Interesting....but suspect - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

tecoyah · 10-21-2005, 05:01 AM

I just read this article...and did not really like /or believe much of what I read in it. But, that said, there are enough supporting data to at the very least make me wonder. As I find our members here a wonderful sounding block, I was hoping to get some opinion before...or if this actually hits the major media.

thanks in advance

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

Elphaba · 10-21-2005, 03:59 PM

Tecoyah, the article does a masterful job of "connecting the dots" with respect to the players and their motivations. My opinion is that you might not be able to take this to the bank in it's entirety, but ultimately most of the information will be found to be true.

The motivation, in my opinion, has always been the mideast oil.

Ustwo · 10-21-2005, 10:30 PM

Quote:

Before Fitzgerald is done, we'll see the warlords of Washington hauled before a court of the people. We'll hear the whole sordid story of how a band of exiles, at least two foreign intelligence agencies, and a cabal of neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the vice president's office bamboozled Congress and the American people into going to war.

Its so one sided I find it rather amusing.

Yes very suspect, it does a masteful job of being suspect

Edit: A few lines in that article to me said 'This guy is Anti-Isreal' and a quick search of his writings yield http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7127.

maximusveritas · 10-21-2005, 11:29 PM

Yeah, this guy is the left's answer to Pat Buchanan. That doesn't mean that he's wrong all the time, but I tend to read his stuff very skeptically if I read it at all.
As far as this article, it's a whole lot of speculation and I've given up trying to figure out where this Plame case is headed. It's certainly bigger than most media accounts are selling it, but I don't think Fitzgerald will have the goods to go much deeper than just Rove, Libby, and the reporters.

roachboy · 10-22-2005, 09:38 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Raimondo

wikipedia article on raimondo.
the association with buchanan is right, but not as was presented.
and not only folk from "the left" opposed and still oppose bushwar--the illusion that opposition is constituted wholly from the left is one manufactured by the right apparatus for its own curious self-justifying ends.

maximusveritas · 10-22-2005, 12:11 PM

Interesting, I didn't know he actually supported Buchanan politically.
I suppose it's wrong to call him a member of the "left", but it's probably wrong to say he's a member of the "right" either. Really, he's just what his site says, "anti-war" and nothing more.

Ustwo · 10-22-2005, 03:30 PM

From his credentials it was obvious he was a Bucannanite

1920's isolationism, worked out well.

dksuddeth · 10-22-2005, 05:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

From his credentials it was obvious he was a Bucannanite

1920's isolationism, worked out well.

and we were to have 4 carriers positioned around the globe in 1929 to prevent the crash?

Elphaba · 10-24-2005, 07:40 PM

Tec, the msp is finally chiming in. I would hope that the naysayers regarding a liberal source have more respect for United Press International.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405A.shtml

Quote:

Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
By Martin Walker
UPI

Monday 24 October 2005

Washington - The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission - and his disbelief - public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.

If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.

If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.

And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 - seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

Ustwo · 10-24-2005, 07:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Tec, the msp is finally chiming in. I would hope that the naysayers regarding a liberal source have more respect for United Press International.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405A.shtml

Fraid not.

Seaver · 10-24-2005, 08:11 PM

Quote:

and we were to have 4 carriers positioned around the globe in 1929 to prevent the crash?

Um.. I'm pretty sure he was talking about the 1930s expansion of Japan/Russia/Germany/Italy and the resulting dispute that insued.

Ustwo · 10-24-2005, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

Um.. I'm pretty sure he was talking about the 1930s expansion of Japan/Russia/Germany/Italy and the resulting dispute that insued.

Thanks, yes, that little dispute is what I was refering to.

Elphaba · 10-24-2005, 08:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Fraid not.

You have an objection to UPI? Please explain why.

If you are objecting to Truthout for the link, that seems a bit silly and/or arbitrary. If you haven't noticed, it is becoming more and more difficult to link the original publication due to subscription requirement fees and such.

But just for you, Ustwo:

http://www.upi.com/InternationalInte...3-104217-9679r

Elphaba · 10-24-2005, 09:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver
Um.. I'm pretty sure he was talking about the 1930s expansion of Japan/Russia/Germany/Italy and the resulting dispute that insued.

Thanks, yes, that little dispute is what I was refering to.

I am still curious as to what this has to do with Tecoyah's OP.

aKula · 10-25-2005, 12:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Tecoyah, the article does a masterful job of "connecting the dots" with respect to the players and their motivations. My opinion is that you might not be able to take this to the bank in it's entirety, but ultimately most of the information will be found to be true.

The motivation, in my opinion, has always been the mideast oil.

I don't think that it makes sense as a motivation of invading Iraq for control of oil if looking purely at the national interest. I believe it was strongly influenced and motivated by neocon ideology (rather than the ultimate reasons given which were Human rights concerns, for which I will not give my reasons here). I think it's too big a risk to take invading a country for mostly inderect control of oil and perhaps the chance a price decrease (which obviously did not occur in Iraq). Not to say that military programs in west africa (training etc.) is not linked to increasing oil production there.

Elphaba · 10-26-2005, 08:50 AM

There has been speculation for some time that Rice or her office was involved in promoting the Niger forgeries. The Italian press claims a direct link to Stephen Hadley, her second in command. I have yet to find anything in the msp on this, but the timing of this meeting raises some red flags that I hope will be pursued.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102505R.shtml

Quote:

La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed
By Laura Rozen
The American Prospect

Tuesday 25 October 2005

Italy's intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced.

With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leak investigation, questions are again being raised about the intelligence scandal that led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House obtained false Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.

The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt later turned out to be crude forgeries, created on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents - and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then - Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the US administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proffered less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.)

The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the US government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries.

The forged documents were cabled from the US embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the US embassy.

Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to US and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion.

What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.

Was the White House convinced that the Niger yellowcake report was nevertheless true because the National Security Council was getting its information directly from the Italian source?

Following the exposure of the discredited Niger allegations in the summer of 2003 by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, White House officials at first sought to blame the CIA for the inclusion of the controversial "16 words" in the president's speech. Although then - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Hadley eventually accepted some responsibility for the mistake, the White House undertook a covert campaign to discredit Wilson and exposed the CIA affiliation of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson.

[/b] Yet if anyone knew who was actually responsible for the White House's trumpeting of the Niger claims, it would seem from the Repubblica report that Hadley did. He also knew that the CIA, which had initially rejected the Italian claims, was not to blame. Hadley's meeting with Pollari, at precisely the time when the Niger forgeries came into the possession of the US government, may explain the seemingly hysterical White House overreaction to Wilson's article almost a year later.[/b]

While the Niger yellowcake claims have provoked much drama in American politics, their provenance is decidedly Italian. The Repubblica investigation offers new insights into what motivated the Berlusconi government and its intelligence chief Pollari to go to so much trouble to bring those claims to the attention of their allies in Washington.

For Berlusconi and Pollari, according to La Repubblica, the overriding motive was a desire to win more appreciation and prestige from the Americans, who were seen as eager for help in making their sales pitch for war. On Monday, the newspaper described the atmosphere in 2002: "Berlusconi wants Sismi to be big players on the international security scene, to prove themselves to their ally, the United States, and the world. Washington is looking for proof of Saddam's involvement ... and wants info immediately."

For the Italian middleman Rocco Martino, who acquired the documents from a Sismi mole at the Niger embassy in Rome, the motive described by La Repubblica is primarily mercenary. He wanted to be paid for the forgeries.

According to the Repubblica account, Martino was a former carabinieri officer and later a Sismi operative who by 1999 was making his living based in Luxembourg, selling information to the French intelligence services for a monthly stipend. The story goes on to explain how Martino renewed his contacts with Sismi officer Antonio Nucera, an old friend and former colleague, who was a Sismi vice-captain working in the intelligence agency's eighth directorate, with responsibilities involving weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation.

Precisely how Nucera, Martino, and two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome came together sometime between 1999 and 2000 to hatch the Niger forgeries plan is still somewhat mysterious. The newspaper's reports that Nucera introduced Martino to a longtime Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome, a 60 year-old Italian woman described in La Repubblica only as "La Signora." Sismi chief Pollari, who granted the newspaper an interview (as he tends to do when he fears that breaking news could taint his agency), suggests that Nucera simply wanted to help out Martino, his old friend and colleague.

But as the Italian reporters suggest, that sounds like a very convenient excuse for the chief of an agency that was engaged in promoting the bogus Niger claims from their inception, all the way to the White House. The picture that emerges of Sismi's relationship with Martino is that the agency used him as a "postman" - a cut-out to sell the bogus intelligence to allied intelligence services. At the same time, Sismi possessed enough information about Martino to claim that he was simply a rogue agent on the French payroll.

La Repubblica's noirish portrait of Martino as a convenient vehicle for plausible deniability is given further resonance by the recent news that a Roman prosecutor has ended his investigation into Martino's role in the Niger hoax without filing any charges or issuing any report.

Although Berlusconi's government clearly sought deniability while pushing the Niger uranium claims, the Bush White House went still further by trying to blame its citation of exaggerated and discredited Iraq WMD claims on the CIA, the very same agency that consistently discounted the Niger claims. The White House's war on the CIA and on the Wilsons - the extent of which has been revealed in recent news reports emerging from the Fitzgerald investigation - has always had an excessive and almost hysterical quality. Why was the White House so worked up over Wilson and the Niger hoax, when there was so much evidence that the administration had based its drive for war on claims that were so thoroughly discredited from top to bottom? Why did Wilson and his CIA wife become the primary targets, when Wilson was hardly alone in pointing out that the White House should have known better about the Niger claims?

News of the secret meeting between the Italian Sismi chief and the White House deputy national security adviser - during the period when the White House was assembling its flawed case for war - provides an important new piece of that puzzle.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, DC, as a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributor to The Nation and other publications, and for her blog, War and Piece.

10-21-2005, 05:01 AM	#1 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	Interesting....but suspect I just read this article...and did not really like /or believe much of what I read in it. But, that said, there are enough supporting data to at the very least make me wonder. As I find our members here a wonderful sounding block, I was hoping to get some opinion before...or if this actually hits the major media. thanks in advance http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681 __________________ Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

10-22-2005, 09:38 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Raimondo wikipedia article on raimondo. the association with buchanan is right, but not as was presented. and not only folk from "the left" opposed and still oppose bushwar--the illusion that opposition is constituted wholly from the left is one manufactured by the right apparatus for its own curious self-justifying ends. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-22-2005, 03:30 PM	#7 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	From his credentials it was obvious he was a Bucannanite 1920's isolationism, worked out well. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

10-21-2005, 03:59 PM	#2 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	Tecoyah, the article does a masterful job of "connecting the dots" with respect to the players and their motivations. My opinion is that you might not be able to take this to the bank in it's entirety, but ultimately most of the information will be found to be true. The motivation, in my opinion, has always been the mideast oil.

10-21-2005, 11:29 PM	#4 (permalink)
maximusveritas Winner	Yeah, this guy is the left's answer to Pat Buchanan. That doesn't mean that he's wrong all the time, but I tend to read his stuff very skeptically if I read it at all. As far as this article, it's a whole lot of speculation and I've given up trying to figure out where this Plame case is headed. It's certainly bigger than most media accounts are selling it, but I don't think Fitzgerald will have the goods to go much deeper than just Rove, Libby, and the reporters.

10-22-2005, 12:11 PM	#6 (permalink)
maximusveritas Winner	Interesting, I didn't know he actually supported Buchanan politically. I suppose it's wrong to call him a member of the "left", but it's probably wrong to say he's a member of the "right" either. Really, he's just what his site says, "anti-war" and nothing more.