replay of robert dreyfuss from mother jones on c-span

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

replay of washington journal from earlier today.
should be up at about 10:50am.

i listened to parts of it. worth tuning in. his article is about thr secret pentagon office that started the war.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

1. he's surprised

that bush is getting away with the bait and switch over WMD.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

2. doug feith controlled the war planning

office of special planning

[KoKo]

3. Tune in if you can, he's laying it all out, the Office of Special Plans in

Pentagon. Doug Feith, Newt Gingrich, David Wormser of AEI and other PNACERS plotted to Invade Iraq.

He's very good, laying it out step by step. And, the lies that were cooked up.

[KoKo]

5. This is excellent. I wonder if his article is online in Mother Jones. He

has a Flow Chart showing all the connections. Might be nice to have and post here on DU. Or, some who go over to to the other site....(the FR one).

[MadHound]

19. No, not yet

But it is in the latest paper version of MJ, on your newstands now.

I read this article last week when my copy came in, and have been waiting until MJ put it online to post about it. Very good, very scary article, really confirms what we've been thinking all along, that Bushco's own people are cooking the intelligence information in order to come up with the results their superiors demand.

[ikojo]

20. While this story may not be on the Mother Jones site

there is an excellent story from the early 1990s about the Bush Family and their connections to various terrorists such as Cuban terrorists (Jeb).

This family seems to fail upward.


Here is the link...read this article

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html

George W. Bush, Jr.

None of George Bush's offspring is more his father's son than George W. Bush. George Jr., or "Shrub" as Molly Ivins refers to him, began his own Texas oil career in the mid-1970s when he formed Bush Exploration. Like the business dealings of his brothers, George's company was not a success, and it was rescued in 1983 by another oil company, Spectrum 7, run by several staunch and well-heeled Reagan-Bush supporters. But by mid-1986, a soft oil market found Spectrum also near bankruptcy.

John Ellis ("Jeb") Bush

After graduating from Texas University, Jeb Bush served a short apprenticeship at the Venezuelan branch of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas before settling in Miami, in 1980, to work on his father's unsuccessful primary bid against Ronald Reagan. Campaigning for Dad was hardly a paying job. But Jeb was about to learn that being one of George Bush's sons means never having to circulate a résumé.

Neil Bush

In the March/April issue of Mother Jones, I detailed Neil Bush's activities and therefore only sketch his involvement here. Neil served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver, Colorado, from 1985 until 1988. During that time, the now-dead thrift made over $200 million in loans to Neil's two partners in JNB Exploration, Neil's abysmally unsuccessful oil company. Silverado's failure was due at least in part to the fact that Neil's two partners welshed on $132 million in loans.

[maddezmom]

4. listening now

boy he lays it out. sources are on the record.

[KoKo]

6. He said we need to know "Why the President was so Wrong" quotes Rep.

Nelson (FLA) who talked about being told by the Administration that Iraqi drones could deliver chemical weapons to the East Coast of the US. (Well, we here on DU didn't believe it, so I wonder why these House and Senate Reps didn't check it all out for themselves)

[rfranklin]

8. "That statement is just silly..."

In response to freeper. And he said it in a calm way that conveyed just how juvenile these loons are when they start rah-rahing the Chimp.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

7. typical RW callers

one wanted to talk about abortion. towards the end, one caller calls him a communist.

[rfranklin]

9. They can't win on facts, so...

they have to bring up the emotional hot buttons of abortion, guns and kommunism.

[KoKo]

10. He's really good with countering the Repuke callers! Doesn't let them get

away with anything.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

11. doug feith.. "criminal exaggerator"

wow

[KoKo]

12. He says Waxman has called for "Whistle Blowers" but the Repukes are stone

-walling any investigation into all of this. He says Leaking of Valerie Plame was to scare people from coming forward as
"whistle blowers." He thinks if Congress doesn't investigate though that there will be more leaks from CIA. (at least that's why I understood him to say).

[buycitgo]

14. wait'll you hear the last caller.....rants and raves and froths and foams

about lies, communism, marxism, propaganda

keeps trying to bully Dreyfuss into admitting that he's a dirty comsymplib, but is UNABLE to give a single example of any inaccuracy in Dreyfuss's story.

too funny

wonder if these jackasses realize how badly they come across.....wild assertions with no backup

over and over

[buycitgo]

13. a thing of beauty!

even mentioned heroine Karen Kwiatkowski.

the way he handled the frothing at the mouthbreathers was most excellent, too.

note that just about every pug caller said he was some sort of liar/propagandist, and not ONE of them was able to offer a single example of his "lies," much less counter them.

the best one could do was to mention the NIE summary, but he knew more about it than the caller, and did a good job of explaining why that was such a crock of you know what.

also shot the hell out of the weekly standard article which "proved" the AlQaeda-Saddam links. he even told the moronski caller that the source of the article was Feith himself!

it was a fine fine fine way to start the year off

a big kudos to Mr. Dreyfuss

too bad the article isn't online, though

[Cocoa]

23. "In order to have your mind boggled....

you need to have a mind to begin with."

Freeper responds, "you guys are always real cute." :-)

[buycitgo]

15. chalabi...one of the few things I hadn't heard......

he says that Chalabi is wanted in Jordan for involvement in the recent, terrorist bombing there!

anyone else heard that?

also brought up his Wohlstetter connection, as well as ties to Perle, etal, and how badly he duped the idiots who sponsored him, starting w/CIA, who tossed him over, then warned his new neocon pals, who obviously didn't listen

made good fun of his expensive taste in suits, Rolexes; his ostensible need for a well-protected custom tailor shop, ha!

[KoKo]

17. That's the first I've heard of connection with Chalabi and Jordan Embassy

bombing. They really covered that one up very well or maybe it was briefly mentioned and died as so many of these unflattering to the Admin stories do.

[Cocoa]

21. that was new to me

that should have been explosive, especially here at DU, but I hadn't herad it. It must have been seriously buried.

Didn't our FBI go over there to investigate that attack? I remember finding that very humorous at the time.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

16. OSP...link

“They were a pretty shadowy presence. Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended.” - Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence

"That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees"- Democratic congressman David Obey
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/wot/iraq/office_of_special_plans.html

**************************************
Soon after September 11, a small intelligence office was created by the Pentagon to assess the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to the U.S. It remained relatively secret during the first year of its existence, known only by Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle of neoconservative ideologues. Sources within the intelligence community told reporters that the group, known as the Office of Special Plans, cherry-picked intelligence from questionable sources to support the case for invading Iraq. The intelligence team's conclusions were presented directly to the White House and National Security Agency without first being vetted by other intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The office was also blamed for the administration's lack of post-war plans in Iraq and accused of undermining the administration's policy towards Iran.

[buycitgo]

18. Kwiatkowski SHOULD become the Ollie North (ew) of any hearings

except for the minor fact that she didn't do anything wrong, is a real hero, and stood UP for the truth, rather than shredded it

here:

"What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense ." Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress".

...

According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was responsible for the administration's failure to anticipate the problems that now dog the US occupation in Iraq, or, in her more colorful words, that have placed 150,000 US troops in "the world's nastiest rat's nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan".

Kwiatkowski's comments echo the worst fears of some lawmakers, who have begun looking into the OSP's role in the administration's mistaken assumptions in Iraq. Some are even comparing it to the off-the-books operation run from the National Security Council (NSC) during the Ronald Reagan administration that later resulted in the Iran-Contra scandal.

and where do we find such excellent reporting? not here, of course

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH07Ak01.html

thanks to one of the FEW reporters working today, Jim Lobe

Kwiatkowski also has a series of amazingly scathing opeds archived below, where she routinely rips the hide off her Strangelovian former bosses at OSP

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski-arch.html

she loves the Sean Hannazi thing, too:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski55.html

On a recent Sean Hannity radio show, a caller explained to Sean how she looked at her husband when she heard of Hussein’s capture and noted how she would always remember that moment. Frozen in time forever, she felt this was a great Christmas present from George W. Bush to our nation. We were all safer now. She proceeded to explain that after seeing Saddam bedraggled and defeated, all the terrorists would know that it wasn’t really true what Saddam had been saying to them, about those 72 virgins who would be waiting.

Sean didn’t bother to correct the caller with the fact that Saddam wasn’t directing any terrorists that attacked the United States. It also seems unlikely, from his latest hiding place and his inability to access a friendly barber, that he was in productive communication with any of the Iraqi Ba-athists, nationalists or other angry folks in the region who are taking deadly potshots at our sons and daughters. Saddam had financially rewarded Palestinian terrorists, or at least their surviving families, but those Palestinians and their families were not targeting the United States. As sorry as relations between Palestine and Israel have been, the United States is still the only broker with even a remote possibility of exercising influence over the Likud Party, and Palestinians realize this.

Sean didn’t bother mentioning that Saddam wasn’t an Islamist, or even a good Muslim. It is well known among radio talk show hosts that Saddam was a secular Marxist dictator, who, like Stalin, used religion only when necessary to prevent total collapse of his dictatorship. It is widely understood that one of the reasons Wahhabists and other Islamists despised Saddam was Saddam’s failure to submit to the will of Allah, and use the wealth of Iraq for Islamic rule in the region.

And lastly, Sean didn’t remind the caller that the capture of Saddam did not contribute to the goal of making America safer. We are as safe from Iraq-supported terrorism and Iraqi WMD as we were a year ago when Saddam called Jerry Bremer’s new palaces home. The threat of WMD and terrorism after Saddam’s capture is identical to that of a year ago. Negligible then as now, it was not worth the life of one American soldier, let alone 458.

urging you resolutely to check her out, I remain yours, faithfully

[Cocoa]

22. I loved the caller from Indiana

I hope this doesn't sound condescending, I don't mean it that way, but I loved when she said she never heard of Mother Jones, but plans to pick one up the next time she goes to Muncie or Indianapolis.

This woman needs to hear about DU, and I bet there are a lot of people out there just like her.