Feith Referenced - FAKE COMPANY - As EVIDENCE Of Pre-War Ties Between Iraq And Bin Laden

[kpete]

Feith Referenced Fake Company As Evidence Of Pre-War Ties Between Iraq And Bin Laden

Early last month, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) released a declassified version of a Pentagon Inspector General report that found that in Sept. 2002, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith gave a briefing entitled “Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida” to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

In this “alternative” intelligence assessment, Feith asserted that Osama Bin Laden’s al-Hijra Company had business “contacts” with a Dutch company, Vlemmo N.V. and that Vlemmo was a “front for Iraqi military procurement“:

copy of document at:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/24/feith-iraq-alqaeda/
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2007/04/feithslides.pdf

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Yesterday, however, the Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen explained that Feith had apparently invented the company, saying “Vlemmo is unknown to the Netherlands“:

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The Inspector General report concluded that Feith inappropriately “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’” which included “conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”

more at:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/24/feith-iraq-alqaeda/

Juan Cole has more.

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On 25 July 2002, Doug Feith's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) issued a statement linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein through a Dutch company named Vlemmo NV.

Now it turns out that Feith just made up the Vlemmo firm. According to the Netherlands Foreign Minister, it does not exist. . Just like virtually none of the things Feith peddled to us has has any reality. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz put Feith in a position to lie our troops into harm's way, as the number three man in the Pentagon. Feith bears responsibility for his lies and fabrications. His superiors are even more culpable.

http://www.juancole.com/2007/05/bushies-just-made-it-up-saddam-al-qaeda.html

[malaise]

1. One more neocon war criminal

These men are the quintessence of evil.

[rodeodance]

2. Yesterday Bush said he was credible cause He reads the intell-when

asked by David Gregory.

[formercia]

3. I watched that segment

The part I liked best was the camera panning the reporters. They weren't exactly fawning over Junior. They looked embarrassed more than anything.

[rodeodance]

4. and the FAKE letter:

Thursday, 24 May 2007
Forum Features Larry Johnson & Patrick Lang
This transcript appears in the May 25, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. (Not available yet.)

Cheney's Impeachable Crimes Highlighted at UDC Forum

On May 7, a group of leading U.S. intelligence and military veterans joined investigative authors Peter Eisner and Knut Royce in a forum at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), that provided, among many revelations, dramatic new evidence as to why Vice President Dick Cheney should be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors." Originally convened as a book-signing forum for Eisner and Royce's new book, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter To Build the Case for War in Iraq (see review), an invaluable documentary account of the Bush Administration lies that led the country to war against Iraq, the authors decided to open the event to a panel of leading retired intelligence officers, to comment on the just-released memoirs of retired CIA Director George Tenet.

The event, which drew over 100 students, faculty, and community activists, provided one of the most damning indictments of the Bush-Cheney Administration's manipulation of intelligence and other crimes. The panelists who joined Eisner and Royce—former CIA officers Larry Johnson and Mel Goodman; retired Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East chief Col. W. Patrick Lang; and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—presented such a significant amount of previously unknown documentation about the crimes of Bush and Cheney, that EIR has decided, as a public service, to publish an only slightly edited transcript of the entire event.

After a brief introduction by Dr. Bill Pollard, president of the University of the District of Columbia, the forum began with an introduction by Eisner, who served as the moderator for the panel discussion.

Bush's '16 Words'

Eisner: We originally had thought that this was going to be a more traditional book event, about The Italian Letter, which is the book that Knut Royce and I have written, which talks about, especially, the effort by the Bush Administration to sell the war in Iraq to the American people and to Congress, focussing especially on evidence about uranium supposedly having been purchased in Africa, and having been sold to Iraq, which became known as—that claim became known as the "16 words," President Bush's 16 words in the <2003> State of the Union message.

[elehhhhna]

9. read this--

But something about this didn't smell right to me. Even if Feith was obviously embroidering certain connections, it seemed doubtful to me that he'd make up an entire company. That would be too easy to discredit, even by wingnut standards.

So I did a simple Google search just now. And I plowed through the results -- many of which simply recite the Vlemmo-doesn't-exist news story -- carefully down to the very end. And there, in the bitter dregs of the Google search bin, you'll find links to two Belgian government documents. (Both are .pdfs; download here and here.)

My Dutch zuigt bigtime, but it sure as heck looks to me like a company called Vlemmo NV operated out of Antwerp, Belgium at least as early as 1997 (first document) until it went bankrupt in 2004 (second document). (Somebody who actually speaks Dutch can probably tell me if I'm reading it right. The first document seems to be a bureaucratic register in which a Vlemmo shareholders meeting is discussed on page 78. In the second document, page 125 seems to include the ruling of an Antwerp bankruptcy court, declaring Vlemmo officially over and out. Ja?)

much more here:
http://www.bobharris.com/

[The Count]

5. Alternative intelligence - shouldn't that be ...stupidity?

[BeyondThePale]

6. nope, it is treason! (nt)

[donkeyotay]

10. But Feith stepped down. How much more neocon accountability could we expect? nt

[BeyondThePale]

12. Point taken... once again...

I was operating in reality world,not neocon world. My bad!

[Hubert Flottz]

7. Nope it criminal intent!

[tanyev]

8. Vlemmo?

You go to all that trouble to set up a fake company and you can't come up with a better name than Vlemmo? I wonder if there is some significance to that name.

[mike6640]

11. named after

that lesser known, gouda wheel toting Marx brother, Vlemmo.

[bobthedrummer]

13. Kick

[bobthedrummer]

14. .