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Vyan (990 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat Jun-10-06 12:13 PM Original message |
The War they Manufactured - How the Lies were planned and planted |
Edited on Sat Jun-10-06 12:15 PM by Vyan
Vanity Fair has an article up that I don't think is getting nearly the play that it should. It details how the tragic intelligence "failures" which led up to the Iraq War weren't failures at all - they were actually part of a covert psy-ops campaign on the American people and the world. The "mistake" was quite deliberate, a part of the overall campaign - and it worked amazingly well.
For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success--specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States. It's a long strange trip the matches exactly what was alleged so long ago by the Downing Street Memos. Crossposted on Truth 2 Power Several current and former government officials, whose names I find quite familiar, have come forward to point out that these documents were part of a "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.Wilkerson has been extremely critical of the Bush Administration. "This is really a very inept administration," says Wilkerson, who has credentials not only as an insider in the Bush I, Clinton and Bush II presidencies but also as a former professor at two of the nation's war colleges. "As a teacher who's studied every administration since 1945, I think this is probably the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making and leadership I've seen in 50-plus years. You've got to go back and think about that. That includes the Bay of Pigs, that includes -- oh my God, Vietnam. That includes Iran-contra, Watergate."Ray McGovern has been a lightenrod for his questioning of Donald Rumsfeld. QUESTION: So I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people, why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kinds of casualties? why?Karen Kwaitkowski on her Pentagon experience leading up to the War on Iraq. I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all, but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and constitutional strictures. More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the "Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States" agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact.
In light of the latest White House sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character, our <2003> testimony remains relevant and accurate. Look at these words. LOOK AT THEM: "In light of the latest White House-sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character ..." My god. The president's head, were he capable of shame, would hang. He would purge the White House of all involved. Not just Karl Rove but the rest of the traitors. So clearly, this isn't exactly the George Bush Booster Club, but neither are they crazed tin-foil hat Liberals. Many are Republicans and have worked extensively within Republican Administrations. In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy--only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique--ruthless relentlessness."Following a complex series of back and forth events - the documents in question fell into the hands of the Italian Secret Service following a break-in at the Niger embassy.
The essential allegation being suggested here by Vanity Fair is that the theft at the Nigerian embassy didn't actually produce the key document, but instead stationary obtained during that theft was used to create the key documents needed to fuel the disinformation campaign by former Reagan NSC member Micheal Ledeen (who had a direct hand in various illegal and quesionable activities including Iran-Contra) and his long-standing associates at SISMI just prior to the start of the incoming Bush Administration in January of 2001. The Niger forgeries just might have been the work of Ledeen working as a rogue/independant U.S. Intelligence Operative. The forged documents were full of errors. A letter dated October 10, 2000, was signed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Allele Elhadj Habibou--even though he had been out of office for more than a decade. Its September 28 postmark indicated that somehow the letter had been received nearly two weeks before it was sent. In another letter, President Tandja Mamadou's signature appeared to be phony. The accord signed by him referred to the Niger constitution of May 12, 1965, when a new constitution had been enacted in 1999. One of the letters was dated July 30, 1999, but referred to agreements that were not made until a year later. Finally, the agreement called for the 500 tons of uranium to be transferred from one ship to another in international waters--a spectacularly difficult feat.Eventually the documents made their way to several journalists at La Repubblica and over the next two years - America. "It was the Italians and Americans together who were behind it. It was all a disinformation operation," Martino told a reporter at England's Guardian newspaper. He called himself "a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me."A plan with well entrenched roots.
Once the information reached the U.S, things started to become interesting. After September 11th, with Bush's approval ratings through the roof at 90% - despite being informed that the 9-11 attack had come from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the time came to focus on Bush and the neo-cons long term goal. Iraq and Saddam. Now the Niger operation went into overdrive. The details of how this happened are murky. Accounts from usually reputable newspapers, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, and other sources are wildly at variance with one another. In October 2001, SISMI, which had already sent reports about the alleged Niger deal to French intelligence, finally had them forwarded to British and U.S. intelligence. The exact dates of the distribution are unclear, but, according to the British daily The Independent, SISMI sent the dossier to the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of M.I.6, in South London. The delivery might have been made, Italian reports say, by Rocco Martino. At roughly the same time, in early October, according to La Repubblica, SISMI also gave a report about the Niger deal to Jeff Castelli, the C.I.A. station chief in Rome. According to a recent broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes, C.I.A. analysts who saw the material were skeptical.The erroneous report that just wouldn't die.
Enter Darth Cheney. Based on this recommendation, management at CPD interviewed Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, and decided to send him to Niger to use his contacts to dig around about the story. It's at this point that the serious marketing campaign to "take care of Iraq' began. The opening salvo was fired on Sunday, September 8, 2002, when National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Let's just remember that the French were in control of the Nigerian mines in question, and that they were later called things like "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for not backing Americas eventual decision to invade Iraq -- maybe they had good reasons, eh? Just like Germany, who also opposed the war and had in their custody "Curveball" the one and only source for continuing allegations that Saddam still possesed WMD's, except that the Germans knew - and told us - he was totally full of crap. All that left in the Iraq triumviariat of terror was the information linking Iraq to al Qaeda coming from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was in custody at Gitmo and who the DIA believed was just as much a liar as "Curveball" (And they were right, too).
Meanwhile, the C.I.A. had finally penetrated Saddam's inner sanctum by "turning" Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. Tenet delivered the news personally to Bush, Cheney, and other top officials in September 2002. Initially, the White House was ecstatic about this coup.So we have the Niger claim shot down repeatedly, a member of Saddam's inner circle - a credibel source - saying "They have no WMD's". But what about the aluminum tubes that Iraq really was trying to buy? The harmlessness of the tubes was later confirmed by Energy Dept, (a fact that was hidden by Hadley and Rove during the 04 elections). That's when the President joined the Marketing Campaign, and the CIA directly tried to stop him. In early October, Bush was scheduled to give a major address on Iraq in Cincinnati. A few days earlier, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the N.S.C. sent the C.I.A. a draft which asserted that Saddam "has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa--an essential ingredient in the enrichment process." But somehow, some magical way - the reference to Iraq and Uranium just kept popping back up. The neocons were not done yet, however. "That was their favorite technique," says Larry Wilkerson, "stick that baby in there 47 times and on the 47th time it will stay. At every level of the decision-making process you had to have your ax out, ready to chop their fingers off. Sooner or later you would miss one and it would get in there."In additional to the skeptism of the analysts and the direct admission by Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri that "We have no WMD's", in December Saddam released a full and complete disclosure which indicated that their WMD programs were long dead - several month's before the war and even before the inspectors were returned to Iraq. Never the less, Condoleeza Rice eventually dismissed this disclosure claiming that Saddam had failed to account for the Uranium from Niger, which as a matter of fact he had never tried to buy. For the next two months, December 2002 and January 2003, references to the uranium deal resurfaced again and again in "fact sheets," talking-point memos, and speeches. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice all declared publicly that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium from Niger. On December 19, the claim reappeared on a fact sheet published by the State Department. The bureaucratic battle was unending. In light of the many differing viewpoints, the Pentagon asked the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, to resolve the matter. According to The Washington Post, in a January 2003 memo the council replied unequivocally that "the Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest." The memo went immediately to Bush and his advisers.So the President distributed a lie to Congress, one that George Tenet had tried repeatedly to have removed. Next up - The American People. At an N.S.C. meeting on January 27, 2003, George Tenet was given a hard-copy draft of the State of the Union address. Bush was to deliver it the next day. Acutely aware of the ongoing intelligence wars, Tenet was caught between the hard-liners in the White House, to whom he reported, and the C.I.A., whose integrity he was duty-bound to uphold. That day, he returned to C.I.A. headquarters and, without even reading the speech, gave a copy to an assistant who was told to deliver it to the deputy director for intelligence. But, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, no one in the D.D.I.'s office recalls receiving the speech. Failed to remember numerous phone calls and faxes directly from George Tenet? Not bloody likely. And how about having some outside experts take a look at the documents? The jig was almost up... but not quite. On March 14, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to F.B.I. chief Robert Mueller asking for an investigation because "the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." But Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, the Republican chair of the committee, declined to co-sign the letter.Five days later - we were at War with Iraq. The article spends quite a bit of time looking the critical linkages between neocon Michael Ledeen and key events between the original forgery of the Niger documents and their eventually being mentioned in the 2003 State of Union - but in the end doesn't exactly succeed in pining the entire plot on his shoulders. Despite all the speculation, there are no fingerprints connecting Ledeen to the Niger documents. Even his fiercest adversaries will concede this. "In talking to hundreds of people, no one has given us a hint linking Ledeen to the Niger documents," says Carlo Bonini of La Repubblica, which is facing a defamation suit by Ledeen in Italy.$2 Trillion dollars in a War without a valid reason? Sure, getting rid of Saddam isn't entirely a bad thing, but there had to be a better way -- it certainly didn't cost this much blood and teasure to remove Slobidan Milosevic from power. Bosnia actually is a thriving Democracy now, instead of a hell-hole of War and Ethnic Cleansing during the reign of the elder (G.H.W.) Bush. But just wait - the fraud, waste and abuse of the Bush Administration isn't done yet. Not hardly. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Bush administration is now rattling its sabers against Iran, which has been flexing its muscles with a new nuclear program. As a result, according to a Zogby poll in May, 66 percent of Americans now see Iran as a threat to the U.S. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security adviser to President Carter, has argued that starting the Iraq war was a catastrophic strategic blunder, and that taking military action against Iran may be an even bigger mistake. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world," he told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world." No, I think we'll lose America itself, our budget will be crushed, our values and long since turned into tiny grains of dusk will be - the truth.
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greenman3610 (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat Jun-10-06 12:53 PM Response to Original message |
1. thanks for puttin this together |
kicked
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Pachamama (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat Jun-10-06 02:54 PM Response to Original message |
2. Reccommended, kicked and bookmarked! |
:kick: Excellent compilation and summary of events...
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hootinholler (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sat Jun-10-06 06:29 PM Response to Original message |
3. Nice recap! n/t |
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catzies (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore | Sun Jun-11-06 10:25 AM Response to Original message |
4. "What political leaders decide, intel tends to seek to justify ." |
I shortened that to fit in the subject line.
The full quote is "What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify." Henry Kissinger said that. And he would know. K & R, BTW. |
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