Know your BFEE: WHIG (White House Iraq Group) Made Phony Case for War

[Octafish]

The White House Iraq Group was charged with making the case for war -- a PR campaign. Its members include Andy Card, Sneering Dick Cheney, Humble Karen Hughes, Scooter Libby, Mary The Brains Matalin and ...Frogmarchin' Karl Rove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Iraq_Group

To make their case for war, as many on DU have noted, it appears the WHIG enlisted the aid of Steno Judy Miller and The New York Times.

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." -- White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card



These turds LIED us into an UNNECESSARY WAR!

THAT'S TREASON!

IRAQ'S NUCLEAR FILE : Inside the Prewar Debate

Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence

By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01

EXCERPT...

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."

In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.

A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39500-2003Aug9?language=printer

Aluminum tubes,



Good ol' Frank "Put 'im on the Media Beat" Rich explains further:

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 16 October 2005

EXCERPT...

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, "because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101605Z.shtml

Gee. That sounds an awful lot like a bunch of press and PR people working up a sweet ad campaign. Except, they were doing it build public support for war -- ignoring the function of a free press, which is TO TELL THE TRUTH!

Times Report on Judith Miller: Key Moments and Initial Comments

Here are my initial annotations of the big report. Key passages and brief comments. (Do add your own.) Plus my eight paragraph summary of the case and its press think.

I give credit to the Times for running the story a few days after they felt the legal clearences were had, for giving readers a look inside at decision-making normally hidden, for airing uncomfortable facts—including internal tensions—and for explaining what happened as well as the editors felt they could. This was a very difficult piece of journalism to do. As language in conveyance of fact, it is superbly edited.

I do have a small bit of news to break if you skip down to “After Matter.” Here’s my eight-graph view of the case and its mangled press think:

Maybe the biggest mistake the New York Times made was to turn decision-making for the newspaper over to Judith Miller and her “case.” This happened via the magic medium of a First Amendment struggle, the thing that makes the newspaper business more than just a business to the people prominent in it.

Miller’s defiance played to their images of Times greatness, and to their understanding of First Amendment virtue. She always described her case in the language of their principles. They heard their principles talking in the very facts of the case.

But her second attorney saw it more clearly. “I don’t want to represent a principle,” Robert Bennett told her. “I want to represent Judy Miller.” And that it is what he did. That is what she needed. The Times was the one left holding the principles.

Mostly they didn’t apply to a case that was bad on the facts, a loser on the law, quite likely to result in victory for the prosecutor, and quite possibly an ethical swamp or political sewer, since it was about using the press to discredit people without being named. All this would warn a prudent person away. It’s why other news organizations settled.

It never seems to have registered with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.—Miller’s biggest supporter and the publisher of the newspaper—that he was fighting for the right to keep things secret, not for the right to publish what had improperly been kept from us. By taking on Miller’s secret-keeping (uncritically) the Times took on more and more responsibilities not to speak, not to publish, not to report. All this is deadly for a newspaper, and the staff knew it. By the end the readers knew it and they were crying out. Even the armchair critics knew a thing or two.

So did Bill Keller, so did Jill Abramson. But there was nothing they could do. By the time they realized what Miller’s secrets had done to their journalism, Judith Miller—by staging a First Amendment showdown she escaped from—had effectively hijacked the newspaper. Her principles were in the saddle, and rode the Times to disaster, while people of the Times watched. The newspaper never got its Robert Bennett.

And in the end her secret-keeping extended to stiffing the Times on its own story. The newspaper’s First Amendment hero wouldn’t talk, share notes, or answer any tough questions.

The spooky thing about her first person account was the suggestion that Judy Miller may have—today—security clearances that her bosses (and colleagues) do not have. This could be the reason her treatment is so singular. She said the prosecutor asked her if she still had special clearances when she met with Lewis Libby. She said she didn’t know. Does that sound good?

CONTINUED...

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/10/15/mlr_act.html

Wow. So Steno Judy had "Secret" clearance. That explains why she was "trusted" with the aluminum tube claptrap. AND "Valerie Flame's" identity.



Here's Lambert'S blog, who does a real bang-up job of painting the exact role played by The New York Times:

The Grey Lady that Did Not Bark in the Night

EXCERPT...

But we’ve said what the problem is, at the Times and in the press as a whole, quite directly in plain language:

7. I suggest that Times management—Keller, Sulzberger—was embedded in the disinformation campaign run by the White House Iraq Group, that Miller was their operative, and Libby was their handler. Of course, their White House handler wouldn’t have been crass enough to offer them money; the access to power, and the promise of scoops, would have been enough. The scoops were to come from Chalabi. (It doesn’t matter whether the White House still had faith in Chalabi; what matters is that the Times did).
(back)

Long story short:

The Times hasn’t mentioned the W.H.I.G. because they were part of the W.H.I.G. disinformation campaign. In Traitorgate, Valerie Plame was outed to protect that operation, because the Niger uranium story was one of the stories that W.H.I.G. planted. (Remember the crude forgery of mysterious provenance that the yellowcake story was based on?)

And the reason it seems like they were all in on it, is that they were all in on it. All the Kewl Kidz, and all the media whores. The Beltway 500 crowd is dirty—Not all of them, but a percentage at the top of the dominance heirarchy (Not you, Dan Froomkin, and not you, Walter Pincus.)

So, it will be interesting to see if the Times can—snigger—cover itself in its still forthcoming story on Miller, or whether they’ll go into modified limited hangout mode to protect Keller and Sulzberger—and, incidentally, not blow the cover of the W.H.I.G. disinformation campaign. Maybe this post can be your magic decoder ring to help you read between the lines of what they are allowed to write.

CONTINUED...

http://www.correntewire.com/the_grey_lady_that_did_not_bark_in_the_night

No wonder people don't trust the media. It appears many of the top players are traitors.

When it comes to the Iraq war, it boils down to an unprovoked attack by the United States upon a country that was no threat to the USA.



That's not just treason, THAT'S A WAR CRIME!

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. It all connects

thanks for tying it all together. Let's just hope Fitzgerald is on the same track.

[Octafish]

4. Fitzgerald may've found evidence of a bigger crime...

... looking into the first reported crime of the outting of Valerie Plame, the NOC spy. Fitzgerald sounds like a straight-shooter who follows the evidence wherever it leads. In this case, the crumbs lead directly to the War Party.

Blood, Sweat & Tears: Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq
David Phinney
October 3rd, 2005
Thousands of low-wage Asian laborers are traveling to Iraq to work for U.S. military contractors like First Kuwaiti and Prime Projects International in the hope of sending money home to their families. Trapped and exploited under inhuman conditions, many of them are now fleeing the country to save their lives.
cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans
Pratap Chatterjee
September 20th, 2005
As Katrina's flood waters recede, government contractors are flowing into the Gulf Coast and reaping billions of dollars in pre-bid, limited bid, and sometimes no-bid contracts. Many of these contractors and the men who award them are the same players who bungled the reconstruction of Iraq. Deja vu all over again.
cartoon by Khalil Bendib
War Profiteers Campaign

Hallliburton Wins New $4.9Billion Iraq Contract
David Phinney
July 6th, 2005
With little fanfare and no public announcement, the U.S. Army quietly awarded $4.972 billion in new work to Halliburton on May 1 to support the United States military occupation of Iraq.
War Profiteers Campaign

Halliburton Hearing Unearths New Abuse
Pratap Chatterjee
June 27th, 2005
"Misplaced" portable military bases, thousand-dollar VCRs, and expired food are only a few of the new charges that have been brought against the most powerful military contractor in Iraq.

CONTINUED...

http://www.warprofiteers.com/article.php?list=type&type=176

Lot o' money to be made in war.

PS: You're welcome, DoYouEverWonder! Thanks for giving a damn!

[hiley]

13. very good link

there War Profiteers, indeed.

[hiley]

2. recommend

excellent OP thank you:patriot:

[Octafish]

5. You're welcome, hiley!

This war wasn't about any threat to We the People.

It was merely a business opportunity for the connected.

STOP THE WAR PROFITEERS
AND END THE CORPORATE INVASION OF IRAQ

http://www.southernstudies.org/campaignpage.asp

The Silent Bastions of Democracy

EXCERPT...

'THE RIGHT PEOPLE'

Complementing RTI's work is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental body promised a 100 percent increase in Congressional funding in George W. Bush's 2004 State of the Union address. "There is a lot of change taking place ," NED President Carl Gershman remarked to the Washington Times. "We know how to get to the right people."

In Nicaragua in 1990, the right people were from the conservative opposition party led by Violeta Chamorro, who ran against the Sandinista President Daniel Ortega with campaign funding from NED.7 In Venezuela in April 2002, NED felt it made the right choice in supporting those who organized a failed coup d'etat against Hugo Chavez.8 In Iraq, NED is once again busy searching for the right people. While RTI recruits people at the grassroots, NED and its affiliates have been developing the machinery for scores of political formations expected to contest the national elections planned for January 2005 or crowd the scheduled Constitutional Assembly to be held beforehand.

In Baghdad, scores of houses have been renovated to be the headquarters of new political parties - many of them furnished by NED. But NED does not simply dispense cash. Since the occupation began, NED's affiliates, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), have been holding political party development seminars and focus group discussions. As with USAID-sponsored "political party development" programs, the NED seminars train Iraqis on techniques of strategic planning, building up the party's local and regional structures, recruiting members, fundraising and media relations. More advanced levels take up electoral communication strategies, campaign planning and candidate

recruitment.9

The NDI has been holding sessions for assessing party strengths and weaknesses and evaluating their potential for participating in elections.10 The IRI has gone as far as producing a database of parties, with information on each group's characteristics, their regions of operations, and estimates of their memberships.11 At least one of the parties, the Free Republican Party, has openly packaged itself as the Iraqi version of the US Republican

Party.12

Meanwhile, the US government allotted funding through a common NED conduit, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce, to set up business associations in Iraq. "By serving as a platform to voice the business community's needs and interests to political decision-makers, business associations contribute to the growth of a participatory civil society and the development of a regulatory and policy environment conducive to private enterprise," reads its report. One of the organizations that CIPE founded, the Iraqi American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is bent on "promoting an open market economy and a democratic political system."13


CONTIUED...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6159

NED. Shmed. E. D. Nothing new, as far as The New York Times is concerned.

I do thank you for giving a damn, hiley!

[Karenina]

9. Errrraaa...

And QUICKLY!

[Octafish]

61. The Law is On the Side of Valerie Plame.

Larry Johson, ex-CIA, is on the case, like you, Karenina!

The Law is On the Side of Valerie Plame

by Larry C. Johnson

Despite claims to the contrary, the Identity Protection Act spells trouble for White House officials. Republican talking points have achieved some success in muddying the waters by insisting that Robert Novak's outing of CIA clandestine officer, Valerie Plame, was not a violation of the law. The typical presentation of this red herring was bandied about most recently in an October 10, 2005 article by Washington Times reporter, Joseph Curl.

Curl wrote:

But lawyers familiar with the probe say special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald appears to be changing the grand jury's initial focus in part because the law protecting covert CIA operatives appears not to apply to Valerie Plame, whose name first surfaced in a July 2003 column by conservative Robert Novak.

"There is not one fact that I have seen that there could be a violation of the agent identity act," said Victoria Toensing, a lawyer who helped draft the 1982 act.

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act outlaws intentional disclosure of any information identifying a covert agent. The penalty for violating the law is imprisonment for up to 10 years.

But according to the law, Mrs. Plame was not a "covert agent" at the time that at least two senior Bush administration officials discussed her with reporters.

Ms. Toensing is wrong. Let us pray that Ms. Toensing is not practicing law these days because, if her comments in this article reflect her abilities as an attorney, clients could be in serious trouble. Valerie Plame was a "covert agent" as defined by the law. In her cover position as a consultant to Brewster-Jennings, Ms. Plame served overseas on clandestine missions. Just because she did not live overseas full time does not mean she did not work overseas using her status as a non-official cover officer.

CONTINUED...

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Wow! I'm glad this guy's on our side. Same goes for you, Karenina!

[hiley]

11. your so right it is all about

GREED, plain and simple.
Military weapons are money making machine. We blow it up and destroy then the elite profit even more from privatization and the rebuilding.
Makes me ill.

[Octafish]

62. Mambo Italiano and Plame Gate

Here's some more background, hiley. The author is a former CIA colleague of Valerie Plame's. He's spitting mad.

Mambo Italiano and Plame Gate

by Larry C Johnson

With friends like the Italians who needs enemies? If Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are indicted they can shift some of the blame to the Italians. If it were not for Italy, Joe Wilson probably never would have been sent to Africa to investigate the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and the ensuing chain of events to smear Wilson would not have happened. A careful review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (July 2004) shows very clearly that there was only one source claiming that Iraq was buying the uranium. Shades of Curveball! Except in this case the source was not an Iraqi linked to Ahmed Chalabi, but a foreign liaison service. Knowledgeable friends say it was the Italian Intelligence Service (SISME).

SISME provided the CIA with three separate intelligence reports that Iraq had reached an agreement with Niger to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium (October 15, 2001; February 5, 2002; and March 25, 2002). (See Expanded PlameGate Timeline below). The second report from February was the subsequent basis for a DIA analysis, which led Vice President Cheney to ask CIA for more information on the matter. That request led to the CIA asking Ambassador Joe Wilson to go check out the story in Niger.

Even in the much maligned October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the entire intelligence community remained split on the reliability of the Iraq/Niger claim. During briefings subsequent to the publication of the NIE, senior CIA officials repeatedly debunked the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. They also dismissed as unreliable reports from Great Britain, which also were derived from the faulty Italian intelligence reports.

Italy’s SISME also reportedly had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in early October 2003 that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neo-con with longstanding ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain, either SISME or someone with ties to SISME, helped forge and circulate those documents which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq.

Although some in the intelligence community, specifically analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), believed the report, the intelligence community as a whole did not put much stock in the reports and forged documents, and repeatedly told policy makers that these reports were not reliable. Despite being rebuffed repeatedly by the intelligence community on these questions, policymakers persisted in trying to make the fraudulent case.

CONTINUED...

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/10/mambo_italiano_.html#more

Spread the word on the BFEE. The American people are good people. The sooner they learn the Truth about Bush and his war turds, the quicker these crooks will be making little rocks out of big ones.

[hootinholler]

18. It was merely a business opportunity for the connected.

Yes, and if we can't create an insurgency, we can always hire one. Just call 1-800-BadMoFo.

-Hoot

[Octafish]

63. Why Patrick Fitzgerald Gets It

Larry Johnson, former CIA colleague of Valerie Plame, sets it down for us to see. The BFEE put power, profits and petroleum ahead of the national security and human rights. It's astounding to read "liberal" columnists like Cohen echo the monkey house.

Why Patrick Fitzgerald Gets It

by Larry C. Johnson

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald understands very well that something beyond a crime was committed when Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and other White House operatives spread the name of undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, around Washington as part of a coordinated effort to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. Someone needs to alert Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen that he is a nitwit and moron for trying to advance White House supplied talking points that no real crime occurred.

Here are some of the facts that will come out when Fitzgerald ends his investigation:

1. Valerie Plame was still a non-official cover officer in July 2003 when her identity was revealed by colostomy bag Bob Novak.

2. Valerie Plame had traveled overseas on secret missions using that cover as required under the statute in question.

3. Valerie Plame's exposure also almost compromised the identity of other non-official cover officers.

4. Valerie Plame did not have the authority to send her husband on the Niger mission and in fact did not make the decision.

CONTINUED...

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Let's keep spreadig the word. The sooner Mr. and Mrs. America get it, the quicker the next sound these BFEE turds hear will be their ears popping as they decompress on final approach to Gitmo.

[FreedomAngel82]

42. Exactly

Don't forget groups like Carlisle as well!

[peacetalksforall]

3. NYT editors and board are complicit in the push for war. There is no

other way to read it. This investigation grows by the minute. Now we have Rumsfeld granting super secret clearance to Miller. To me that means they granted the NYT the clearance. How will the NYT find the nerve to say that she operated independently of her bosses and her bosses bosses, if not the board?

Now they will stall and fight it. Rumsfeld will stall and fight it. She could even consent to going to prison again to protect Rumsfeld.

We have talked about the cooperation of the media with the WH. Now we get to see how far they can go. This all proves that they have utter disregard for people. Thousand of missing body parts and organs, incredible immune problems, and wrecked and devastated families.

Anyone who is still out there spreading the war is honorable crap is sick. Sick in their soul.

I fear the NYT will get away with it.

This is a sick country - we have no mainstream press that doesn't kill people.

[texpatriot2004]

8. I believe the NYT is complicit too. I think they had an interest in

this sick, sordid affair. I think they were connected to the scheme on some level.

I agree that anyone who can still defend this war, and I would add still defend that lying lunatic * is sick in their soul.

[FreedomAngel82]

43. I wouldn't be surprised

Probably money making involved.

[Octafish]

17. They are sick souls. They won't get away with it...

...if we have anything to say about it.

We know they are Masters of War

http://www.masters-of-war.net/madness.html

And then there's the ultimate truth:



At the monkey house, Smirko is Nutjob 1.

[Octafish]

19. E&P: 'Secret Clearance' is 'Hidden Scandal' in Miller Story.

Editor & Publisher makes me believe there's hope yet. They've published a letter from CBS newsman Bill Lynch:

'Hidden Scandal' in Miller Story, Charges Former CBS Newsman

By E&P Staff
Published: October 16, 2005 4:00 PM ET

EXCERPT...

There is one enormous journalism scandal hidden in Judith Miller's Oct. 16th first person article about the (perhaps lesser) CIA leak scandal. And that is Ms. Miller's revelation that she was granted a DoD security clearance while embedded with the WMD search team in Iraq in 2003.

This is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised. It is all the more puzzling that a reporter who as a matter of principle would sacrifice 85 days of her freedom to protect a source would so willingly agree to be officially muzzled and thereby deny potentially valuable information to the readers whose right to be informed she claims to value so highly.

One must assume that Ms. Miller was required to sign a standard and legally binding agreement that she would never divulge classified information to which she became privy, without risk of criminal prosecution. And she apparently plans to adhere to the letter of that self-censorship deal; witness her dilemma at being unable to share classified information with her editors.

In an era where the Bush Administration seeks to conceal mountains of government activity under various levels of security classification, why would any self-respecting news organization or individual journalist agree to become part of such a system? Readers would be right to question whether a reporter is operating under a security clearance and, by definition, withholding critical information. Does a newspaper not have the obligation to disclose to its readers when a reporter is not only embedded with a military unit but also officially proscribed in what she may report without running afoul of espionage laws? Was that ever done in Ms. Miller's articles from Iraq?

SNIP...

I am a former White House and national security correspondent and have had plenty of access to classified information. When I divulged it, it was always with a common sense appraisal of the balance between any potential harm done and the public's right to know. If I had doubts, I would run it by officers whose judgement I trusted. In my experience, defense and intelligence officials routinely share secrets with reporters in the full expectation they will be reported. But if any official had ever offered me a security clearance, my instincts would have sent me running. I am gravely disappointed Ms. Miller did not do likewise.

CONTINUED...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001306732

Yeah. This is getting interesting.

Should we put the sickos in jail or a mental hospital?

Seeing how their budget cuts have closed the latter, it's a slam-dunk.

[cosmicdot]

31. Carlyle Group represented on NYTimes Board of Directors ...

... just saying ... to :kick:

William E. Kennard was elected to the Board of Directors of The New York Times Company in 2001.

Mr. Kennard joined The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, in May 2001 as a managing director in the global telecommunications and media group. Before joining The Carlyle Group, Mr. Kennard served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from November 1997 to January 2001.

Mr. Kennard served as the FCC's general counsel from December 1993 to November 1997. Before serving in the government, Mr. Kennard was a partner and a member of the board of directors of the law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand.

Mr. Kennard is also a member of the board of directors of Nextel Communications, Inc. and Dex Media, Inc.

Other Board members

http://www.nytco.com/company-directors.html

some corporate affiliations of NYT's Board include:

Nextel, W.R. Grace & Co., Hallmark Cards, Inc., PepsiCo, Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., Sara Lee Corp, Schering-Plough, MetLife, Citicorp, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co, Cummins, Alcoa, Lucent, Warburg Pincus, etc.

[Octafish]

32. Makes clear what happened to the Freedom of the Press Thing.

Thank you for posting that most important information. It is a wonder, cosmicdot.

Those who see these names and what they represent and still fail to see how what gets covered and what doesn't makes me want to scream.

Remember Ben Bagdikian warned us in 1983 about the Media Monopoly:

Understanding the Modern Mass Media

When the first edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 1983, critics called Ben Bagdikian's warnings about the chilling effects of corporate ownership and mass advertising on the nation's news "alarmist." Since then, the number of corporations controlling most of America's daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies has dwindled from fifty to ten to five.

"Ben Bagdikian has written the first great media book of the twenty-first century. The New Media Monopoly will provide a roadmap to understanding how we got here and where we need to go to make matters better."
-Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy

"No book on the media has proved as influential to our understanding of the dangers of corporate consolidation to democracy and the marketplace of ideas; this new edition builds on those works and surpasses them."
-Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?

SOURCE:

http://www.benbagdikian.com/Docs/comment.htm

These connected people are largely in it to protect their wealth, power and prestige -- including many who sit on non-profit boards. Apart from making a buck off these: They care not for the country, the Constitution or We the People.

If the general public knew, they'd see the media for what they are -- a conspiracy of lying gatekeepers. They also are traitors. May the public and the courts see them for what they are.

[FreedomAngel82]

46. This is also why

those corporations in turn also support the republican party. Because they profit more with republicans. Republicans today don't respect government.

[FreedomAngel82]

44. Of course!

And Poppy is on the board and so is George!

[BamaBecky]

6. kick

[Octafish]

20. Thanks, BamaBecky! The NYT and their ilk are in deep doo-doo.

They've been caught red-handed as co-conspirators in making a case for an illegal war.

TimesSelective: Judy-Culpa Raises More Questions Than It Answers

by Arianna Huffington
 
The first question raised by the Times’ Judy-Culpa and by Judy Miller’s own account is: Who told Judy about Valerie Plame (or “Flame” as the name appears in Judy’s notes)? According to these two pieces, the name was immaculately conceived. "As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from," Miller writes.

When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old. But who had revealed Plame’s name was not seared on Miller's mind?

This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was. It also means that Judy went to jail to protect a source she can't recall.

Update: Not Since Geraldo Cracked Open that Vault...

Now that I have spent a few hours absorbing this latest installment in the ongoing soap opera "Desperate Editors," I can safely say that not since Geraldo cracked open Al Capone’s vault has there been a bigger anticlimax or a bigger sham. After all, the question everybody has been asking is: who was the source who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to Judy Miller?

And the answer? She can't remember.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1016-33.htm

And just like Smirko and Sneer, these media whores better know the blood of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- is on their hands.

[BamaBecky]

35. And they want to give this Lady an Award! n/t

[zippy890]

7. Wow! really well done

Nazis at Nuremburg at the end - quite appropriate.

Thanks - recommended

[Octafish]

21. Minute Bushler announced 'Target Iraq' I thought of NAZI Germany...

This man wept as he watched the NAZIs march down the Champs Elysees in 1940.

Same thing as when Bush ignored warnings of 9-11.

Same thing as when the Supreme Court voted 5-4.

Same thing as when Bush took money from the bin Ladens to keep his businesses afloat.

And on and on and on.

It goes back a ways ...

[Rex]

10. The world geography textbook that I teach out of

states that in the case of the "war on terror", Boosh attacked Iraq when all other options had run out. As I recall, it was the UN weapons inspectors that were running out of Iraq for fear of a US led invasion!

[Octafish]

22. Smirko lied us into war in 2003. Poppy lied us into war in 1991.

BOTH TIMES, THE MEDIA WENT ALONG WITH THE LIE!

Sorry to shout. I'm not yelling at you, Rex.

You, an educator -- a provider of Truth -- must be so conflicted to have to see the level that these school books have descended. It's not enough to be outdated, but to be filled with lies is, like everything else Bush, criminal.

BTW: Poppy Bush told America that Saddam was readying his army to attack Saudi Arabia. This is AFTER Bush's acting ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam a Green Light to invade Kuwait. There is no limit to the treachery of such men.

How Both Bushes Attacked Iraq

By Michelle Mairesse

EXCERPT...

Fake Satellite Photos

In early January, Hussein’s troops began to withdraw from Kuwait, but the Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs showing an enormous buildup of Iraqi forces and weapons, 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1500 tanks massing in the desert for their impending attack on Saudi Arabia. This announcement stunned the anti-war protesters, and world opinion gradually shifted, although no one saw the alleged photos, which were, of course, classified.

Jean Heller, an ace journalist from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, persuaded her editors to buy two photos from the Russian commercial satellite, the Soyuz Karta, taken September 11 and September 13. The photos proved that the entire Iraqi airforce was parked in Riyadh and that Iraqi troops were nowhere to be found massing in the desert. The editors asked two former Defense Intelligence Agency analysts to examine the photos. They, too, were surprised that the pictures showed American jets arrayed on the Saudi Arabian border but no troops at all on the Kuwaiti border.

Peter Zimmerman, a satellite expert at George Washington University, said,

"We could see clearly the main road leading right through Kuwait, south to Saudi Arabia, but it was covered with sand banks from the wind and it was clear that no army had moved over it. We could see empty barracks where you would have expected these thousands of troops to be billeted, but they were deserted as well."

Then a strange thing happened. Major news organizations, including Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, and ABC, perused the photos but decided not to publish a story that would contradict the government’s information. The Iraqi military buildup, which did not exist, was Bush’s justification for dispatching troops, yet the American media refused to expose the government’s lie. The only honest American journalists were in St. Petersburg, Florida.

CONTINUED...

http://www.hermes-press.com/like_son.htm

When it comes to the BFEE, the turd doesn't fall far from the bowl.

[Rex]

34. At least they can't really do anything to Fitz, it would be to obvious.

Ya it is frustrating, 30% of my students don't believe in gravity! I asked them last week who the VPOTUS is, 90% didn't know. These are poor kids, 14-17 years old. I didn't read that part of the textbook to them, but they could read it if they wanted to. Choice is part of their heritage and they better use it before the BFEE suspends the Constitution.

Thanks for all you do Octafish! I hope one day we can celebrate the end of the BFEE's hold over America and the world. If not then the BFEE will get to write our history and it won't be the truth.

[FreedomAngel82]

45. Powell did the same thing at the UN

Remember those photo's he showed of "bunkers"? Why were they in black and white and no closeups? Because they weren't bunkers. I remember watching a documentary about this and in reality they were fire trucks and just regular trucks. Nothing at all. Powell was in on this since the beginning.

[hiley]

50. The Media, Schools everything!

During the Gulf War I had to throw a HUGE fit to make the Elementary School stop showing the WAR to my kids instead of teaching them! CNN on in the class room all day long.. Kids came home and I asked about their day.. I was furious that the school was promoting this shit to little kids.
I took MLK's Words to them and stood my ground and won.

[hiley]

12. Here are the Nuremberg Trial indictments.

“To initiate a war of aggresion…is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
- Nuremberg Tribunal


"the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter." UN Chief Kofi Annan - -September 2004. Source BBC

Dust off the Nuremberg Files

By Anwaar Hussain


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9218.htm


06/20/05 - - At Nuremberg, in early October 1945, the four prosecuting nations -- the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia -- issued an indictment against 24 men and six organizations of the Nazi Germany. Of that 24 only 21 eventually sat down in the trial. The individual defendants were charged not only with the systematic murder of millions of people, but also with planning and carrying out the war in Europe. Twelve Nazi officials were sentenced to be hanged, three sentenced to life in prison, four were given prison sentences of 10-20 years, and the rest were acquitted.


snip--


Here are the Nuremberg Trial indictments.

The Nuremberg Trial Counts One & Two: Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War and Waging Aggressive War. The "common plan or conspiracy" charge was designed to get around the problem of how to deal with crimes committed before the war. The defendants charged under Count One were accused of agreeing to commit crimes. Accusation for Count Two was defined in the indictment as "the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances."

Abundant evidence is now available that shows that leaders and advisers of the Bush and Blair administrations engaged in "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression." Iraq posed no threat to either the United States or Britain. Its government had neither the means nor the intent of waging war against these countries; nor did it issue any threat to them. It possessed no WMDs.

The events now bear out that the US administration had plans ready well before the 9/11 crime to not only invade Iraq, but also target much if not all of the Middle East. Former CIA Director James Woolsey and presidential advisor David Gergen have confirmed that. The war of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," was planned well over a decade earlier. All alibis put forward by Bush administration for the Iraqi invasion, and the resultant near-genocidal massacre, have now been fully exposed as fraudulent motives.
snip---

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9218.htm

[Octafish]

23. Common Plan or Conspiracy.

By outting Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings & Associates, the treasonous Bush gang crippled the national security of the United States. Plame and her team were working on halting the spread of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and from other nations. Other targets included Pakistan and possibly Saudi Arabia, the nation which largely funded the Pakistani (I"slamic") bomb. Of course, Cheney and the BFEE were in on all those deals.

The Veep and Pakistan

Cheney Helped Cover-Up Nuclear Proliferation in 1989, So Pentagon Could Sell Pakistan Fighter Jets

By JASON LEOPOLD
Counterpunch
March 8, 2004

When news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered last month, the world's leaders waited, with baited breath, to see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow upon Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff.

Bush has, after all, spent his entire term in office talking tough about countries and dictators that conceal weapons of mass destruction and even tougher on individuals who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the means to build WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMDs, which was the primary reason the United States launched a preemptive strike there a year ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMDs to al-Qaeda terrorists and/or Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack the U.S.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan's proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact, it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan's sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the U.S._nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq_but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03082004.html

Friends of Kissinger.



The all just love war.

[FreedomAngel82]

48. What really gets me

is how Bush goes around and tells other countries they can't protect themselves but yet we have the biggest wmd factories here in our country and we're number one with making WMD's. Nothing but hypocrites. It's all apart of the PNAC plan.

[bloom]

47. I watched the Nuremberg (2000) movie recently...

One of the sad things was how they kept repeating that they had the trials to discourage aggressive wars in the future. :(

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000056B67/104-5739874-5807902?v=glance

[FreedomAngel82]

49. Same things today

It's like they studied Hitler, Stalin etc. to a "t". *sigh* Is there any way to see this movie online?

[bloom]

51. Studying Hitler

- yeah - that's how it seems to me, also.

I guess it was originally a TV miniseries. I got it at the local library - in DVD - movie-length format.

[Metta]

14. War crimes for sure. Let's see what the Times does. Great post.

What will they say about the WHIG? Hm.

[Octafish]

25. Hi, Metta! The NYT are accomplices to war crimes.

They PUSHED the story about Iraq and WMDs. They'll probably blame Steno Judy, but she had the owner Sulzberger's BLESSING! How very neo-connish.

Project for a New American Century

aka PNAC

It sounds so innocuous. Who could object to a project for a new American century? It's a new century, and we live in America! What could possibly go wrong?

The Project for a New American Century, aka PNAC, is a think tank founded in 1997 by arch-conservative commentator William Kristol, whose illustrious career peak was a stint as Dan Quayle's chief of staff. Despite this, Kristol somehow rose to become one of the Republican Party's leading intellectuals and editor of The Weekly Standard, the chief propaganda weapon of the neoconservative movement.

Neocons are ultra-right-wing conservatives who basically believe the United States is entitled to rule the Earth. The movement was founded in the 1960s and '70s by a small group of pro-Israel, anti-communist intellectuals, including Kristol's father, Irving. The movement's militant anti-Communism went adrift after the fall of the Soviet Union, but resurfaced in the late 1990s in the form of militant anti-Everybodyism.

The neocons who banded together to form PNAC emerged from the Cold War with a conviction that America was entitled to drive world politics and culture. The group was founded in 1997 by a core group of disenfranchised right-wing idealogues that included:

* High-stakes slot machine aficionado William Bennett
* Conservative Christian moralist and rumored adulterer Gary Bauer
* Favored son and future election stealer Jeb Bush
* Oil industry kingpin and future Iraq invader Dick Cheney
* The aforementioned Dan Quayle, whose resume speaks for itself
* Pardoned Iran-Contra felon and Israel lobby panderer Elliot Abrams
* Crazy-eyed billionaire and flat tax proponent Steve Forbes
* Security specialist and future heir to the title of McCarthyism Frank Gaffney
* Afghanistan oil opportunist and (at the time) Taliban supporter Zalmay Khalilzad
* Future Iraq war architect and top Cheney aide "Scooter" Libby
* Former Saddam Hussein buddy and future Saddam Hussein enemy Donald Rumsfeld
* Seriously deranged Cold War ideologue and future seriously deranged Iraq War idealogue Paul Wolfowitz
This motley crew of wealthy, white, middle-aged males -- along with several conservative policy wonks from academia and bureaucratia -- signed off on a statement of principles that aimed to provoke a resurgence of the Reagan era.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/pnac/

Yeh. These are evil bastards, all right.



Stupid, too.

Personally: Thanks for the kind words!

Most importantly: A hearty welcome to DU, Metta!

[Metta]

57. I agree.

Also, thanks for the kind words, warm welcome and informative post.

[robertpaulsen]

15. Another top-notch post Octafish! Here's David Corn's take on his blog.

CIA Leak Scandal: Judy Miller and the Times Speak

Finally, theNew York Times and Judith Miller speak, and the paper and reporter leave their readers with as many questions as answers. In Sunday's edition, the Times publishes a lengthy account by three reporters (Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford Levy) of what it calls "the Miller case" and a first-person account by Miller. Neither piece explains all.

Miller spent eighty-five days in a federal prison after she refused to cooperate with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Bush Administration leak that outed undercover CIA officer Valerie Wilson, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush White House. She was released from jail after she received a personal waiver from a confidential source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, that granted her permission to discuss their conversations with Fitzgerald. With that waiver in hand, she cut a deal with Fitzgerald that limited his questioning only to her discussions with Libby (not other sources) and that compelled Miller to turn over her notes of these conversations with Libby.

The denouement of Miller's legal tussle with Fitzgerald was rather puzzling. Libby's lawyer indicated that Miller could have had the personal waiver a year earlier. And after Miller and the Times had spent months crowing that Miller--unlike other reporters--would stand on principle and not submit to Fitzgerald's zealous pursuits, her final settlement with Fitzgerald (which resembled that of the other reporters) was not in sync with the grand we're-protecting-journalism rhetoric the Times and Miller had hurled. Moreover, there were new and old questions about Miller's involvement in the case. Why had Fitzgerald subpoenaed her? How did it come to happen that she only recently discovered a notebook containing notes of Miller's first conversation with Libby about Joseph (and possibly Valerie) Wilson? What had Libby told her? What sort of relationship did she have with Libby? Was Miller eager to discredit Wilson because her prewar reporting on Iraq's WMDs had overstated and hyped the claim that Saddam Hussein presented a WMD threat?

The Times's double-header does not clear up all the mysteries. Let's start with Miller's article, "My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room." Miller does not explain the disappearance and discovery of a notebook that contained notes of a June 23, 2003, conversation she had with Libby. This chat occurred two weeks before Wilson published an op-ed piece for the Times in which he revealed that after being sent to Niger in 2002 by the CIA he had concluded that it was highly unlikely that Iraq had been able to obtain weapons-grade uranium there. For weeks, Wilson had been talking to reporters--off the record--about his trip to Niger, and media stories regarding the trip had appeared without naming Wilson as the former diplomat who had gone on this mission.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=29143

Corn was one of the first to cut through the IIPA media distraction and rightly point out that what the WHIGgers really engaged in violated the ESPIONAGE ACT, which does not stipulate that the conspirators "knowingly" leak the agent's "name". It is this law that will hang the BFEE out to dry.

[Octafish]

26. Thanks, robertpaulsen! Yeh. Ol' David understood Plame Affair early on.

From 2003:

A White House Smear

By David Corn

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?

It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.

SNIP...

"Stories like this," Wilson says, "are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears."

Will there be any inquiry? Journalists who write about national security matters (as I often do) tend not to big fans of pursuing government officials who leak classified information. But since Bush administration officials are so devoted to protecting government secrets--such as the identity of the energy lobbyists with whom the vice president meets--one might (theoretically) expect them to be appalled by the prospect that classified information was disclosed and national security harmed for the purposes of mounting a political hit job. Yet two days after the Novak column's appearance, there has not been any public comment from the White House or any other public reverberation.

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=823

Most importantly: Thanks for the kind words, Robert! If it weren't for Friends like You and those on DU, we will never give up.

[robertpaulsen]

59. Thank you! It's friends like you who light the real Paths of Glory.

Great picture! :)

[Just Me]

16. They defrauded the American people in order to exploit them!!!!

They LIED to the American people in order to manipulate them into supporting an illegal, immoral, murderous war,...FOR PROFIT and to impose their heartless will upon a weaker people.

:cry:

They are responsible for the most sacrificial and bloody CON pulled upon the American and Iraqi people ever to be executed.

SICK FUCKS!!!! :grr: :grr: :grr: MAY THE ROT!!! :grr: :grr: :grr:

:cry: So MANY innocent human lives exploited by those who NEVER GAVE A DAMN about "freedom" or "democracy",...those whose only interest was in accumulating wealth and power. :grr:

WE, THE PEOPLE, CAN NEVER EVER QUIT TAKING A STAND AGAINST SUCH HEARTLESS, ANTI-DEMOCRACY, PRO-DESTRUCTIVE MEN!!! WE DESERVE TO BE TREATED WITH COMMON HUMAN DIGNITY AND RESPECT!!! WE DESERVE A HELLUVA' LOT MORE THAN THESE LYIN' GREEDY BASTARDS!!!

:cry: So MANY innocent human lives SPENT BY THESE SICK FUCKS!!!

[Octafish]

28. When the Soviets took Berlin, they found Hitler's burned corpse.

NAZIsm, however, didn't die with the Fuehrer.

Let's not let the Fourth Reich succeed, either.

We have the Truth on our side. We've an obligation to keep spreading it, so that more and more people see what kind of people the Bush gang really are.

Operation Paperclip Casefile

By Agent Orange

EXCERPT...

Convinced that German scientists could help America's postwar efforts, President Harry Truman agreed in September 1946 to authorize "Project Paperclip," a program to bring selected German scientists to work on America's behalf during the "Cold War"

However, Truman expressly excluded anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Naziism or militarism."

The War Department's Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) conducted background investigations of the scientists. In February 1947, JIOA Director Bosquet Wev submitted the first set of scientists' dossiers to the State and Justice Departments for review.

The Dossiers were damning. Samauel Klaus, the State Departments representative on the JIOA board, claimed that all the scientists in this first batch were "ardent Nazis." Their visa requests were denied.

Wev was furious. He wrote a memo warning that "the best intrests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in 'beating a dead Nazi horse.'" He also declared that the return of these scientists to Germany, where they could be exploited by America's enemies, presented a "far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have."

When the JIOA formed to investigate the backgrounds and form dossiers on the Nazis, the Nazi Intelligence leader Reinhard Gehlen met with the CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles and Gehlen hit it off immediatly. Gehlen was a master spy for the Nazis and had infilitrated Russia with his vast Nazi Intelligence network. Dulles promised Gehlen that his Intelligence unit was safe in the CIA.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Operation_Paperclip_file.html

I know that's all old hat for you, Just Me. For most of America, though it's news.

For details:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/nazi.html



Most importantly: Thanks for giving a damn, Just Me!

[seemslikeadream]

24. and a Merry Fitzmas to you Octafish

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Everywhere you go.
Who's gonna do five-or-ten?
We're thinking once again
Of handcuffs and of orange jumpsuits aglow.
It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Indictments on every score
But the prettiest sight to see
Is the scowl on Darth Cheney
At the slammer's front door.

A warrant or writ, a subpoena that fits
Is the wish of Barney and Ben;
The thought of Turdblossom hung up like a possum
Is the hope of Janice and Jen;
And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for court to start again.

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Everywhere you go.
There's an defendant who doesn't want to tell;
One in the White House as well --
The felony kind that doesn't mind the law!
It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Soon the bells will start
And the thing that will make them ring
Is the indictment that we sing,
Right within our hearts!

crispini

[Octafish]

29. ¡Feliz Navidad, seemslikeadream! Love your poem!

That is excellent work, Dreamy!



Love the flashing Rudii, too.

[Octafish]

60. Hey, Dreamy! Didya hear Steno Judy bossed a bird colonel around?

It's like the big-headed bat liked letting on who was in command.

I kid you not. Joshua Micah Marshall delivers this gift:

(October 17, 2005 -- 03:12 PM EDT // link // print)

More on Judy Miller's special embed agreement, from Frank Foer's piece in New York magazine from the summer of 2004 ...

According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.)

As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to Pomeroy and one other witness, she wore a military uniform.

When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision—and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn’t back down. What’s more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhee’s unit fell outside the general’s line of command, Petraeus’s rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, “McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so.”

Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed its members that they couldn’t talk with him. According to Pomeroy, “She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.” (One other witness confirms this account.)

More soon.

-- Josh Marshall

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_16.php#006764

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

27. The White House Iraq Group sounds almost benign. It wasn't called

that. It was called the Office of Special Plans, which sounds a lot more sinister.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Special_Plans

[Octafish]

30. Great point! 'Office of Special Plans' had major role in all this treason.

Thanks, OmmmSweetOmmm! Yours is a most important point.

The OSP was the Pentagon's in-house custom-order intelligence agency.

Office of Special Plans

In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in Iraq as its top priority.

To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein’s regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” OSP’s mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.

The OSP played a key role in providing Rumseld, Cheney, and the president himself with the intelligence frequently cited to justify the March 2003 invasion. By late 2003 the OSP was closed down, having accomplished its mission of providing the strategic intelligence cited by the administration in the build-up to the invasion. OSP’s staff and operations were folded back into the normal operations of the NESA and into its Office of Northern Gulf Affairs.

Feith oversaw these efforts to provide the type of “strategic intelligence” needed to drive this policy agenda. As the Pentagon’s top policy official in Middle East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DOD’s Near East and South Asia bureau (NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of William Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protégé and who has long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq.

When OSP was operating at top capacity--just prior to the invasion--it counted on a staff of eighteen. But a stream of consultants and collaborators flowed in and out the OSP, bypassing normal intelligence procedures and protocol. Operating independently of the established intelligence apparatus, OSP dispensed with the normal guidelines for vetting information. Instead, in the rush to make the case for preventive war, the OSP routinely “stovepiped” its strategic intelligence directly to the top administration officials who then took this unfiltered information directly to the president. As Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq and author of The Threatening Storm, told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: What the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policy makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership.” (2)

CONTINUED...

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/govt/osp.php

There's a reason Tommy Franks called Douglas Feith "The dumbest fucking guy on the planet."



That's really saying something.

[G_j]

36. "The Lie Factory"

one of the very important articles included at your excellent link:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/iraq/1448.html



The Lie Factory

News: This special Mother Jones investigation late last year detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004 Issue

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

..more..



Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski

[seemslikeadream]

33. Where's Michael Ledeen?

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public. His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White House. Hence Rove's predicament.

An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant to Israel's Likud party, to prepare for the war. In the words of Robert Baer, a distinguished former CIA man, it was a "competing intelligence shop at the Pentagon"..."if you didn't like the answer you're getting from the CIA". In short, bogus stories would get a second chance at the OSP.

A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in 1980, when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan elected. They publicised a story that Billy Carter, the then President Jimmy Carter's colourful brother, had received $50,000 (£28,000) from the Libyan government.

The story was always denied by the President and no evidence of the payment was found, but the story helped to elect Reagan. Its source? Sismi, and an associate of a man called Michael Ledeen.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m16578&l=i&size=1&hd=0

First of all, I am not a leftist. Secondly, the sources for the quotes of former CIA and DIA agent Philip Giraldi were my interviews of him, as indicated in the correctly transcribed entry on the Wikipedia page, and which I provided the mp3 link for. Fourth, I am happy that the US is no longer part of the British Empire.

As far as Ledeen and the Niger uranium forgeries, Giraldi explained in the interviews that the "couple of CIA agents" were paid in foreign accounts and that Fitzgerald had "already found the money trail." Ledeen's connections to the Office of Special Plans and Sismi are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy with Harold Rhode, who "practically lived out of (Iranian spy) Ahmad Chalabi's office," Manucher Ghorbanifar and guilty Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill:

"he intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later...

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence...

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named."

But where did they originate? Giraldi's partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, "You'd be very close," in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.

Combined with what Giraldi had to say, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=2426_0_1_0_C

[Octafish]

38. That's a good question.

Ledeen brings in the world's dumbest man Feith and then Larry Franklin and the rest of that steaming turd heap.

If there's justice in America, the jails may not be big enough to handle the business...

New Spy Investigation Suppressed at Crucial Juncture

By Richard H. Curtiss

The United States is investigating another case of Israeli espionage that apparently neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to touch until after the Nov. 2 election. This latest case involves two long-time staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

U.S. investigators were surveilling a lunch meeting between an AIPAC employee and an Israeli Embassy official when an unknown person joined them. The investigators had no idea who he was.

The man turned out to be Lawrence A. Franklin, a mid-level civil service employee who worked for many years at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The FBI obtained warrants from a special federal court for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and for months kept tabs on Franklin.

About three years ago Franklin transferred to the staff of Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, who has spent most of his career looking out for the interests of Israel.

Interestingly, Feith’s father, Dalck, was an Israeli extremist and a long-time protégé of Zev Jabotinsky. Dalck Feith, who now lives in the United States, is just as extreme today as he was all those years ago in Israel. His son Douglas, as the person in charge of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), for some time has worked on compiling any material, no matter how vague or extreme, to make the case for military action in Iraq.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/November_2004/0411026.html

Oh yeah. Don't say anything mean about AIPAC or bring up Mossad.

[sattahipdeep]

69. A PIECE OF CRAP KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN

Where is the little turd?

The accompanying figure shows a bit of
the cobbled-up intelligence report on
stolen letterheads, forged by amateurs
-- most likely Ledeen’s friend,
Francesco Panzienza. This document,
which can be viewed at the Israeli site
http://www.4law.co.il/Le838k.html, is the
"evidence" on which George Bush sent
almost two thousand young Americans
and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians
to their deaths.

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7256

[seemslikeadream]

70. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar Merry Fitzmas sattahipdeep

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" scandal by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

more
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681















It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Everywhere you go.
Who's gonna do five-or-ten?
We're thinking once again
Of handcuffs and of orange jumpsuits aglow.
It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Indictments on every score
But the prettiest sight to see
Is the scowl on Darth Cheney
At the slammer's front door.

A warrant or writ, a subpoena that fits
Is the wish of Barney and Ben;
The thought of Turdblossom hung up like a possum
Is the hope of Janice and Jen;
And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for court to start again.

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Everywhere you go.
There's an defendant who doesn't want to tell;
One in the White House as well --
The felony kind that doesn't mind the law!
It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas
Soon the bells will start
And the thing that will make them ring
Is the indictment that we sing,
Right within our hearts!

crispini

[screembloodymurder]

37. Nice summation.

You should be a reporter.

[Octafish]

40. Thanks, screembloodymurder! I once was...

...in a previous life. I was part of a team that blew up a crooked S&L. We won some big awards and I thought it would make a great career. Little did I know that exposing the Truth was a career killer.

Here's a bit more on Plamegate that's important to remember:

A Case Of Treason

Larry Johnson
October 06, 2005

Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked the fact that Valerie Plame, wife of former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA undercover operative, is nearing completion. Virtually lost in the recent spurt of press reporting is the fact that the compromise of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day her carefully cultivated network of spies) was unconscionable. Ms. Plame, a very gifted case officer, was a close colleague of mine at CIA. Her dedication and courage were clear in her willingness to assume the risks of an agent under non-official cover—meaning that if you get caught, too bad, you’re on your own; the US government never heard of you.

The supreme irony is that Plame’s network was reporting on the priority-one issue—weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it was made abundantly clear to all, including potential intelligence sources abroad, that even when priority-one intelligence targets are involved, Bush administration officials will not shrink from exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The harm to CIA and its efforts to recruit spies willing to take risks to provide intelligence information is immense.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Wilson publicly exposed an important lie, and the president as liar, when he debunked the report that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Still, as Wilson himself has suggested, the primary objective of leaking his wife’s employment at CIA was not to retaliate against him personally, but rather to issue a stark warning to others privy to administration lies on the war not to speak out. Administration officials felt they needed to provide an object lesson of what truth tellers can expect in the way of swift retaliation.

All Based On A Forgery

Indictments or no, the mainstream media will continue to play down this key aspect of the story, and—equally important—prescind completely from the event that started the whole business—the forging of documents to feed the spurious report that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger for its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Together with other circumstantial evidence, the neuralgic reaction of Vice President Dick Cheney to press reports that he was point man for promoting the bogus report suggests that he may also have been its founding father, so to speak. We do not rule out the possibility that he and his chief of staff Lewis Libby may have had a hand in commissioning the forgery, as a way to come up with an “intelligence report” with “mushroom cloud” written all over it, in order to deceive Congress into approving an unnecessary war.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051006/a_case_of_treason.php

You have no idea how much I appreciate your kind words.

[mod mom]

39. Amazing how you put the pieces so well together. Especially thanks for 03

WaPo article. I had no idea they were covering this back then!

[Octafish]

54. Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State

Here's some news from a source I trust...

Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State

by Norman Solomon  
Published on Monday, October 17, 2005 by
CommonDreams.org
 
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration's "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

Let's replay that one again in slow motion.

Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she's given "clearance" by the Pentagon "to see secret information" -- which she "was not permitted to discuss" with Times editors.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1017-22.htm

Gee. It really says a lot about our Times if the paper of record is an organ for the War Party.

Most importantly: Thanks and you're welcome, mod mom!

[FreedomAngel82]

41. It's still all amazing to me

How they're all traitors. This is why people like Lou Dobbs were prompting Judy out to be like a deep throat...because they too were involved.

[Octafish]

55. D.C. Press Co-Opted By War Lies

Orwell hit the nail on the neokkkon's head.

D.C. Press Co-Opted By War Lies

by Jay Bookman
Published on Monday, October 17, 2005 by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (Georgia)
 
These days, Washington is looking a little too much like Las Vegas of the early '80s. Neither place should be flattered by the comparison.

Working as a kid journalist in Vegas back then was like finding yourself at the opera — not in the audience but onstage, surrounded by prima donnas playing out a high-stake drama of power, greed, sex and murder.

Headless bodies were appearing in the desert. Cars were getting blown up. A local federal judge publicly attacked federal law enforcement as "a bunch of crooks." Mobsters were not just part of the community, they were public figures, and they would call favorite reporters to plant stories about their rivals or discredit cops they couldn't buy off.

And everyone who thought of themselves as players — mobsters, politicians, businessmen and not a few journalists — traded information, access and anything that might bring them that most treasured of Vegas commodities, "juice."

"Juice" was power. "Juice" not only meant you got your phone calls returned, it meant you got free seats for Frank's show at Caesars. Juice meant you knew people who knew people; losing juice was the worst thing that could happen to you.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1017-27.htm

Traitors. Everyone who went along with the bullshit war. Traitors all.

[killbotfactory]

52. soulless creeps

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

[Octafish]

56. Beyond the Miller-Libby game: People died

From a real reporter:

The Iraq War Runs Through It

Beyond the Miller-Libby game: People died

by Sydney H. Schanberg
October 17th, 2005 6:25 PM

Six weeks ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly that the pre-war speech he gave to the United Nations in early 2003 claiming vast evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be nonexistent was a "painful" and lasting "blot" on his career.

Though his language of regret was bitterly potent, and it was Powell's first interview since leaving office in January, the nation's press gave it subdued play, far from the front page, and let it die after one day's run.

"I'm the one who presented it to the world," he told ABC's Barbara Walters, "and it will always be part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now."

Powell blamed the detailed misinformation he spread before the U.N.—about stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons program—on "some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me."

His U.N. speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, less than two months before the U.S. invasion, did not sway the U.N. to support the war, but it did raise support for it with the American public.

CONTINUED...

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0542,schanbergweb,68945,6.html

Soulless creeps, indeed.

[H2O Man]

53. What's interesting

is that the rest of the country is beginning to recognize this, too. It's taken a while. But there is a significant change in perception.

[Octafish]

58. We the People smell a rat: FT - 'Probe widening, includes use of Intel'

Drive the tipping point with the Truth.

CIA leak probe 'widening to include use of intelligence'

By Caroline Daniel and Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 17 2005 21:39 | Last updated: October 17 2005 21:39

Evidence is building that the probe conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor, has extended beyond the leaking of a covert CIA agent's name to include questioning about the administration's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence.

According to the Democratic National Committee, a majority of the nine members of the White House Iraq Group have been questioned by Mr Fitzgerald. The team, which included senior national security officials, was created in August 2002 to “educate the public” about the risk posed by weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.

Mr Fitzgerald, who has been applauded for conducting a leak-free inquiry, has said little publicly about his 22-month probe, other than that it is about the “potential retaliation against a whistleblower”, Joseph Wilson. After Mr Wilson, a former ambassador, went public with doubts about the evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, the name of his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA official, was leaked to reporters.

The prosecutor has given no indication whether he will charge anyone in the case. At the weekend Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter jailed for 85 days after refusing to testify, provided new details about the scope of Mr Fitzgerald's investigation. She was asked “repeatedly” how Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, “handled classified information”.

Ms Miller said Mr Libby had made “a sharp critique of Mr Wilson”, and referred several times to the fact his wife worked at the CIA. Ms Miller also expressed surprise at a letter sent by Mr Libby when she was in jail that, she said, could imply he was trying to influence her testimony. “I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr Libby to suggest that I too would say we had not discussed Ms Plame. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job,” she wrote.

CONTINUED...

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ff92e968-3f4b-11da-932f-00000e2511c8.html

Sorry if the link proves hard to reach. Freaking FT likes to charge for everything. Greedy swine.

Regarding the Truth:

Bush is a liar.
Bush is a crook.
Bush is a mass murderer.
Bush is a war criminal.

[Frank Rose]

64. Hello Octafish!!!

Great writing as usual, and pictures that are worth 1000+ words. What are your thoughts on why Miller is a more central figure than Novak. Both would (and did) carry water for the empire.

[Octafish]

66. Hey Frank! How's Chicago? IMFO, Steno Judy was head whore at NYT.

She may or may not have had Secret clearance, but WHIG and OSP gave her access to all the dirty laundry, and I mean dirty.

Judy Twoface was the one who wrote news articles based on "facts." Decrepit BFEE fart Novakula has an "opinion" column based on "facts" and his own spin. Working as a straight news reporter, Judy's stuff would also be more valuable for its ability to impact, direct and shape the rest of Corporate McPravda's coverage.

From a PR perspective, news outweighs opionion which outweighs purchased advertising. Thus all the madministration's measures to keep their influence out of public discussion. Like the great whore Armstrong Williams, I imagine Kneepad Judy kept silent because she wanted to keep the illusion of her being a true glorious Hero of Journalism on the QT and very hush-hush.

[oasis]

65. Thanks Octafish for putting this together for our DU community.

:yourock: :hi:

[Octafish]

67. You're welcome, oasis! Didya see the Treasongate Talking Points?

Still No Answers for the American People

October 17, 2005

The American people deserve to know who jeopardized U.S. national security by leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Over the weekend, The New York Times finally published a report on Judith Miller's role in the story. With a decision pending on whether to bring charges against those involved in the leak, the Times raised more questions – about Miller’s role and the case itself – than answers.

* Did Scooter Libby obstruct justice?: Both Miller's personal account and the staff report from The New York Times suggest that Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff, may have obstructed justice during the course of the investigation. According to Miller, in 2004 Libby's lawyer sought assurances that Miller's testimony would exonerate his client. Miller also produced a letter Libby wrote to her last month as an effort to influence her testimony.

* We still do not know who told Miller Valerie Plame’s name: In two instances, Miller wrote the (slightly mistranscribed) name of Joe Wilson's wife in her notes. Miller says she is sure the name did not come from Libby, but cannot recall where she learned the information. However, Miller’s account was directly contradicted by her own lawyer. In an interview with The Washington Post, Floyd Abrams said "others may have mentioned Plame only 'in passing. . . . The central and essentially only figure who had information was Libby.'”

* Again, why did they do this? Why did the administration work so hard cover up Wilson’s report? Because Wilson threatened to reveal the truth – that they manipulated intelligence to convince the American people of the need for war.

Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund.

SOURCE:

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=700005

Most importantly: I appreciate your kind words, oasis.



YOU and all good DUers are why I do this stuff.

[oasis]

68. Kick for an informed America.