Posted on 05/08/2006 11:14:24 AM PDT by Enchante
"The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
And that's surely not even counting all of these leftist reporters, since I'm sure that the Libby defense team could not get these reporters to voluntarily testify to Joe Wilson outing Valerie...... it's five people from whom the Libby team has secured voluntary cooperation plus all the reporters who have been lying and covering for Joe these past 3 years.... he probably outed her most explicitly to at least a dozen or more people before July 2003, and we already knew that from his bio and speeches, etc. he had outed her indirectly several times. Yeah, they were a super-duper top-secret spy couple for sure.....
Will you add me to your ping list? I love your detective work!
Enchante - I went back and read through the other threads that you linked, and I saw my own posts from last year positing that Chris Lehane was likely in the middle of al of this. I haven't changed my mind about that, and this thread makes me even more sure. I even looked up some old articles that mentioned Lehane and this whole thing has his M.O. - spreading false stories among many reporters and playing them off against each other so that nobody ends up being sure where the story started but it develops such a "buzz" that "everyone" knows it is true. Couple that with Lehane's pathological hatred of Karl Rove from the 2000 campaign, and his close association with Mandy Grunwald, a/k/a Mrs. Matt Cooper, and you have both the motive and the method for the invention of the "White House war on Wilson." Lehane knew all those lefty reporters extremely well and had used them before to spread rumors and lies. He managed to get the New York Times to run a front page, above the fold story on the "Rats" ad during the 2000 campaign - would have been a piece of cake for him to get David Corn and then Matt Cooper to write about a White House conspiracy to out Valerie Plame.
Excellent points about Lehane - don't know how to smoke him out on this but every one of these reporters should be grilled under oath - of course there will be a big legal battle over that and the MSM will squawk so much it may never happen, but that's what should happen..... among other things such as Joe and Valerie being prosecuted, etc.
Thanks for the ping.
It's looking more and more like there is no Vast Left Wing Conspiracy trying to mount this coup, but rather a small, vocal and determined Little Left Wing Sedition and Sewing Circle.
These are all the same little cabal of traitors showing up over and over in these articles, written by members of the same little group! We'll only need a dozen scaffolds at the most. ;-)
Pinz
I agree that someone is handing out money. Before Joe Wilson ever wrote a book he had a millioin-dollar house in a tony area of DC, a kitchen remodel with custom cabinets and granite counter-tops, antiques and oriental rugs, a Jag, a Mercedes, a Rollex watch, and enough money to clothe Valerie in fancy dudds for dinner parties all over Georgetown. Pretty amazing for a guy who was retired on a civil service pension and a wife who was a government employee. They did NOT inherit money; both come from middle-clas backgrounds.
Makes sense.
Chris Lehane was the slime ball behind the last minute Bush Drunk Driving story in 2000. And got Carl Cameron to break it, no less!
He's also the genius behind the compilation in the White House of all of the 'smears' about the Clintons in '93 or '94.
He was Kerry's spokesman during 2004, wasn't he?
His resume is all about dirty tricks.
Ping to kcvl and some great research skills... :-)
Pinz
He's a member of a Saudi think tank. Aren't all the former Middle East ambassadors??? Makes me wonder who he was really working for while he was collecting his USA government paychecks...
I would bet $$$ that Soros is putting money into an offshore account in his name, too.
Pinz
“There was a lot of reason to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein,” he told WABC Radio’s Mark Simone. “I always thought that he probably had chemical and biological weapons and biological precursors as well.”
Wilson said his primary policy difference with President Bush wasn’t over Saddam’s WMDs, but rather on the question of “how to construct a policy that gets to the national security issue of disarming Saddam Hussein and does so at minimum risk to other legitimate U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region.”
But aside from that, Wilson said he cheered President Bush’s decision to topple the Iraqi dictator, telling Simone: “When the president went up to the U.N. and got the [war] resolution unanimously passed at the U.N., nobody applauded louder than I did.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dug this up .. and am rather stunned that PotatoHead totally misstated the President's SOTU statement about WMD .. didn't remember this from June 1, 2003 -- almost to the end of the page:
"Actually, after watching yesterday’s Meet the Press, we can think of several. Does the fog come in on little cat’s feet? So did Russert’s panel of pundits as they discussed those WMDs. David Broder did start the session by saying that the CIA “in my view has been misused by this administration.”
But Russert’s pussy-footin’ panel struggled to keep themselves out of the catnip. Mark Bowden wants the truth. Others aren’t eager to help him.
For example, what about those forged documents about uranium from Niger—the documents Colin Powell touted at the UN? According to Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times (5/6), the documents in question “had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.” According to Kristof’s reporting, the matter had been clear since February 2002.
{{{LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER LIE}}}At that time, a former ambassador—Cheney’s office had asked him to investigate—“reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.” Kristof: “The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.” Seymour Hersh did similar reporting on this incident in the New Yorker.
Mark Bowden probably wants to know the truth about this matter. We hope he didn’t watch Meet the Press. Incredibly, this was the panel’s entire discussion of that seminal topic:
RUSSERT: On January 24th, the president’s State of the Union message, he said that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and that now has been proven not to be accurate, that the documents were forged. How does that find its way into a presidential speech?
WILLIAM SAFIRE: That was stupid, and somebody goofed. But that doesn’t derogate the whole thing.
“Somebody goofed,” Safire explained. And that was the total discussion! Russert simply changed the subject, moving on to the next question.
At times, the group seemed to be on Planet La-La. “Nobody ever thought [Saddam] had nuclear arms,” Robert Novak said at one point. And no one contradicted the statement—although Cheney and Rice had both warned the public about those Iraqi nukes.
Earlier, Novak served another howler, saying that the Admin never discussed Iraqi WMDs until “Secretary Powell talked the president into going to the U.N.” No one on the panel demurred, although the statement is complete, screaming nonsense. (Bush warned about Iraqi WMDs at a 10/11/01 press conference. Rice followed suit four days later.) Meanwhile, what do you suppose Broder said when Safire posed this tangy question?
BRODER: I believed the rationale that our government put out. I believed when they said that there are these weapons of mass destruction and we have proof that they exist…What gave this urgency, what gave it the plausibility to go ahead and act on our own against Saddam Hussein was the assertion that he had amassed these weapons of mass destruction.
SAFIRE: But it was a truthful assertion. Nobody—you’re not suggesting that he lied about it?
How did Broder answer? He didn’t—Russert cut the question off, moving to the Potemkin “discussion” about that Niger document.
No, the panel had little time for the questions which trouble Mark Bowden. But they did have oodles of time for one question. They had plenty of time to clown around, asking if Bill Clinton wants to seek a third term. This Sunday, out in America, Mark Bowden had serious questions. But at Meet the Press, they knew their roles. They clowned around about Bill Clinton—and ran from important discussion."
Ever since I was very young I was taught "thou shalt not lie". I have mostly tried to obey. Nevertheless, I have occasionally been accused of lying. Invariably, those doing the accusing could be caught lying, themselves. It is a good rule that one who accuses you of lying, is most likely a lier himself.
And some of them tell lies, too.
Wooooooooooooooooo hooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I recieved a copy of the Nation in the mail a few weeks back (it was delivered to the wrong address) I had never seen it before. What a cheap-ass "magazine" Poor quality paper, printing, and only a hand full of pages....pathetic.
Way to go finding this
Given the source, the description and the timing it has to be Lyin' Joe.
Exactly how did he phrase his "strong links to the CIA", I wonder? Was it along the lines of "Didja know my wife is not only a hottie, but she's a secret agent working on WMD matters?"
What a jerk!
The Russians are a possibility, certainly. But all of these people have known (and close) ties with both France and Saudi Arabia -- who have a lot more to gain from the delegitimatizing of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The French and the Saudis are more likely culprits, in my view.
bttt
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.