The real reason behind Plamegate: Hiding the Forgeries

[Carolab]

I was watching Meet The Press and listening as Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard tried to pass off the notion that Wilson's timeline didn't make sense because his op-ed exposed the fake Niger claim in February 2002, and yet "the administration didn't get the forgeries until October 2002" (see Hayes' and Russert's exchange below). I thought: that's ridiculous, since Wilson was specifically assigned to investigate the claims that the claims made by the forged documents were false!

Suddenly, it occurred to me: They exposed Plame because Joe Wilson's disclosure led right back to the Niger forgeries--and who was behind them, and why. And that is a new "meme"--that the timeline doesn't make sense, in order to make it seem that the administration did not know about this before October 2002.

Here are just two reports that back this up:


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/22/7563/12283

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1


**************

HAYES: I happen to think that, you know, unless they broke the Agents' Identities Protection Act or have subsequently committed perjury or created--or tried to obstruct the investigation, that it's perfectly defensible for them to have tried to counter Joe Wilson's claims.

We have to remember, Joe Wilson came back, and when he went public, first anonymously then later with his name attached, claims that he had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the chronology doesn't work. Wilson was in Niger in February of 2002. The U.S. government came into possession of those forgeries in October of 2002. He could not have done what he said he had done. So if you're in the White House at the time, why would you not say, "Gosh, who is this guy? Why is he saying these things that we know aren't true? And how do we fix this?"

MR. RUSSERT: But it's interesting; in terms of the sale of uranium, the State Department found his findings much more credible than did other parts of the government. We saw that--again, that division play out.

MR. HAYES: We saw--I mean, the CIA analyst who received Mr. Wilson's information or report, oral briefing, on March 5, 2002, believed that it actually enhanced the possibility that such a transaction had taken place because Wilson spoke with the prime minister of Niger.

MR. RUSSERT: And the State Department thought the exact opposite?

MR. HAYES: The State Department was on the other side.

**************

[Wilms]

1. Welcome to the party!

Of course the REAL SOURCE of the Niger docs was more likely why they outed Plame.

NBC News this evening, as have others endlessly, said that she was outted to "discredit Wilson". And that doesn't seem to make any real sense.

[lostnfound]

2. Interesting.

A beautiful idea, and it would translate well into digestible spoon-feeding material for the masses.

There's also the theory that wiping out Brewster-Jennings was a goal. One of the most interesting aspects to that theory, IMHO, is that FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has stated in interviews that high level adminstration officials were complicit in illegal smuggling including nuclear weapons.

But your theory is more plausible.

[NVMojo]

3. I agree ...remember, * said he had "darn good intelligence" at the time ..

President Defends Allegation On Iraq
Bush Says CIA's Doubts Followed Jan. 28 Address

By Dana Priest and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 15, 2003; Page A01

President Bush yesterday defended the "darn good" intelligence he receives, continuing to stand behind a disputed allegation about Iraq's nuclear ambitions as new evidence surfaced indicating the administration had early warning that the charge could be false.

Bush said the CIA's doubts about the charge -- that Iraq sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore in Africa -- were "subsequent" to the Jan. 28 State of the Union speech in which Bush made the allegation. Defending the broader decision to go to war with Iraq, the president said the decision was made after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush's speech.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56336-2003Jul14?language=printer

[Carolab]

4. Yes, and remember how Rathergate bumped the story on 60 Minutes?

60 Minutes was going to run the story with Elizabeth Burba, the Italian journo who first went down and found out the forgeries were fake.

It got bumped for the Rathergate fiasco, which appeared instead! A 60 Minutes producer said they were going to run it again "at a later date", but they never did!

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines04/0923-02.htm

Published on Thursday, September 23, 2004 by MSNBC
The Story That Didn’t Run
Here’s the Piece that ‘60 Minutes’ Killed for Its Report on the Bush Guard Documents

{snip}

A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies.

Although the edited piece never ended up identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.

But just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a direct order to take a flight physical while serving in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

{snip}


Burba, who has twice been interviewed by the FBI but never gave up Martino’s name, said she had been cooperating with the CBS team on the story in hopes of getting to the bottom of the matter. But now, with the “60 Minutes” broadcast postponed, she is no longer confident that can ever happen. Meanwhile, she said she is fed up with Martino who has “lied” to her and provided contradictory accounts to other journalists.

“I’m disappointed,” she told NEWSWEEK. “In this story, you don’t know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. The sources have been both discredited and discredited themselves.”

[Historic NY]

5. Ah...the Italian faked documents with the

wrong Niger seals. Somewhere someone posted copies of the documents which compared them to normal Niger documents. The official seals looked like some 5yr old made them.

[Carolab]

6. I want to add Seymour Hersh's The Stovepipe to the list

Which also substantiates that Cheney knew about the phony Niger reports before Wilson went to Niger and didn't like the fact that it was being doubted.

{snip}

By early 2002, the sismi intelligence—still unverified—had begun to play a role in the Administration’s warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, “Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.” A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, “With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.”

The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’ ” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.

In late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger to discreetly check out the story of the uranium sale. Wilson, who is now a business consultant, had excellent credentials: he had been deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, had served as a diplomat in Africa, and had worked in the White House for the National Security Council. He was known as an independent diplomat who had put himself in harm’s way to help American citizens abroad.

Wilson told me he was informed at the time that the mission had come about because the Vice-President’s office was interested in the Italian intelligence report. Before his departure, he was summoned to a meeting at the C.I.A. with a group of government experts on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. He was shown no documents but was told, he said, that the C.I.A. “was responding to a report that was recently received of a purported memorandum of agreement”—between Iraq and Niger—“that our boys had gotten.” He added, “It was never clear to me, or to the people who were briefing me, whether our guys had actually seen the agreement, or the purported text of an agreement.” Wilson’s trip to Niger, which lasted eight days, produced nothing. He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake would have required the signatures of Niger’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Mines. “I saw everybody out there,” Wilson said, and no one had signed such a document. “If a document purporting to be about the sale contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.” Wilson also learned that there was no uranium available to sell: it had all been pre-sold to Niger’s Japanese and European consortium partners.

Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but “I heard nothing about what the Vice-President’s office thought about it.” (In response, Cathie Martin said, “The Vice-President doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.” The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson’s trip.)

{snip}

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

Was Joe set up? They are trying awfully hard to say Cheney had no idea who he was.

[Carolab]

7. Check this out: Fitz is digging into this DIRECTLY

Fitzgerald has the legal right to follow the threads...
to the web and to THE SPIDER.

Clue: Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the blatantly forged documents (yellowcake)

December 2001 meeting in Rome involving Michael Ledeen, CLOSE friend of Karl Rove. Larry Franklin. recently arrested for leaking classified US government information to Israel and Harold Rhode, who works for the Department of Defense for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld

Coincidentally..shortly after this meeting the Niger embassy was illegally entered and nothing was stolen other than letterhead and seals. Which the faked yellowcake information was written on.

Note: In 1970, Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon and stole some letterhead, which he used to print fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters. Rove admitted the incident later, saying "It was a youthful prank...
wikipedia.com

Franklin faces prosecution next year and is most
probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald
Bob Novak has made some kind of deal -
Judy Miller is talking, but caught in her own lie under oath
Other reporters contacted could be telling a different story..
Rove is blaming Libby and caught in a lie
Libby is blaming Tim Russert and caught in a lie.

RUMORS rampant that Rove was not after Wilson - he was
after Plame and the CIA who was working intelligence on the Saudi Arabian oil situation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/the-most-important-crimin_b_9183.html

{snip}

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. As much as this sounds like the plot of a John le Carre novel, it also comports with the profile of the Karl Rove I have known, watched, traveled with and written about for the past 25 years.

{snip}

Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents. The blatantly fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister.

{snip}

No great extrapolation is necessary to assume that OSP, sitting inside the CIA, got early word that Joseph Wilson was being dispatched to Niger to investigate the sale of low-grade uranium to Iraq. Rhode needed only to pick up the phone and call the vice president’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who would tell his boss and Karl Rove. How hard is it for even Republicans to believe, at this point, that Rove is capable of launching a plan to discredit Wilson and punish him by exposing his wife? Rove and his boss were not simply in danger of losing the prime cause for the war; they faced an even graver political wound of being discovered as covert agents who defrauded the government and the public.

{more at link)

[Neil Lisst]

8. The forgeries and the Plame outing are both Cheney actions

He was behind both, I have no doubt at all.

Today I address Plame Game and its implications
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/neillisst

[Carolab]

9. I think you're right. Cheney and Rove.

Nice graphics, BTW.

[Neil Lisst]

10. thanks Carolab!

We enjoy making them.

[emulatorloo]

11. David Schuster Hardball Report well worth watching - video here:

Hardball 10 21 05 - Fitz, Niger docs, etc

thanks so much to the can of fun person!


ON EDIT:

http://www.canofun.com/blog/videos/schustercialeakinvestigationoct2105.wmv

[schmuls]

12. Why doesn't MSM talk about the 70 CIA agents killed or the supposed ...

CIA impeachment movement against the chimp? I have read a lot about these two items on the web, but never hear about them on MSM. Do you think these are conspiracy theories or is there any basis in reality? Or would these facts be too much for the public to handle?

[Justice]

13. I agree with you

[Carolab]

14. Much more here--including SYRIA

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5151583&mesg_id=5151583