Niger docs "smell" like Rove was involved to me.

[garybeck]

Watch the movie Bush's Brain, which outlines some of the tactics Karl Rove has used in his infamous career as a political adviser. More than once he has stolen letterhead to create false documents. In once case he snuck in to a opponent's office to steal his letterhead, wrote bogus letters as if from him, and sent them out to discredit him.

Then read the recent WP article about the Niger/Uranium documents. particularly these parts:

In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.

...

It was written in all capital letters, in the form of an old telex, and bore the letterhead of the Republic of Niger. The letter was dated July 27, 2000, and included an odd shield on the top, a shining sun surrounded by a horned animal head, a star and a bird. The letter was stamped Confidential and Urgent.

The letter said that "500 tons of pure uranium per year will be delivered in two phases." A seal at the bottom of the page read "The Office of the President of the Republic of Niger." Superimposed over the seal was a barely legible signature bearing the name of the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201777.html?hpid=topnews


This wreaks of Karl Rove. I can see him up late at night, creating an false pretense for war, with a scissors, white-out, tape, and a copy machine. Every so often he takes a break to rip the head off a small animal. Might want to check those docs for the presence of squirrel blood.

Even if he didn't do it himself, this really smells of his methods and I would bet he was involved. When there's false letterhead involved, look to Karl Rove. Just my opinion.

[xultar]

1. You'll smell him comin before you see him comin...TURD BLOSSOM is his name

fuckin up the world is his game.

[Skidmore]

4. Foul and smelly little goomer, isn't he?

[Iwasthere]

2. I agree 100 %

carefully hid his tracks but involved. More news on this! Get it out there. Who was behind the bogus docs?

[Robbien]

3. Why the heck does it always have to be Rove. The whole lot of them

are sick shits. Read the email dumps. Each and every GOPer is a scheming liar.

The whole GOPer culture is corrupted. They even teach each other that corruption crap.

Almost anyone in the GOPer camp could have been responsible.

[garybeck]

5. I'm just saying Rove has an established pattern of falsifying documents and using stolen letterhead.

n/t

[kiahzero]

6. It was probably much higher up.

Keep in mind that the forgery goes back to the Italian intelligence service... whatever his power is here in America, I doubt he has enough sway in international politics to make this happen.

Josh Marshall has done a lot of work tracking down the story behind these documents. If you're interested, I highly recommend reading it. Sadly, there's no organized way of going through his posts on the topic, so I'd recommend a Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atalkingpointsmemo.com+italian+intelligence

[blm]

7. Wrong operative - they always smelled like Michael LeDeen to some of us longtime

BFEE watchers.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. He ingratiated himself into the campaign of democratic candidate

Alan Dixon in 1970, stole 1000+ letterhead, and then printed a fraudulent announcement about Dixon, promising free beer, free food, and women, women, women. Rove distributed the announcement among skid row, and "hippies" to make sure the "wrong" element showed up to the Dixon event.

Dixon won anyway.

Same modus operandi for the Niger docs.

[garybeck]

12. And how about "Rathergate" ?

false documents planted, once again.

[Norquist Nemesis]

9. After reading the post piece, one person kept coming to mind...

Dan Rather, 2004.

I dunno. The whole thing's just...screwy at the very least. But things just don't smell right about any of it. What makes it even more suspicious was that the WH was ready and waiting to attack with write-ups on people like Joe Wilson. Why would they take the time effort to do this unless they KNEW (rhetorical)?

I have a friend who to this day suspects Moussad was involved. She bases her speculation on a book she read by Ostrovsky (sp?). I dunno.

Wish we could get to the bottom of this and put people on trial if the facts call for it...none of this 'It's a political thing, not criminal wrongdoing' that we'd be getting from the Loyal Bushies aka USAs.

[kiahzero]

13. We know it at least goes back to Italy and SISMI.

Does she think that Israel put pressure on the Italians? That seems rather... unlikely to me. I admit I'm no expert in European politics, but it seems that we'd have a lot more influence than Israel.

Regardless, I don't think it was a political operative that called for the forgeries, which is much much worse.

[Norquist Nemesis]

15. No, she doesn't think it was pressure from them

Her speculation is that they circulated it originally and fed the spy-rumor mill until it fell into the right hands.

[Little Wing]

10. He's the Devil I tell, you, THE DEVIL!

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

11. Check this article out. I posted it today on an earlier thread.

From American Conservative Magazine of all places.


http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html

November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Forging the Case for War

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?

by Philip Giraldi

From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.

Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.

Continued at above link

[Warpy]

14. It was such an incredibly clumsy forgery

that I've always suspected an inside job.

[garybeck]

16. do you think they do it clumsy for a reason?

like the thing with Dan Rather, where it said "c'ya" on it. made it obvious it was fake. in that case they really wanted people to figure out it was fake. in this case I think they maybe just couldn't get their hands on the real seals and letterhead so they used what they could.

[Warpy]

18. The Killian memos were never proven to be forgeries.

If they were fogeries, they were cleverly done, mimicking a Selectric variable space typewriter and font used at the time.

These were ridiculously clumsy, using an outdated letterhead and very badly printed. It's almost like Stupid himself did these.

[Peace Patriot]

17. He was certainly part of the conspiracy to use them, and what all that may have been

about (more than we know, I'm sure), but it's pretty well established that they were of Italian origin, some of them from some old Italian sting of some kind, which were then peddled around by some shady persons who got hold of them (or made them--can't recall), but then there was a cover sheet added--an invented "accord" between Niger and Iraq. Invented in Italy, I believe. The perps would be who located these documents, who added the "accord," and who peddled them to the Pentagon and the White House (to get around any honest evaluation of them at the CIA), and who took them and used them.

Suspects: Possibly among the people who attended the Rome meeting in late 2001. Attendants included the head of Italian intelligence (Nicolo Polari), rabid NeoCon Michael Ladeen and others (on the Pentagon payroll), and notorious Iran/Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. And, of course, Tony Blair and the Blairites played a critical role in giving the Bushites cover on using the forgeries. (This may be what David Kelly's death was all about.)

I don't think Rove did the docs (although, who knows?), but I see your point that the Rove M.O. now permeates our government. What he did was to bring dirty, CIA-type ops into the domestic area of politics, so that sincere, innocent people, engaging in what they thought was a lawful and worthy civic endeavor--running for office, advocating policy--would be blind-sided by some mysterious scandal, not knowing what hit them, then the fascist media would chime in as cooperators, and the thing would become like quicksand: the poor target cannot get out of it.

I think we may have had an example of Rove's handiwork here at home--with his role still obscured--in the way California's good Sec of State Kevin Shelley was taken down--on entirely bogus corruption charges--after he sued Diebold, decertified their touchscreens, and demanded to see their source code six months before the 2004 election. The charges were trumpeted around the state by the SF Chronicle and other shitrags, and were part of a campaign that began with corrupt county election officials (one of them, Connie McCormack of Los Angeles, so in Diebold's pocket that she does sales brochures for them), and--dismayingly--with some help from the state party Dem leadership--with these corrupt county officials screamingly mad at Shelley for denying them their touchscreens. The whole thing had the smell of Rovian black ops. Bogus charges of misuse of federal electronic voting money. Bogus charges of campaign corruption. Bogus charges of sexual harassment. All creating a "perfect storm" of righteous allegations, all based on nothing. Shelly, who had no personal money--no legal funds (tells you something about Shelley)--and couldn't do his job under this cloud, resigned shortly after that election. And Schwarzenegger then appointed a Diebold shill, Bruce McPherson, to that office, who soon illegally re-certified the Diebold machines and began to undo Shelley's reforms. (We now have a good Sec of State again--Debra Bowen--one of the miracles of the '06 elections--and, boy, is she giving it to Diebold and brethren!)

Anyhow, the whole thing smelled to high heaven. And some of us were pretty gloomy about our poor country at the time that this happened. If Rove--as I expect--was dictating the percentages by which he wanted them to win, to Diebold and ES&S, and was playing the 2004 election like a piano, one obstacle he would not want in his way was a vigilant California Sec of State who was influencing other election officials around the country to look more closely at the "trade secret," proprietary programming code in all the new voting machines and central tabulators--nor an official like Shelley who would likely follow up afterward. How long has it taken us, to start getting some of the truth known, and a slowing turning paradigm shift on secretly coded voting counting? It seems like centuries--but has been only two years--two years for something that should have been plainly obvious on 11/3/04.

Framing: We had Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice framing Saddam for WMDs (and probably trying to plant them on Saddam, if the truth were known), Rove & Co. framing Max Cleland (quadriplegic--Vietnam) of sympathy toward Osama bin Laden in the GA Senate election in '02 (the first all-Diebold state), Rove & Co. framing their critic Joe Wilson of nepotism (and outing his CIA agent wife and her counter-proliferation network), the "Swiftboat" framing that Kerry's medals were phony, and the counter-framing that charges that Bush was AWOL during his service had been cooked up, we have the same White House liars and cookers of evidence now trying to frame Iran as "bad guys" needing "regime change" (though they have done nothing to anyone--haven't bombed anyone, haven't invaded anyone), Rove & Co. trying to frame voters for "voter fraud" (pressuring US Attorneys to file cases of voters committing fraud for which there was no evidence), and, back then, more than likely, Rove & Co. framing Kevin Shelley--probably the cleanest politician in the country--on bogus fraud charges.

That's a lot of framing, in the legal sense--of creating false charges against someone. And I'm sure everyone has their own examples.

They create a climate of lies and deception, with Rove having a knack (I will not go so far as to say talent) for writing the P.R. for pre-ordained events. It's only a few short chubby steps from framing the lies about Saddam to framing the narrative for stolen elections, and concocting all manner of falsehoods, leaks, planted lies, "talking points," documents and even nuclear weapons to "prove" your false case. You can sure see Rove's footprints through it all, though he may not have committed a particular act, like penning the Niger docs. It's an assault on the very concept of truth that is threatening our existence as a nation--and, if you consider global warming, threatening all life on earth. People sometimes say "we are a nation of laws" (as opposed to a nation ruled by a man or men--a monarch or a junta). This is what distinguishes us. And it's true. But there is something else--our unspoken agreements, not enforced by any law, to abide by certain commonly understood ethical principles and sense of decency. Our concept of right and wrong. Our concept of truth. Without these principles, our system of government, our democracy and our social cohesion cannot work. This is the biggest threat of all--especially in this very diverse nation--that our common, ordinary, daily faith in each other has been gravely injured.

I do not blame it on one man--though he seems to sum it all up. I blame it on the excessive power of global corporate predators who are loyal to no one and to nothing except financial profit, and whose culture disconnects the individual from his community, his country and the human race, resulting in lethal irresponsibility toward all living things, and especially toward the finest achievement of human civilization: our respect for the truth.