it is a cadre of former House Republican aides, not Navy officers, who dominate the new management team. This month, they have toppled Mr. Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, in a way that former intelligence officials say has shown little regard for the tradition-bound clandestine service which has always prized rank, experience and lines of authority.
“The C.I.A. is a line organization like the military,” said Christopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee. “When staff guys insert themselves, that causes confusion and discontent.”
Under Mr. Goss, the extent of the rebellion in the ranks is not clear. Much of the anger has been focused on a former Congressional aide, Patrick Murray, the chief of staff, who is said to have raised the hackles of some station chiefs around the world. The atmosphere has so deteriorated in the agency that some career officers have begun using derogatory nicknames for Mr. Murray and his colleagues, former intelligence officials said.
A backdrop to the tensions have been accusations from some Republicans that the agency sought over the summer to undermine Mr. Bush’s re-election. Mr. McCain, in suggesting that the agency had been disloyal, has singled out the disclosure of intelligence reports about Iraq whose conclusions were at odds with administration assertions about the war.
In a rare public rebuttal, John E. McLaughlin, a career C.I.A. official who is stepping down as the agency’s No. 2 official after less than two months as Mr. Goss’s deputy, wrote in an op-ed article on Tuesday in The Washington Post that the accusation was unjustified.
“C.I.A. officers are career professionals who work for the president,” Mr. McLaughlin wrote. “They see this as a solemn duty, regardless of which party holds the White House. Has everyone ruled out the possibility that the intelligence community during this period was simply doing its job – calling things as it saw them – and that people with a wide array of motives found it advantageous to put out this material when the C.I.A.’s views seemed at odds with the administration’s?”
Still, the memorandum that Mr. Goss issued last week advised his employees that the agency’s job was to “support the administration and its policies” and to do nothing to associate themselves with opposition to the administration.
People close to Mr. Goss and Mr. Murray, 40, say the two believe that major shakeups are needed.
“What’s going on at the agency now is very clearly a group of deskbound bureaucrats who don’t want the system to change,” said Gardiner Peckham, a longtime friend of Mr. Murray and, like him, a former Republican Congressional official. “Basically, they’re looking at a president, a director and his chief of staff who are change agents. There are some who would like to stand in the way and prevent that change from taking place, and they shouldn’t win.”
Mr. Turner, as intelligence chief under President Jimmy Carter, had an agenda that was the opposite in many ways from Mr. Goss’s. He sought to shrink the clandestine service and rein it in, in reaction to the abuses of the 60’s and 70’s. Mr. Goss wants to make it bigger and bolder, in response to failures in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks and in prewar intelligence on Iraq.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Turner said he recognized the challenge that Mr. Goss was facing.
“Criticize the D.O., and you’re in trouble,” Mr. Turner said, using an abbreviation for the operations directorate. “Try to modify the way that operation works, and if you’re an outsider, you’re in trouble.”
Mr. Goss and his team, including Mr. Murray, have never made a secret of their view that the clandestine service was in need of major change. A report by the House Intelligence Committee issued in June, when Mr. Goss was its chairman and Mr. Murray its staff director, portrayed the operations directorate in scathing terms, disparaging what it called “a continued political aversion to operations risk” and calling for “immediate and far-reaching changes.”
“The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the D.O. once was, is becoming just a fleeting memory,” the report said. “With each passing day, it becomes harder to resurrect.”
The report so infuriated the agency that Mr. Tenet, who was still director of central intelligence, shot off an angry letter to Mr. Goss.
To replace Mr. Kappes, Mr. Goss has appointed a career covert officer whose name has not been announced because he is undercover but who has been most recently director of the Counterterrorism Center at the agency.
An agency spokesman declined to comment on the internal dispute.
"Still, the memorandum that Mr. Goss issued last week advised his employees that the agency’s job was to “support the administration and its policies” and to do nothing to associate themselves with opposition to the administration."
I guess Valerie didn't get the memo.
Someone forged a letter to look like it came from a US diplomat and sent it to the press - it concerned the diplomat's alleged opinion of the current President and goings on at the State Dept -but the diplomat [not Wilson] said it wasn't written by him and didn't reflect his views.
Maybe even earlier then that. Remember that letter a bunch of democrats signed and sent over to the President calling for war? I'm wondering now who all signed their name to that letter? Because like you, I'm wondering just how far back this dirty deal goes.
Just one of many Democrat Traitors. They want the US to lose so that they may win back power. It's disgusting.
On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, "There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and "why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated." A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.
So this memo could have been written anytime after March 14, 2003.
It sure is amazing all that was going around that time. That is when Wilson began to have his epiphany.
It's also when the former CIA experts (aka traitors) Johnson and McGovern and others began their campaign.
Of course it wasn't coordinated. Not at all. No way.
Ich pingen Sie.
"A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees.”
Hersch here is quoting crackpot traitor Ray McGovern here. You can bet your bottom dollar.
Here is some more agit-prop lying from that raving anti-Semitic lunatic:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215
Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
“The Crazies Are Back”: Bush Sr.’s CIA Briefer Discusses How Wolfowitz & Allies Falsely Led the U.S. To War
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the forgeries.
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, the forgery we referred to before with respect to alleged Iraqi attempts to seek uranium in Niger.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, we always refer to that, but most people don’t know what the fraud was that was perpetrated. Explain what actually happened.
RAY MCGOVERN: What happened was this: in early 2002, Vice President Cheney learned that there was a report floating around that the government of Iraq was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons in the African country of Niger. He was so interested in that for obvious reasons, that he and his staff went to the Central Intelligence Agency and said tell me more about this. The CIA in response found out the best person to send down there, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who knew Africa like the palm of his hand, who had served in Niger as ambassador to other countries.
DAVID MACMICHAEL: Just to intrude here. Joe Wilson was particularly important for that. He had been the Deputy Chief of Mission in Baghdad just prior to the 1991 Iraq war and actually had been serving as effectively the US ambassador there, so he knew Iraq and he knew Africa.
AMY GOODMAN: He was Bush’s ambassador to Iraq at that time.
RAY MCGOVERN: Exactly, with high commendations from President Bush the First [Bush Senior]. So Joe went down there, spent eight days down there checking it out, with the ambassador down there and everybody else who knew this situation. He came back and said it was ‘highly dubious’. Number one: The government of Niger cannot, even if it wanted to, give uranium or sell uranium to Iraq. Why? Because it doesn’t control it. Who controls it? An international consortium led by the French. Every ounce of the uranium is accounted for. There is no way they could do that. Number 2: Iraq already has several, 50 tons of this yellow cake uranium it doesn’t know what to do with.
DAVID MACMICHAEL: And again, to intrude, all of which was under control of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency
AMY GOODMAN: The yellow cake uranium that Saddam Hussein had.
DAVID MACMICHAEL: The existing uranium ore that they had.
RAY MCGOVERN: So on the strength of that, the ambassadors report was that, forget it, this is really bogus, this report. It just can’t…the first thing you do as an intelligence analyst or any kind of analyst is look at the substance of the report. If it makes no sense, it hardly matters what kind of source was behind it. But in this case it really did matter because later, it was discovered, that this report came from deliberate forgeries, and crude forgeries at that. And so, what I am reminded of is…
AMY GOODMAN: By whom?
RAY MCGOVERN: Well, it’s not clear. One asks themselves, Qui bono? Who would profit from this kind of thing? And a lot of people suggest it was the Israeli service, Mussad.
Wasn't that one you posted sent to Clinton?
I thought there was one, just before the war, that was sent to President Bush. But I could be wrong.
Danke, LOL.
I wonder if he's emphasizing that to cover up for someone on one of the intelligence committees who had unauthorized access to the PDB through a leak.
There was this letter to Bush:
Nine Congress Members Call for Stepped up Action Against Iraq
http://www.usembassy.it/file2001_12/alia/a1120711.htm
But it's just Republicans, plus Lieberman.
McGovern is the only one who thinks PDBs are so damn important.
(Maybe because in actual fact, he never gave one. Though his whole claim to fame is based on his lies that he did.)
bttt
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