http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051012/pl_nm/security_cia_dc_1



White House approves plan to bolster CIA By David Morgan
Wed Oct 12, 5:09 PM ET


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has approved a plan to install CIA Director Porter Goss as the manager of traditional spying operations across the 15-agency intelligence community, officials said on Wednesday.

Goss, who took over the CIA just over a year ago after chairing the House of Representatives intelligence panel, would receive the title of "national HUMINT manager" under a plan that experts say could restore some of the CIA's lost prestige as the lead agency in the intelligence community.

HUMINT is bureaucratic parlance for human intelligence, or traditional espionage by operatives overseas.

Officials, who asked not to be identified because the plan has not been formally announced, said U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte will charge Goss with coordinating agencies involved in human intelligence and setting new common standards for clandestine operations.

Negroponte's office would retain oversight of human intelligence but would not be involved in day-to-day management decisions, officials said.

A spokesman for Negroponte, whose formal title is director of national intelligence, declined to comment on the plan but said an announcement was expected shortly. A CIA spokeswoman also declined to discuss details of the plan.

Intelligence experts say the change could restore to the CIA some of the stature stripped away by congressionally mandated reforms that created Negroponte's job last year.

The CIA, which orchestrated America's Cold War espionage activities against the Soviet Union, lost its leadership role in the intelligence community as a result of the reforms.

Still reeling from criticism over huge intelligence lapses involving the September 11, 2001, attacks and prewar Iraq, the agency has lost some of its most senior clandestine officers in recent months.

"The continuing erosion of CIA authority is a concern. They've clearly made mistakes in the past, but we've got to stop the hemorrhaging," said a congressional aide who receives regular intelligence briefings.

The new intelligence plan comes just weeks after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said the CIA was failing to lead U.S. human intelligence efforts and suggested Negroponte take a stronger management role.

Negroponte received White House approval for the plan recently, according to officials who said a formal announcement could come as early as Thursday.

Goss told CIA employees at a closed-door meeting last month that Negroponte intended to grant him the wider management authority and predicted the agency would set standards for the entire community on human intelligence.

The CIA reached separate agreements earlier this year on coordinating foreign intelligence with the FBI and the Pentagon, which have stepped up their intelligence activities since the September 11 attacks prompted the Bush administration's war on terrorism

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051012/ts_nm/iraq_usa_cia_dc_1

US ignored forecasts of Iraqi ethnic turmoil-CIA By David Morgan
Wed Oct 12, 5:18 PM ET



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration paid scant attention to prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq predicting the ethnic and tribal turmoil that now threatens the future of the country, a newly released 2004 CIA report said.

The report said U.S. policymakers instead concentrated more on the agency's assessments of Iraq's weapons program, which helped them make the case for the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq but which turned out to be flawed and misleading.

"Intelligence assessments on post-Saddam issues were particularly insightful," said the report.

But it added: "In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program) where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right."

Administration officials justified the 2003 invasion in part on assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the region and the United States. No such weapons have been found and investigations have blamed the CIA for huge lapses in its prewar intelligence.

The report, published in the current issue of the quarterly CIA magazine, "Studies in Intelligence," was commissioned by former CIA Director George Tenet. He resigned last year after fierce criticism over the faulty Iraqi weapons assessments.

The report said the agency was largely correct in its estimate of cultural and political postwar issues and "accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq."

The Bush administration suggested early in the Iraq war that American forces would be greeted as liberators by a grateful Iraqi people. President George W. Bush initially took a cavalier approach to the insurgency, suggesting it would be no threat to U.S. forces there and declaring: "Bring 'em on!"

But more than two years later the country is gripped by a deadly Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shi'ite and Kurdish-led government and U.S. troops and nearly 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed.

Presented in July 2004, the report said prewar Iraq intelligence also concluded accurately that Saddam had no operational or collaborative ties with al Qaeda and calculated the war's impact on oil markets.

The CIA report, produced by a team led by former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr, was issued as the last in a series of three reports on Iraq intelligence. It is unclassified but has not been released publicly until now. The two earlier reports remain classified.

U.S. involvement in Iraq also came under fire on Wednesday from former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who said the CIA's faulty WMD intelligence only provided the pretext for a long-standing U.S. policy of regime change.

"We had two policies in Iraq. A publicly stated policy of containment through the maintenance of economic sanctions linked to disarmament, and ... regime change. Regime change was the dominant policy," he said during an event to promote his new book, "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books).

CIA review faults prewar plans :

A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.
http://tinyurl.com/9eqb2

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20...15346-1405r.htm

Pentagon increases recruitment of spies
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 12, 2005


The Pentagon has increased programs to recruit spies, both in the United States and abroad, as part of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's push to penetrate and destroy Islamist terror cells.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has increased its work force, including agents who recruit spies, from 6,500 to 7,500 since the September 11 attacks. DIA wants Congress to relax a rule on recruiting U.S. citizens as spies so it can burrow even deeper inside the enemy.
"We believe there are potential sources of information in this country we are not tapping right now," Jim Schmidli, deputy DIA general counsel for operations, said in an interview. "We think there is a potential well of information here."
Outside the DIA, Mr. Rumsfeld has empowered U.S. Special Operations Command to use warriors in more spying missions. Socom has added training programs to better teach commandos how to recruit sources and how to track suspected al Qaeda operatives around the world.
Mr. Rumsfeld established the first-ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The new undersecretary then created the Defense HUMINT Management Office at DIA to train case officers and coordinate dissemination of what the spy culture considers its crown jewels -- trusted human sources burrowed inside the enemy. HUMINT is short for human intelligence.
The Pentagon's move to recruit more spies is receiving a bipartisan endorsement from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has the power to veto Mr. Rumsfeld's spy policies.
"The committee supports the creation of the Defense HUMINT Management Office as a means of executing [Pentagon] objectives," the committee said in its fiscal 2006 legislation authorizing intelligence programs. "The military services have been authorized to rebuild their HUMINT capabilities."
The panel also delivered a plum the DIA has been seeking for two years. Under the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act, military intelligence officers must disclose who they are when trying to recruit a U.S. citizen, or permanent resident alien, to spy on an enemy. The FBI and CIA have no such restriction. The committee has endorsed giving the same exemption to the DIA. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is expected to go along when the 2006 bill reaches a conference.
George Peirce, the DIA's general counsel, said approaching a potential source under the cover of another identity is sometimes the only way to assess a person's value and to protect the operation's secrecy. Also, he said, immediately disclosing that you are a DIA agent can have a chilling effect on the approached person.
"The framers of the Privacy Act did not envision that its notification requirement would be used to frustrate the legitimate efforts of military officers to collect information from citizens voluntarily in order to protect our nation and its armed forces," Mr. Peirce said.
The DIA is particularly interested in persons who can provide information on another country's arsenal. It wants informants on the group al Qaeda in Iraq and on the terrorist-run industry that is producing scores of deadly improvised explosive devices.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 4:20 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2005
Oct. 12, 2005 - As if they didn’t have their hands full with Iraq and terrorism, U.S. intelligence agencies are being drawn into the debate over whether the United States is imminently threatened by a deadly outbreak of bird influenza and whether the Bush administration has adequately prepared for such an epidemic.


Over the last two weeks, the administration has held bird flu briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” for members of both houses of Congress, according to intelligence and congressional officials. A counterterrorism official indicated that the intelligence community is also studying whether it would be possible for terrorists to somehow exploit the avian flu virus and use it against the United States, though there is no evidence that terrorists have in any way tried to do so.

The intelligence community also recently distributed inside the government an illustrated booklet, “Avian Influenza and the Threat of Pandemic Influenza,” marked “Unclassified/For Official Use Only” that highlights the dangers of a global outbreak. The booklet, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, cites unidentified "experts” who believe that H5N1, a bird flu strain now circulating in Asia, could spread around the world as a pandemic and cause mass fatalities. (Scientists define a pandemic as a disease for which there is no certain treatment and to which humans have no natural immunity.)

According to the intelligence document, the World Health Organization is warning that if a pandemic outbreak occurs, “as much as one-fifth of the world’s population could become ill, at least 30 million people worldwide could require hospitalization, and at least 2 million people could die.” According to the booklet, however, other experts “warn that far more could die, with some estimates as high as 180 million” in the event that a new pandemic virus is as potent as the “Spanish flu” virus which caused massive casualties in 1918.

Most scientists say the likelihood of casualties on this scale is small. But alarming figures like these in recent weeks caught the attention of President George W. Bush and other White House aides. The White House is anxious to ensure that the administration won’t be blindsided by what has been portrayed as a potential “bio-Katrina,” according to one administration consultant who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Three Capitol Hill officials familiar with the contents of the top-secret briefings, which were open to congressional leaders of both parties as well as senior staffers with appropriate security clearances, said there was little if any information imparted during the sessions that had not already appeared in the press. Two officials indicated that the secrets in the briefing related to intelligence raising questions about the thoroughness with which foreign governments were monitoring and disclosing information about the spread of bird flu in their countries.

The briefings were staged principally by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but a senior representative of the intelligence community was also present, according to administration officials. A spokeswoman for HHS declined to explain why the department considered the briefings classified. She would only say that the substance of the briefings related to “general issues of avian flu and pandemic preparedness plans.”

An intelligence official told NEWSWEEK: “The briefings did contain classified information. The reason the information is classified is because some of it was acquired through clandestine means. The DNI [the office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte] works hand in hand with HHS on a range of issues.”

A leading public-health expert questioned the wisdom of discussing epidemiological policy in secret. Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s school of public health, said, “This is old-fashioned cold war secrecy being applied to a public-health issue--a very bad idea.” Redlener has criticized President Bush and other administration officials for hinting recently that in the event of a pandemic bird flu outbreak, the federal government might rely heavily on the military to establish quarantine zones and restrict public movement to limit the possible spread of disease.

Redlener and other experts say that the United States is seriously unprepared to cope with an avian flu outbreak, although there is no clear indication if or when such a pandemic might strike the United States. According to the intelligence-community paper, the World Health Organization has reported that since 1997, 132 people have been reported to have contracted the H5N1 strain, and “so far about half of the people infected” have died.

According to the intelligence booklet, complications caused by the H5N1 virus resemble those of the deadly flu outbreak of 1918, and this particular virus strain is of “particular concern” because it has passed from birds to humans, and, in rare cases, may have also been transmitted from person to person. According to the document, human cases of H5N1 have been confirmed in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, and the virus has been detected in birds in Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Russia and South Korea. News reports last week also indicated new bird flu cases were under investigation in Turkey and Romania. Also last week, scientists revealed that the killer 1918 flu appeared to come from an avian virus that mutated slightly to allow for human-to-human transmission.

Despite H5N1’s reported mortality rate of 50 percent or more, Dr. Redlener says that by the time such a virus did arrive in the United States, its strength might be significantly degraded. But he notes that in the case of the 1918 Spanish flu, the eventual mortality rate of the virus turned out to be around 2 percent, yet millions still died. Experts note, however, that there is no certainty that North America will be swept by H5N1 in the next few months, or at any point in the foreseeable future.

What is vexing the Bush administration and other public-health professionals is the fact that the United States is not particularly well prepared in the event a bird flu pandemic does strike in the near future. Presently, only one or two drugs are regarded as effective treatments for this type of influenza, and it is not certain that even the known drugs would be effective against a particularly virulent strain. Even if the drugs do prove effective, the United States is behind other countries in ordering the drug which experts say has the most potential to be effective against bird flu--a Roche Laboratories product called Tamiflu.

Meanwhile, President Bush met last Friday with executives from vaccine manufacturing companies to urge them to expand U.S. capacity to make vaccines to protect against a possible flu pandemic. Manufacturers have complained that making flu vaccines carries burdensome financial and legal risks, and note that new vaccines have to be made fresh every winter to keep up with anticipated mutations in the virus.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt is currently on a trip to several countries in Asia to get a firsthand look at measures some countries are taking to contain the spread of known bird flu cases. The best defense against a deadly flu pandemic would be stopping it where it starts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9675585/site/newsweek/

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle....&archived=False

Al Qaeda in Iraq says Zawahri letter is fake - Web
Thu Oct 13, 2005 1:55 PM ET
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By Firouz Sedarat
DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq on Thursday rejected as a fabrication a letter by a top group leader that was issued by U.S. officials and suggested deep internal rifts among militants.

According to the letter, released this week by U.S. intelligence officials, al Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahri urged the group's leader in Iraq to prepare for an Islamic government to take over when U.S. forces leave.

The letter warns Zarqawi the killing of Shi'ite civilians and hostages risked alienating Sunnis at a time when al Qaeda in Iraq should be seeking support for a religious state.

But Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq said the letter's release showed the "bankruptcy plaguing the infidels' camp".

"We in Al Qaeda Organization announce that there is no truth to these claims, which are only based on the imagination of the politicians of the Black (White) House and their slaves," the group said in a statement posted on an Islamist Web site.

"All of this is in a letter attributed to our Mujahid sheikh ... and naturally we do not know how and where this letter is to have been found," said the statement signed by the group's spokesman in Iraq.

U.S. officials said the July 9 letter, addressed to Iraq's al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was obtained during

operations in Iraq.

SPLIT OVER AUTHENTICITY

In Washington, U.S. officials and experts were split on the letter's authenticity.

Ken Katzman, a terrorism expert with the Congressional Research Service -- the in-house think-tank of the U.S. Congress -- said the letter contained elements that raised doubts about its authenticity.

"The purported letter has Zawahri admitting to certain things that it's not realistic for him to admit, because he would know there's a potential this letter might be intercepted," Katzman said.

He said they included a request for money from Zarqawi, an admission that Pakistan's army is hunting for al Qaeda and how the arrest of a top operative affected the network.

A U.S. security official said: "There's every reason to believe it's legitimate. We have high confidence that it's legitimate."

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to say what steps were taken to authenticate the letter for fear of revealing intelligence sources and methods.

Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and critic of the U.S. war against terrorism, also said the letter appeared authentic.

Scheuer said the letter's admission of setbacks were typical of al Qaeda. "They have always been almost puritanical in talking about setbacks."

Several experts said the letter contained far fewer Koranic references and quotations than other Zawahri statements.

The letter was released days before Iraqis were to vote in a referendum on a new constitution in which U.S. authorities hope for a large turnout among Sunni Muslim Arabs.

Many Sunni Arabs oppose Saturday's referendum, and some experts say that Zarqawi declared war on Iraq's majority Shi'ites last month to curry favor among the disaffected.

(Additional reporting by Caroline Drees and David Morgan in Washington)

CIA acquires new US clandestine leadership role

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA will lead a new clandestineservice designed to coordinate all traditional U.S. spyingactivities overseas, including those of the FBI and Pentagon,top intelligence officials said on Thursday.

As part of an ambitious strategy to rebuild U.S. humanintelligence after debilitating lapses over Iraq and theSeptember 11, 2001, attacks, the new National ClandestineService, or NCS, will operate out of the spy agency under adirector reporting to CIA Director Porter Goss.

The new service will act as the national authority for theintegration and coordination of human intelligence operations,which involve spying by people rather than satellites and othersophisticated technology.

Intelligence experts view the service, which won PresidentGeorge W. Bush's approval in recent days, as an effort torestore some of the stature which the CIA lost whencongressionally mandated reforms largely stripped the agency ofits community role last year by establishing the position ofdirector of national intelligence, held by John Negroponte.

"I am confident that with the creation of the NCS, the U.S.government will have a more cohesive and truly national humanintelligence capability," Negroponte said in a statementannouncing the service.

"This is another positive step in building an intelligencecommunity that is more unified, coordinated, and effective, andis better positioned to meet the increasingly complexintelligence challenges of the future," he said.

With the new clandestine service based at his agency, Gosswill have a dual role as CIA director and "National HUMINTManager." HUMINT is bureaucratic parlance for humanintelligence.

Goss is also leading an effort within the CIA to expand theagency's global operations and build its ability to act alonein countries where U.S. spies up to now have been more likelyto act in concert with foreign intelligence services.

The CIA, which orchestrated America's Cold War espionageactivities against the Soviet Union, forfeited its leadershiprole in the intelligence community as a result of the reformscrafted to address weaknesses exposed by the September 11attacks.

Still reeling from criticism over intelligence lapses, theagency has lost some of its most senior clandestine officers inrecent months.

The announcement of the new clandestine service comes justweeks after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence saidthe CIA was failing to lead U.S. human intelligence efforts andsuggested Negroponte take a stronger management role.

The CIA reached separate agreements earlier this year forcoordinating foreign intelligence activities with the FBI andthe Pentagon. Both have stepped up their intelligenceactivities overseas since the September 11 attacks prompted theBush administration's war on terrorism.


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http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/13/goss.spies/

CIA director to manage all human spying

Thursday, October 13, 2005; Posted: 2:41 p.m. EDT (18:41 GMT)


CIA Director Porter Goss will coordinate spying efforts across 15 agencies.WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has approved a plan to name CIA Director Porter Goss as the manager of all U.S. human intelligence-gathering, John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, announced Thursday.

Negroponte also announced the formation of a new National Clandestine Services group within the CIA to coordinate and evaluate intelligence. The move came in response to recommendations made in March by President Bush's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"I am confident that with the creation of the NCS, the U.S. government will have a more cohesive and truly national human intelligence capability," Negroponte said.

The plan aims to restore to the battered CIA some of the prestige it lost when Congress created the post of director of national intelligence, as recommended by the 9/11 commission.

Under the plan, sources told CNN, Goss will set the common standards for spying operations, whether they are conducted by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency or one of the 13 additional intelligence agencies in the federal government.

"This is another positive step in building an intelligence community that is more unified, coordinated and effective, and is better positioned to meet the increasingly complex intelligence challenges of the future," Negroponte said.

CNN's David Ensor contributed to this report.

http://www.military.com/opinion/0,,78593,00.html

Accountability or Capability
Richard Coffman | October 13, 2005
(“Risk is a critical part of the intelligence business. Singling out these individuals would send the wrong message… about taking risks….” CIA Director Porter Goss October 5, 2005)

Finally, someone in authority has the courage to put a halt to Washington's accountability jihad against CIA over 9/11, recognizing that it already has severely damaged US intelligence.

Goss announced in early October that he would not convene, as recommended by CIA's IG, a so-called “accountability board” to consider further punitive actions against CIA officers for 9/11 related performance. Goss said that neither this nor the many other reports on 9/11 suggested that any one person or group could have prevented 9/11. Goss added that because CIA was starved of resources and staff in the 90's, the Agency's “stars” were asked to step up to the most difficult tasks, and that any further sanctions would fall heavily on the finest officers still actively serving there.

Most importantly, Goss aimed his decision -- sure to provoke controversy and consternation in many quarters -- squarely at the culture of risk aversion that has grown in the Agency for many decades and which reached its pinnacle just prior to 9/11.

Simply put, we have come to the point where we cannot have both full, untrammeled accountability, which is certainly a splendid concept, and still field a capable foreign intelligence service. At a time of worldwide terrorist threat, this is not a close call.

CIA is hardly the only agency undermined by risk aversion in the toxic Washington environment. Witness the post-Katrina spectacle of former FEMA director Michael Brown under incessant pillorying by largely Republican members of Congress at a hearing in late September.

“I don't know how you can sleep at night,” said one legislator in full-throated outrage.

You don't need to be supportive of Brown or FEMA to appreciate the rank hypocrisy and selective outrage of Congress when, the following day, a Senate committee excused the Governor of Louisiana from addressing her or FEMA's shortcomings during a totally anodyne hearing.

Nary a senior career or appointed official in US government service -- whether in FEMA, DHS or elsewhere -- missed the implicit message here: when you take on a tough job, stick your neck out, and something goes wrong, you are at risk of taking the fall. Therefore, stay cautious, keep your head down, and don't take chances.

As I have written earlier, all of this is a clear result of the obsession by Congress, the press, and political opportunists to point the finger of blame as quickly and categorically as possible. In the case of CIA, it started in the 70's with Watergate-era congressional investigations of abuses -- many real and some imagined or unimportant. It was abetted by the hostility and indifference of the CIA's political masters during the 70's and 90's, and also by the politicization of congressional oversight.

The Agency suffered never-ending and agenda-driven congressional and IG investigations that punished the competent and daring and left untouched the mediocre and cautious. That unleashed battalions of intrusive lawyers and bureaucrats obstructing risky endeavors and risk-taking officers.

In the wake of 9/11, grieving families, a carping press and cowed politicians gave full scope to the misguided 9/11 commission, which blamed and “reformed” intelligence by burying CIA under yet another bureaucracy, further reinforcing the risk averse culture gripping Langley. Even after two presidential commissions and three separate congressional inquiries on 9/11, Congress encouraged the IG's in the national security agencies, including CIA, to take an internal look at what went wrong. And the resulting report in CIA is where Porter Goss took his stand.

Hopefully, Goss' moment on the road to Damascus doesn't come too late to restore CIA's derring-do. We have been reminded this past week how major US cities and states have tuned out federal intelligence and installed their own information gathering and sharing systems to cope with terrorist threats in their jurisdictions.

The New York City Police Department has been a pioneer in this effort, establishing an intelligence capability said to number more than 1000 officers and an in-house operations center. They have also posted police officers abroad in liaison with foreign law-enforcement agencies.

The Wall Street Journal reported October 10 that police in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Houston also are setting up their own intelligence shops, working with foreign law enforcement, and creating secure communications networks that bypass federal authorities. It is noteworthy that each of these cities has been targeted by terrorists in the past or mentioned in terrorist threat advisories.

Given the struggles of DHS and the Intelligence Community in developing and transmitting timely tactical threat information, it is understandable that local officials responsible for safety and security in their jurisdictions would take such measures. But this is far from an ideal situation, as demonstrated by the public disagreement between New York City and the federal government over the credibility of information that led to tighter security in the New York subway system. Imagine what would happen if there were another Katrina or 9/11 attack.

If only for this reason, it is imperative that federal intelligence and homeland security regain the confidence of the nation's states and cities.

Patting Goss on the back for a courageous and wise stand does not diminish the reality that putting things... right in Langley is an urgent and tall task, particularly in today's bitterly partisan and finger-pointing Washington. But, he has taken a necessary first step.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=54&u_sid=2043670

'Jose' will lead U.S. spies






WASHINGTON (AP) - A top CIA manager who remains undercover will soon oversee traditional human spy activities for the entire intelligence community, a position created in overhaul of U.S. intelligence following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Publicly, the manager is referred to only as "Jose."

Jose will broadly coordinate operations for the CIA, FBI, Defense Department and other agencies involved in human intelligence, or the information gathered by people, rather than by technical means.

Forming a National Clandestine Service was one of more than 70 recommendations from President Bush's commission on the search for weapons of mass destruction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/national/14intel.html

Little Authority for New Intelligence Post

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 14, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 - A new Central Intelligence Agency office intended to provide more coordination over American spying operations will wield only limited authority, leaving the Defense Department and the F.B.I. free to carry out an increasing array of human intelligence missions without central operational control, two senior intelligence officials said Thursday.

The director of the new office, as head of a national clandestine service, will instead be responsible primarily for setting standards and rules designed to minimize conflicts between the agencies, whose human spying operations in the United States and abroad have been expanding rapidly and are expected to continue to do so, the officials told reporters at a briefing.

In written statements issued on Thursday, John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, and Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, said the new arrangements would improve the quality of American human spying. That has been a goal recommended by Congress, the Sept. 11 commission and others in reviews conducted in the last two years. President Bush pledged last year to increase human spying operations at the Pentagon and the F.B.I. by 50 percent in the next five years.

But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the changes as "a negotiated settlement" between the various agencies. Mr. Roberts expressed reservations about what he called "this latest reorganization," saying he would have preferred that Mr. Negroponte exert his authority to "manage human intelligence collection worldwide." Mr. Negroponte took over the new post in April under a law enacted last year.

The limited power to be granted to the new coordinator underscores the degree to which the Pentagon, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have retained considerable autonomy even under the new system led by Mr. Negroponte, whose job was created as part of an effort to impose more central control over intelligence agencies.

"We won't tell the F.B.I. how to do their business, and we don't tell the D.O.D. how to do their business," one of the two senior intelligence officials said of the role to be played by the C.I.A.

A second senior intelligence official said Mr. Negroponte's office would limit its role in overseeing human spying operations to broad, strategic direction, rather than asserting operational control.

Mr. Negroponte and his deputies do not anticipate "getting into the weeds of tactical day-to-day operations," said that second official, speaking at a briefing at C.I.A. headquarters. The two officials were from the C.I.A. and Mr. Negroponte's office, but the briefing was provided to reporters on condition that they not be identified by name.

The new system leaves the C.I.A. as the pre-eminent agency in charge of human spying, a mission it has had since its creation in 1947. The new clandestine service replaces the directorate of operations, the C.I.A. branch responsible for stealing secrets, recruiting spies and carrying out covert operations around the world.

The decision to allow the C.I.A. to maintain its designated role as the national human intelligence manager comes despite opposition from Mr. Roberts and other Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had urged that Mr. Negroponte's office assume that management task. In a report last month, the Republican majority on the panel said the C.I.A.'s record of coordinating other agencies' activities had been weak, as underscored by intelligence failures on terrorism and Iraq.

But Democrats on the committee opposed that recommendation, saying it would be "at best premature" to strip the C.I.A. of its powers. In a statement issued on Thursday, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said Mr. Negroponte had made "the right decision" and would give Mr. Goss "the tools he needs to ensure an effective and coordinated effort across all agencies involved with human intelligence."

Technically, Mr. Goss, as director of the C.I.A., is to be designated as national human intelligence manager. That is a role comparable to those once played by the director of the National Security Agency, the national signals intelligence manager; and the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the national imagery intelligence manager.

Under the new structure, however, Mr. Goss will delegate those day-to-day responsibilities to a new director of the national clandestine service, and he has appointed the current deputy director for operations to assume that post, the C.I.A. said. That official, a long-serving C.I.A. officer with considerable experience in Latin America, remains undercover and cannot be publicly named, the agency said.

One deputy director of the clandestine service will be responsible for managing the C.I.A.'s own clandestine service, and a second deputy will be responsible for "facilitation, coordination and deconfliction" of broader human spying operations, missions that are increasingly being carried out by the F.B.I.'s new national security branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency's human intelligence service and Special Operations Forces, as well as the C.I.A. The service will also include a unit responsible for covert operations and another branch responsible for providing scientific and technological support.

James L. Pavitt, who retired in 2004 as deputy director for operations, said he believed that the impact of the restructuring would be limited.

"A change in the table of organization, the 'wiring diagram,' will not substantively change the basics of the business," Mr. Pavitt said in an e-mail exchange on Thursday.

Mr. Pavitt said he believed that the old directorate of operations, now renamed the national clandestine service, would "continue to carry the real burden."

CIA Spies Get a New Home Base
Agency Will Set Up the National Clandestine Service

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 14, 2005; Page A06

Intelligence officials yesterday announced establishment of a National Clandestine Service at the CIA, saying the step is necessary because of the dramatic expansion in U.S. human intelligence collection abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The NCS, which will be based at the CIA, will carry out that agency's espionage, taking over what has been called the Directorate of Operations, and will coordinate, though it will not actually direct, the increasing spying and covert activities conducted worldwide by the Pentagon and FBI, officials said.



CIA Director Porter J. Goss garners another title, national humint manager. (Dennis Cook - AP)

Intelligence Reorganization
From the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: Establishment of the National Clandestine Service
From the CIA: DNI and D/CIA Announce the Establishment of the National Clandestine Service
CIA Fact Sheet: Creation of the National HumInt Manager


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"This is another positive step in building an intelligence community that is more unified, coordinated and effective," Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte said in a statement yesterday.

President Bush had ordered increases of 50 percent in the number of CIA case officers and analysts, and there has been similar, if not greater, growth since the late 1990s in Pentagon and FBI human intelligence collection operations, the officials noted.

That growth requires greater coordination of efforts and "has for the first time since 1947 forced us to redraw the lines," said a senior intelligence official, one of two who briefed reporters yesterday on the condition they not be identified by name. One official was from Negroponte's Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies; the other was from the CIA.

Yesterday's announcement gives CIA Director Porter J. Goss another title, national humint manager, incorporating the intelligence community's shorthand for human intelligence, which refers to information collected from people rather than from technical sources such as electronic intercepts. The director of the National Clandestine Service will report to Goss, but the new agency's work will be overseen by Negroponte's staff.

One official said creating the new clandestine service office at the CIA -- instead of within the DNI's office -- reflects an endorsement of the agency by Bush.

John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, yesterday praised the new setup.

"This decision reaffirms the agency's status as the nation's premier human intelligence organization and gives the director of the CIA the tools he needs to ensure an effective and coordinated effort across all agencies involved with human intelligence," he said.

The intelligence committee's Republican majority, however, citing the CIA's failures before Sept. 11, 2001, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, had wanted the NCS job to be located within the DNI's office, not at the CIA.

While the new agency will be part of the CIA, national intelligence director Negroponte's deputy, Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA operations officer, will oversee the NCS and all human intelligence collection overseas.

But the officials said Negroponte's office will not get involved in setting targets or running or approving specific covert operations. The DNI's role is "to set policy," one official said, "and [he] will not be a command chain for decisions on operations."

The DNI will set priorities for those who collect intelligence and those who analyze it, appointing "mission managers" to make certain the intelligence community is focused on what is important.

One official said the DNI's plan is to bring together collectors and analysts from all intelligence agencies concerned to work out the best way to tackle specific problems. Each agency -- the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department Intelligence and Research Bureau and others -- can contribute to such prioritizing. Then it will be up to Goss and the NCS director to coordinate the operations.

The director of NCS will supervise such coordination, but "he will not tell the FBI or DoD [Defense Department] what they can do; they will do their own operation business," one official said. The CIA station chief in foreign countries will be fully briefed on all proposed operations, and any disagreements are to be worked out primarily at the local level.

"Deconfliction," the process of making certain there is no overlapping or conflict among clandestine operators, "is best handled in the field," one of the officials said.

The director of the NCS will have two deputies, one to run CIA clandestine operations and the other to coordinate activities of other overseas operators. The second deputy will also set standards for training by all agencies involved in intelligence, including tradecraft and the vetting or validation of foreign agents or sources being recruited.

Common training, with CIA, FBI and Pentagon officers in the same classes, is already taking place, the officials said.

Karl Rove makes final Grand Jury appearance KHON2
Karl Rove and the man who could indict him were in a federal courthouse throughout Friday morning and into the afternoon as President Bush's top political adviser testified in the ongoing investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative. Rove was in the building for over four hours, and left without speaking to reporters. Instead, his attorney, Robert Luskin, issued a brief statement saying Rove appeared voluntarily. "Karl C. Rove testified voluntarily today before the grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA agent's identity," the statement said. "The Specal Counsel [Patrick Fitzgerald] has not advised Mr. Rove that he is a target of the investigation and affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges." Luskin's statement also said Fitzgerald has asked Rove not to discuss his testimony, but did not anticipate the need for Rove to testify further. Friday was the fourth time Rove has been before that grand jury, which is set to wrap up its term Oct. 28, barring a possible extension. The investigation centers around the question of who "outed" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative back in 2003 — an action Bush critics say was taken in retaliation for Plame's husband's public criticisms of the White House regarding the Iraq war. Rove has acknowledged talking to two reporters on the subject, but saying he only spoke about Plame and did not name her or disclose her status at the CIA — whether she was covert or not. At the time of the alleged "outing," Plame was working at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Whether or not she technically was considered "covert" at the time of the name leak is part of the controversy. If Fitzgerald does not obtain an indictment before Oct. 28, he might have to start all over again and presenting evidence and testimony before a brand new grand jury. He could, alternatively, obtain a six-month extension of the grand jury. Fitzgerald has reportedly declined to assure Rove's attorney that the White House official will not be indicted. Legal experts say it is not unusual for a witness to be called back before the grand jury, although with repeat appearances comes the risk of inconsistent statements.

White House: 'No Comment'
The White House has gone from issuing strong denials that Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were involved in the leak and promising to fire anyone involved in the leak to a posture of "no comment" on Friday. After Rove's testimony, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked whether Rove still had the president's confidence. He would say only, "Karl continues to do his duties." McClellan said he was declining to comment on all questions that touched on the grand jury matter. "The president made it very clear, we're not going to comment on an ongoing investigation," he told reporters. Instead, the spokesman said the president and his staff are focusing on Saturday's constitutional referendum in Iraq, continuing the rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina, avian flu concerns and other issues. In an exclusive interview Friday with FOX News' Brit Hume, Cheney would not discuss the topic. "I'm simply not at liberty to discuss the issue. I understand you've got to ask those questions, but it is an ongoing investigation, and we're under instructions not to discuss the matter, so therefore I can't discuss the matter," Cheney said. Whether Rove's involvement in the scandal will hurt the White House remains to be seen, as does what will happen to Rove when the CIA leak investigation is over, political observers told FOX News on Friday. "Certainly, the specter of this grand jury investigation hanging over the White House doesn't help the president's approval ratings," Washington Times columnist Bill Sammon told FOX News. But whether Rove will be charged, "it's anybody's guess," Sammon said. "We just don't know what [Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald] will do." Democratic strategist Doug Schoen told FOX News that the White House's backing off of Rove and Libby's assertions that they were not involved puts the two men in jeopardy. "I think they are both at risk and it creates a [political] diversion at the very least," Schoen said. The spotlight in Fitzgerald's investigation recently has fallen on Libby, who was the focus of prosecutors' questions in two grand jury appearances by New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Miller was recently released after spending more than 80 days in jail over her refusal to testify on the matter. After getting confirmation that she had been released by her confidential source, Libby, to talk, she agreed to testify. Miller has since discussed her conversations with the vice president's top aide about Plame, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Legal Options
But the legal path that Fitzgerald could take is yet to be determined, FOX News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told FOXNews.com. Napolitano says the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 is the main law that could be used to show criminal wrong-doing, however, it poses a difficult standard for prosecutors to prove. For one, Rove would have had to have learned Plame's identity from some officially classified source. Learning the identity from a reporter does not meet the test, Napolitano said. Also, Plame would have to have been covert, but Napolitano said her covert status is highly questionable because of reports that Plame's role with the CIA was widely known throughout Washington. The government must also prove that it had spent considerable efforts in maintaining her covert identity either at the time of her outing or in the recent past, Napolitano said. While a specific violation of that law might be difficult to prove, Napolitano said others might not be so complex, and Fitzgerald's historical background leads him to believe that it's likely a charge will emerge. The grounds for other possible charges include: perjury — lying about subjects directly related to the investigation; a lesser charge for making up information not directly related to the investigation; obstruction of justice; or conspiracy-related charges. Napolitano said the most worrisome charge likely would be a conspiracy charge related to the 1982 law. For instance, if Rove and Libby agreed at one point to out Plame to get back at Wilson, and either one of them took any action to continue on that agreement, the prosecutor could pursue a conspiracy charge. A conviction on the charge would net no less than four years in prison. The investigation's roots lie in statements Wilson made in a newspaper column that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq. Eight days after Wilson made his allegations, columnist Robert Novak identified Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, saying she had suggested her husband for a mission to Africa for the agency. Novak said his sources were two senior administration officials. Rove spoke to Novak about Wilson's wife and is apparently one of Novak's sources. The other is still a public mystery. Novak is believed to have cooperated with Fitzgerald's investigation, though he has declined to comment on the matter. The White House denials of Rove's and Libby's involvement collapsed three months ago, when Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper testified that Rove had been one of his sources for a story that identified Wilson's wife. Libby was another of Cooper's sources for the story.
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Many Democrats reserving judgment on Miers Boston Globe
Despite vows to fight President Bush's next conservative Supreme Court nominee, Senate Democrats and leading liberal groups are largely holding their fire over Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers, calculating that their best move is to stay out of the conservative movement's internal battle about whether Miers is the best choice for the high court.
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Wireless World: Industry Mum On Attacks
http://www.spacewar.com/news/cyberwar-05zzc.html

Chicago (UPI) Oct 14, 2005 - Who do most IT professionals call when there has been a breach of security - an attack by hackers seeking to steal information from mobile phones and personal digital assistants? Is it the FBI or the CIA or the NSA or the Department of Homeland Security?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/115..._House_CIA.html

Miller story shows White House-CIA tension

By PETE YOST
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- A New York Times reporter's accounts of her private conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff capture a behind-the-scenes blame game between the White House and the CIA over the war in Iraq.

Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, complained that the CIA and other agencies were trying to shift responsibility to the White House over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction after the U.S.-led invasion, reporter Judith Miller wrote in a first-person story in Sunday's editions.

Miller recounted her recent grand jury testimony, describing her conversations with Libby about Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and his wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

It was Plame's identity that the administration leaked to reporters in an apparent effort to undercut the credibility of her husband. Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, contended the administration manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Miller revealed that Libby referred to Wilson's wife in three conversations, though not by name.

"I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as `selective leaking' by the CIA," Miller wrote. "He told me that the agency was engaged in a 'hedging strategy' to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq."

Amid the ultimately futile hunt for the banned weapons, Libby told Miller that the CIA's strategy was, "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," the reporter recounted.

Libby's "frustration and anger" spilled over into their conversations, Miller wrote, with the Cheney aide describing leaking by the CIA as part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq.

Libby, she said, characterized intelligence agencies' prewar assessments as unequivocal on the question of whether Iraq had the deadly weapons.

The White House's primary justification for invading Iraq and toppling President Saddam Hussein had been the assertion that he had such weapons; U.S. intelligence agencies indeed concluded that was so.

Subsequent inquiries have shown there was dissent among those agencies before the war over some of the data supporting the conclusions.

During the period when Libby was complaining to Miller about CIA leaks, Libby was doing some leaking of his own to Miller about Wilson and his wife, the covert CIA officer.

Libby had persuaded the reporter to refer to him for a prospective story as a "former Hill staffer," a switch from their earlier understanding that Libby should be referred to as a senior administration official.

"I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill," Miller said. "I assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson."

Libby "proceeded through a lengthy and sharp critique of Mr. Wilson and what Mr. Libby viewed as the CIA's backpedaling on the intelligence leading to war," Miller said in describing a two-hour breakfast with Libby at a hotel near the White House in July 2003.

Two days earlier, Wilson wrote an opinion column in the Times in which he leveled the charge against the administration of manipulating prewar intelligence about Iraq's supposed nuclear weapons program.

Miller had written stories before the war supporting the administration's position that Iraq had such a program.

"Although I was interested primarily in my area of expertise - chemical and biological weapons - my notes show that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the administration's nuclear claims," Miller wrote Sunday in The Times.

"His main theme echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson's criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq's nuclear capabilities based on the regime's history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports," she said.

Wilson's criticism came after the CIA had sent him to Africa to check out intelligence that Iraq had an agreement with the government of Niger to acquire uranium yellowcake. When refined, it can be used in nuclear weapons. Wilson's trip prompted his later criticism.

Libby said CIA Director George Tenet had never even heard of Wilson and that a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium. A classified portion of the estimate contained dissent on that point.

Miller said she "pressed Mr. Libby to discuss additional information that was in the more detailed, classified version of the estimate."

"According to my interview notes, though, it appears that Mr. Libby said little more than that the assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version," Miller wrote.

In the end, Tenet said the CIA should never have let President Bush in his State of the Union address repeat a British report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

U.S. intelligence analysts could not corroborate it. The president's deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen Hadley, apologized as well, saying he had received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from Tenet several months before the president's address raising objections to the assertion.

A Year Later, Goss's CIA Is Still in Turmoil

By Dafna Linzer

When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division.

Goss, himself a former covert operative who had chaired the House intelligence committee, focused on the officers in the field. He pledged status and resources for case officers, sending hundreds more to far-off assignments, undercover and on the front line of the battle against al Qaeda.

A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate's second-in-command walked out of Langley last month and then told senators in a closed-door hearing that he had lost confidence in Goss's leadership.

The turmoil has left some employees shaken and has prompted former colleagues in Congress to question how Goss intends to improve the agency's capabilities and restore morale. The White House is aware of the problems, administration officials said, and believes they are being handled by the director of national intelligence, who now oversees the agency.

But the Senate intelligence committee, which generally took testimony once a year from Goss's predecessors, has invited him for an unusual closed-door hearing today. Senators, according to their staff, intend to ask the former congressman from Florida to explain why the CIA is bleeding talent at a time of war, and to answer charges that the agency is adrift.

"Hundreds of years of leadership and experience has walked out the door in the last year," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), "and more senior people are making critical career decisions as we speak."

On a recent visit to a large CIA station in the Middle East, Harman, the ranking Democrat on the same House intelligence panel where Goss once presided, said she asked for a show of hands from those who understood where Goss was leading the agency. "The vast majority didn't know, and they are worried," Harman said in a telephone interview during her trip.

Some of the struggles that have dominated Goss's first year stem from a massive reorganization that stripped the CIA of its leadership role in the intelligence community and made it subservient to a new director of national intelligence. Congress ordered the shake-up after several public investigations blamed the CIA for failing to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, plot and erring in assessments of Iraq's weapons. The probes crippled morale inside the deeply secretive agency. Goss's staff says he is confident he can reshape the CIA and, despite persistent rumors, he has no intention of resigning. "Director Goss loves his job and is dedicated to the CIA team and his vision of modernizing and strengthening our numbers and capabilities across the board," his spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said. "He wants to see that through."

Several moves in recent weeks indicate Goss is trying to address the ill will, which has becoming increasingly public, between his office and career officials at the CIA.

He held an agency-wide meeting to discuss staff concerns last month and later announced that he would not seek to punish career analysts whose poor performances had been singled out in a classified and internal review of the agency's work leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. "Risk is a critical part of the intelligence business," Goss said in a public statement that championed the CIA's successes. "Singling out these individuals would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks." The statement went a long way to quell some of the unhappiness, officials said in interviews.

Harman's Republican counterpart argues that Goss needs to make significant changes, including among personnel, if the agency is to rebuild. "It's going to be very hard to get the change you need if you keep all the same players," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the committee chairman. "Yes, the agency needs to have good morale, but they need to have the right people in the right jobs, and I think that is exactly where Porter is moving to."

Taking over the agency at a turbulent time in its history would not have been an easy task for anyone. It was particularly difficult for Goss, an eight-term congressman who was close to the White House and who became fiercely critical of the CIA.

Shortly before he was nominated for the job, Goss co-authored a scathing indictment of the agency and its popular director, George J. Tenet. In a letter to the agency in May 2004, Goss and several congressional colleagues focused particular wrath on the clandestine service and human intelligence.

"After years of trying to convince, suggest, urge, entice, cajole, and pressure CIA to make wide-reaching changes to the way it conducts its HUMINT mission," the CIA "continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff. The damage to the HUMINT mission through its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the Committee's judgment, significant and could likely be long-lasting."

Goss declined to be interviewed. But some of his close allies say the letter, which they believe he regrets in tone, if not substance, has haunted his first year and accounts for much of the strain between Goss and the clandestine service. "The letter is a pretty clear indication that he didn't expect to get the job," one official said.

Goss, who turns 67 in November, had been preparing to retire from public service and spend more time on a family farm in Virginia when he was asked by Vice President Cheney to stay on as House intelligence chairman after the 2001 attacks. When Tenet resigned in the summer of 2004, Goss was nominated to succeed the longest-serving director in CIA history.

At the time, Congress was working through details of a dramatic refashioning of the bureaucratic landscape, in which a new intelligence czar would oversee not just the CIA but also all intelligence offices in the U.S. government. Goss did not know whether he would eventually become the new director of national intelligence or end up focusing solely on the CIA.

"Porter took over the agency at an extremely difficult time, when his job was going to change fundamentally and the agency's role in the community was going to change," said Mark Lowenthal, a senior manager hired by Tenet. He left the CIA six months into Goss's term; the two have remained friends. "It was a hard time to become director," he said.

Goss divided his attention between the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. In March, President Bush chose as DNI John D. Negroponte, a career foreign service officer and ambassador in Iraq. Negroponte's office is still taking shape, and it is unclear how much control he will exert over the CIA.

But the days of an all-powerful CIA director who reports exclusively to the president are over. Goss no longer has daily access to the Oval Office -- Negroponte is now responsible for briefing the president -- and Goss must coordinate all decisions with Negroponte's office.

Through memos and the recent staff meeting, Goss has tried to assure employees that he has made the transition from critic to champion and that the CIA will remain the country's preeminent intelligence-gathering agency. "CIA is the gold standard when it comes to human intelligence collection," he told the staff in a recent agency-wide meeting.

Among his top priorities is getting spies in the field to work more independently and to rely less on complicated relationships with foreign intelligence services. Some veterans have interpreted that push as either a disinclination to work with others or a rejection of a collection method that is highly valued inside the clandestine service. But Goss believes the agency has leaned too heavily, sometimes to its detriment, on faulty information gleaned from others.

Goss, who served as a CIA operative in Latin America in the 1960s, is also eager to reopen stations there so the agency is prepared when conflicts arise in otherwise quiet areas. That desire has been welcomed even by his critics, but some argue it is still too early in the struggle with al Qaeda to begin moving resources elsewhere.

"The CIA is like a lot of other bureaucracies," said former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a friend of Goss's. "They don't like change and are somewhere between resistant and noncooperative."

In one of his first moves, Goss eliminated a daily 5 p.m. meeting on terrorism, attended by dozens of specialists inside the agency to better coordinate information on al Qaeda. Instead, he asked to be briefed on the subject three times a week in a more intimate setting.

For Goss, the new format worked better, but the abrupt change stirred dissent and suspicion in the agency.

A work trip to picturesque Slovenia had similar consequences. The trip raised eyebrows, from the spy division to the legal department, officials said, because Goss, an avid organic farmer, arranged for one meeting to take place at a local organic farm.

There is also a perception among some at the agency that Goss and his staff are not as engaged as Tenet, a gregarious New Yorker who roamed the halls, chatting up analysts and putting in 16-hour days at headquarters.

Goss's style is more reserved, and his aides said his days are just as long. But not all his work is conducted from behind his desk. "He begins every day with an intelligence update briefing prior to his arrival at the agency," his spokeswoman said. "He has meetings throughout the day; some are at Langley, some are downtown. Some days he stays very late, but every day is different."

In March, Goss complained during a speech that his job was overwhelming and that he was surprised by the number of hours it demanded. "The White House wasn't amused by that," one intelligence community official said. Then in June, Goss told Time magazine that he had "an excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden was but that the United States could not get him because of diplomatic sensitivities. This time, the White House and the State Department publicly disputed the remarks.

In a now-infamous e-mail to overseas station chiefs, Goss said appointments with visiting intelligence chiefs should be arranged for Tuesdays or Thursdays. The memo was apparently meant to assure station chiefs that he was setting aside extra time for important visits, but it bewildered officers in the field.

He eventually corrected the memo but has developed a reputation inside the agency, and out, for being unavailable.

When Goss arrived at the CIA in September 2004 with four GOP aides from Capitol Hill in tow, he was accused of bringing a Republican agenda to an agency that has long sought to distance itself from partisan politics. Personality clashes erupted between his staff and career officials, leading to two high-profile resignations in the clandestine service within six weeks.

Hoping to quell fears that the posts would be filled with political allies, Goss quickly promoted from within. But he has had difficulty retaining senior leaders. Most of those departing are doing so on their own initiative, not Goss's.

In the clandestine service alone, known as the "Directorate of Operations," Goss has lost one director, two deputy directors, and at least a dozen department heads, station chiefs and division directors -- many with the key language skills and experience he has said the agency needs.

"He obviously has a problem with the D.O.," said one ally in the intelligence community who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Some officials resigned in frustration with Goss or his staff; others took early retirement or arranged transfers out of the CIA. Robert Richer, the No. 2 official in the D.O., announced his resignation last month, then shared his concerns about Goss with the Senate intelligence panel.

Shortly afterward, the head of the European division, whose key and undercover role includes overseeing the hunt for al Qaeda on the continent, surprised his staff by announcing his own departure. Equally surprising to some was his destination: the Energy Department's office of intelligence, a small and specialized analytic shop concentrating on nuclear technology. For an operator of his seniority, the career choice was seen as highly unusual.

Goss tried to calm the waters with a town-hall-style meeting on Sept. 23 in the agency's white-domed auditorium, known as "the bubble." He focused again on the need for better and more independent spy work. But the message, one year after he was sworn in, fell short of at least some expectations.

"With all due respect," one junior officer told Goss during the question-and-answer session that followed, "it was a vanilla speech." Another officer asked about Richer's departure and sought assurances that others would stay. "Goss responded fully and made clear the future of the directorate is bright," his spokeswoman said.




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Niger Uranium Forgery
Mystery Solved?
The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the brouhaha over whether I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, or any number of Bush administration insiders had a hand in leaking the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, the essential crime at the core of the investigation – and its probable starting point – often gets lost in the shuffle. The "outing" of Plame was not an end in itself: the outers didn't just one day decide that they were going to go after her and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, her husband, because they were in a vindictive mood. They were out to get them because Wilson drew attention to the provenance of the infamous "16 words" uttered by President Bush in his 2003 state of the union address, in which Bush claimed that Iraq had sought out uranium to make a nuclear bomb in "an African country." Perhaps without knowing it, Wilson – in taking an interest in this subject – was getting too close to the enormous fraud at the center of the War Party's propaganda campaign.

The African country Bush spoke of is Niger, where much of the world's uranium is mined under the watchful eye of a French consortium – and where it would be extremely difficult, if not close to impossible, for the Iraqis to walk off with the tons of uranium required to produce weapons-grade materials. This accountability issue was no doubt a major reason for the skepticism the Niger uranium story engendered in Ambassador Wilson, who was sent to Niger by the CIA to check out the facts – and came back with a negative report. Wilson was therefore shocked to hear the president reiterate a claim that had been previously and definitively debunked, and went public with his mission and its results – but not before the source of that claim had been brutally and publicly refuted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In early October 2002, Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, a writer for Italy's Panorama magazine, delivered some documents to the U.S. embassy in Rome: a cache of letters and other papers purporting to be correspondence between officials of the Niger government and the Iraqis relating to the acquisition of uranium "yellowcake." The documents soon found their way to Washington, D.C., where key administration officials were quick to incorporate them into their "talking points" for war with Iraq – and into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 speech.

When the IAEA asked to see evidence of the administration's contentions, they were put off, until finally the Niger uranium documents were handed over. It took IAEA scientists just a few hours to demonstrate that the documents were not only forgeries, but were particularly crude ones at that – an amateur could have debunked them using Google. As the Washington Post reported, one administration official's response was "We fell for it."

And how! – but that wasn't the end of it, by any means. After all, someone had deliberately set up the American government with false information and badly embarrassed George W. Bush, who had taken the Niger uranium canard and run with it in a very public way. An investigation was launched just as Robert Novak's column outing Plame appeared – mid-July 2003. Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries?

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" scandal by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

Franklin, we now know, was busy spying for Israel during this period, handing over classified information to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman: he has been indicted and has turned state's evidence: the trial is set to begin in January. To this day, Franklin maintains he was just trying to get AIPAC's assistance in moving a more pro-Israel agenda in policymaking circles.

Rhode is an ideologue of a similar coloration. Together with Franklin, Rhode helped set up the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans, which stove-piped phony "intelligence" provided by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and hyped the case for war. Rhode and Franklin worked hand in hand with Chalabi, and, as United Press International intelligence correspondent Richard Sale reports, they had certain interests in common:

"According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, 'Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmed) Chalabi's office.' This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, 'Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel,' and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was 'mind-boggling,' this source said. It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said."

No wonder my source tells me that "Fitzgerald asked the Italians if he could share the report with Paul McNulty," the prosecutor in the AIPAC case. There are plenty of links between the two investigations: they are, in a sense, the same investigation, since many of the same people are involved. McNulty is delving into a single aspect of the cabal's activities, while Fitzgerald seems to have broadened his probe to include not only the outing of Plame, but also the origin of the Niger uranium forgeries and other instances of classified information leakage via the vice president's office.

I am hardly the first to implicate Ledeen in connection with the Niger uranium forgeries. Former CIA counterterrorism officials Vince Cannistraro and Larry Johnson have pointed the finger in Ledeen's direction. As the latter put it:

"Italy's SISME [sic] also reportedly had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome in early October 2003 that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neocon with long-standing ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain, either SISME or someone with ties to SISME, helped forge and circulate those documents which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq."

Cannistraro, asked by an interviewer if Ledeen was involved with the forgers, said "you'd be very close."

The cast of characters involved in Niger-gate is like old home week in the government scandal sweepstakes. Aside from Ledeen, whose storied (or is that checkered?) history is well-known, we have Clarridge, first head of the Counterterrorism Center set up by Bill Casey under Reagan, who deserves a column all by himself. His close relationship with Ledeen dates from his time as chief of station in Rome in the late 1970s. Clarridge was indicted for lying to prosecutors during the Iran-Contra imbroglio, but given a presidential pardon. His book, A Spy for All Seasons, was the first real "tell-all" book about the Agency. During the Reagan administration, he purportedly was the intellectual author of the notorious "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare," a CIA how-to manual instructing the Nicaraguan contras in the fine art of terrorism, including bombings, assassinations, and violence directed at noncombatants. It was Clarridge who came up with the bright idea of mining Nicaragua's harbors, which led to the unprecedented condemnation of the U.S. government's actions in the World Court. He was reportedly slated to become a top counterterrorism official in the National Security Council, but was nixed. He now lives in San Diego, Calif., and pursues a number of business and ideological interests, including Dax Resources Corp., which runs a 24-hour Global Response Center and advertises its facility at kidnap prevention and counterterrorism, noting that "we can also undertake special operations, including technical countermeasures."

The Niger uranium forgeries surely qualify as "technical countermeasures," popping up as they did just as the administration's assertions about Iraq's alleged nuclear ambitions and capability were being questioned. As Seymour Hersh pointed out, CIA director George Tenet appeared at a crucial congressional briefing, on the eve of the vote on authorizing the war, and

"Declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the CIA had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers."

The story of how the Niger uranium forgeries got past all the safeguards, how the actual documents were never seen by the CIA until after the president's 2003 speech, and who was pushing to include a reference to Saddam's alleged efforts to procure uranium in "an African nation" as one of the president's major talking points – these are all subjects of interest to a prosecutor attempting to prove charges of conspiracy to lie us into war. There must be a special law that covers government employees, including high officials, who transmit tainted information and poison the well of U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts. I'm sure Fitzgerald will have no trouble finding it.

Fitzgerald's reported interest in the Italian parliamentary report indicates just how his investigation is broadening. The forgeries, the lies fed to us by Ahmed Chalabi and his fellow "heroes in error," the leakage of vital U.S. secrets to the Iranians – all point to the existence of the conspiracy the prosecutor is tasked with uncovering. In the course of their campaign of deception, the conspirators not only outed a CIA agent who was working in the vital area of nuclear proliferation, they also passed on classified information to foreign nationals, including the Israelis and the Iranians. They committed forgery and God knows what other crimes.

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. As the indictments come down, so will the elaborate narrative so carefully constructed by the War Party in the run-up to war be exposed as a tissue of fabrication, forgery, and fraud.

– Justin Raimondo

Some media observers call NY Times leak report insufficient Boston Globe
A long tell-all by reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times has done little to exonerate the newspaper for its handling of the case in which a CIA operative was exposed, media observers said yesterday, and raised new questions about journalistic ethics. After the publication in the Times on Sunday of a 5,800-word account of the saga, some media analysts called on the influential newspaper to dismiss the reporter and others said it needs to give a fuller explanation. Miller, who covers national security, spent 85 days in jail rather than reveal a source's name to prosecutors in the leak probe. Then a deal was worked out for her to testify before the grand jury in the case. When she testified, Miller said she could not remember where she learned the CIA operative's name. In the published account, Miller said she ''didn't think" she was given the name by Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who had been identified as her source. Media critics said her explanation was hard to fathom and they criticized Times editors for what they called lack of oversight. The article also failed to explain why Miller tried to avoid testifying and why she never wrote a story about the events, they said. ''It's quite possible that of all the scandals and disturbances that the Times has gone through, this is the worst," said Michael Wolff, a media critic for Vanity Fair. While the account was unusually revealing, said Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, ''Judith Miller's future is really in question. Her attempt to defend herself leaves a deep, self-inflicted wound." She made matters worse, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University. ''She subtracted from public knowledge by introducing this unknown source whose name she couldn't remember," Rosen said. ''It's almost like the gaps in the Nixon tapes." Inside the Times newsroom, reporters were angry and disappointed. ''People here are seething. They want some resolution," said one senior reporter. Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who heads the Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said the paper's credibility is in question. The Times already was trying to recover from the damage inflicted when former reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated stories for years. ''They have to go back and explain what happened," said Jones. ''If they don't, the Times's credibility will be severely damaged." Media critic Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, however, said it was plausible Miller could have forgotten a source's name. ''It's not like [Robert] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein forgetting the identify of Deep Throat," he said. But others were less forgiving. ''She should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism and her own newspaper," wrote Greg Mitchell, editor for the newspaper trade journal Editor and Publisher. Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said she had no immediate response to the media critics. One bright spot for Miller: The Society of Professional Journalists plans to honor her today with its First Amendment Award for her willingness to go to jail rather than give up a source.
Key CIA leak detail disputed as announcement nears Reuters
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War and Intelligence
The Wrong Operative in Charge?
By CHET RICHARDS

"Guerrilla warfare isn't about holding terrain," as the late Colonel David Hackworth summed up Vietnam. "It's about making us bleed until we give up and leave." The latest casualty figures from Iraq put the insurgency on a trend to be averaging 100 US fatalities per month by the 2006 election. The insurgents have thrown off Secretary Rumsfeld's dismissal as a few "dead enders" and appear to be edging perilously close to Colonel Hackworth's goal. How could this be happening to the world's only superpower?

For an explanation, one might look to December 14, 2004, when President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to George Tenet, former director of the CIA. This struck many people as odd even back then because he had nearly cost George Bush reelection. Tenet had assured the president that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction and also pursued an active nuclear weapons development program, both of which turned out to be imaginary. The intelligence community, of which Tenet was the titular head, had previously failed to comprehend preparations for the 9/11 attacks, which turned out to be quite real. So instead of basking in the adulation of the party faithful, Karl Rove spent many sleepless nights down in the White House basement plotting strategy.

Fortunately for Rove, he had material he could spin. Despite intelligence failures comparable to any in the history of this republic, the blitzkrieg of Iraq succeeded with even fewer troops than the Army had requested, election season was underway in the Arab world for the first time anyone could remember, and Osama and the Taliban were banished from Afghanistan. So who needs the CIA; who needs intelligence?

Apparently the answer is us. The election safely over, reality now intrudes: an intractable insurgency in Iraq and failure to eliminate al-Qa'ida and its allies. We need to start using intelligence more effectively against this new generation of opponents who are perhaps more ruthless and certainly more capable than Saddam or the Taliban.

Here is some advice based on 18 years in the business. Leaders determined to learn the truth won't get it waiting around for the CIA. For one thing, nobody can brief the president on who is cooking up what plots in all the dark corners of the world. When trying to understand clever human opponents, there just isn't a neat set of dots waiting to be found and connected. Instead, there are streaks, splotches of gray, and sundry reports of dots, many of which will conflict, and intelligence analysts can connect them in any number of ways.

The process of understanding is also clouded by the natural tendency of subordinates to tell the boss whatever they think he or she wants to hear. Unless senior leaders signal by their actions that they are interested in what could go wrong, they will be assured that everything will be all right. "Signal by their actions" means fire sycophants, not award them medals. It is brutal, but goes with the job. All leaders like to think of themselves as heirs of Napoleon and Patton, but these commanders achieved greatness by ensuring that people told them the truth.

The late Air Force Colonel John Boyd, one of this country's most influential strategists, insisted that great leaders start their campaigns by aggressively probing and testing. They keep at it until they force potential adversaries to reveal their intentions and capabilities. This turns splotches into something more closely resembling dots, at least for a while. The president and senior leaders have the power to focus national intelligence and keep it focused until they are satisfied with the results. Did we do this in Iraq? Well, did we believe Saddam when said he had weapons of mass destruction?

How much probing is enough? We've spent $300 billion trying to recover from our failure to use intelligence properly in Iraq and could spend as much as $450 billion more. Certainly some small fraction of this amount could have could have discovered the truth during the dozen years between Gulf Wars I and II.

There is, fortunately, a rule of thumb that has come down through the ages. The greatest of all strategists, the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, wrote that to ensure victory, you must know the enemy as well as you know yourself. Applying this test to Iraq reveals the root of our problems. Perhaps never in history has an administration understood the domestic situation as well as the president's political advisors. They took nothing for granted and probed and tested the electorate and the Kerry campaign at every turn. No illusion went unquestioned that might threaten the future of the administration. Pity we didn't have Karl Rove running the CIA and George Tenet heading the reelection campaign.

Chet Richards is a retired intelligence analyst and Air Force Colonel. He is the author of an upcoming analysis of fourth generation warfare, "Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead," which will be released by the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information later this fall.

America's Ministry of Propaganda Exposed -- Part One
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
November 7, 2003
A Strategy of Lies: How the White House Fed the Public a Steady Diet of Falsehoods


Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus.
Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn't waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to "market" the military invasion of Iraq.

Gardiner has credentials. He has taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and was a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College.

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a "meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner's final assessment "irresponsible in parts" and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to create an Office of Strategic Influence early in 2002. At the same time British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Strategy Director Alastair Campbell was setting up an identical operation in London.


As soon as Pvt. Jessica Lynch was airlifted from her hospital bed, the first call from her "rescue team" went, not to military officials but to Jim Wilkinson, the White House's top propaganda official stationed in Iraq.
White House critics were quick to recognize that "strategic influence" was a euphemism for disinformation. Rumsfeld had proposed establishing the country's first Ministry of Propaganda.

The criticism was so severe that the White House backed away from the plan. But on November 18, several months after the furor had died down, Rumsfeld arrogantly announced that he had not been deterred. "If you want to savage this thing, fine: I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done -- and I have."

Gardiner's dogged research identified a long list of stories that passed through Rumsfeld's propaganda mill. According to Gardiner, "there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people." Those stories include:



The link between terrorism, Iraq and 9/11

Iraqi agents meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta

Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons.

Iraq's purchase of nuclear materials from Niger.

Saddam Hussein's development of nuclear weapons.

Aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons

The existence of Iraqi drones, WMD cluster bombs and Scud missiles.

Iraq's threat to target the US with cyber warfare attacks.

The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

The surrender of a 5,000-man Iraqi brigade.

Iraq executing Coalition POWs.

Iraqi soldiers dressing in US and UK uniforms to commit atrocities.

The exact location of WMD facilities

WMDs moved to Syria.

Every one of these stories received extensive publicity and helped form indelible public impressions of the "enemy" and the progress of the invasion. Every one of these stories was false.

"I know what I am suggesting is serious. I did not come to these conclusions lightly," Gardiner admits. "I'm not going to address why they did it. That's something I don't understand even after all the research." But the fact remained that "very bright and even well-intentioned officials found how to control the process of governance in ways never before possible."

A Battle between Good and Evil
Gardiner notes that cocked-up stories about Saddam's WMDs "was only a very small part of the strategic influence, information operations and marketing campaign conducted on both sides of the Atlantic."
The "major thrust" of the campaign, Gardiner explains, was "to make a conflict with Iraq seem part of a struggle between good and evil. Terrorism is evil... we are the good guys.

"The second thrust is what propaganda theorists would call the 'big lie.' The plan was to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks."

The means for pushing the message involved: saturating the media with stories, 24/7; staying on message; staying ahead of the news cycle; managing expectations; and finally, being prepared to "use information to attack and punish critics."

Audition in Afghanistan
The techniques that proved so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom were first tried out during the campaign to build public support for the US attack on Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld hired Rendon Associates, a private PR firm that had been deeply involved in the first Gulf War. Founder John Rendon (who calls himself an "information warrior") proudly boasts that he was the one responsible for providing thousands of US flags for the Kuwaiti people to wave at TV cameras after their "liberation" from Iraqi troops in 1991.

The White House Coalition Information Center was set up by Karen Hughes in November 2001. (In January 2003, the CIC was renamed the Office for Global Communications.) The CIC hit on a cynical plan to curry favor for its attack on Afghanistan by highlighting "the plight of women in Afghanistan." CIC's Jim Wilkinson later called the Afghan women campaign "the best thing we've done."

Gardiner is quick with a correction. The campaign "was not about something they did. It was about a story they created... It was not a program with specific steps or funding to improve the conditions of women."

The coordination between the propaganda engines of Washington and London even involved the respective First Wives. On November 17, 2001, Laura Bush issued a shocking statement: "Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish." Three days later, a horrified Cherie Blaire told the London media, "In Afghanistan, if you wear nail polish, you could have your nails torn out."

Misleading via Innuendo
Time and again, US reporters accepted the CIC news leaks without question. Among the many examples that Gardiner documented was the use of the "anthrax scare" to promote the administration's pre-existing plan to attack Iraq.

In both the US and the UK, "intelligence sources" provided a steady diet of unsourced allegations to the media to suggest that Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists were behind the deadly mailing of anthrax-laden letters.

It wasn't until December 18, that the White House confessed that it was "increasingly looking like" the anthrax came from a US military installation. The news was released as a White House "paper" instead of as a more prominent White House "announcement." As a result, the idea that Iraq or Al Qaeda were behind the anthrax plot continued to persist. Gardiner believes this was an intentional part of the propaganda campaign. "If a story supports policy, even if incorrect, let it stay around."

In a successful propaganda campaign, Gardiner wrote, "We would have expected to see the creation [of] stories to sell the policy; we would have expected to see the same stories used on both sides of the Atlantic. We saw both. The number of engineered or false stories from US and UK stories is long."

The US and Britain: The Axis of Disinformation
Before the coalition invasion began on March 20, 2003, Washington and London agreed to call their illegal pre-emptive military aggression an "armed conflict" and to always reference the Iraqi government as the "regime." Strategic communications managers in both capitols issued lists of "guidance" terms to be used in all official statements. London's 15 Psychological Operations Group paralleled Washington's Office of Global Communications.

In a departure from long military tradition, the perception managers even took over the naming of the war. Military code names were originally chosen for reasons of security. In modern US warfare, however, military code names have become "part of the marketing." There was Operation Nobel Eagle, Operation Valiant Strike, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and, finally, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The "Rescue" of Jessica Lynch
The Pentagon's control over the news surrounding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives a good deal of attention in Gardiner's report. "From the very beginning it was called an 'ambush'," Gardiner noted. But, he pointed out, "If you drive a convoy into enemy lines, turn around and drive back, it's not an ambush. Military officers who are very careful about how they talk about operations would normally not be sloppy about describing this kind of event," Gardiner complained. "This un-military kind of talk is one of the reasons I began doing this research."

One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: "as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks."

It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch's rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House's top representative on the ground.

On the morning of April 3, the Pentagon began leaking information on Lynch's rescue that sought to establish Lynch as "America's new Rambo." The Washington Post repeated the story it received from the Pentagon: that Lynch "sustained multiple gunshot wounds" and fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldier... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."

Lynch's family confused the issue by telling the press that their daughter had not sustained any bullet wounds. Lynch's parents subsequently refused to talk to the press, explaining that they had been "told not to talk about it." (Weeks later, the truth emerged. Lynch was neither stabbed nor shot. She was apparently injured while falling from her vehicle.)

Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers let the story stand during an April 3 press conference although both had been fully briefed on Lynch's true condition.

"Again, we see the pattern," Gardiner observed. "When the story on the street supports the message, it will be left there by a non-answer. The message is more important than the truth. Even Central Command kept the story alive by not giving out details."

Gardiner saw another break with procedure. The information on the rescue that was released to the Post "would have been very highly classified" and should have been closely guarded. Instead, it was used as a tool to market the war. "This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war," Gardiner wrote. "It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gar Smith is Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal, Roving Editor at The-Edge (www.the-edge.org) and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War (www.envirosagainstwar.org).


For more information contact:
Col. Sam Gardiner's entire 56-page report is available in six PDF files that can be accessed beginning with:
www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/documents/truth_1.pdf

On October 21, Col. Gardiner [10/21/03] was interviewed on the Paul Harris Radio Show on The Big 550 KTRS in St. Louis.
The Real Audio interview (and another link to the PDF files) can be found here:
www.harrisonline.com/audio/listings/samgardiner.htm

THE-EDGE is a project of Earth Island Institute.

(510) THE-EDGE (843-3343)
E-mail us at gsmith@earthisland.org

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051019/...vert_action.php

Dick Cheney's Covert Action
Larry C. Johnson
October 19, 2005


Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Face it, America. You’ve been punk'd.

It is now quite clear that the outing of Valerie Plame was part of a broader White House effort to mislead and manipulate U.S. public opinion as part of an orchestrated effort to take us to war. The unraveling of the Valerie Plame affair has exposed their scam—and it extends well beyond compromising the identity of a CIA officer. In short, the Bush administration organized and executed a classic “covert action” program against the citizens of the United States.

Covert action refers to behind-the-scenes efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to plant stories, manipulate information and shape public opinion. In other words, you write stories that reporters will publish as their own, you create media events that tout a particular theme, and you demonize your opponent. Traditionally, this activity was directed against foreign governments. For example, the U.S. used covert action extensively in Greece in the 1960s to help fend off communists. Covert action also played a major role in rallying world support for the Afghanistan mujahideen following the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Revelations during the past week about the Plame affair make it clear that the Bush administration used covert action against its own citizens. Consider, for example, the charge that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The key event in this disinformation campaign was the intelligence manufactured by the Italians. The Italian intelligence service, SISME, provided the CIA with three separate intelligence reports that Iraq had reached an agreement with Niger to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium (October 15, 2001; February 5, 2002; and March 25, 2002). The second report, from February, was the subsequent basis for a DIA analysis, which led Vice President Cheney to ask the CIA for more information on the matter. That request led to the CIA asking Ambassador Joe Wilson to go check out the story in Niger.

We learned last May that in the summer of 2002, the Bush administration told our British allies that they would "fix the facts" around the intelligence. In other words, the United States sought to manufacture a case that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear capability. Note, not only did bogus intelligence reports and fabricated documents surface, but senior administration officials—Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney—went to great lengths to try to convince Americans that the United States would soon face the wrath of Iraqi attacks. Remember the smoking mushroom cloud?

Despite repeated attempts by the Italian intelligence service to help us cook the books, the senior CIA intelligence analysts resisted the administration’s effort to sell the bogus notion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger. Even in the much-maligned October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the entire intelligence community remained split on the reliability of the Iraq/Niger claim. During briefings subsequent to the publication of the NIE, senior CIA officials repeatedly debunked the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. They also dismissed as unreliable reports from Great Britain, which also were derived from the faulty Italian intelligence reports.

It is now clear that Italy’s intelligence service, SISME, had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in early October 2003 that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neocon with longstanding ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain: Either SISME or someone with ties to SISME helped forge and circulate those documents, which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq.

Although some in the intelligence community, specifically analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy, believed the report, the intelligence community as a whole did not put much stock in the reports and forged documents, and repeatedly told policy makers that these reports were not reliable. Yet the Bush administration ignored the intelligence community on these questions, and senior policymakers—like Vice President Cheney—persisted in trying to make the fraudulent case.

Two weeks before President Bush spoke the infamous 16 words in the January 2003 State of the Union speech, the Department of Defense was fanning the flames about Iraq’s alleged Nigerian uranium shopping trip. Starting in late 2001, senior Department of Defense officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, provided favored military talking heads with talking points and briefings to reinforce messages the administration wanted the public to remember.

One of those who frequently attended these affairs, Robert Maginnis, a former Army officer and now a commentator for Fox News and the Washington Times , published an op-ed on January 15, 2003, for United Press International, subsequent to one of the briefings. In writing about the case for attacking Iraq, Maginnis affirmed that Saddam, “failed to explain why Iraq manufactures fuels suited only for a class of missile that it does not admit to having and why it sought to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger.”

Notwithstanding repeated efforts by intelligence analysts to downplay these intelligence reports as unreliable, DOD officials fanned the flames. This, my friends, is one example of “cooking intelligence.” These facts further expose as farce the Bush administration’s effort to blame the CIA for the misadventure in Iraq. We did not go to war in Iraq primarily because of bad intelligence and bad analysis by the CIA. The Bush administration started a war of choice.

While CIA did make mistakes, and while some key members of the National Intelligence Council were willing to drink the neocon Kool-Aid and go along with the White House, when it came to questions of whether Iraq was buying uranium in Niger or if Saddam was working with bin Laden, CIA and INR analysts consistently got it right and told the administration what they did not want to hear. It was policymakers, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, NSC Chief Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored what the analysts were saying and writing.

The evidence of the White House effort to manipulate and shape U.S. public opinion is now overwhelming. Just last week, President Bush appeared in a pathetic scripted “dialogue” with hand-selected U.S. troops. We also know that male escort Jeff Gannon Guckert was granted special access to White House press briefings and that pundits like Armstrong Williams sold themselves to the White House. The Bush administration had an organized campaign to manipulate the U.S. media to get its message out. Unfortunately, the corporate media played along.

The attack on Valerie Plame Wilson was not an isolated incident. It was part of a broader pattern of manipulation and deceit. But this was not done for the welfare of U.S. national security. Instead, we find ourselves confronted by an unprecedented level of terrorist attacks and a deteriorating military situation in Iraq. At the same time, we now know that the Bush administration gladly sacrificed an undercover intelligence officer in order to keep up the pretense that the war in Iraq was all about weapons of mass destruction.

Americans have died because of the Bush deceit. The unmasking of Valerie Plame was not an odd occurrence. It was part of a pattern of deliberate manipulation and disinformation. At the end of the day, American men and women have died because of this lie. It is up to the American people to hold the Bush administration accountable for these actions.

Inaccurate Info May Help CIA Leak Probe AP
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff apparently gave New York Times reporter Judith Miller inaccurate information about where Valerie Plame worked in the CIA, a mistake that could be important to the criminal investigation. Miller's notes say I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told her on July 8, 2003, that the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson worked for the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control unit.
Leak Case Shines Light on White House AP
What's Known and Unknown KR via Y! News - Slideshow: CIA Leak Case

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher...-th_b_9203.html

Patrick Fitzgerald and the NeoCons


As rumors swirl that key NeoCons are frantically speed-dialing their lawyers in PlameGate, it's important to remember that if and when Richard Perle gets handed an indictment from Patrick Fitzgerald he is the only one we know of who will have to ask -- in what case?

In his day job as US Attorney in Chicago, Fitzgerald is also looking into Perle's activities on the board of Hollinger International, one of the country's largest media empires.

His investigation focuses on how exactly big NeoCon chiseler Lord Conrad Black allegedly looted the company of some $540 million.

According to shareholders who are desperately trying to get their money back, Perle both enabled Black's generosity to himself and was also one of the beneficiaries of Black's largesse.

As part of the SEC investigation Perle had received a Wells notice, "a formal warning that the agency's enforcement staff has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit."

Then recently, in his dogged climb to the top of the crap heap upon which Black himself is perched, Fitzgerald managed to flip Chicago Sun-Times publisher David Radler, who has agreed to serve 29 months and turn state's evidence.

We'll pause here for a moment to enjoy a roundly amusing side note regarding Radler, which ought to entertain anyone who relishes the thought of these kleptocratic white collar creeps behind bars:

Radler... is a notorious germaphobe and hypochrondiac, according to an ex-colleague.

During his years traversing the country as an executive for Black's Hollinger International, he refused to stay in any hotel other than the Four Seasons. A source related the tale of when, years ago, company execs were on a road show meeting with prospective investors in a Four Seasons-less Cincinnati.

When meetings wrapped up, Radler insisted the group fly back to Chicago and then return to Cincinnati for more meetings the next day — rather than stay in a non-Four Seasons.

On the company's Challenger jet, Radler stocked pantries with antibiotics and cleaning supplies. And when he arrived in Toronto during the SARS scare, Radler de-planed wearing a surgical mask. "It was a flying pharmacy," said a source. "He'd better be working in the prison laundry."

Stateville Prison/Four Seasons. Been to both. Big difference.

Anyway, as part of Radler's deal, he'll be cooperating with the SEC's case that already has Perle in the crosshairs and which Fitzgerald asked to intervene in this last March.

And to make matters worse, Hollinger's board just censured Perle in an internal company report, and they are reportedly suing him. Fellow board member Henry Kissinger and others settled a $50 million lawsuit with Hollinger shareholders in May, which also delightfully teases that there may criminal charges waiting for that old warmonger, too. But it is Perle who really has his neck in the noose.

Fitzgerald's investigation has already inflicted a severe case of dyspepsia to the BushCo. aparatus who have definitely been off their game since Matt Cooper testified last summer, and it looks like he's also having an effect on the international front since many of the bad guys are running for cover.

In an article entitled Corridors of Power: Return of Diplomacy UPI reports that after the recent deal with North Korea went down, one diplomat quipped, "This would never have happened if Richard Perle were alive."

But the good news in all of this is that Fitzgerald gets it. He sees into the ugly, greedy, oozing heart of the NeoCon kleptocracy, its mafia-like structure and the all-too-cozy overlap between the war party and the profiteers, and it pisses him off. "Shareholders in public companies have a right to expect that their monies will be managed properly by officers and directors and that the officers and directors won't steal it," he said.

Fitzgerald has also been busy indicting henchmen of the cravenly corrupt Daley administration, proving along the way that a) he is non-partisan in his pursuit and just as willing to throw a beating to crooked Democrats, and he is, as he was once described, Elliot Ness with a sense of humor.

Let's hope Mr. Fitzgerald can put a few more NeoCons in the "posthumous" category before this is all over.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20051020...eycialongatodds

Cheney, CIA Long at Odds
By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writers
Thu Oct 20, 7:55 AM ET



WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Dick Cheney has tussled with the CIA, first as secretary of Defense and later as vice president. Now that long and tortured history forms the backdrop of a federal probe into who named an undercover agency officer — an inquiry that is centering in part on Cheney's office.

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has interviewed not only the vice president but also his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and several other current and former Cheney aides as he seeks to learn who told reporters about the agent and whether anyone obstructed his inquiry.

Cheney's long relationship with Libby, and their shared doubts about the CIA, help explain why the vice president and his staff would draw the prosecutor's interest. Fitzgerald is in the final stages of deciding whether to issue indictments, according to defense lawyers in the case, and his decision could roil a White House struggling with sinking poll numbers, a troubled Supreme Court nomination and other problems.

Fitzgerald is trying to determine who revealed the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover officer and the wife of former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had publicly accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to rally support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Initially, Fitzgerald was investigating whether Plame was unmasked in an effort to undermine her husband's credibility by suggesting that a fact-finding mission he undertook for the CIA was the result of nepotism. However, the inquiry has broadened to questions of perjury, obstruction of justice and possibly conspiracy to violate laws on classified materials.

Fitzgerald has learned about ongoing tensions between Cheney's circle and the CIA. According to a former White House official interviewed by The Times, Libby and others in the White House were incensed by Wilson's public criticism, in part because they saw it as a salvo fired by the CIA at administration officials, including Cheney, who was perhaps the most outspoken advocate of the case against Iraq.

Witnesses have told Fitzgerald about those tensions. New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote recently that she told the grand jury that Libby had been angry with the CIA in the months after the invasion of Iraq, saying that President Bush might have made inaccurate statements about Iraqi weapons programs because the agency did not discuss its doubts.

Cheney and Libby have worked together for years. As secretary of Defense for President George H.W. Bush, Cheney hired Libby in a senior role. As vice president, Cheney brought Libby on as his top aide and national security advisor. The two are said to be so close personally and ideologically that some refer to Libby as "Cheney's Cheney."

In addition to Cheney and Libby, Fitzgerald has interviewed aides Mary Matalin, John Hannah and Cathie Martin. Jennifer Millerwise, a former media aide now working as CIA communications director, was questioned two years ago.

The fact that Cheney has only been questioned once could suggest that the prosecutor, though interested in Cheney's office, is not focused on the vice president. Fitzgerald has shown strong interest in senior White House advisor Karl Rove, who has testified to the grand jury four times.

Cheney's skepticism of the CIA dates to the late 1980s, when the agency failed to predict the Soviet Union's breakup, according to a source familiar with Cheney's thinking. When then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and the first Bush administration began to ponder its military options, it became clear to Cheney that the intelligence community had a poor understanding of Iraq's arsenal.

Libby, who was working for Cheney, assigned an aide to conduct a secret investigation of Hussein's biological warfare capabilities and his likely reactions to a U.S. invasion.

"Libby's basic view of the world is that the CIA has blown it over and over again," said the source, who declined to be identified because he had spoken with Libby confidentially. "Libby and Cheney were [angry] that we had not been prepared for the potential in the first Gulf War."

In the view of the officials who went on to form George W. Bush's war Cabinet, the CIA continued to blunder through the 1990s. In 1998, for example, the CIA failed to anticipate India's testing of a nuclear weapon.

After President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, Cheney immediately established the vice president's office as a second base of foreign policy and intelligence inside the White House, in addition to the National Security Council. Cheney not only received a daily briefing from the CIA, he frequently sat in on the president's briefing and the "principals' meetings" held to assess serious foreign policy and national security issues.

Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Cheney worked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to challenge CIA findings that countered their expectations or that disagreed with information they had received through their own intelligence channels.

Cheney traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a dozen times, most often to discuss Iraq's possible links to nuclear weapons and terrorism. Agency veterans have said that Cheney's visits were more frequent than those of any other president or vice president, including the first president Bush, a former director of the agency.

When Cheney visited the CIA, Iraq was his main focus, particularly in the months before the war. Unlike Libby and others working with the vice president, Cheney was reportedly always polite. But in his quiet way, he was insistent, sometimes asking the same question again and again as if he hoped the answer would change, according to people familiar with his contacts with the CIA.

Cheney's visits perked up agency analysts who often worked anonymously, said one former official. Many reportedly enjoyed the challenge of a smart questioner and appreciated his interest. But Cheney's visits and his clinging to certain views became noticeable and drew expressions of concern, according to the former official.

For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks.

Nonetheless, the agency continued to receive dozens of inquiries on the topic from top officials — several times from Cheney himself. Despite the agency warnings, Cheney made reference to the Atta meeting as if it were a sure thing.

"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The allegation was not backed up with reliable intelligence, as Cheney and his staff had been repeatedly told, according to a former CIA official. The matter was addressed in public when senators asked CIA Director Porter J. Goss during his confirmation hearings last year to assess the accuracy of Cheney's allegations.

"I don't think it was as well-confirmed perhaps as the vice president thought," said Goss, a Florida Republican who had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "But I don't know what was in the vice president's mind, and I've certainly never talked with him about this. So I don't know how we came to that conclusion."

Asked by Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) (D-Mich.) whether the assertion was "worthy of correction," Goss said he might have intervened had he been in charge at the time. "If I were confronted with that kind of a hypothetical, where I felt that a policymaker was getting beyond what the intelligence said, I think I would advise the person involved," Goss said.

Cheney also frequently spoke with certainty throughout 2002 about Iraq and its pursuit of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Addressing Korean War veterans in Texas that August, he predicted that Hussein, armed with nuclear weapons, would "be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, to take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, and to directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

"Simply stated," Cheney continued, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us."

A presidential commission on intelligence led by senior federal Judge Laurence H. Silberman concluded that questioning of intelligence analysts by outsiders was healthy, and said in March in its final report on the Iraq war that the "intelligence community did not make or change any analytical judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion."

Nonetheless, the tensions between the vice president's office and the CIA increased as investigators failed to find weapons of mass destruction. White House staffers feared they would be blamed by the CIA for encouraging misleading intelligence estimates, one former official said.

Then, Wilson's account of his CIA mission to Niger embarrassed the White House by undermining the administration's claim that Iraq had sought nuclear materials from Africa.

Fitzgerald has been told that Wilson's public disclosure of his findings in Niger reminded Libby and other neoconservatives in the White House of their longtime battles with the CIA, according to someone familiar with the case. And it led some to fear that the agency was trying to shift the blame to the White House for intelligence failures before the war.

*

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/20/cia...tion=cnn_latest

Democrats seek Bush-Rove details in CIA leak

Thursday, October 20, 2005; Posted: 2:04 p.m. EDT (18:04 GMT)

(Reuters) -- Democrats asked the White House on Wednesday for details of President George W. Bush's private conversations in 2003 with top political adviser Karl Rove after conflicting reports about whether Bush was aware of any role by Rove in the outing of a covert CIA operative.

Rove and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are at the center of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, challenged the administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq.

A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no charges in the nearly two-year leak investigation were expected this week. But Fitzgerald was still expected to wrap up the case before the grand jury expires on October 28.

Bracing for possible indictments, White House officials have been discussing what to do if Rove were forced to step down. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a former campaign adviser to Bush, is one of the names being floated in Republican circles as Rove's possible successor.

Bush and Cheney were interviewed last year by Fitzgerald and White House spokesman Scott McClellan said earlier this week that the prosecutor has not asked to question either the president or vice president a second time.

In a letter to Bush on Wednesday, Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, asked for details about the president's conversations with Rove after The New York Daily News reported that the president was initially furious with Rove when Rove conceded in 2003 that he had talked to the press about Wilson's wife.

The Daily News account appeared to contradict assertions earlier this month by sources close to the case that Rove had kept his role from Bush, assuring him in a brief conversation in the fall of 2003 that he was not involved in any effort to punish Wilson by disclosing his wife's identity.

The Daily News said those earlier reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the president.

"I urge you to immediately and publicly clear up the record," Schumer wrote.

"When was the president told?" asked the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

One Republican strategist with ties to the White House said officials were jockeying for position. "There are a lot of knives out," the strategist said in explaining the conflicting accounts about what Bush knew about Rove's role in the leak.

McClellan has refused to provide details about Bush's private conversation with Rove, though he has referred to it publicly. Around that time McClellan also flatly denied that Rove and Libby had any involvement in the leak, but reporters have since identified them as sources.

McClellan on Wednesday broke with his usual practice of refusing to comment on the leak case, saying of the Daily News report: "I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account."

When reporters pressed him on which facts he was challenging, though, McClellan refused to say.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller and other witnesses have been questioned by investigators about whether Cheney was aware or authorized Libby to talk to reporters about Wilson.

Two legal sources involved in the case said investigators also asked witnesses what Bush knew about the leak.

Wilson says White House officials outed his wife, damaging her ability to work undercover, to discredit him for accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war in a New York Times opinion piece on July 6, 2003.

After initially promising to fire anyone found to have leaked information about Plame, Bush offered a more qualified pledge in July, saying, "If someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my administration."

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://www.crn.com/components/weblogs/arti...cleId=172302894


CIA's investment arm expands high-tech reach


By Mark LaPedus, EE Times
3:26 PM EDT Thu. Oct. 20, 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif. — In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, is aggressively expanding its technology portfolio by pumping new investments into startups involved in networking, energy, semiconductor and software visualization.
On Thursday (Oct. 20), In-Q-Tel (Arlington, Va.) separately announced undisclosed investments in three startups and no less than six companies this week alone.

The spy agency's venture capital arm invested in two energy-related companies: Electro Energy Inc. and SkyBuilt Power Inc. It also poured money into two networking startups: Ember Corp., and Tendril Networks Inc.

And not to be outdone, it also invested in two security and visualization software companies: FMS Inc. and Idelix Software Inc.

In total, In-Q-Tel has invested in some 80 companies since its inception in 1999. The venture arm acts as an independent, private and not-for-profit company that assists the CIA in identifying, acquiring and deploying cutting-edge technologies.

After focusing on data mining and security technologies, the organization appears to be expanding into communications, energy, mesh networking, wireless and other new markets.

In 2003, for example, it invested $10 million in Bay Microsystems Inc., a developer of packet processing and traffic management chips. Last year, In-Q-Tel and others poured $7 million into Dust Inc., a developer of devices for wireless mesh sensor networks (see Feb. 18, 2004 story).

In-Q-Tel has expanded those efforts by investing in Ember and Tendril. Tendril develops software applications for seamlessly combining wireless sensor and control networks, while Ember sells wireless chips based on emerging ZigBee technology.

The CIA appears intent on exploring wireless sensor networking. "The next generation of computing will seamlessly network billions of embedded devices," In-Q-Tel CEO Gilman Louie said in a statement.

“Ember is the market leader with a mature platform that has been successfully deployed in a variety of applications around the world," he said. "We believe their technology has great potential to improve the security and efficiency of government and defense operations."

CIA's investment arm expands high-tech reach


By Mark LaPedus, EE Times
3:26 PM EDT Thu. Oct. 20, 2005

Energy is another hot area for the spy agency. In-Q-Tel's investment in Electro Energy gives it access to advanced battery technologies, while SkyBuilt claims to have developed rugged and mobile energy systems that can use any combination of commercial solar, wind, micro-hydro, diesel and other sources.

Electro Energy on Thursday said it entered into a stock purchase agreement with In-Q-Tel. Under the terms, In-Q-Tel has agreed to purchase 241,692 shares of unregistered common stock and warrants to purchase 75,829 shares of unregistered common stock of the company an exercise price of $3.11 per share.

The total purchase price for the stock and warrants is $800,000 and is expected to be paid over the course of 14 months following the closing. Electro Energy will use the funds to demonstrate the incorporation of Bipolar lithium-ion cell technology into bipolar lithium-ion batteries.

Electro Energy was founded in 1992 to develop, manufacture high-powered, rechargeable bipolar nickel-metal hydride batteries for use in a wide range of applications.

Separately, Electro Energy also announced it is developing a custom-designed prototype battery pack for the Toyota PRIUS+ Test Vehicle, which is the centerpiece of the California Cars Initiative designed to promotethe commercial use and mass production of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

On the software front, In-Q-Tel is investing in its more traditional portfolio of security and visualization technologies with FMS and Idelix.

FMS' Sentinel TMS software analyzes and ranks people, transactions, events, and other criteria, assigns relative values to those connections, and develops a dynamic picture of the relationships, according the company.

Idelix’s pliable display technology (PDT) is billed as a tool for information visualization and data fusion.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051019/pl_af...aq_051019173913


Senator seeks explanation from Bush in case of outed CIA spy Wed Oct 19, 1:39 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A top Democratic senator called on US President George W. Bush to reveal what, if anything, he knew about the involvement of senior White House officials in outing the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

In a letter to the president, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer cited press reports alleging that Bush reportedly had spoken with his Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove about the case involving outed spy Valerie Plame in 2003.

In comments to the press however "the White House issued emphatic and blanket denials of any involvement in the disclosure or confirmation of Ms. Plames status as a CIA agent," Schumer wrote.

"In light of these reports, I urge you to make public the details of Mr. Roves involvement, your understanding of that involvement, and an explanation as to why Mr. Rove was neither dismissed nor his security clearance revoked when you learned of his participation in the Plame affair."

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into who leaked Plame's name to reporters. It is a federal crime to knowingly reveal a CIA agent's identity.

Her cover allegedly was blown in retaliation against her husband, former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, for critical comments he made to the US media condemning the Bush administration's justification for waging war against Iraq.

Several high-ranking White House officials -- including the president, Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney -- have testified before a grand jury investigating the matter, which is nearing completion of its probe.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101faco...-revisited.html

Blowback Revisited
Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds
From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005

Article preview: first 500 of 2,351 words total.

Summary: The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends.

PETER BERGEN is a Schwartz Fellow of the New America Foundation and the author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden." ALEC REYNOLDS is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.


TODAY'S INSURGENTS IN IRAQ ARE TOMORROW'S TERRORISTS
When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And so it made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the name of global jihad and became the spearhead of Islamist terrorism. The seriousness of the blowback became clear to the United States with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: all of the attack's participants either had served in Afghanistan or were linked to a Brooklyn-based fund-raising organ for the Afghan jihad that was later revealed to be al Qaeda's de facto U.S. headquarters. The blowback, evident in other countries as well, continued to increase in intensity throughout the rest of the decade, culminating on September 11, 2001.

The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends. Yet the Bush administration, consumed with managing countless crises in Iraq, has devoted little time to preparing for such long-term consequences. Lieutenant General James Conway, the director of operations on the Joint Staff, admitted as much when he said in June that blowback "is a concern, but there's not much we can do about it at this point in time." Judging from the experience of Afghanistan, such thinking is both mistaken and dangerously complacent.

COMING HOME TO ROOST

The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam against a superpower that had invaded a Muslim country. Estimates of the number of foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan begin in the low thousands; some spent years in combat, while others came only for what amounted to a jihad vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy and prestige from their triumph both within the militant community and among ordinary Muslims, as well as the confidence to carry their jihad to other countries where they believed Muslims required assistance. When veterans of the guerrilla campaign returned home with their experience, ideology, and weapons, they destabilized once-tranquil countries and inflamed already unstable ones.

Algeria had seen relatively little terrorism for decades, but returning mujahideen founded the Armed Islamic Group (known by its French initials, GIA). GIA murdered thousands of Algerian civilians during the 1990s as it attempted to depose the government and replace it with an Islamist regime, a goal inspired by the mujahideen's success in Afghanistan. The GIA campaign of violence became especially pronounced after the Algerian army mounted a coup in 1992 to preempt an election that Islamists were poised to win.

In Egypt, after the assassination ...

End of preview: first 500 of 2,351 words total.

Danger Point In Spy Reform

By David Ignatius

The most dangerous moment in any transition is halfway through, when the old structure is badly weakened but the new one isn't yet strong enough to carry the load. That's where the Bush administration stands in its incomplete effort to restructure the intelligence community.

The intelligence reshuffle was the product of two warring impulses that have been apparent in this administration's foreign policy from the start -- a "realist" support for strong, independent spy agencies and a "neoconservative" mistrust, bordering on outright hatred, of the CIA as a supposed obstacle to the president's goals.

The intelligence-reform impulse led President Bush, after some foot-dragging, to back the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by creating a director of national intelligence to oversee the nation's 15 spy agencies and appointing veteran diplomat John Negroponte to fill the post. But before the new structure was in place, the president tapped Republican Rep. Porter Goss as director of the CIA. Goss was accompanied by a team of right-wing congressional staffers, quickly dubbed the "Gosslings" at Langley, who set out to cuff the CIA's headstrong Directorate of Operations into line.

The aim was to revitalize U.S. intelligence. But rather than consolidate and streamline the overlapping agencies, the new system has added even more boxes to the organization chart. The result has been a further layering of the intelligence community's bureaucracy and further demoralization among career intelligence officers. "Adding more layers causes indecision and confusion in the ranks, and leads to a wait-and-see, risk-averse attitude," warns Richard Stoltz, a former head of the CIA's clandestine service.

Negroponte's new DNI structure has had some successes. It finally created a central hub for coordinating the intelligence community -- something the old "director of central intelligence" role was supposed to accomplish but never did. Visit the DNI's Web site and you'll see the seal of the new intelligence czar at the center, surrounded by the seals of the 15 agencies that (at least in theory) he supervises. Negroponte showed his clout in September by scaling back a planned multibillion-dollar satellite surveillance system known as the Future Imagery Architecture, according to news reports. That was a good start on the kind of tough management the intelligence community needs.

Negroponte has inevitably concentrated on the small islands he actually controls within the intelligence archipelago -- the daily briefing of the president and the top-level analytical group known as the National Intelligence Council. Observers say that has led to crisper analysis of political options in Syria and Iraq. But some worry that Negroponte is so linked to the White House that he may politicize the process. They cite the DNI's release this month of excerpts from a letter allegedly written by al Qaeda strategist Ayman Zawahiri just as Bush was making a major speech on al Qaeda terrorism. Revealing the letter made sense, despite questions about its authenticity, but not as a prop for a presidential speech.

The reorganization that created Negroponte's office also established a National Counterterrorism Center and, just last week, a National Clandestine Service. But beneath these imposing bureaucratic edifices will be the old CIA structures, the Counterterrorism Center and the Directorate of Operations. The layers are confusing, especially for intelligence officers trying to make good choices about where to build their careers. And the reality is that the country doesn't have enough good terrorism analysts to staff two counterterrorism centers. The layering process is also evident in overlapping staffs to handle the public affairs and general counsel functions.

The really dangerous problems, though, lie in the heart of the CIA -- the Directorate of Operations (DO), which recruits the spies and runs the covert actions. The Gosslings have made a real mess of things, driving out a half-dozen top officers, most recently the DO's No. 2 official, 35-year veteran Robert Richer. Why these inexperienced congressional staffers thought they had better judgment than career professionals, many of them former military officers, is beyond me.

I'm told that Goss has now gotten warnings from the White House that he should clip the wings of the head Gossling, his chief of staff, Patrick Murray. Goss should heed that advice before even more officers quit in disgust at the political meddling. And Goss himself may be part of the problem. His laid-back style (liaison meetings with foreign intelligence services on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, please) is said to have led Negroponte to tell one colleague that Goss was still working a "congressional schedule."

The half-baked intelligence reorganization should go back in the oven. Negroponte, supported by President Bush, must finish the process -- and consolidate this overlayered bureaucracy. Getting intelligence right is a life-or-death matter for America, and, so far, it's only partly right.

davidignatius@washpost.com


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October 21, 2005
Was Plame Outed
by a Foreign Spy?
The Larry Franklin-Plame connection
by Justin Raimondo
For a good many years, I have been writing about the tremendous influence of the neoconservatives in formulating and implementing U.S. foreign policy, and maintaining that their role has not just been important – it has been decisive. For underscoring the neocons' pivotal role – since before the Kosovo war – I have been called a lot of uncomplimentary names, the least of which is "conspiracy theorist," and for a while there Antiwar.com's insistence on emphasizing this theme tended to isolate us from antiwar leftists, as well as alienating the more "mainstream" types who doubted whether such an abstruse ideological movement could possibly wield the sort of clout I was describing.

No more. Now the lefties over at, say, DailyKos.com, are hip to the magnitude of the threat and are busy poring over old PNAC position papers [.pdf] looking for clues to our present predicament. Even the word neocon, once all but unrecognizable to the great majority of readers, is now firmly embedded in the American political lexicon – even as the consequences of their policies exact an ever increasing toll. Yet still there are some doubters: how could such a small group of people exercise such power – especially considering that they aren't exactly a mass movement. Someone once quipped that there are only about 20 or so neocons – but 18 of them are major newspaper columnists. Yet there is more to it than that, and now that Scooter-gate is unfolding before the astonished eyes of official Washington, the neocons' ubiquity in the mid-to-upper levels of the U.S. government's national security and foreign policy bureaucracy is all too obvious. General Anthony Zinni was one of the first to call attention to the dangers inherent in the neocons' foreign policy specialization, and now we have another major senior figure in the Washington policy establishment coming forward to confirm, in no uncertain terms, the nature and extent of the problem.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff over at the State Department, where he formerly served as associate director of policy planning. Before that, he was the director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College. At a recent talk given at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Col. Wilkerson described the dysfunctional mess the national security bureaucracy finds itself in these days, due in large part to the sheer complexity of the problems we face. He emphasized the need for dissent, because the would-be central planners can't possibly know all there is to know about even a single issue – say, nuclear proliferation – and must depend on others who have no compunctions about speaking freely, without fear of violating some party line. Yet that, he sadly avers, is not the case today:

"And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don't know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

A cabal – it's such a cool word, I try not to overuse it. Slightly foreign-sounding and somehow exotic, it has the advantages of being short and unambiguous as to its exact meaning. The members of a cabal are engaged in a conspiracy, usually of a criminal nature, and they are often to be found in the upper reaches of powerful institutions, especially government institutions, plotting coups d'etat. The Roman senators who murdered Caesar belonged to a republican (small "r") cabal, whose members resented the conqueror of Gaul's determination to take their republic down the road to empire. In our own time, as Wilkerson – and his former boss – observed, another sort of cabal seized control of the U.S. government and steered it down the same road. As Seymour Hersh put it:

"The question we have to say to ourselves is, OK, so here's what happens, a bunch of guys, 8 or 9 neoconservatives, cultists – not Charles Manson cultists, but cultists – get in and it's not, with all due respect to Michael Moore, and you'll read it, his movie's fine, but it's not about oil, it's not even about protecting Israel, it's about a Utopia they have, it's about an idea they have. Not only about – democracy can be spread – in a sense, I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time, he believes in permanent revolution, and in the Middle East to begin, needless to say.

"And so you have a bunch of people who've been for 10, 12 years have been fantasizing since the 1991 Gulf War on the way to resolve problems. And of course Israel will be a beneficiary and etc., etc., but the world in their eyes – this was Utopia. And so they got together, this small group of cultists, and how did they do it? They did do it. They've taken the government over. And what's amazing to me, and what really is troubling, is how fragile our democracy is. Look what happened to us."

Sure, our republic is fragile, especially these days – yet it isn't as fragile as Hersh feared. Yes, our institutions were corrupted by a well-organized conspiracy of liars with an agenda, who deceived the nation into going to war and committing what one general called the worst strategic disaster in American history. We will suffer the consequences for generations to come: we are damaged, but not beyond repair. The self-correcting mechanisms built into our republican form of government have lashed back at this alien intrusion, and the coup-plotters are cornered. That's what Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald has accomplished on our behalf, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Not a few have exposed the cabal Col. Wilkerson spoke of, but Fitzgerald – armed with the subpoena power and a passion for justice – is going after them with a vengeance, rooting them out of the corridors of power and hauling them into court, where they are being called to account. Fitzgerald is "turning" the foot soldiers of the cabal, the ones who did the dirty work, and getting them to rat on their commanding officers. Raw Story, which is the place to go these days for the latest in the rats' sweepstakes, reported that John Hannah, Dick Cheney's national security adviser, was turning state's evidence as of Tuesday, and Wednesday it was David Wurmser, Cheney's chief adviser on Middle East affairs.

Wurmser, whose Israeli-born wife Meyrav is director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, is the principal author of a by-now-famous 1996 policy paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic Political Studies. The "Clean Break" strategy proposed an attempt by Israel to break out of its military and political isolation in the midst of a hostile Arab sea by pursuing regime-change in Iraq, and eventually Syria. Wurmser sought to mobilize the far-right wing of Israel's Likud party, represented by Netanyahu, around a vision of a Greater Israel surrounded by much lesser enemies. Syria, in Wurmser's view, was the main target, but the road to Damascus, he contended, had to run though Baghdad. "Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote. The key to Israel's regional hegemony was in rejecting "land for peace" and creating a "natural axis" consisting of Israel, Jordan, and a Hashemite Iraq that could "squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi peninsula." This would be "the prelude to redrawing the map of the Middle East" – to Israel's advantage, of course.

Among the other co-authors whose names adorn "A Clean Break": Douglas J. Feith, director of policy at the Department of Defense, and the ubiquitous Richard Perle, who is having his own problems with prosecutor Fitzgerald.

The connection of Israel to all this is plain enough: for the neoconservatives, Israel plays the same role as the old Soviet Union did to the American Communist Party. Acting sometimes in tandem with Tel Aviv, and always in Israel's interests, the cabal Wilkerson and others have identified is pursuing an ideological vision, which Seymour Hersh refers to above. Yet it could not be pursued in a vacuum, without the assistance of allies, and certainly the Israelis have played a key role in influencing the U.S. government to tread the path to war – covertly in the case of Iraq, and now quite openly when it comes to Syria and Iran.

The Israeli penetration of our national security has been put in the spotlight, lately, by the indictment – and guilty plea – of former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin on charges of spying for Israel. During his tenure as the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, when he worked for Doug Feith, Franklin was caught red-handed funneling highly classified information to Steve Rosen, AIPAC's chief lobbyist, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's top foreign policy analyst, who then passed the stolen secrets on to the Israeli embassy. The interconnectedness of the investigation into AIPAC's treason with Fitzgerald's probe is underscored by the following passage from Franklin's indictment:

"On or about June 3, 2003, Franklin met with FO-3 [Naor Gilon] at the POAC [Pentagon Officers Athletic Club], and the discussion centered on a specific person, not in the United Status government, and her thoughts concerning the nuclear program of the Middle Eastern country and, separately, certain charity, efforts in Foreign Nation A."

If Franklin and his Israeli handler – a nuclear weapons specialist – were talking about a woman whose "thoughts concerning the nuclear program" of a certain "Middle Eastern country" had some significance, then surely Judith Miller is a likely candidate. When we add in the business about "certain charity efforts in Foreign Nation A," the identification becomes even more credible: "Foreign Nation A" is Israel, the "charity efforts" consist of work on behalf of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, a joint project undertaken by Miller, Harold Rhode (Franklin's associate – and fellow suspect – in Feith's policy shop), and Ahmed Chalabi. It might be said that these efforts on behalf of the Archive are not taking place "in Israel," as the wording of the indictment puts it, but the ultimate location of the archives is uncertain, and surely Israel is one very possible destination. In any case, it can safely be said that this is a project undertaken on Israel's behalf.

As Franklin and Gilon hung out at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club, shooting the breeze, it seems Ms. Miller was the subject of their conversation, at least in part. Did the name Valerie Plame also come up?

The first week of June 2003, was an eventful time in the Plame outing drama: Walter Pincus, a Washington Post reporter, made inquiries at the CIA about Ambassador Joe Wilson's trip to Niger. Also that week, a memo addressed to undersecretary of state Marc Grossman referred to Plame. Plame's name and CIA affiliations were being whispered around Washington, and the knives were slowly being unsheathed and aimed at Ambassador Wilson's throat…

The FBI was listening as Franklin and Gilon discussed closely held national security secrets. The question is: Do the Feds have the two of them on tape gossiping about that troublesome gal over at the CIA's anti-nuclear-proliferation unit whose husband could potentially cause the War Party an awful lot of trouble?

Inquiring minds want to know. And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one taking an interest in what transpired at the POAC that day.

What leads me to suspect something of the sort is that Rosen's and Weissman's lawyers are demanding access to all the extensive tapes and other materials recording the surveillance of their clients, but the government, in an unusual move, is refusing, much to the judge's consternation.

"I am having a hard time," said Judge T. S. Ellis to prosecutor Kevin DiGregori, "getting over the fact that the defendants can't hear their own statements, and whether that is so fundamental that if it doesn't happen, this case will have to be dismissed."

I wouldn't count on a dismissal, however. Judge Ellis seemed baffled as to the reason why the defendants couldn't hear their own incriminating words, but it could be their lawyers who are the problem. It wouldn't do for them to hear their clients "outing" Valerie Plame or otherwise implicating themselves in the Plame matter – such a revelation could endanger and possibly abort Fitzgerald's case at a crucially important moment in its gestation.

Amid all the speculation about who outed Plame, and who was in a position to know what she was up to, it is odd that no one has mentioned the possibility of a foreign intelligence agency being involved. Yet this would explain the nature of the conspiracy that Fitzgerald is said to be pursuing, going far beyond a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act – and crossing the line into espionage.

Was Plame outed by agents of a foreign power? Given what we know, it's entirely possible. As to which country would be ruthless – and motivated – enough to do it, I hereby nominate "Foreign Nation A" as the most likely candidate.

– Justin Raimondo

One Good Leak
Deserves Another
How the CIA got the ball rolling on the Plame investigation.
by Stephen F. Hayes
10/31/2005, Volume 011, Issue 07



FOR FOUR YEARS, A slow-motion war between the CIA and the Bush administration has been unfolding over America's airwaves and on its front pages. A principal weapon in this war has been the deliberate leaking of information to the media.

When the history of this damaging episode is written, two leaks will stand out as having been most consequential. One of them is famous: the alleged leak to columnist Robert Novak that led to the compromising of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

But there was another big leak that no one seems to care about: the leak of the CIA's referral to the Justice Department concerning the Plame matter. That second disclosure, perhaps even more than the initial leak, set off the chain of events that resulted in the naming of a special prosecutor and finds us now anticipating indictments of senior White House officials.

Some additional relevant details: The CIA referral to the Justice Department was classified, an intelligence source tells The Weekly Standard. Anyone who disclosed the existence of the referral and described its contents broke the law. The agency, however, has thus far refused to send a referral to the Justice Department that could result in an investigation into the source and effects of that leak. Why? An intelligence source tells The Weekly Standard that there are limits--of time and manpower--to how many such referrals the CIA can make. Perhaps. But there's another possible explanation: The second leak came from the CIA itself, and lawyers there are reluctant to call for an investigation for fear of what such an investigation might reveal.

On Friday, September 26, 2003, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell and MSNBC's Alex Johnson broke a big story on the MSNBC website. "The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman's husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush's since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa, NBC News has learned."

This report came after a lull in the narrative. Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, had accused the Bush administration of disclosing his wife's identity to retaliate for his "truth-telling." He boasted in speeches that he would mount a campaign to get Karl Rove "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs. And while many reporters in Washington may have been sympathetic to Wilson, few took his threat seriously.

That changed with the news from NBC that the CIA had referred the case to the Justice Department for investigation. Other news organizations scrambled to catch up. Over the next two weeks the New York Times would run nearly three dozen stories on the case, the Washington Post more than forty. News reports noted the close relationship between Attorney General John Ashcroft and the White House. Editorials called for Ashcroft to recuse himself. Prominent Democrats stepped up their calls for a special prosecutor.

Trying to determine the source of leaks is a popular parlor game in Washington. The obvious question: Who does the leak hurt and who does it help? With that in mind, the leak of the CIA referral achieved two important results. First, it embarrassed the White House and put pressure on the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. A September 29, 2003, news story in the New York Times is illustrative. It reads, "The very fact that Mr. Tenet referred the matter to the Justice Department comes as a major political embarrassment to a White House that is famously tight-lipped, and a president who has repeatedly vowed that his administration would never leak classified information."

The second effect of the leak was equally obvious. It produced a series of news stories in which journalists reported uncritically the claims of the CIA and Joseph Wilson regarding the original Iraq-Niger uranium deal and stated unequivocally that the White House had simply ignored their strong warnings about the intelligence.

From the same September 29, 2003, New York Times story: "The agent is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador to Gabon. It was Mr. Wilson who, more than a year and a half ago, concluded in a report to the CIA that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger in an effort to build nuclear arms. But his report was ignored, and Ambassador Wilson has been highly critical of how the administration handled intelligence claims regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons programs, suggesting that Mr. Bush's aides and Vice President Dick Cheney's office tried to inflate the threat."

(We now know that neither of those claims is true. Wilson's oral report was not ignored, though it appears never to have found its way to the officials, at both the CIA and the White House, responsible for clearing presidential language on Iraq and uranium. And, as the Senate Intelligence Committee report of July 2004 makes clear, Wilson did not conclude in his report to the CIA that there was no evidence Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. In fact, the CIA analysts on the receiving end of Wilson's report told the intelligence committee staff that Wilson's findings had made a uranium deal seem more plausible and, if anything, appeared to confirm the earlier intelligence on Iraq's nuclear ambitions in Africa.)

So who were the chief beneficiaries of the leak to NBC News about the CIA referral to the Justice Department? Joseph Wilson and the CIA.

"We all assumed that it was the [Central Intelligence] Agency that leaked it to ratchet up the war that they were having with the White House," says a former Justice Department official.

The referral process works like this. The CIA monitors media reporting to determine whether there has been a disclosure of classified information. When such an incident occurs, the CIA notifies the Justice Department. Justice then sends a questionnaire to the CIA to obtain more information about the possible breach and, if warranted, opens an investigation. (In recent years, these two steps have been collapsed into one: The CIA simply sends a completed questionnaire to the Justice Department.) There are approximately 50 such referrals from the CIA to the Justice Department each year. Few of these result in prosecutions, and fewer still are ever disclosed to the public.

In the months before the Iraq war, officials at the CIA engaged in a broad campaign of leaks designed to undermine the Bush administration's case for war. It was a clever hedge. The finished intelligence products distributed by the agency made a strong case that Iraq was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. Dissenting assessments were buried in footnotes. (These "intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program," said Senator Hillary Clinton on October 9, 2002, an unlikely shill for the Bush administration.)

But the agency leadership knew its assessments amounted to an educated guess. It was an entirely defensible educated guess, based on a decade of deceit by the Iraq regime and reinforced by behavior that suggested the regime's work on weapons continued. But it was an educated guess nonetheless.

Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack paints a particularly devastating picture of CIA cluelessness. Woodward interviewed "Saul," the chief of the Iraqi Operations Group at the CIA. Writes Woodward:


Saul was discovering that the CIA reporting sources inside Iraq were pretty thin. What was thin? "I can count them on one hand," Saul said, pausing for effect, "and I can still pick my nose." There were four. And those sources were in Iraqi ministries such as foreign affairs and oil that were on the periphery of any penetration of Saddam's inner circle.
A war in Iraq risked exposing this incompetence, and the CIA began to wage its own preemptive war: Leaks from the agency implied that analysts were being pressured into their aggressive assessments. Footnotes filled with caveats became more important than primary texts. This campaign intensified after the war, with the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It culminated in the leaking to the news media of the CIA's referral of the Plame matter to the Justice Department.

None of this should be mistaken for an attempt to minimize the seriousness of knowingly and deliberately leaking the name of a CIA operative. If that is what happened in this case, a full prosecution is not only justifiable but necessary.

Even so, this entire episode reeks of hypocrisy and blatant double standards. The result may well be a renewed interest in prosecuting leakers of classified information. That would be an unfortunate development for reasons long articulated by the political left--the silencing of dissent and the muzzling of whistleblowers.

But if prosecuting leakers becomes the norm, certainly the CIA cannot expect to be exempt from prosecution. Can it?



Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...06/244chpdw.asp

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/politics...artner=homepage

Washington Memo
Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
and DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - The legal and political stakes are of the highest order, but the investigation into the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.

That fight has preoccupied the White House for more than three years, repeatedly threatening President Bush's credibility and political standing, and has now once again put the spotlight on Vice President Dick Cheney, who assumed a critical role in assembling and analyzing the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs.

The dispute over the rationale for the war has led to upheaval in the intelligence agencies, left Democrats divided about how aggressively to break with the White House over Iraq and exposed deep rifts within the administration and among Republicans. The combatants' intensity was underscored this week in a speech by Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state.

Mr. Wilkerson complained of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that bypassed normal decision-making channels when it came to Iraq and other national security issues. He described "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team and said that Mr. Powell's aides had thrown out "whole reams of paper" from the intelligence dossier developed by Mr. Cheney's staff for use in Mr. Powell's presentation of the case against Iraq to the United Nations in early 2003.

Mr. Cheney's focus on the threat from Iraq has put some of his aides, especially I. Lewis Libby Jr., his chief of staff, in the middle of an investigation by a special prosecutor into the leak of the C.I.A. operative's name. According to lawyers in the case, Mr. Libby remains under scrutiny this week in the investigation stemming from his effort to rebut criticism by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat, that the administration had twisted intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.

Mr. Libby has become emblematic of the broader Iraq debate, cast by supporters as a loyal aide working diligently to set the record straight, and by critics as someone working to smear or undermine the credibility of a politically potent opponent.

"The way in which the leak investigation is being pursued is becoming a symbol of who was right and who was wrong about the war," said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. "The possibility of Libby being indicted, and the whole Cheney angle, is all about proving in some sense that they were wrong and therefore that we who opposed the war and never thought the intelligence was right have been proven correct."

The passions surrounding the investigation and the question of why the administration got it wrong about Iraq's weapons programs, other analysts agree, reflect the troubled course of the war and the divisions over whether it was necessary or a diversion from the effort to combat Islamic extremism.

The administration has acknowledged the failures of pre-war intelligence, though its supporters have pointed out that many Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, and the intelligence services of other countries were also convinced that Saddam Hussein had caches of banned weapons. But the White House's insistence that there were many other compelling reasons for deposing Saddam Hussein have only inflamed critics of the war.

"There's a daisy chain that stems from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Iraq was at core a war of choice, and extraordinarily expensive by every measure - human life, impact on our military, dollars, diplomatically," said Mr. Haass, a former senior State Department official under President Bush. "If this war was widely judged to have been necessary along the lines of Afghanistan after 9/11, I don't believe you would have this controversy. If the war had gone extremely well, you wouldn't have this controversy."

While the leak case has ensnared other officials, most prominently Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, appears to have devoted much effort to understanding the role of Mr. Cheney's office and actions taken by Mr. Libby, who has twice testified before the grand jury. Mr. Fitzgerald has been examining whether administration officials disclosed to the media that Mr. Wilson's wife was a C.I.A. employee.

The investigation led to the jailing for nearly three months of a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, for refusing to discuss her conversations with a confidential source who turned out to be Mr. Libby.

From the time Mr. Wilson began circulating his criticism in May and June 2003 of the administration's assertions that before the war Iraq had been seeking nuclear material in Africa, Mr. Libby showed an intense interest in Mr. Wilson's public statements and argued to colleagues that he should be rebutted at every turn, a former administration official said, confirming an account Friday in the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Libby also sought to insulate Mr. Cheney from Mr. Wilson's critique, telling journalists that the former diplomat's trip to Africa to assess Iraq's intentions was orchestrated by the C.I.A.

Mr. Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Mr. Libby was immersed in painting a dark picture of Iraq's weapons capabilities and alleged it had ties to Al Qaeda.

In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Mr. Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council. But in meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early February, Secretary Powell and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Mr. Libby's draft as exaggerated and not supported by intelligence.

John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy C.I.A. director, referred to this period in a statement issued in April 2005. "Much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material, including much that had been added by the policy community after the draft left the agency, that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable," Mr. McLaughlin said.

In his 2004 book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward of The Washington Post wrote that Mr. Powell had rejected Mr. Libby's draft as "worse than ridiculous," which Mr. Wilkerson alluded to in his speech last week.

That episode added to tensions between Mr. Cheney's office and senior officials at the C.I.A., which had also dismissed as unwarranted claims by Mr. Cheney and others about close links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Before the war, the C.I.A. also issued intelligence assessments warning of potential obstacles to the stability of postwar Iraq, although the agency's capabilities have also been harshly criticized since the war and it is now in the midst of upheaval set off by the creation of a new intelligence structure and the appointment of a new director, Porter J. Goss.

The wrangling over the United Nations speech exposed long-simmering suspicions by some administration officials about the reliability of the C.I.A.'s intelligence on Iraq. A former intelligence official who previously worked with Mr. Libby said that his antipathy to the C.I.A. dated back at least 15 years, to the first Bush administration, when he was working under Mr. Wolfowitz at the Defense Department.

"He always saw C.I.A. as the enemy, more a problem than a help, and someone who was out to get him," the former intelligence official said. Mr. Libby was also part of the network of Iraq hawks within the administration. He is a protégé of Mr. Wolfowitz, perhaps the leading neoconservative in the administration until he left to head the World Bank. Mr. Libby's deputy, John Hannah, had close ties to John R. Bolton, then the undersecretary of state for arms control; David Wurmser, a Bolton aide who later joined Mr. Cheney's office; and Robert Joseph, then the senior director for non-proliferation on the national security council.

Mr. Bolton is now ambassador to the United Nations, and Mr. Joseph has taken over as undersecretary of state, where he has retained as his executive assistant Frederick Fleitz, a C.I.A. officer who had served as Mr. Bolton's chief of staff. Some of those officials, including Mr. Hannah and Mr. Joseph, have been questioned in the leak case.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2201113_pf.html

Letter Shows Authority to Expand CIA Leak Probe Was Given in '04

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 23, 2005; A05



Weeks after he took over the investigation 22 months ago into the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald got authority from the Justice Department to expand his inquiry to include any criminal attempts to interfere with his probe, according to a letter posted Friday on Fitzgerald's new Web site.

Fitzgerald is nearing a decision on whether he will prosecute anyone when the federal grand jury term ends Friday. The letter specified that he could investigate and prosecute "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and intimidation of witnesses."

According to a lawyer familiar with the case, the current speculation about such charges eventually arising appeared to have occurred to Fitzgerald in the first months of his inquiry.

In a letter dated Feb. 6, 2004, then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said that he was clarifying, "at your [Fitzgerald's] request," the added authority to investigate and prosecute "crimes committed with intent to interfere with your investigation." Fitzgerald's appointment as special counsel on Dec. 30, 2003, after then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself, gave him specific authority to investigate "the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity," according to another letter from Comey posted on the Web site.

"The fact that he [Fitzgerald] asked for authority that he probably already had, but wanted spelled out, makes it arguable that he had run into something rather quickly," Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris said yesterday.

The investigation was triggered by a July 14, 2003, syndicated column by Robert D. Novak in which he identified Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had been sent to Niger to check whether Iraq was trying to get uranium from that country. Novak wrote that two senior administration officials had suggested that Wilson's wife had proposed him for the trip.

After Novak's column appeared, the CIA notified the Justice Department that publication of Plame's name and CIA employment was an unauthorized leak of classified information. The CIA then looked into whether the disclosure had caused damage to Plame and to people familiar with Plame and her job at the agency. The CIA's report went to the Justice Department, which determined in late September 2003 that a criminal investigation of the leak should be initiated.

Ashcroft recused himself because the inquiry would focus on White House personnel. Comey then named Fitzgerald, a highly regarded prosecutor and the U.S. attorney in northern Illinois, as special counsel.

From the start, the inquiry focused on a potential violation of a federal statute that prohibits the disclosure of the name of a covert CIA operative. Then the inquiry began looking at whether a conspiracy developed within the top levels of the Bush White House to leak Plame's name to discredit Wilson because of his statements criticizing the administration's use of intelligence in the buildup to the war in Iraq.

The possibility of perjury or obstruction charges emerged more recently, after the publication of reports on the testimony of journalists who said they were told about Plame either by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/22/143214/56



TreasonGate: The little-discussed ace in the hole
by clammyc
Sat Oct 22, 2005 at 11:32:14 AM PDT
Ask yourself this question:

What if the country finds out that yes, an undercover CIA agent was definitely killed overseas as a result of the outing of Valerie Plame and her network of contacts?

This is, I think, the one thing that, no matter what else happens, no matter who is indicted for what, no matter what freeperville and the wingnuts say, will lead to an immediate downfall of Bu$hCo, the neo-cons and unless they are very careful, much of the GOP.

Everything else, as Chimpy McVodka says, is background noise.

Indulge me, if you would.....

clammyc's diary :: ::
Lately, there have been some discussion over diaries or news that is old news to us, but is now being reported on Hardball, or some other MSM outlet. Regardless of any opinions, the fact is that most of the country is just waking up to the fact that something really "expletive deleted"ed up has been going on here. This, in and of itself, is big news, as I diaried yesterday.

And on another discussion today, Elwood Dowd made a comment that wasn't news to us, but it got me thinking of how important it is if this tidbit gets out.

From wikipedia:

A possibility has been raised by several sources that a death may have occurred as a result of this leak. Under the Espionage Act, this could lead to a death penalty case. The CIA Wall of Honor has stars representing agents killed on duty. Named stars are used where information is not classified, and anonymous stars are used when the agent's name cannot be released. Below the stars is a chronological Book of Honor. An anonymous star was added to the wall between named stars that can be dated to deaths on February 5, 2003 and October 25, 2003. The anonymous star thus fits the timing of the Plame leak. Wayne Madsen, a reporter and former NSA employee, has claimed, "CIA sources report that at least one anonymous star placed on the CIA's Wall of Honor at its Langley, Virginia headquarters is a clandestine agent who was executed in a hostile foreign nation as a direct result of the White House leak."

As Lawrence O'Donnell reported, and as we know, many judges read what Fitzgerald knew when they were ruling on whether Miller and Cooper had to testify or turn over their notes.

One very important item (also known to us) is that:

In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues' order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges "in the light of reason and experience." Tatel actually found that reason and experience "support recognition of a privilege for reporters' confidential sources." But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to "the gravity of the suspected crime."

Judge Tatel's opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to "[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor's] voluminous classified filings."

Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case "which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent." Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters' shield law -- but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he "might have" let Cooper and Miller off the hook "[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security." (emphasis mine)


Now, we have discussed this as part of the overall TreasonGate story, but I would venture to guess that an extremely small percentage of the population knows that the CIA has a Wall of Honor, let alone that someone may have died as a result of this leak.

A major part of the support for Bush was at least that there was a perception that he would "keep us safe". With Katrina and the ass-backwards response, the curtain was pulled back.

But if the general population finds out that Bu$hCo lied about WMD (check), started a war based on these lies (check), outed a CIA with NOC and all of her contacts as retribution for her husband telling the truth and calling "expletive deleted" on their lies (check), AND that national security was blown, and one of our own agents was killed as a direct result, then I would say Game Over.

So, with everything else being speculated, from perjury to conspiracy to espionage act, to un-indicted co-conspirator to Fitzmas to the ultimate smear campaign or pushback, one thing can trump them all--

If an undercover CIA operative was definitely killed as a result of the Plame/Brewster Jennings outing, nobody can explain away treason. Noone can support treason.

That is the ace in the hole that very few currently know about.

http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/10/23/113837/26


More Bad News for Bush

By Larry Johnson,

Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 11:38:37 AM EDT :: Bush


The CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, has finally got approval to publish his book, which will hit the streets on December 27, 2005. The CIA has sat on the book for more than a year and tried to stop its publication. Although the book is not intended as a criticism of President Bush, it will land another body blow to the beleaguered Bush Presidency. Bernsten's key point in the book is his testimonty that he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. According to NEWSWEEK, "Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora--intelligence operatives had tracked him--and could have been caught. He was there."

Look for General Tommy Franks image as the great commander to be further tarnished. This book will have the unintended effect of reminding all Americans that George Bush did not finish the job of tracking down Bin Laden. Instead, he shifted key military and intelligence resources and started a war of choice in Iraq. At the current fatality rate more than 2100 Americans will have died in Iraq when this book is available in bookstores. Put on your list for belated Christmas and Hanukkah shopping. Happy Holidays.

Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).







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More Bad News for Bush
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Franks was just following orders......
Acceptng the premise that there is more than meets the eye in our prosecution of the Afghan and Iraq escapades, the fact that we have not, and most likely will not capture Osama is a foregone conclusion IMHO.
Unfortunately America, like a herion junkie, is hopelessly addicted to the military-industrial welfare cycle and so we needed a new "fix" after the wall came down in Berlin and the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, miraculously, we have a new endless war on terror.

Osama and his cadre are a necessary element for continuing agression in the region as Al-Qaeda must be everywhere so we can fight them everywhere.

It is so Orwellian, it's almost funny. Russia is now our friend. Oceania is now double-good!

It's all about the oil people. The world uses a billion barrels every 11 days and there are 500-600 billion known barrels. (Ruppert). That's about 19 years.

Working back from that idea, the whole "strategy" kinda makes sense: in an agressive-bullying, you-are-either-for-us-or-against-us, terrorist kind of way.

by brent (bonnyladd@hotmail.com) on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 12:43:18 PM EDT


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Thanks for your good works
at VIPS.
With the Tenth Mountain (among the very best at fighting in mountainous terrain) available at Tora Bora it is a puzzlement as to why we allowed the questionably loyal Northern Coalition ( of warlords and drug smugglers)and equally questionable Pakistani Army to chase after bin Laden (or look the other way while he escaped).

But the events of 9/11 and the AlQaeda group was only a great excuse to implement the take over of Iraq, a goal long sought after by the Cheney's, Rumsfeld's and their ilk. It would have ill suited their purpose to have captured bin Laden that early and put a (supposed) end to terrorism at least in the minds of the voter.
We see things as we are not as they are. Anais Nin
by ardee (rdubin@earthlink.net) on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 12:47:24 PM EDT


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Anais Nin
Yes, I read that somewhere a long time ago and it made perfect sense to me but I couldn'tr emember how it was said or who said it but I use it a lot ....I think I say it like we see things not as they are but as we are...or something like that...i love that saying.
Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example.
by lizbitchwitch (saylinbackagin@yahoo.com) on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 01:48:32 PM EDT
[ Parent ]
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Where's Osama?
One of the more common errors in military history is the failure to follow up an attack or a route. There's a tendency to focus on the immediate battle and ignore the aftermath. During the US Civil War Gen. McClellan personified this by letting Lee escape after a route. Had he pursued Lee after the victory at where ever, he could have brought the Civil War to a swift completion. As Lee beat a strategic and hasty retreat from McClellan, the al Qaeda and Taliban scurried into the hills of Tora Bora. Like McClellan, was Bush uninterested in a hot pursuit?
I've never heard a more than a cursory explanation of McClellan's reluctance to follow through. Perhaps he hoped Lee would realize how badly he was outgunned and call it a day. There's the theory that McClellan was timid or over cautious. Both sides were more or less an even match man for man.

None of this makes sense in the case of Tora Bora. The US armed forces were more than a match for bin Laden's forces. An easy victory in the "War on Terror" was there for the taking. Why not just clean up the mess and be done with it? Would the pursuit of bin Laden really be a drain on a campaign in Iraq? Was there a greater political risk in capturing or killing bin Laden? Is bin Laden more useful alive?

Seriously though, bin Laden and other Islamic extremists are a convenient target for blame for our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. If bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban were to disappear in a flash, it would put the lie to the resistance consisting mainly of outside militants and their local supporters. Granted, there are groups from outside Iraq who are trying to use the chaos to further their political agendas. However, this phenomenon is not causal. There would be no jockeying for power if the invading US forces had a plan to secure Iraq and restore order and the infrastructure. In the game of political trade-offs, it was probably more cost effective to blame bin Laden, former Baathists, meddlesome Syrians, and the man in the moon than expend the political and economic capital in rebuilding Iraq. An Iraq lying in ruins is also no threat to US hegemony. Whatever the strategy, it's obvious the people of Iraq don't enter into the equation.

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. -Lord Halifax
by DurangoKid on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 12:59:22 PM EDT


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Face for Evil
Terrorism is probably not a threat to the USA... at least how it is described as radical islam. Radical Islam is mostly "fighting" moderate islam and EVERYONE wants the WEST out of their neck of the woods.
It is more than likely that the 9.11 was some sort of "inside" job... designed to spotlight and focus on the"NEW ENEMY" and it would be radical Islam and the face would be none other than OBL.

Before 9.11 the cheney administration was praising the Taliban for destroying all them poppies which end up as heroine in our veins. The Taliban was not out enemy despite how atrocious their human rights record was. But that was a matter for the COMMUNITY of nations... through the UN.

The attack of Afghanistan was really to accomplish several things... I suspect...

Get a foothold in South Asia because of ENERGY.

Establish some large "enduring" military bases there to stage further attacks on the region... Iran and Iraq.

Create a new "enduring" war... worldwide stateless islamic readicalism. We could use the excuse of a nation harboring terroism as cause for attack. We used that excuse ... along with other lies ... to attack Iraq in 3/03

Give the military an opportunity to use their big weapon systems that they procured during and after the cold war... and then call for new replacements and upgrades.

So now the "fascists" have taken our government, attacked two nations (both on false premises) pushed through the patriot act restricting our freedom, suspended the Geneva convention for the "war on terror", refused to recognize the world court, suspended the constitution for anyone they want to charge with "terrorism".

We need to destroy the myth of islamic terror as the enemy of the West. It is more than likely that stirring up these terrorists acts are agents involved in black ops. Terrorism will always be a tool for the disenfranchised who want to attack the establishment... but it is not huge and it is not hierachical and it is largely not a real threat. But the idea of this "big" terror movement is enough to get everyone shaking in their boots, put soldiers on cummter trains and get the public to accept random searches of their property in the subway... and overly invasive searaches when they fly on airplanes, or attend at the Metropolitan opera for example.

Where is the conclusion to any of these "terror" attacks... the evidence... and who did it, who planned it, who carried them out? All we hear is some vague stories. In 4 years since 9.11 how many terrorists have been cuaght tried and convicted in a fair trial... with evidence and witnesses?

When something like 9.11 goes down we see many more anamolies than answers. The official story, even from the 9.11 commission does not compute. Too much is wrong, inconsistence, inconclusive, and covered up.

We have been lied to. Our government, which is supposed to be OURS has been hijacked by people who are up to no good. That is for sure.

by DefJef on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 03:43:32 PM EDT
[ Parent ]

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Reaction
Terror by the powerless is a reaction to terror by the powerful. In real terms, terrorism by the weak against the US is not much of a threat. In propagandistic terms, it serves as a rallying point and means to misdirect media attention.
At

http://forum.truthout.org/blog/comments/20...174337/16/26#26

I give a cursory analysis of Peak Oil. It's not just a question of who benefits, but by what do they benefit?
A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. -Lord Halifax
by DurangoKid on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 04:07:29 PM EDT
[ Parent ]

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and MORE bad news for/about BushCo
Just in this afternoon from "The Pen", not only a great "call to action" piece, but the info it contains gives answers to some very significant questions that I and others have asked and about which we have speculated here in this Town Meeting Forum:-) :-) :-)
GoodnessGracious! ;-o
YIPPEEEDOOODLEDAY!!!!!
(you're gonna LOVE this one!!!)
____

IMPEACH BUSH AND ENTER THE "GUESS HOW MANY INDICTMENTS" POOL

As always we feature the action link first, this one to call for the impeachment of George Bush

http://www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach.htm

There is a storm of historic proportions headed for the United States, one that will make Hurricane Wilma (also en route) look like a small splash in the pond by comparison. It's been building and gathering strength in the increasingly hot waters of the Special Counsel's office for almost two years, and in a matter of days it may lay waste to the entire political infrastructure of Washington, D.C., from one end to the other.

We start with the understanding that the crime of the century (so far) has taken place in Iraq. Lies and forged evidence duped the American people into waging preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us -- all for the cynical and greedy purpose of enriching a handful of the Bush administration's closest cronies. In the process, over 100,000 people have been senselessly murdered and maimed, including many thousands of our own service people. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been looted from the treasuries of two countries, mostly our own. Even worse, many believe that the attack of 9/11 was not only foreseen by the inner circle of our government, but that orders for a deliberate "stand-down" allowed it to occur. Why? So that the horrific resulting tragedy would justify all that followed.

The magnitude of these crimes is so monumental that their perpetrators were obsessed with suppressing any evidence of it. They ruthlessly smeared all critics, purging and intimidating any dissenting voices. For them the treasonous acts of exposing (and thereby destroying) one of our most critical intelligence assets (a front company secretly working to prevent the spread of WMD), were just another day's collateral damage. Having lied successfully for so long, having corrupted their mainstream corporate media lap dogs, and having made eunuchs of many in the "opposition" party, they considered themselves unassailable. Such arrogance has seldom been equaled.

What they did not count on was Patrick Fitzgerald. The letter which appointed him as Special Counsel granted to him the "authority of the Attorney General . . . independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department." Careful to confirm the extent of his mandate, he further inquired and was advised that

"[It] is plenary and includes the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure, as well as federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, your investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted . . ."

"Plenary" means "absolute and unqualified." In a word, Fitzgerald has all the power of the attorney general, the top law enforcement officer of the federal government himself, to pursue the facts wherever they may lead. It therefore appears he now possesses his own authority, and cannot be legally removed from his position, even by Bush. He has his own operating budget too, direct from the GAO.

For the criminal purposes of the Bush administration, Patrick Fitzgerald is their worst nightmare come true. He is a career prosecutor with a reputation for being not only "frighteningly" brilliant but fearless, and with a driving passion for determining the truth, their most mortal enemy. Indeed, the fastest way to get Fitzgerald's fur up is to try to lie to him as a witness. See, he's a workaholic already, and liars just make him work harder. And if you've committed a federal crime like maybe . . . oh gee, maybe like perjury . . . says an old attorney friend, "Pat Fitzgerald's gonna get ya." Oh, and did we mention that he always goes for the person at the top of the conspiracy?

For those who are still trying to get their minds around the possible indictment of Rove and Libby, now a near certainty, consider that no one in the Bush camp is capable of telling the truth under any circumstances. As for Bush himself, one of his Harvard Business School professors said that Dubya was "famous" in his class for being a "pathological" liar. Bush has known all along who the leakers were, and he's been lying all along. Fitzgerald interviewed Bush for over an hour, and it's unlikely that he told the truth in any respect. Bad move, George. Fitzie don't play that.

But wait, you say; that interview wasn't under oath. Try telling that to Martha Stewart who just got out of prison from her conviction for deceiving an investigator. Likewise with Dick Cheney. Even if two of his bag men had not cut deals with Fitzgerald already. And as for those who did testify untruthfully to the grand jury under oath, ask Li'l Kim what heinous lie she told to keep her in federal prison for a year. All she did was deny that she knew somebody that she did, in fact, know.

So let's put it together. We have a president who seems unable to tell the truth. We have an independent prosecutor of immaculate integrity who will not tolerate a lie. The INESCAPABLE conclusion is that Bush will be indicted, along with each and every member of his administration who participated in this. There has been talk on the web of 22 indictments. Rove and Libby -- (that's two), add two for Hannah and Wurmser (already cooperating but not given immunity), plus Bush and Cheney -- that gets us up to six . . . why don't we just say conservatively for the purposes of the pool . . . that 12 people will be indicted.

Besides perjury (and false statements), Fitzgerald has conspiracy and obstruction of justice to pick from as well, and those are just a couple of the technical crimes. Remember that he has the authority to pursue this investigation wherever it leads, and he is driven to do just that. He was born for this. Among other things, he requested from the Italian authorities the files on the forging of the Niger documents themselves. That was what Joe Wilson's trip was all about. And why they were so compelled to "out" his wife in the first place in their clumsy attempt to discredit him. What do you think the chances are that the most zealous prosecutor they could have appointed won't get to the bottom of that one, too? He may even expose what really happened on 9/11. Wouldn't that be the "coup de grace"?

So what happens next? What happens if Bush tries to preemptively pardon everyone, INCLUDING himself? Even Nixon wasn't that shameless. But don't put it past Bush to trigger the greatest constitutional crisis of all time. There are a couple of wrinkles involved here, beyond even the public outroar that would result. The constitution states that the president has the power to pardon "except in Cases of Impeachment." That's why it is important that you act now to demand the impeachment of Bush for all the high crimes and misdemeanors that he has committed already. In the end it may be the only way to restrain him.

TAKE ACTION NOW AT http://www.millionphonemarch.com/impeach.htm

If Bush tries to pardon himself AND cling to power, expect winds of historic intensity for change. And in the center of it all there will be a vacuum of power. For those politicians who have shown no courage so far, this will be their last chance! Don't be surprised to see the conspirators running to Roberts, their latest crony appointment, to try to find a way out. And eternal shame on any member of the senate who lets that one slide without demanding each and every document that could help reveal the truth.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this message to everyone else you know.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at http://www.usalone.com/in.htm
___________
I would say that quite likely the folks at The Pen are figuring that the indictments about to come down on BushCo are so pervasive, both in reach to the BushCo gang in #'s AND in scope that were Bush to take the shamelessly arrogant route of trying to pardon everyone, the blowback repercussions from that would be extremely devastating to the Republican Party, in general. This would be enough so that the Repubs will KNOW that if they do not separate themselves from BushCo, they will be bringing on the downfall of their party to the extent that it would be a VERY long time before they might get in sight of ANY majority in ANYthing again. (Maybe even the breakup of the party???)

Let's go for it with this one folks!! Use the link, and copy/paste this to send around to all you can, maybe even to some Repubs!!!

(-:
"Give up those treasured wounds, let go the tempting memory of the pain...." Buffe St.Marie
by G Achin (XLexcel at zia net dot com TruthOut in subj.line) on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 03:00:48 PM EDT http://www.zianet.com/XLexcel/moons.html


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The Eleven Year Agenda
The fact that Bush rerouted military resources to Iraq is no surprise. Iraq was the intended target all along. In 1992 Wolfowitz wrote a report describing a global strategic plan for gaining control of the Middle East and gaining control of Iraq was at the top of his list. Then in 1998, PNAC whose members included Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle and Frank Gaffney, developed a strategic plan for the U.S. which involved gaining control of Iraq. Many of the members of PNAC ended up in key positions in the first Bush Administration. They convinced president Bush to adpot their strategy.
After 9/11, the administration had the opportunity they were waiting for but decided that for the sake of optics, they needed to attack Afghanistan first because that apparently is where Bin Laden was holed up and after all, he was responsible for 9/11.

Afghanistan was just a stopover on the way to Iraq and I don't really think that Bush and his fellow thugs really cared whether they caught Bin Laden although he would have been a nice trophy to hang in the White House.

Author of "Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes with a Straight Face"
David Model
by David Model on Sun Oct 23rd, 2005 at 04:04:07 PM EDT http://lyingforempire.blogspot.com/

In case you missed it:


THE STOVEPIPE
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20


Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”

There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”



A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. “Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,” Thielmann said. “We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That’s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.”

But, Thielmann told me, “Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.” Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton’s early-morning staff meetings. “I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ‘The Under-Secretary doesn’t need you to attend this meeting anymore.’ ” When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, “The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.”

Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. “He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,” Thielmann said.

In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that.” Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had “invited himself” to his daily staff meetings. “This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary’s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,” Bolton said. “This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else—the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.”

There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d’état to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call “branches and sequels”—that is, “plan for what you expect not to happen.” The official said, “It was a ‘what could go wrong’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?”

The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official told me. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.”



Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the military’s quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion.

In a speech on November 14, 2001, as the Taliban were being routed in Afghanistan, Richard Perle, a Pentagon consultant with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, Feith, and Chalabi, articulated what would become the Bush Administration’s most compelling argument for going to war with Iraq: the possibility that, with enough time, Saddam Hussein would be capable of attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon. Perle cited testimony from Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector, who declared that Saddam Hussein, in response to the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, had ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. “Every day,” Perle said, these sites “turn out a little bit of nuclear materials.” He told his audience, “Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn’t do what we know he is capable of . . . or do we take some preemptive action?”

In fact, the best case for the success of the U.N. inspection process in Iraq was in the area of nuclear arms. In October, 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report declaring Iraq to be essentially free of nuclear weapons. The I.A.E.A.’s inspectors said, “There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.” The report noted that Iraq’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War.

The study’s main author, Garry Dillon, a British nuclear-safety engineer who spent twenty-three years working for the I.A.E.A. and retired as its chief of inspection, told me that it was “highly unlikely” that Iraq had been able to maintain a secret or hidden program to produce significant amounts of weapons-usable material, given the enormous progress in the past decade in the technical ability of I.A.E.A. inspectors to detect radioactivity in ground locations and in waterways. “This is not kitchen chemistry,” Dillon said. “You’re talking factory scale, and in any operation there are leaks.”

The Administration could offer little or no recent firsthand intelligence to contradict the I.A.E.A.’s 1997 conclusions. During the Clinton years, there had been a constant flow of troubling intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but most were in the context of worst-case analyses—what Iraq could do without adequate United Nations inspections—and included few, if any, reliable reports from agents inside the country. The inspectors left in 1998. Many of the new reports that the Bush people were receiving came from defectors who had managed to flee Iraq with help from the Iraqi National Congress. The defectors gave dramatic accounts of Iraq’s efforts to reconstituteits nuclear-weapons program, and of its alleged production of chemical and biological weapons—but the accounts could not be corroborated by the available intelligence.

Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton’s office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq’s progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, “It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted.”

The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.



In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. “We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President,” Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report. At the time, Niger, which had sent hundreds of troops in support of the American-led Gulf War in 1991, was actively seeking economic assistance from the United States.

None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie’s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as “yellowcake.” (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)

What made the two-and-a-half-year-old report stand out in Washington was its relative freshness. A 1999 attempt by Iraq to buy uranium ore, if verified, would seem to prove that Saddam had been working to reconstitute his nuclear program—and give the lie to the I.A.E.A. and to intelligence reports inside the American government that claimed otherwise.

The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.

The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. “The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,” Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. “He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ‘We do have a report, but there’s a lack of details.’ ” The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.

As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.

“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and choose your case,” the former aide told me. “It opens things up to cherry-picking.” (“Some reporting is sufficiently sensitive that it is restricted only to the very top officials of the government—as it should be,” Cathie Martin said. And any restrictions, she added, emanate from C.I.A. security requirements.)

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 ‘"expletive deleted" 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.)



By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”

A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret.

“It became a personality issue,” a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence. “My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.” The intelligence community was in full retreat.

In the spring of 2002, the former White House official told me, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began urging the President to release more than ninety million dollars in federal funds to Chalabi. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized ninety-seven million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, but most of the funds had not been expended. The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money, arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. “The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn’t given the money to Chalabi,” the former official recalled. Cheney said, “Here we are, denying him money, when they”—the Iraqi National Congress—“are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.”

In late summer, the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America’s national security.

On August 7th, Vice-President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein, “What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” On August 26th, Cheney suggested that Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten “anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.” He added that the Iraqis were continuing “to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.” On September 8th, he told a television interviewer, “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” The President himself, in his weekly radio address on September 14th, stated, “Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” There was no confirmed intelligence for the President’s assertion.

The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush’s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need “to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.” Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that “the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” The dossier noted that intelligence—based, again, largely on the sismi report—showed that Iraq had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi.

The White House, meanwhile, had been escalating its rhetoric. In a television interview on September 8th, Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, addressing questions about the strength of the Administration’s case against Iraq, said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”—a formulation that was taken up by hawks in the Administration. And, in a speech on October 7th, President Bush said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”



At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents’ existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a glossy Italian weekly owned by the publishing empire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible. In 1995, when she worked for the magazine Epoca, he had provided her with detailed information, apparently from Western intelligence sources, for articles she published dealing with the peace process in Bosnia and with an Islamic charity that was linked to international terrorism. The information, some of it in English, proved to be accurate. Epoca had authorized her to pay around four thousand dollars for the documents—a common journalistic practice in Italy.

Now, years later, “he comes to me again,” Burba told me. “I knew he was an informed person, and that he had contacts all over the world, including in the Middle East. He deals with investment and security issues.” When Burba met with the man, he showed her the Niger documents and offered to sell them to her for about ten thousand dollars.

The documents he gave her were photocopies. There were twenty-two pages, mostly in French, some with the letterhead of the Niger government or Embassy, and two on the stationery of the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See. There were also telexes. When Burba asked how the documents could be authenticated, the man produced what appeared to be a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy, along with other items. “What I was sure of was that he had access,” Burba said. “He didn’t receive the documents from the moon.”

The documents dealt primarily with the alleged sale of uranium, Burba said. She informed her editors, and shared the photocopies with them. She wanted to arrange a visit to Niger to verify what seemed to be an astonishing story. At that point, however, Panorama’s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rossella, who is known for his ties to the Berlusconi government, told Burba to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully took a copy of the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.

A week later, Burba travelled to Niger. She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger’s uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq. The Panorama story was dead, and Burba and her editors said that no money was paid. The documents, however, were now in American hands.

Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. “The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,” the first former official told me, “and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.” Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that “the jury was still out on this”—that is, on the authenticity of the documents.

George Tenet clearly was ambivalent about the information: in early October, he intervened to prevent the President from referring to Niger in a speech in Cincinnati. But Tenet then seemed to give up the fight, and Saddam’s desire for uranium from Niger soon became part of the Administration’s public case for going to war.

On December 7th, the Iraqi regime provided the U.N. Security Council with a twelve-thousand-page series of documents in which it denied having a W.M.D. arsenal. Very few in the press, the public, or the White House believed it, and a State Department rebuttal, on December 19th, asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their Niger procurement?” It was the first time that Niger had been publicly identified. In a January 23rd Op-Ed column in the Times, entitled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” Condoleezza Rice wrote that the “false declaration . . . fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.” On January 26th, Secretary Powell, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, “Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium?” Two days later, President Bush described the alleged sale in his State of the Union address, saying, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”



Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)

The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”



President Bush’s State of the Union speech had startled Elisabetta Burba, the Italian reporter. She had been handed documents and had personally taken them to the American Embassy, and she now knew from her trip to Niger that they were false. Later, Burba revisited her source. “I wanted to know what happened,” she said. “He told me that he didn’t know the documents were false, and said he’d also been fooled. ”

Burba, convinced that she had the story of the year, wanted to publish her account immediately after the President’s speech, but Carlo Rossella, Panorama’s editor-in-chief, decided against it. Rossella explained to me, “When I heard the State of the Union statement, I thought to myself that perhaps the United States government has other information. I didn’t think the documents were that important—they weren’t trustable.” Eventually, in July, after her name appeared in the press, Burba published an account of her role. She told me that she was interviewed at the American consulate in Milan by three agents for the F.B.I. in early September.

The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting. The former intelligence official who gave me the account of the forging of the documents told me that his colleagues were also startled by the speech. “They said, ‘Holy "expletive deleted", all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!’ They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the I.A.E.A.”

I subsequently met with a group of senior I.A.E.A. officials in Vienna, where the organization has its headquarters. In an interview over dinner, they told me that they did not even know the papers existed until early February of this year, a few days after the President’s speech. The I.A.E.A. had been asking Washington and London for their evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of African uranium, without receiving any response, ever since the previous September, when word of it turned up in the British dossier. After Niger was specified in the State Department’s fact sheet of December 19, 2002, the I.A.E.A. became more insistent. “I started to harass the United States,” recalled Jacques Baute, a Frenchman who, as director of the I.A.E.A.’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office, often harassed Washington. Mark Gwozdecky, the I.A.E.A.’s spokesman, added, “We were asking for actionable evidence, and Jacques was getting almost nothing. ”

On February 4, 2003, while Baute was on a plane bound for New York to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Iraqi weapons dispute, the U.S. Mission in Vienna suddenly briefed members of Baute’s team on the Niger papers, but still declined to hand over the documents. “I insisted on seeing the documents myself,” Baute said, “and was provided with them upon my arrival in New York.” The next day, Secretary Powell made his case for going to war against Iraq before the U.N. Security Council. The presentation did not mention Niger—a fact that did not escape Baute. I.A.E.A. officials told me that they were puzzled by the timing of the American decision to provide the documents. Baute quickly concluded that they were fake.

Over the next few weeks, I.A.E.A. officials conducted further investigations, which confirmed the fraud. They also got in touch with American and British officials to inform them of the findings, and give them a chance to respond. Nothing was forthcoming, and so the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, publicly described the fraud at his next scheduled briefing to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on March 7th. The story slowly began to unravel.

Vice-President Cheney responded to ElBaradei’s report mainly by attacking the messenger. On March 16th, Cheney, appearing on “Meet the Press,” stated emphatically that the United States had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program. He went on, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.” Three days later, the war in Iraq got under way, and the tale of the African-uranium-connection forgery sank from view.



Joseph Wilson, the diplomat who had travelled to Africa to investigate the allegation more than a year earlier, revived the Niger story. He was angered by what he saw as the White House’s dishonesty about Niger, and in early May he casually mentioned his mission to Niger, and his findings, during a brief talk about Iraq at a political conference in suburban Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (Wilson is a Democrat). Another speaker at the conference was the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who got Wilson’s permission to mention the Niger trip in a column. A few months later, on July 6th, Wilson wrote about the trip himself on the Times Op-Ed page. “I gave them months to correct the record,” he told me, speaking of the White House, “but they kept on lying.”

The White House responded by blaming the intelligence community for the Niger reference in the State of the Union address. Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, told a television interviewer on July 13th, “Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence . . . it would have been gone.” Five days later, a senior White House official went a step further, telling reporters at a background briefing that they had the wrong impression about Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger and the information it had yielded. “You can’t draw a conclusion that we were warned by Ambassador Wilson that this was all dubious,” the unnamed official said, according to a White House transcript. “It’s just not accurate.”

But Wilson’s account of his trip forced a rattled White House to acknowledge, for the first time, that “this information should not have risen to the level of a Presidential speech.” It also triggered retaliatory leaks to the press by White House officials that exposed Wilson’s wife as a C.I.A. operative—and led to an F.B.I. investigation.



Among the best potential witnesses on the subject of Iraq’s actual nuclear capabilities are the men and women who worked in the Iraqi weapons industry and for the National Monitoring Directorate, the agency set up by Saddam to work with the United Nations and I.A.E.A. inspectors. Many of the most senior weapons-industry officials, even those who voluntarily surrendered to U.S. forces, are being held in captivity at the Baghdad airport and other places, away from reporters. Their families have been told little by American authorities. Desperate for information, they have been calling friends and other contacts in America for help.

One Iraqi émigré who has heard from the scientists’ families is Shakir al Kha Fagi, who left Iraq as a young man and runs a successful business in the Detroit area. “The people in intelligence and in the W.M.D. business are in jail,” he said. “The Americans are hunting them down one by one. Nobody speaks for them, and there’s no American lawyer who will take the case.”

Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:

Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”


The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”

Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:

Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.


Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.

There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”



In early October, David Kay, the former U.N. inspector who is the head of the Administration’s Iraq Survey Group, made his interim report to Congress on the status of the search for Iraq’s W.M.D.s. “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,” Kay reported, “but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war.” In the area of nuclear weapons, Kay said, “Despite evidence of Saddam’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.” Kay was widely seen as having made the best case possible for President Bush’s prewar claims of an imminent W.M.D. threat. But what he found fell far short of those claims, and the report was regarded as a blow to the Administration. President Bush, however, saw it differently. He told reporters that he felt vindicated by the report, in that it showed that “Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger.”

The President’s response raises the question of what, if anything, the Administration learned from the failure, so far, to find significant quantities of W.M.D.s in Iraq. Any President depends heavily on his staff for the vetting of intelligence and a reasonable summary and analysis of the world’s day-to-day events. The ultimate authority in the White House for such issues lies with the President’s national-security adviser—in this case,Condoleezza Rice. The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”

Vice-President Cheney remains unabashed about the Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents, despite the revelation of their forgery. In a September interview on “Meet the Press,” Cheney claimed that the British dossier’s charge that “Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa” had been “revalidated.” Cheney went on, “So there may be a difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground. . . . I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him.”

The Vice-President also defended the way in which he had involved himself in intelligence matters: “This is a very important area. It’s one that the President has asked me to work on. . . . In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job.”

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

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=7741


October 24, 2005
Putting the Plame Case in Perspective
by Steve Weissman and Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
As many now know, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Plame case, set up an official Web site last week. Something tells me he isn't planning on going anywhere soon.

While we await the indictments to come, consider the strange history of the 1982 CIA shield law that triggered the process (as Steve Weissman explains it below). It was a backlash law, a dream law of the Right; it was a response to the 1960s, to the Church Committee's revelations of CIA assassination plots, coup attempts, black propaganda operations and the like, to the urge to put even minimal constraints on an "intelligence" agency that had run amok in the world; and it was a response to the "rogue" CIA agent Philip Agee who named names.

In 1975, with his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Agee became the agent-outer of all times. It's true, of course, that many CIA employees are simply in the business of analyzing information, much as reporters or scholarly experts might (though obviously – since it's "intelligence" – at least some of their analysis comes from other kinds of sources than a reporter or scholar would have access to). As an insider, the task of the analyst is to privately connect the dots (just as TomDispatch tries to do in a completely open way) for those who run our government. This is a perfectly sensible thing for any set of government administrators to want and it was, of course, the original stated purpose for the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency. The usually ignored word "central" in the Agency's title once had a real meaning. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the thought was to centralize scattered and ill-coordinated government intelligence, put it in a form the president could use, and get it to him in a timely manner to prevent any future surprise attacks.

The reality of the CIA's half-century-plus run through our world has been quite another matter, though: the formation and funding of secret armies and death squads from Laos and El Salvador to Afghanistan; the corruption of democratic political parties; the assassination, or attempted assassination, of leaders of other countries; the investment of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in torture research, and then the teaching of new methods of torture (as well as time-tested ones) to allied police and military forces globally; the running of torture centers and secret prisons abroad; and the overthrow of democratically elected governments from Guatemala and Chile to Iran. Through all these years, CIA agents have acted with impunity. The intricate tale of CIA "covert" operations is quite a grim little history, drenched in blood and pain – and a history that finally blew back on Americans.

In his prophetic book Blowback (published before the 9/11 attacks), Chalmers Johnson made that CIA term – for covert operations about which Americans know nothing, which nonetheless inspire retaliation against us – a part of our language. In many ways, the present nightmare can be traced all the way back to the first (successful) CIA attempt to overthrow a foreign government, that of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953. The Agency was then only six years old. That act – like the famous shin bone that's connected to the knee bone – can be connected to the brutal shah who succeeded Mossadegh (with vast American backing); to Ayatollah Khomeini who overthrew the shah and brought Islamic fundamentalism to power in one crucial Middle Eastern country; to Saddam Hussein who, again with our backing, fought Khomeini; to the Afghan anti-Soviet war where the CIA supported the most fundamentalist and extreme of the mujahedeen fighters (including one Osama bin Laden); and so on down to the present.

If Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone this week for violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act (as opposed to a myriad of other possible charges), there will be a certain blowback aspect to it as well. After all, the Plame case lies at the unexpected end of a cycle of blowback (defined more loosely) that started with the Right's response to Agee. Now, the most extreme government in American memory could buckle under the weight of the dream law its predecessors came up with at a moment when George Bush the elder, a former CIA director (January 1976 to January 1977) was Ronald Reagan's vice president. So, as you prepare for this week, consider the strange, circuitous route we've taken to the present moment and where we might be heading. Tom

Outing CIA Agents
Valerie Plame Meets Philip Agee
by Steve Weissman

As we approach the week when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury will undoubtedly issue indictments against White House officials, the seldom considered 1982 CIA shield law under which the Plame case was first launched deserves some attention. When Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, and possibly others decided to reveal the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, they clearly wanted to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for undermining administration claims that Saddam Hussein sought "yellowcake" uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. But by publicly ruining Plame's undercover career, they were undoubtedly also sending a very personal message to CIA types and other insiders not to question Mr. Bush's rush to war in Iraq.

As despicable as this White House treachery may have been, those of us who oppose it need to regain some lost perspective. Being bashed by Team Bush does not turn the Central Intelligence Agency into the home team or necessarily make Valerie Plame a modern-day Joan of Arc; nor should her outing stop journalists or anyone else from blowing the cover of her fellow agents when they are found engaging in kidnappings, torture, or attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments.

CIA Torturers

Among its many sins, the CIA has played a central role in the American torture machine. The agency created its "stress and duress" torture methods back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then passed the techniques to the Pentagon and client regimes around the world. Now, to complete the circle, CIA squads kidnap those they consider terrorist suspects and secretly disappear them into the prisons and torture chambers of countries like Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Uzbekistan.

The antiseptic name for this outsourcing of torture is "extraordinary rendition," and – to be fair – the CIA does not do it on its own say-so. "Renditions were called for, authorized, and legally vetted not just by the N.S.C. [National Security Council] and the Justice Department, but also by the presidents – both Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush," former CIA official Michael Scheuer wrote last March in an op-ed in the New York Times (scroll down). "I know this because, as head of the CIA's bin Laden desk, I started the Qaeda detainee rendition program and ran it for 40 months."

Author of the best-selling Imperial Hubris, Scheuer has become a leading critic of the war in Iraq, which he rightly sees as counterproductive in the fight against terrorists. Still a spook at heart, though, he rushes to defend the agency's "snatch and grab" program, calling those of us who want to outlaw it either "woefully uninformed" or "horse's asses."

The program was "tremendously successful," he told reporter Randy Hall of Cybercast News. "The amount of information we received that helped us better understand al-Qaeda and formulate additional operations against them was invaluable, and the simple fact that, for example, we put one of bin Laden's main procurers of weapons of mass destruction in prison is a good thing."

Yes, jailing terrorists is good, but not by sidestepping formal charges, habeas corpus, independent judges, and fair trials – and certainly not by using torture. To trash civilization's hard-won legal safeguards and let our secret police become judge, jury, and executioner is to do bin Laden's work for him.

For CIA veterans, the ends too often justify the means, as long as the whole business does not become public (as it now has). The belief that an elite corps of CIA officers – and they alone – can keep self-corrupting means both under wraps and in check seems to be part of the job description.

The U.S. Senate appears to agree. In their admirable, bipartisan amendment to stop the American military from using torture, the senators carefully refrained from extending the ban to cover the CIA, which continues to run its own secret prisons elsewhere. If torture is wrong for uniformed GIs, it should certainly be no less wrong for undercover agents.

But what does all this have to do with Valerie Plame?

I hope nothing at all. The CIA is a sizable, complex bureaucracy, and only a relatively small number of its employees have anything to do with kidnapping, torture, and the like. The problem is that we know very little about what Ms. Plame did, and she has told us nothing about her views on anything at all. Her supporters – like former CIA and State Department officer Larry Johnson – tell us only that she worked undercover to protect Americans from nuclear proliferation.

As it happens, I was chief investigator on the BBC television team that first exposed the world's worst nuclear proliferator, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. We pursued Khan's story back in 1980, and many of our best leads came from intelligence operatives like Ms. Plame – and not just on the American side.

The information invariably came through "cutouts," or intermediaries, and we took great pains to check every lead for ourselves, knowing that intelligence agencies miss few opportunities to spread disinformation. After we broadcast our film and published a book called The Islamic Bomb, one of our cutouts passed word from the CIA that our exposé had set back the Pakistani nuclear program by three years.

I mention this to make clear how much I value the kind of intelligence work Ms. Plame is said to have done. But there's a dark side to CIA work that none of us should ignore. A significant part of the Agency's recent efforts against proliferation has rightly focused on stopping terrorists from getting nuclear materials. Given the history of the last few years, there can be little doubt that the Agency would be sorely tempted to ship off any credible suspects to be interrogated under torture in some foreign hellhole. As a result, we need to take a long, hard look at anyone who has worked in CIA covert operations, especially in the area of nuclear proliferation.

None of this should weaken our opposition to the way Team Bush has treated Ms. Plame. But eternal suspicion of our legal, military, and intelligence professionals is one of the prices we will increasingly have to pay if our government continues to insist on relying on torture.

Enter Philip Agee

The current scandal over Plame's outing raises an even tougher issue for those of us who work as journalists. Do we have any obligation to refrain from publishing the identity of undercover CIA operatives engaged in such activities? Or, when we write about their dirty work, do we tell the whole story without leaving out the leading characters?

Back in 1975, former CIA officer Philip Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, an international bestseller in which he revealed what the CIA was doing, especially in Latin America where he had worked. He also named every CIA officer he knew – an indication of just how complete a break he had made with the Agency. The contrast with Michael Scheuer or Valerie Plame is obvious.

It was hardly surprisingly, then, that Agee's former comrades saw what he had done as an utter betrayal, much as old lefties viewed the staged performances of those who named names for Senator Joseph McCarthy and other Congressional investigators. (The difference between the two situations was immense, of course, as Agee made his decision to go public without coercion and solely for reasons of conscience.)

A young idealist with a Jesuit education, he had believed all the apple-pie myths of American democracy and had joined the CIA to do what he thought was right. After 12 years "inside the Company," he ended up loathing the dirty work he had seen and done, and so tried to disrupt the Agency's operations by blowing the cover of its operatives. This clearly put CIA officers at increased risk, but – so he felt – the more time they had to spend ensuring their own safety, the less time they would have to put other people elsewhere on earth at risk.

Several journalists in London at the time – and I was one of the most active – joined Agee in publishing the names of large numbers of CIA officers in dozens of countries, often as lead stories in widely read newspapers and magazines. Contrary to media accounts, however, Agee did not provide the names, as he had already named everyone he knew. The identifications came from the U.S. government's Foreign Service Lists and its yearly Biographic Registers, using a time-consuming method that former State Department officer John Marks described in the November 1974 Washington Monthly. Marks called his method "How to Spot a Spook."

No midnight mail drops from the Soviet KGB. No whispered messages from some Cuban Mata Hari. Just the hard slog of journalistic investigation.

Then came the crisis. Two days before Christmas in 1975, assassins shot and killed Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. The agency quickly used the killing to escalate its attacks on Agee, even though he had never known Welch or identified him in his book (or anywhere else). No doubt Agee would have, but he played no part in the outing, as the CIA knew.

His only contact was peripheral. In January 1975, the American magazine CounterSpy identified Welch as the CIA station chief in Lima, and also carried an essay by Agee. But the magazine, which was funded by author Norman Mailer and his Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, had found Welch's identity in a Peruvian journal and then confirmed it with the spook-spotting techniques from the Washington Monthly.

Welch's name also appeared in the English-language Athens News in November 1975, along with nine other CIA officers working in Greece. Many months later, the press revealed that the killers had stalked Welch even before the list appeared. The CIA had reportedly warned him not to move into the house which the stalkers knew as the CIA chief's residence. For whatever reason, Welch refused to heed the warning.

But Agee's vindication came nearly 20 years later when former First Lady Barbara Bush repeated the old libel that he had played a role in Welch's death in her memoirs. Agee sued, and Mrs. Bush was forced to remove the passage from the paperback edition of the book. She also had to send him a letter of apology, acknowledging that her accusation had been false.

Now, with the outing of Valerie Plame, many pundits are again blaming Agee for revealing Welch's identity. No doubt, they will check the facts and send their apologies as well.

The CIA Fights Back

In the meantime, the CIA continued to do to Agee far worse than Team Bush has done to Valerie Plame, using his notoriety to turn the spotlight away from the dirty work he was protesting. First they persuaded Britain to deport him; then they convinced France, the Netherlands, Norway, and Germany to keep him on the run. Though Germany later relented and let him live there, none of the countries ever presented a public case with specific charges that Agee could contest.

Then, in 1982, the CIA and its former director George Bush, who was by then vice president, persuaded Congress to pass the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, one of several laws that the current Bush administration appears to have broken in outing Valerie Plame. Often called "the Anti-Agee Act," the law targeted those with authorized access to classified information, past or present. It also criminalized journalists and others who showed "a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents."

Though poorly drafted and hard (but not impossible) for prosecutors to use, the "Anti-Agee law" acts as a gag on whistleblowers, journalists, scholars, and activists who might want to expose covert wrongdoing. Worse, in the wake of the Plame outing, several members of Congress want to extend the law, creating even more of a British-style Official Secrets Act.

Whatever Karl Rove or Lewis Libby did to reveal Plame's identity, they should be punished, as should the president and vice president they serve. But let's not jump overboard. Making a bad law worse would prove exceedingly shortsighted, especially for anyone who cherishes a free press or fears the unchecked power of the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. During that time, he was a close friend and colleague of Philip Agee. Weissman now lives and works in France, where for the last two years he wrote regularly for Truthout.org.

Copyright 2005 Steve Weissman

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7743

October 24, 2005
Let Justice Be Done
Though the heavens fall…
by Justin Raimondo
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.

"Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

The above Latin quotation – usually attributed to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman statesman and Julius Caesar's father-in-law – succinctly summarizes both prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's view of the law and the possible consequences of its application in the case of the CIA leak investigation.

In Washington, D.C., the heavens will surely fall on the heads of several prominent players, including not only the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but also the president's top national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley; John Hannah, the vice president's chief national security adviser; and David Wurmser, the VP's chief of Middle Eastern affairs. The fate of the more high-profile Karl Rove is in some doubt: he's probably looking at obstruction of justice and/or perjury charges, but the others – including, perhaps, a number of unindicted co-conspirators – are looking at some real jail time. The number of the indicted is likely more than just these few, however, especially as rumors that Fitzgerald's investigation has widened considerably harden into near certainty. It wasn't for nothing that Fitzgerald's people posted on their brand-new Web site a letter [.pdf] from the Justice Department making clear that the special counsel has "the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure." This isn't just about the "outing" of deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame anymore, if it ever truly was. Scooter-gate is about one of the biggest and most brazen lies used by this administration to drag us into an unjustified [.pdf] and reckless war: the Niger uranium forgeries.

No sooner had I written about this in my Wednesday column of last week than it was confirmed a couple of days later by MSNBC, which reported that Fitzgerald's investigation has led him to ask for the Italian parliamentary report on the Niger uranium forgeries, which, I am told, points directly at the identity of the forgers.

There are plenty of violations of federal law to be found around the Niger uranium forgeries, and I expect Fitzgerald has found most if not all of them by now. When the president made his 2003 State of the Union address, and referred to Iraq's efforts to procure uranium in "an African country," the source of his allegation was a cache of documents that had been turned over to the American embassy in Rome under mysterious circumstances. Less than a month after the president's speech, these documents were proved to be fakes, crude forgeries that could have been debunked by an amateur with a few hours to spend on Google.

Whoever forged these documents and introduced them into the American intelligence stream is guilty of violating this law:

"Whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully– (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

And this law:

"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Furthermore, the conspiracy charge applies equally to the unauthorized dissemination of classified information to persons not entitled to receive it – as in the AIPAC spy case in which longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Steve Rosen, his sidekick Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin are charged [.pdf] with passing classified information to Israeli "diplomats." Add to this charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the total number of the indicted and their prospective years in the hoosegow begins to add up. What also begins to add up is the rationale for this case, which has been only vaguely understood from the very beginning (and I include myself as being among those unclear on the concept).

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. To begin with, they must have known that such a course was risky, and out of all proportion to its possible benefits to their cause. As much as Scooter and his pals berated the CIA for not taking enough risks, it is unlikely they would have outed Plame without having a very good reason. A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense…

Remember, the forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized.

The CIA, after all, hadn't even gotten their hands on a copy of the forgeries until February 2003 – a year after the administration began citing them as "proof" of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It would have been well within the purview of Brewster Jennings & Associates to trace the origins of the Niger uranium documents back to the forgers: surely they weren't sitting on their hands in the months before columnist Robert Novak printed Plame's name and sparked a furor.

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

This drama is playing out in two theaters, one domestic and the other overseas. In Washington, the heavens are falling even before Fitzgerald issues so much as a single indictment, but they're also threatening to take a tumble in the Middle East. The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? For the sake of the country, I dearly hope Fitzgerald's staff has writer's cramp by now from furiously tapping out indictments.

The War Party has its own prosecutor, UN "investigator" Detlev Mehlis, currently trumping up charges against the next candidate for "regime change" in the Middle East: Syria. Mehlis operates under none of the constraints of the U.S. legal system that keep Fitzgerald's inquiries and the testimony before the grand jury under lock and key. The UN's grand inquisitor has published his findings midway through his investigation into the question of who killed Lebanese politician-entrepreneur Rafik Hariri. His report – here – is full of uncorroborated testimony from unknown witnesses of unknowable veracity, and in places reads more like a political polemic than a legal document. I defy anyone to read it and come to any definite conclusion other than that Lebanon is one vast snakepit we would do well to stay out of.

Yet drawing American troops into the Levant is precisely what the neocons are counting on to distract the American people from their treason, in a "wag the dog" scenario so bold it leaves one breathless. According to Joshua Landis, the respected scholar of Syrian politics and culture who resides in Damascus, the very people who fear indictments the most are behind this new push for war:

"I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked [sic] if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to."

The War Party is in a hurry. Even as they prepare to take indictments and fight the charges of a conspiracy to lie us into war, the neocons and their allies in the media are laying the groundwork for the next war. We're on the Middle Eastern escalator, as I've said before: there is no way to contain the conflict we've unleashed in Iraq. Michael Ledeen, named by a former CIA operations officer as the chief conduit of the Niger uranium forgeries, continually urges this administration to go "Faster, please!" – and there are ominous indications that the foot is off the brake. The neocons know they're running a marathon, desperately trying to outrun the consequences of their own trail of deception. Will the truth catch up with Hadley, Ledeen, et al., before they can do any more damage to American interests in the Middle East – and spill more blood?

Stay tuned…

– Justin Raimondo

All The Blame That's Fit To Print CBS News
There’s no shortage of schadenfreude being experienced over The New York Times’ problems. Those with one bone or another to pick with Judy Miller, bloggers who chant the mantra of MSM demise and critics of the war in Iraq are just a few who are reveling in the now-very public internal fighting at the paper. I say good for The Times. Not praise for the mess they find themselves in, surely. Miller’s pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction, the paper’s apology for them, not to mention Miller’s still-curious role in the Valerie Plame case are among the things the Times’ has been suffering from for some time, and will continue to haunt them in the foreseeable future. And while Miller’s attorney, Robert Bennett, may be right about old scores being settled, at least we’re seeing a public airing of it all. The Times’ lengthy reporting on Miller and her involvement with the grand jury, and her own first-person account last week, led to this weekend’s burst of discussion. Not all of it pretty, but out there for everyone to see. What kicked off this round was a memo to the paper’s staff from Executive Editor Bill Keller, who apologized for not taking up the issue of the WMD reporting earlier, writing:Then, the Times’ Public Editor, Byron Calame weighed in with a blistering rebuke of Miller’s account of the Plame case, concluding:Columnist Maureen Dowd concurred with Calame, noting in her column:This morning, Calame posts Miller’s response on his Web Journal, in which she takes issue with many of Calame’s conclusions and noting,Those who like a good fight will love watching this one continue to unfold. One of the major changes that came to the Times in the aftermath of the Jason Blair fiasco was the Public Editor, a decision that all-but guarantees the type of public airing we’re now witnessing, from the top on down. (Ironically, some of this “public” discussion will cost you $50 a year to see, but that’s a topic for another time.) While those enjoying this show might want to focus on the paper’s inability to learn from past mistakes, it seems to me they have learned how to handle the fallout a little more publicly and honestly. I’m here to tell you that that’s not easy.
Colleagues assail 'Times' reporter USA Today
Doing the Right Thing American Journalism Review
Political Affairs Magazine - Newsweek - Reuters - United Press International - all 816 related »

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10472

The Yes-Man
President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he’s really doing is wrecking it.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.23.05

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Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball.

The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his staff in tow -- a collection of Capitol Hill aides nicknamed “the Gosslings” -- Goss bowled into the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, scattering senior officials like so many duckpins. In mid-September, Robert Richer, the newly installed deputy director of operations and a former Near East Division chief, quit in disgust. The newspapers duly reported Richer’s departure. But he is only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg.

Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated.

And the agency has been locked down tight: After a decade during which the CIA prided itself on a new openness, shedding some of its legendary obsession with secrecy, neither Goss nor anyone else in the organization is giving interviews or bothering to explain the CIA’s workings.

Appointed to lead the agency in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Goss’ primary mission, according to numerous former CIA officials -- including some only recently departed -- was to yank Langley onto President Bush’s political team. His immediate goal in 2004 was to block what had been, until then, a stream of damaging leaks of information about CIA intelligence reports that ran contrary to the White House’s rosy optimism about Iraq and U.S. anti-terrorism efforts. More broadly, the Goss team clamped down on dissenting views and radically politicized the CIA’s leadership. Even worse, say former agency officials, Goss has acquiesced in the dismantling of the CIA itself, which has bowed too easily to the supremacy of the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who spent his days in Baghdad contradicting the CIA’s clear-eyed battle reports.

For liberals and leftists accustomed to viewing the CIA as a rogue agency prone to unaccountable covert actions abroad, it is ironic that since 9-11, the CIA has emerged as a bastion of opposition to George W. Bush’s imperial foreign policy. Further, since 9-11, the CIA has established itself as perhaps the primary U.S. system of defense against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and its offshoots and co-thinkers in the Muslim world. That reality makes Goss’ wrecking-ball approach to the agency both irresponsible and dangerous.

This article, based on more than two-dozen interviews with former intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, along with ex–Capitol Hill intelligence staffers who worked with Goss, is the first comprehensive account of the CIA’s transition from George Tenet through John McLaughlin, the agency’s respected acting director in mid-2004, to Goss. It reveals that Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a "expletive deleted"ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”


* * *
From 9-11 through the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the neoconservative nexus in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, leaned heavily on the CIA to come up with intelligence to support the White House’s preordained determination to go to war against Iraq. The pressure directed at Tenet, McLaughlin, and scores of other CIA managers, analysts, and field officers was intense. Subsequent official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, blithely passed over the question of whether intelligence analysts were pressured by the administration. Both studies determined that analysts were not pressured, a conclusion that CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured. “The senior guys got together and said, ‘You guys weren’t pressured, right? Right?’” says W. Patrick Lang, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East section.

In fact, analysts were pressured, and heavily so, according to Richard Kerr. A 32-year CIA veteran, Kerr led an internal investigation of the agency’s failure to correctly analyze Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities, preparing a series of four reports that have not been released publicly. Kerr joined the CIA in 1960, serving in a series of senior analytic posts, including director of East Asian analysis, the unit that prepared the president’s daily intelligence brief, and finally as chief of the Directorate of Intelligence. For several months in 1991, Kerr was the acting CIA director; he retired in 1992. A highly respected analyst, Kerr received four Distinguished Intelligence Medals; in 1992, President George Bush Senior gave him the Citizen’s Medal for his work during Operation Desert Storm.

Two years ago, Kerr was summoned out of retirement to lead a four-member task force to conduct the investigation of the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. His team, which included a former Near East Division chief, a former CIA deputy inspector general, and a former CIA chief Soviet analyst, spent months sorting through everything that the CIA produced on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion, as well as interviewing virtually everyone at the agency who had anything to do with producing the faulty intelligence estimates. The Kerr team’s first report was an overview of what the CIA said about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war compared with what Kerr calls the postwar “ground truth.” The second looked specifically at a classified version of the important October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which the administration used to build its case for war. The third looked at the overall intelligence process, and the fourth was a think piece that considered how to reorganize the management of intelligence analysis “if you could start all over again.”

Kerr’s four reports, with a fifth now under way, were viewed as the definitive works of self-criticism inside the agency and were shared with the oversight committees in Congress, outside commissions, and the office of the secretary of defense. Unlike the outside reports that looked at the same issues, however, Kerr’s concluded that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration. “Everybody felt pressure,” Kerr told me. “A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions … . I talked to a lot of people who said, ‘There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.’ There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had.”

In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials hammered at the CIA to go back time and time again to look at intelligence that had already been sifted and resifted. “It was a continuing drumbeat: ‘How do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?’” says Kerr. Many of those questions, which began to cascade onto the CIA in 2001, were generated by the Office of Special Plans and by discredited fabricators such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a secret source code-named “Curveball.” As a result, says Kerr, the CIA reached back to old data, relied on several sources of questionable veracity, and made assumptions about current data that were unwarranted. In particular, intelligence on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program, much of which was based on data collected in the 1980s, early ’90s, and more spottily until the end of the United Nations inspection regime in 1998, was parsed -- and, some would argue, cherry-picked -- in order to reinforce the administration’s case.

On and off the record, other former CIA officials say that despite the pressure, dissent against the White House was rife within the agency. The strongest opposition centered in the CIA’s Near East Division, few of whose officials supported the idea of war with Iraq. They clashed often with WINPAC, the CIA division focused on weapons proliferation and the part of the agency most responsible for the heavily skewed conclusions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. “The Near East Division people didn’t buy into what the Bush administration wanted to do in regard to Iraq, but much of WINPAC did,” says Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who left the agency in 1989 and then served four years as deputy director of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism. “Bush, and the White House, favored WINPAC over [the Near East Division]. There were people in the agency who tried to speak out or disagree … who got fired, got transferred, got outed, or criticized. Others decided to play ball.”

Michael Scheuer -- who gained fame in 2004 as Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris, and who exited the CIA as Goss came in -- headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit and saw the confrontation up close. “I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting,” he says. “There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts.” Opposition flared, particularly when the controversial 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was being cooked. “There was a great deal of dissent about that [estimate],” says Scheuer. “No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public.”

According to another former CIA official, as the war loomed, the CIA’s Iraq task force ballooned in size, from fewer than 10 analysts to 500. But some of the CIA’s best and brightest on Iraq asked to be given other assignments rather than play ball with an administration already set on war. “A lot of people from the Iraq shop asked to be transferred away from Iraq,” the former officer said. “You had all these people being transferred in, and the people who didn’t like the direction it was going transferred out.”


* * *
Despite the vise-like squeeze on the CIA by Cheney and the Defense Department, the agency still got a lot on Iraq right. Not once in the period up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did the U.S. intelligence community determine that Hussein posed a threat to the United States. The CIA concluded convincingly that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that Hussein had no connection to bin Laden’s attacks. “We, at CIA, were convinced within days -- within hours, by midday on September 11 -- that we had evidence that it was al-Qaeda and had no reason to suspect that Iraq was involved,” says a former high-level official. “That was our position, and we held to it firmly.” According to Scheuer, after the CIA received repeated inquiries about Iraq–al-Qaeda links from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, the agency reviewed more than 70,000 documents and pieces of data, concluding that there was no tie between Hussein and al-Qaeda.

The CIA also correctly concluded that Iraq was not even close to developing nuclear weapons. And, long before the war, the CIA told the White House that if the United States invaded Iraq and carried out a prolonged occupation, it would spark an insurgency like the one now tearing Iraq apart. “We did predict this in papers that we wrote,” says a former CIA official.

Paul Pillar was one of many inside the CIA who accurately foresaw the insurgency, according to Scheuer. A longtime CIA officer who served in battle-scarred venues such as Sri Lanka, Algeria, and Kashmir until becoming the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Pillar “knows insurgencies inside out,” says Scheuer admiringly. “It’s no surprise that Pillar would understand that there would be an insurgency in Iraq.”

By 2004, the CIA had issued a steady stream of finished intelligence products that, one after another, undermined the premises of the Bush administration’s basic assertions about the occupation. The team that put these together included McLaughlin, the bloodied Near East Division analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Not only did the CIA’s work shoot holes in White House policy; several of its conclusions were leaked, finding their way on to the front pages of the major newspapers. More than anything else, it was these leaks that enraged Bush and Cheney and caused them to turn to Porter Goss as their enforcer.

The fact that the agency was leaking isn’t denied by some. “Of course they were leaking,” says Pat Lang. “They told me about it at the time. They thought it was funny. They’d say things like, ‘This last thing that came out, surely people will pay attention to that. They won’t re-elect this man.’”

The dissent within the agency, and the anger about being manipulated, were palpable by 2004. Equally palpable were the complaints about the agency emanating from the neoconservatives and other war supporters. In The New York Times, David Brooks was bloodthirsty. “If we lived in a primitive age,” he wrote, “the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes.” And Robert Novak, the principal conduit for the White House leak campaign against Plame and Wilson, concocted an indictment against Pillar for supposedly having leaked a CIA report that contradicted the most cherished assumptions of the administration about Iraq. The incident with Pillar, wrote Novak, “leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.” It made for a situation that Bush, facing re-election, wanted desperately to change. Brooks was about to get his wish.


* * *
Porter Johnston Goss is a well-bred Connecticut Yankee whose genteel family sent him to The Hotchkiss School and then to Yale University (class of 1960). The CIA that Goss joined in 1962 was still the Old Boys’ club, an insiders’ preserve for Ivy League grads and others of the “best and the brightest.” Goss married Mariel Robinson, daughter of a rich Pittsburgh industrial family -- “she’s an heiress,” says a former CIA colleague -- and amassed even greater wealth. In 1999, Goss listed his net worth as more than $20 million.

Over the years, Goss has refused to say much about his career as a clandestine-services officer in the CIA, but several colleagues say that it was an undistinguished one, mostly in headquarters. “He was a nothing as a [Directorate of Operations] guy,” says one. “He served mostly a few [temporary duty] postings in Europe.” Goss apparently also served for a time in Mexico and the Caribbean, and likes to say things like, “I had some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits.”

In any case, by 1971, stricken with a life-threatening staph infection, Goss quit the agency and moved to sunny Florida. For a time, he co-owned a chintzy newspaper, the Island Reporter, which he later sold for what he called an “obscene” amount. He drifted into local politics, and in 1988 was elected to Congress from Florida’s 14th District. Ensconced in the 14th, the state’s most Republican district, Goss frequently ran unopposed or won re-election by huge margins, with virtually all of his campaign contributions coming from business. Not surprisingly, he adopted the right-wing agenda.

It wasn’t long before Goss was trading on his hush-hush CIA background. His first official brush with intelligence was to serve as a Republican member of the special task force assembled to investigate the 1980 “October Surprise” allegations claiming that Bush Senior and William Casey, the late CIA director, had struck a secret deal with Iran’s ayatollahs in advance of the November 1980 election to prevent the release of U.S. hostages held in Tehran. It was no surprise that Goss, acting to protect then–Vice President Bush, found no truth to the story. In 1994 he served on one of those what’s-wrong-with-intelligence commissions that turn up every few years.

By 1996, Goss, having established an alliance with Newt Gingrich, got himself named to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Gingrich’s support for Goss was critical to the Florida congressman’s success, because Gingrich -- far more than any other speaker of the House in recent times -- maintained an extraordinary interest in intelligence issues and, unusually, served as an ex-officio member of the HPSCI. Goss cemented his tie to Gingrich by chairing the subcommittee tasked with investigating ethics charges against the speaker. Within days of being mostly cleared, Gingrich selected Goss as chairman of the HPSCI, the post he would hold until being nominated to run the CIA in 2004.

Another key bond was formed in this period: Gardiner Peckham, Gingrich’s right-hand man on intelligence issues, would eventually become a close friend of Patrick Murray, who off and on served as an HPSCI staffer under Goss. To many who worked with him on the Hill, Goss was seen as a prisoner of his staff -- above all, of Murray. During one confrontation over a controversial piece of legislation, when other members challenged Goss, he deferred to Murray. “Goss looked sad and apologetic, and he looked at us and said, ‘Pat runs the show,’” according to a source. “We all wondered, ‘What does Pat Murray have on Porter Goss?’”

During his years as HPSCI chairman, Goss established himself as a friend of the CIA, preferring partnership to oversight. When Bush took over in 2001, it was Cheney who persuaded Goss not to retire from Congress, as he had pledged to do, and for a time Goss was viewed as a replacement for Tenet in the Bush administration. However, Tenet obsequiously cultivated the Bush family, going so far as to name the CIA’s Langley headquarters after George Bush Senior, and Tenet was asked to stay on. But Goss retained the support of Cheney. In May 2001, speaking about intelligence, Goss praised Cheney to The New Yorker. “You need to take risks,” he said. “We need leadership. Cheney is certainly the man who can provide it. He understands risk. He understands bold leadership. He understands purpose.”

Meanwhile, Murray, according to former HPSCI staff, stayed even closer to Cheney’s White House office and the network of neoconservatives who’d taken up key posts in the Bush administration. “There was a sense that [Murray], even more than Porter, was close to the folks at the White House,” says a former HPSCI staffer. “And that [Murray] was making everything happen, with lots of meetings at the White House, with Cheney’s office, and House leadership.”

And in 2004, with tempers flaring between the White House and the agency, Goss, despite his longtime advocacy for the CIA, turned on a dime and issued a report that blasted it for having lost its way. Seemingly overnight, Goss decided that the CIA was a “stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.” The CIA, said Goss, is mismanaged, has a “political aversion to risk,” and “continues down the road leading over a proverbial cliff.” For many at the agency, it was a sign that Goss was auditioning for the job of intelligence reformer, but his newfound zeal for reform bemused CIA partisans. “He served on the HPSCI for eight years,” says Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “What the "expletive deleted" was he doing for the last seven years?”

But if Goss lambasted the CIA, he never wavered in his fealty to the Bush-Cheney team. When David Kay, the CIA’s point man on searching for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said that the weapons weren’t there, Goss told a packed news conference, “Those weapons are there.” He defended Bush-Cheney right down the line on Iraq policy, blocking efforts in the House or at the hpsci to investigate prewar intelligence about the weapons. He blocked an inquiry about Abu Ghraib, too. And when it became apparent that White House officials had leaked Plame’s name, Goss ridiculed the idea of investigating what was, according to nearly all intelligence officials, a significant breach of national security. “Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I’ll have an investigation,” sniffed Goss.

His nomination didn’t exactly win plaudits, and four Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- including the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller -- voted against it. But in the end, the Democrats rolled over, choosing not to make a fight on the eve of the elections. On September 24, he took over.


* * *
Within weeks of Goss’ arrival, it was clear that the agency had been plunged into turmoil. One after another, top CIA officials bolted: first McLaughlin; then Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick, the top two officials in the Directorate of Operations; Jami Miscik, who headed the Directorate of Intelligence, and her deputy, Scott White; Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s executive director; Mary Margaret Graham, a senior counterterrorism official; the heads of the European and East Asia divisions; and many more. Pillar, the Middle East national intelligence officer, took retirement. Many others, less prominent, also quit, were fired, or took jobs as consultants. Rockefeller, watching from the sidelines, said Goss “faces rumors of a partisan purge at the CIA.”

Leading the purge were Murray, who followed Goss to Langley, and perhaps half a dozen other HPSCI staffers who joined them, including Merrell Moorhead and Jay Jakub. Nearly all of them had poor reputations at the HPSCI. California Democratic Representative Jane Harman, hardly a critic of the CIA, said Goss has assembled a “highly partisan, inexperienced staff,” noting that “[f]rankly, on both sides of the aisle in the committee, we were happy to see them go.” And the CIA, where they were referred to as the “Hitler youth,” was not exactly happy to see them arrive.

Many of these departures made headlines, none more so than the confrontation between Murray and Mary Margaret Graham, who, according to a former colleague, was serving as the CIA’s chief of station in New York on 9-11. Murray treated Graham, a 27-year CIA veteran, so imperiously that the ensuring fracas led to the resignations of both Kappes and Sulick. According to several former CIA officers who served with Kappes and Sulick, both former Moscow chiefs of station who had only assumed the reins at the Directorate of Operations months earlier, the two men were among the most highly respected agency officers. “The real loss was Steve Kappes,” says Mike Scheuer. “He would have been one of the best [deputy directors of operations].” Says another clandestine-services officer with more than 25 years of experience: “Goss got rid of them like they were nothing. His attitude was, ‘You guys leaked stuff against the president. You’re disloyal, and you need to be punished.’”

The purge was felt down the line, with various chiefs of station, division heads, and other top officials bailing out. No section was harder hit than the already rattled Near East Division. At least two consecutive Baghdad chiefs of station have quit or been fired, and division’s staff at headquarters has been nearly swept clean of its experienced officials. “All over the agency, the talk is about the steady stream of people leaving,” says one veteran CIA officer. “People are disillusioned, and there seems to be no relief from the sense that there is no fixing this.” In the Near East Division, especially in the section that focuses on Iraq, many are gone. “What you’ve got left is a bunch of kids,” this officer said. “You’ve got a bunch of newbies in there -- some very smart, but with no experience.” Another former CIA chief of station said: “There aren’t any Arabists left in the CIA. They’re gone. They weren’t with the program. It’s like Pol Pot, who killed anybody wearing glasses because they might be able to read.”

Most troubling to agency watchers -- including Harman, who says that the CIA’s “free fall” is a “very, very bad omen in the middle of a war” -- is that the people exiting the CIA are those with decades of experience. “The intelligence process is based on experience,” says one grizzled CIA veteran. “It’s the 10,000 at-bat syndrome. It’s more an art than a science, and it is very difficult to teach. We’re talking about an agency that has no bench. When you take out the A-team, there’s no one.”

Another retired chief of station, who maintains close ties inside the CIA, said that scores of top agency officials have scattered. Some have made deals with contractors, returning to the CIA sporting the green badge signifying that they are from the private sector, yet working alongside CIA officers doing the same job for half as much money. Others have taken jobs in the military-industrial complex. And still others are flocking to the new office of the director of national intelligence, led by Negroponte. “What’s left behind are what you’d call the less enlightened people,” he says. “Hot molecules escape; the cold ones are left behind.”

Without a doubt, Goss’ team is the most highly partisan ever to run the CIA. The ex–HPSCI staffers were notorious for taking a Republican Party–oriented stance on many issues, especially Murray, who once tried to get classified information released so it could be used against the Democrats. Under Goss, the CIA public-affairs office has been nearly shut down, under the tight control of Jennifer Millerwise -- not an intelligence person, but a political operative who worked on the Bush-Cheney election campaigns and for Goss at the HPSCI. The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis. “At the [Directorate of Intelligence], they’re wondering, ‘What is our job now, now that our boss doesn’t seem to care about us anyway?’” says Gregory Treverton, who served on the National Intelligence Council under Bill Clinton.


* * *
On the seventh floor at Langley, Goss is reportedly isolated. His staff protects him from agency veterans. It is said that he doesn’t walk the halls or mix readily with the troops, doesn’t eat in the CIA cafeteria, and gets chilly stares from employees. Many of them are angry that Goss has quietly allowed Negroponte to usurp traditional CIA roles, such as briefing the president on daily intelligence. “He’s seen as a weak leader, not as an advocate,” says one recently retired Middle East CIA officer. “So the agency is losing its position of influence.” Having clashed early with the Directorate of Operations, Goss has alienated -- some say irreparably -- the heart of the CIA: its clandestine service. “Without the [Directorate of Operations], the CIA is the Brookings Institution with razor wire,” says one former agent. Another adds: “The [Directorate of Operations] won’t forgive Goss. With the [directorate], you are either an ‘us’ or a ‘them.’ With the start Goss made, he was firmly placed in the ‘them’ category.”

Chas W. Freeman is a former assistant secretary of defense and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “What Goss is doing is an effort that originated outside the agency to impose a vision on it that its analysts and operatives reject as simply not based on reality,” he says. “It’s totalitarian. We are going to end up with an agency that is more right-wing, more conformist, and less prone to produce people with original views and dissenters.”

Demoralized, weakened, and politicized, the CIA may yet recover. The agency, particularly the Directorate of Operations, has weathered storms before and knows how to hunker down. Goss will probably not remain at the helm for long. And despite him, the agency continues to produce reports on the U.S. predicament in Iraq that reflect a measure of reality-based pessimism. But there is anger, bitterness, and an unhealthy caution that ill serves America’s need for an agency that, as one former CIA officer says, “speaks truth to power.” Enormous damage has been done, and the rebuilding of the CIA will take many years after Goss departs.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The Nation and Mother Jones. His book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published this fall by Henry Holt/Metropolitan.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "The Yes-Man", The American Prospect Online, Oct 23, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2401734_pf.html

washingtonpost.com
CIA Leak Linked to Dispute Over Iraq Policy
As Grand Jury Term Nears End, Officials' Critique of Administration Gains Attention

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 25, 2005; A03



The alleged leaking of a CIA operative's name had its roots in a clash over Iraq policy between White House insiders and their rivals in the permanent bureaucracy of Washington, especially in the State Department and the CIA.

As the investigation into the leak reaches its expected climax this week with the expiration of the grand jury's term, the internal disputes have been further amplified by a recent string of speeches and interviews criticizing the administration's handling of Iraq, including by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and State Department diplomats, and other officials involved in the early efforts to stabilize Iraq.

Scowcroft, a close friend of former president George H.W. Bush, revealed in interviews with the New Yorker a deep disdain for the administration's foreign policy, according to an article published this week. He said he had once considered Vice President Cheney "a good friend," but "Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." When Scowcroft was asked whether he could name the issues on which he agreed with President Bush, he replied "Afghanistan." He then paused for 12 seconds before adding only, "I think we're doing well on Europe."

A top State Department official involved in Iraq policy, former ambassador Robin Raphel, said the administration was "not prepared" when it invaded Iraq, but did so anyway in part because of "clear political pressure, election driven and calendar driven," according to an oral history interview posted on the Web site of the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace.

The unusual on-the-record bashing comes at a difficult period for the White House, which this week is also bracing for the 2,000th military fatality in the Iraq conflict. While the internal conflicts were not a secret even during the planning for war, the intensity of the feelings more than two years later is striking.

A special counsel is investigating how the undercover status of Valerie Plame -- the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV -- was revealed to reporters in July 2003. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium. Wilson said he found little evidence to support the allegations and later emerged as an administration critic after Bush referred to the Niger connection in the 2003 State of the Union address.

Testimony in the leak case, especially by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, has suggested that one reason White House officials sought to discredit Wilson is a deep animus toward the CIA -- and a suspicion the intelligence agency was trying to shift blame for its failures onto the White House.

But, elsewhere in Washington, others were seething, as well.

"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's former chief of staff and longtime confidant, said in a speech last week. "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

Wilkerson added that when decisions were presented to the bureaucracy, "it was presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace."

Scowcroft also dismissed former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, the intellectual godfather of the Iraq invasion. "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic," Scowcroft said. "Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts," he added.

Raphel's interview, conducted in July 2004, has been posted on the institute Web site, along with more than 30 other interviews -- some blunt in their dissatisfaction and disappointment -- with a range of officials involved in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Little notice has been paid to the interviews until this week.

Raphel, who still works at State, said that controversial decisions to fire any officials associated with the Baath Party and to demobilize the Iraqi army were made largely because of "neoconservative" ideology. "What one needs to understand is that these decisions were ideologically based," she said. "They were not based on an analytical, historical understanding. They were based on ideology. You don't counter ideology with logic or experience or analysis very effectively."

Raphel added: "There was very much the sense that we were getting in way over our heads within weeks."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

I didn't see this article on this thread, but please forgive if it's a repeat. Notice, however, that even NATO is part of the investigation- highlighted in red...

From Truthout.org

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=7759

Frustrated Scowcroft Assails Neocons, Cheney

by Jim Lobe
One week after a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a blistering attack on foreign policy-making in the George W. Bush administration, Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under Bush's father, assailed neoconservatives who persuaded the president to go to war in Iraq.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Scowcroft, whose relations with the Bush administration have been badly strained since he publicly warned against invading Iraq seven months before U.S. troops crossed over from Kuwait, argued that the invasion was counterproductive.

"This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism," Scowcroft told the magazine, adding that the war risked moving public opinion against any new foreign policy commitments for some time, just as the Vietnam War did during the late 1970s and through the 1980s.

"Vietnam was visceral in the American people," said Scowcroft, who also served as national security adviser in the mid-1970s under former President Gerald Ford. "This was a really bitter period, and it turned us against foreign policy adventures deeply. This is not that deep, [but] … we're moving in that direction."

Scowcroft's remarks come at a critical moment. According to recent opinion polls, the government's performance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bush's choice of his personal attorney to serve on the Supreme Court, and the lack of progress achieved in Iraq have combined to put the president's approval ratings at below 40 percent.

Moreover, there is a growing likelihood that a federal special prosecutor will indict top administration officials, including Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, this week.

They are thought to have played a key role in trying to discredit and punish whistleblower Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had publicly questioned its rationale for going to war in Iraq. The probe has cast a dark cloud over the White House at a moment when it can least afford it.

The administration was also unpleasantly surprised by the cascading media coverage given to a talk at the New America Foundation (NAF) last week by ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's top aide for some 16 years, in which he accused Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of leading a "cabal" that circumvented the formal policymaking and intelligence processes in order to take the country to war in Iraq.

Wilkerson, whose long-standing personal and professional closeness to Powell has been widely noted, also accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Scowcroft protégé from Bush I, of condoning the cabal's machinations and failing to ensure an open policymaking process in which all reasonable voices and options were heard when she served as Bush's national security adviser during his first term.

Scowcroft, a former Air Force general who has long been seen as George H.W. Bush's closest friend, if not alter ego, was not nearly as scathing as Wilkerson, although some of his opinions echoed those of Powell's former chief of staff. While Wilkerson's words reflected deep anger and frustration, Scowcroft comes across in the interview as regretful but resigned.

Of Cheney, who worked closely with Scowcroft as secretary of defense under Bush I and White House chief of staff under Ford, Scowcroft expressed bewilderment. "The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," he said. "I consider Cheney a good friend – I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Cheney, he said, appeared to have been taken with a presentation by Bernard Lewis, an octogenarian Middle East scholar from Princeton University, who had been invited to the White House soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. According to Scowcroft, Lewis' message was, "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power."

"I don't think Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job," Scowcroft told The New Yorker.

"There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is okay, but it's not sufficient.'"

On the foreign policy process, Scowcroft also implicitly echoed Wilkerson's contention that the views of dissenters from the Cheney-Rumsfeld line, including himself, were either ignored or screened out.

When a frustrated Scowcroft published his warning against invading Iraq in August 2002, Rice telephoned him and asked, according to another source, "How could you do this to us?"

"What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national security adviser had to say," according to the source.

At the time, Scowcroft was serving as chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which should have been consulting regularly with the White House but was apparently kept in the dark about the preparations and rationale for going to war.

Scowcroft was dropped from PFIAB earlier this year, and efforts by George H.W. Bush to arrange a meeting between his son and Scowcroft have been unavailing, according to The New Yorker account.

Indeed, one of the most important differences between foreign policy by Bush I and Bush II was the openness of the process to dissenting opinions, according to John Sununu, Bush I's chief of staff.

"We always made sure the president was hearing all the possibilities," he told The New Yorker, a view that was implicitly endorsed by the former president himself. In an e-mail message, the elder Bush described Scowcroft as being "very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not."

The willingness to consider what could go wrong, as well as what could go right, is one of the most profound critiques of the current administration made by Scowcroft, widely considered a classic "realist," of both the current administration's policy process and the neoconservative influence on it.

Noting that he and his Bush I colleagues, including Cheney, strongly opposed invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War because of the risks of becoming bogged down in a "hostile land," Scowcroft told The New Yorker, "[T]his is exactly where we are now. We own it. And we can't let go."

"Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost."

"What the realist fears," he went on, "is the consequences of idealism. The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."

(Inter Press Service)

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news5/nyt10.htm

New York Times
October 25, 2005
Exception Sought in Detainee Abuse Ban
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 - Stepping up a confrontation with the Senate over the handling of detainees, the White House is insisting that the Central Intelligence Agency be exempted from a proposed ban on abusive treatment of suspected Qaeda militants and other terrorists.

The Senate defied a presidential veto threat nearly three weeks ago and approved, 90 to 9, an amendment to a $440 billion military spending bill that would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee held by the United States government. This could bar some techniques that the C.I.A. has used in some interrogations overseas.

But in a 45-minute meeting last Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney and the C.I.A. director, Porter J. Goss, urged Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who wrote the amendment, to support an exemption for the agency, arguing that the president needed maximum flexibility in dealing with the global war on terrorism, said two government officials who were briefed on the meeting. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the discussions.

Mr. McCain rejected the proposed exemption, which stated that the measure "shall not apply with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States, that are carried out by an element of the United States government other than the Department of Defense and are consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and treaties to which the United States is a party, if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack."

Spokesmen for Mr. McCain, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Goss all declined to comment on the matter Monday, citing the confidentiality of the talks.

Human rights organizations said Monday that it was unclear whether the language in the changes proposed by the White House meant that the president would decide exemptions case by case or whether there would be more of a blanket authority. But they said the administration's proposal would seriously undermine Mr. McCain's measure.

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the administration had interpreted an international treaty banning torture to mean that a prohibition against cruel and inhumane treatment did not apply to C.I.A. actions overseas.

"That's why the McCain amendment is important, and that's why this language they're floating now would gut it," said Ms. Massimino, who provided a copy of the administration's proposed changes to The New York Times.

Human rights advocates said that creating parallel sets of interrogation rules for military personnel and clandestine intelligence operatives was impractical in the war on terrorism, where soldiers and spies routinely cross paths on a global battlefield and often share techniques

"They are explicitly saying, for the first time, that the intelligence community should have the ability to treat prisoners inhumanely," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said. "You can't tell soldiers that inhumane treatment is always morally wrong if they see with their own eyes that C.I.A. personnel are allowed to engage in it."

Mr. McCain's provision faces stiff opposition in the House, which did not include similar language in its version of the spending bill.

The White House has threatened to veto any bill that includes the McCain provision, contending that it would bind the president's hands in wartime.

But Mr. McCain has kept the pressure on as the issue moves to a House-Senate conference committee, perhaps later this week or next. Shortly after the Senate vote on Oct. 5, Mr. McCain's staff sent members of the conference committee letters endorsing the provision signed by more than two dozen retired senior military officers, including former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, both former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The matter will probably be settled in a private meeting in the next week or two among four senior lawmakers: Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, both Republicans; and Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, both Democrats. All are on the conference committee.

Mr. McCain originally offered his measure earlier this year, when the Senate was working on a bill setting Pentagon policy. But Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, scuttled that bill, partly because of White House opposition to the amendment.

Now it appears that senators have struck a deal to revive the budget bill for Senate floor debate and action. One of the principal amendments that Democrats are expected to offer, sponsored by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, would create an independent commission to review accusations of prisoner abuse by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere. The White House has also threatened a presidential veto if any bill comes to Mr. Bush's desk that contains the provision.








Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...24-112439-3515r
Intelligence offices remain separate
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Published October 24, 2005


WASHINGTON -- More than two-and-a-half years after it was set up, the Department of Homeland Security is still some way from successfully integrating the 10 separate intelligence offices run by its 22 component agencies, according to its chief intelligence officer.

"We have some way to go before we have a truly unified intelligence enterprise and culture," Charlie Allen told United Press International last week, after giving testimony about his new role to two House subcommittees.


He also told the committee, "We are obviously short of facilities," and lawmakers advised him to petition Congress for any additional resources he needed.

Allen, a 47-year veteran CIA official, had previously been a senior member of the community management staff -- officials who worked for the director of Central Intelligence in his capacity as nominal head of all 15 U.S. spy agencies.

As assistant director for collection, he had the unenviable job of coordinating the "tasking" of intelligence assets, technical and human -- striving to please both military and policy-making customers, while making the best use of limited resources.

It was a tricky task at which Allen, in the opinion of several current and former intelligence officials, excelled.

But no less daunting must be the job he came out of a brief retirement three weeks ago to do. As well as being Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's top intelligence adviser, Allen also must help define the department's role in the increasingly crowded field of U.S. intelligence agencies; and manage the department's eclectic collection of "non-traditional" intelligence-gathering operations -- like mapping trends in document forgery or other kinds of fraud by people trying to enter the country illegally.

Many of the 22 agencies, departments and offices that were merged into the department in March 2003 -- including the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and the Transportation Security Administration -- have intelligence operations of one kind or another.

The Border Patrol, for instance, has a small intelligence unit in each sector that analyzes data about gangs and others smuggling migrants across the border.

And there are also new intelligence-gathering elements in the department, to exploit what it says is a unique relationship with the private sector and with state and local governments and law enforcement agencies, all of which enables it to collect a great deal of so-called open source, or unclassified intelligence.

Officials in the department's infrastructure protection office, for instance, track reports from the private sector of suspicious or anomalous behavior at chemical plants and other potential terrorist targets; looking for patterns that might be signs of preparation for an attack.

Allen told lawmakers that the key issue was "how to bring together all these disparate components and the intelligence ... that they collect on a daily basis."

"They collect a lot of it," he added, "but there's a great amount of information that does not get fully disseminated or used as part of trends and patterns and threat streams."

Part of the problem, he told UPI later, was the absence of common standards, such as so-called reporting thresholds -- guidelines about what kind of data should be passed up the chain -- or common reporting formats, so that each element was producing materials that could be easily and accurately interpreted and understood by everyone else.

"It is a huge and big, big problem for all of us, and it has not been done," he concluded at the hearing, adding that his predecessors had exhibited "a lack of real focus" on the issue.

His most recent predecessor, who left more than seven months ago, retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, said that, overall, he thought Allen's assessment of state of play was "fair."

But he took issue with the idea that there had been no focus on integration.

"I don't think that's right," he told UPI. "We did make progress, but it was progress from zero."

He said that in 2004 he had instituted regular monthly meetings of the 10 intelligence heads, a process which Allen said he will now formalize as the Homeland Security Intelligence Council.

Hughes acknowledged that guidelines setting out common standards were "something we just never got to."

But he added that part of the problem had been the absence of guidance for the whole collection of fractious agencies dubbed the Intelligence Community. Without that, he said, guidelines set unilaterally by homeland security "would only have contributed to the problem" of multiple inconsistent or even contradictory standards and procedures.

Allen told UPI he would be working closely with the office of the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the guidelines issue, and in many ways, the challenges he face resemble those facing the new director, albeit on a department-wide, rather than government-wide level.

For instance, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, asked Allen how he could succeed in improving coordination and integration without budgetary and personnel authority over the 10 offices, which at the moment report to -- and are budgeted by -- the heads of their different home agencies within the department.

"I'm going to evaluate whether I need additional authorities," Allen responded, adding, "At this stage I think I have the needed authority," but promising to come back to congress if he found he needed more.

On the question of the department's role vis-à-vis other intelligence agencies, Allen told the hearing that another "of the things I found that has not been done" was the preparation of an intelligence community directive, defining the department's role, and the relationship of the chief intelligence officer to the new director of national intelligence.

Hughes said that under his leadership the department had produced what he called "beginning documents" on the issue, "a basis for the work to go forward."

One thing both men agreed on was that the physical infrastructure available to the department's intelligence operation leaves a lot to be desired.

"The physical facilities were inadequate," said Hughes, adding that this had also slowed down his efforts to ramp up the office's staffing, because there sometimes was not room to put people to work.

"We obviously are short of facilities," Allen told the hearing, "But I've submitted a plan to Deputy Secretary Jackson and I will press that."

Hughes said that "A plan has to factor in the limitations," pointing out that the whole department was cramped on its current campus, and that new buildings cannot be thorwn up overnight.

Fixing the facilities problem, he "is a matter of time and money, and I don't think enough time has elapsed or enough money has been applied."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7776

October 26, 2005
Background to Betrayal
Behind the CIA leak investigation
by Justin Raimondo
Has I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, made a deal with CIA leak investigator Patrick J. Fitzgerald – and turned on his boss in return for leniency?

It sure looks like it. Or else how is it that Scooter suddenly discovered his notes of a "previously undisclosed" conversation held with Cheney on June 12, 2003, in which the vice president was the first to tell him that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked for the CIA? Prior to Scooter's eleventh-hour revelation, he had been telling the grand jury that he got the information from journalists.

That makes at least three neocons "turned" by the Bulldog. Libby follows John Hannah, the VP's national security adviser, and David Wurmser, Cheney's Middle East expert-in-residence, down the well-trodden path to collaboration with the special counsel.

All roads lead directly to Dick Cheney.

What crime, however, has been committed? New light has been shed on this mystery with the breaking news that Fitzgerald is homing in on the question at the heart of his investigation – who forged the Niger uranium documents, and how did they get passed off as reliable enough information to be referenced in the president 2003 State of the Union address? UPI's Martin Walker confirms what I reported in this space last Wednesday:

"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 NATO intelligence sources. … 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."

The key to finding out who outed deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame has always been the motive. Why would anyone in the U.S. government deliberately expose the identity of an agent working in the vitally important realm of nuclear proliferation – identifying not only Ms. Plame, but also her co-workers at "Brewster Jennings and Associates," the CIA front company whose real function was to scour the world for evidence of rogue nukes and other weapons of mass destruction? In busting up the Agency's operations designed to prevent the spread of WMD, whoever outed Plame was taking a very big risk – but why?

In investigating what led to the outing of Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald discovered that a fraud had been perpetrated on the American people and the Congress of the United States. In detailing the case for war, the administration based much of its argument that Saddam was close to acquiring nuclear weapons on a cache of documents that purported to show an agreement between Iraq and the African nation of Niger to purchase "yellowcake" uranium. The president referred to this, albeit obliquely, in his 2003 State of the Union address. A few weeks after that speech was delivered, however, the White House was forced to retract its statement – because the documents turned out to be forgeries.

Now we discover – and Fitzgerald no doubt knows more about this than anyone – that it wasn't an error, another dreaded "intelligence failure," that had allowed the Niger uranium forgeries to be marshaled along with similarly bogus intelligence as "evidence" of Iraqi WMD; it was a deliberate act of deception, carried out at the highest levels of the U.S. government. A series of articles in La Repubblica exposes the provenance of the documents, shows how they were funneled to U.S. policymakers, and maps their course all the way up to the White House. Go here for an English translation of the first installment. Here is the Italian version of Part II, and here is the translated version.

Authors Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo describe how SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, was a party to faking the documents. Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was keen to put SISMI at America's disposal in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and SISMI's chief, Nicolo Pollari, was eager to make himself – and Italy – indispensable to the warlords of Washington. Pollari's initial attempts to pass off the Niger uranium forgeries as authentic evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions did not, however, meet with success. Whereupon Pollari took advantage of the developing split between the State Department-CIA professionals, who tended to be skeptical, and the Cheney-Pentagon-neocon ideologues, who were looking for any evidence – however dubious –of Iraq's WMD, and the Italians developed a strategy to legitimize the forgeries in the eyes of the White House.

The Italian strategy was to enter the factional conflict on the side of the Cheney-ites. As a liaison to those circles, Defense Minister Antonio Martino recommended "an old friend of Italy," one Michael Ledeen – neoconservative ideologue and veteran of "parallel intelligence" work from his days as broker of the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" deal. Just as Ledeen acted as the middleman in effecting the transfer of Israeli arms to Iran in exchange for the hostages, so he apparently played a similar role as a go-between in Niger-gate. Using Ledeen as their Washington intermediary, the Italians succeeded in circumventing the CIA and getting the unvetted forgeries to the White House via the good offices of both Condoleezza Rice and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.

La Repubblica also reports that Pollari traveled all the way to Washington to sell these tainted goods, and, on Sept. 9, 2002, met in secret with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

This meeting came at a turning point in the debate within the administration over whether to include the Niger uranium claims in the president's public arguments for war: the CIA and the State Department both insisted that the claims were highly dubious. They won in the case of the Cincinnati speech, where the reference was deleted at CIA director George Tenet's insistence, but, in the interim between that and the 2003 State of the Union, the War Party managed to gain the upper hand – with the help of Pollari and his allies in the administration. The documents – or, at least, the allegations contained therein – made their way directly to the White House via the disinformation superhighway constructed by Pollari, Hadley, Ledeen, and the gang down at the Office of Special Plans.

In short, SISMI knew the documents were fakes but pushed them to help the White House gin up a war. The question is: who else knew? As we go up the chain, from the low-level criminals who prepared and disseminated the documents, to the second-and-third tier American officials who received them, finally ascending to the inner sanctum of the Office of the Vice President and the National Security Council, we have to ask: Did Hadley know? Did Libby? Did Cheney?

There are all sorts of undercurrents swirling around this vortex of deceit and double-dealing: a key link is Larry Franklin, the Pentagon's top Iran analyst who recently pled guilty to charges of handing over sensitive information to Israeli "diplomats." Franklin met with Ledeen, Pollari, Martino, and the ubiquitous Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome – where else? – in December of 2001. A number of Iranians participated in this conclave, and the American delegation also included Harold Rhode, a Middle East scholar of rabidly neoconservative views who worked in the Office of Special Plans (as did Franklin). These unauthorized "back channel" meetings caused consternation at the State Department and the CIA, but continued unabated and apparently without consequences for the participants – until now.

The more one looks at the outing of Valerie Plame and the exposure of Brewster Jennings, the more it looks like a covert action aimed at what were once the eyes and ears of the U.S. intelligence community in the realm of WMD. That's why this two-year investigation was launched to begin with, and why it is being pursued so relentlessly – because, at a time when nuclear terrorism is held up as the principal threat to our security, the Plame leak involves nothing less than an attack on what is arguably the most vital of our defenses. Which raises the question: A covert action – carried out by whom?

If we look at the individuals involved, we see that many have links to Israel, Iran, and the Iraqi National Congress, including:

John Hannah: Juan Cole details Hannah's career and points to his strategic position as a key link in the neoconservative network that dragooned us into war:

"It is possible that Wilson posed a special danger to Hannah, since Hannah was at the center of the 'cherry-picking bad intelligence' effort that led Cheney to maintain that Saddam and Bin Laden were Siamese twins and that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons and within 3-5 years of having an atomic bomb. … Hannah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came – Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress."

Hannah is former head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the educational arm of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the principal pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., whose two top lobbyists – longtime AIPAC powerhouse Steve Rosen, and Iran analyst Keith Weissman – have recently been indicted [.pdf] for spying on behalf of Israel.

David Wurmser: A professional fabulist, as Raw Story reports:

"Those familiar with information provided to Fitzgerald say that shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

Wurmser culled much of his material from the professional fraudsters of the Iraqi National Congress.

Wurmser is also the primary author of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm," a 1996 policy paper prepared for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "A Clean Break" argued for regime change in Iraq as a means of knocking out Syria and extending Israeli influence throughout the region. Prior to serving on Cheney's staff and as an aide to John Bolton at the State Department, Wurmser was a member of a two-man team, the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, which, last we heard, was being investigated for leaking sensitive U.S. secrets to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and thence to the Iranians. The Israelis, too, are involved, as the Washington Post reported a year ago:

"Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues, including Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode and others at the Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle of the defense board and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney's office, according to sources familiar with or involved in the case. 'The initial interest was: Do you believe certain people would spy for Israel and pass secret information?' said one source interviewed by the FBI about the defense officials."

Michael Ledeen: The first president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which describes its goal as "to inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." Ledeen played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, utilizing his Israeli and Iranian contacts. His allegiances have always been rather suspect, as journalist Stephen Green relates:

"In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel."

Ledeen was first identified as an active player in Niger-gate in this space, and the La Repubblica piece confirms it. Whatever charges are filed by Fitzgerald this week, the latest revelations ought to provide plenty of grist for the prosecutor's indictment mill – which we should not assume to be exhausted after this week.

As the architects of a campaign to lie us into war saw their narrative of a nuclearized Saddam come under challenge, they returned fire – and hit a CIA agent, blowing her cover and sabotaging an important U.S. intelligence-gathering operation. Perhaps, as I speculated in my last column, they had special reason to fear Plame and the capability of her colleagues at Brewster Jennings to track down the provenance of the Niger uranium forgeries. In any case, the neocons' act of retribution backfired badly – to what extent we will learn shortly.

If the activities of this cabal were encouraged and, in part, directed by agents of a foreign power – the Israelis, the Iranians, or both – that wouldn't be too surprising. After all, that is one of the great dangers of becoming an Empire: foreign ambassadors and native-born courtiers with an interest in pursuing various foreign agendas are expected to crowd around the throne, demanding an audience. They bribe, flatter, cajole, and otherwise inveigle their way into the policy debate, seeking to exert as much control as they can over what are, for them as well as ourselves, life-and-death decisions. It's no wonder agents of influence would seek to foment a war seen as serving their interests – what's frightening, however, is that the U.S. government finds itself so vulnerable to manipulation.

A two-way transmission belt of treason has been operating in Washington for years, and Fitzgerald is moving to shut it down. On the one hand, fraudsters like Chalabi have been hanging around the Imperial City, spreading tall tales and whooping it up for war, in hopes that American troops would '"liberate" their country – and, not coincidentally, turn it over to Chalabi's tender mercies. On the other hand, aside from broadcasting lies (via sock-puppets of Judy Miller's ilk), they vacuumed up bona fide intelligence – vital U.S. secrets – which Washington leaked like a sieve. This is the sort of treasonous tradeoff our highest officials have been engaged in. And for that they will pay the price.

As of this writing, we don't know what specific charges Ftizgerald will bring, or against whom. However, the aforesaid is the backdrop, if you will, to the action, as the curtain rises on what promises to be the most sensational courtroom drama since the trial of Alger Hiss.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I have to add that this piece analyzing the La Repubblica article, by Laura Rozen, which appears on The American Prospect's Web site, is interesting, but in an important sense it is misleading: the focus is entirely on the Hadley-Pollari meeting. No mention is made of the Office of Special Plans, nor does Ledeen's name come up at all. I find this puzzling, especially considering this excerpt from the Rozen piece:

"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."

Since the OSP – and certainly Ledeen – are specifically named as the conduits through which the White House received the forgery-based "evidence," Rozen's omission is inexplicable.

The Washington rumor mill is churning so furiously and loudly that I'm hearing it here in San Francisco: my sources tell me anywhere from five indictments – Libby, Rove, Hadley, Hannah, and Mary Matalin – to possibly just one. A Thursday morning press conference will reveal all. Maybe…

– Justin Raimondo

Leak indictments may come today Seattle Times
The prosecutor in the CIA leak case was preparing to outline possible charges before a federal grand jury as early as today, even as the FBI conducted last-minute interviews in the high-profile investigation, according to people familiar with the case. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was seen in Washington on Tuesday with lawyers in the case, and some White House officials braced for at least one indictment when the grand jury meets today. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is said by several people in the case to be a main focus, but not the only one.
Prosecutor's Progress Is Rare for Leak Inquiries New York Times
CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq San Jose Mercury News
Salon - San Francisco Chronicle - Newsday - Muslim American Society - all 952 related »

Leak indictments may come today Seattle Times
The prosecutor in the CIA leak case was preparing to outline possible charges before a federal grand jury as early as today, even as the FBI conducted last-minute interviews in the high-profile investigation, according to people familiar with the case. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was seen in Washington on Tuesday with lawyers in the case, and some White House officials braced for at least one indictment when the grand jury meets today. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is said by several people in the case to be a main focus, but not the only one.

President Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove drives away from his home in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
In a possible sign that Fitzgerald may charge one or more officials with illegally disclosing Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation, FBI agents as recently as Monday night interviewed at least two people in her D.C. neighborhood to determine whether they knew she worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials. Two neighbors told the FBI they were shocked to learn she was a CIA agent. The FBI interviews suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame's status was covert, and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked at the CIA. Underscoring the uncertainty surrounding the investigation, two Republican officials said Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, the president's top strategist, is not sure whether he will face indictment as the case winds down. Rove was said to be awaiting word from Fitzgerald, even as prosecutors questioned at least one former Rove associate about Rove's contacts with reporters before Plame's name was disclosed. The White House expects indictments to come today, according to a senior administration official. The news of the 11th-hour moves came on the same day that Cheney himself was implicated in the chain of events that led to Plame's being revealed. In a report in The New York Times that the White House did not dispute, Fitzgerald was said to have notes taken by Libby showing that he learned about Plame from the vice president a month before her name appeared in a column by Robert Novak. There is no indication that Cheney did anything illegal or improper, but the report is the first evidence to indicate he knew of Plame well before she became a household name. Fitzgerald's investigation has centered on whether senior administration officials knowingly revealed Plame's identity in an effort to discredit a Bush administration critic — her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. On July 6, 2003, Wilson accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Eight days later, Novak revealed Plame's name and her identity as a CIA agent. The grand jury, whose term expires Friday, is scheduled for a session today. Unlike the jury in a criminal trial, grand jurors are not weighing proof of guilt or innocence. They decide whether there is probable cause to charge someone with a crime, and they must agree unanimously to indict. The prosecutor could seek to seal any indictments until he announces the charges. It is not clear what charges Fitzgerald will seek, if any. After setting out on his original investigation, he won explicit authority to also consider perjury and other crimes that government officials might have committed during the nearly two-year investigation. Fitzgerald and his investigative team have questioned more than two dozen officials from the White House, the vice president's office, the CIA and the State Department, as well as residents of Wilson's neighborhood. Fitzgerald has looked closely not only at the possible crimes, but also at the context in which they would have been committed. This search, say lawyers in the case, has provided him a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, glimpse into the White House effort to justify the Iraq war — and rebut its critics. The trail often has led to Cheney's office, which officials describe as ground zero in the effort in promote, execute and defend the Iraq war and the campaign to convince the American people and the world that Saddam Hussein had amassed a stockpile of the most dangerous kinds of weapons. According to the report in Tuesday's New York Times, the investigation also led to Cheney himself. Cheney has the security clearance to review and discuss classified material, and no evidence has been made public to suggest he did anything illegal. But this is the first time the vice president has been directly linked to the chain of events that eventually led to Plame's identity being disclosed. McClellan said Cheney has always been honest with the American people. He dismissed as "ridiculous" a question about whether Bush stood by Cheney's account of his role in the matter. In an interview in September 2003, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert that he did not know Wilson or who sent him to Africa. Officials said Cheney was careful to distance himself from Wilson in the interview without telling a lie about what he knew about the diplomat and his wife. Two lawyers involved in the case said that based on Fitzgerald's questions, the prosecutor has been aware of Libby's June 12 conversation with Cheney since the early days of his investigation. The lawyers said Libby did record in his notes that Cheney relayed to him that Plame may have had a role in Wilson's taking the CIA-sponsored mission to Niger. According to a source familiar with Libby's testimony, he previously told the grand jury he believed he heard of Plame first from reporters.
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Grand Jury in CIA Leak Case Adjourns ABC News
Federal Grand Jury Investigating Leak of CIA Officer's Identity Adjourn for Day Without Announcement. The federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer's identity met for three hours Wednesday with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and his deputies, adjourning for the day without announcing any action. Fitzgerald is known to be putting the finishing touches on a two-year criminal probe that has ensnared President Bush's top political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby. Away from the federal courthouse, FBI agents conducted a handful of last-minute interviews to check facts key to the case.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, right, leaves the federal courthouse Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005 in Washington after meeting for three hours with the federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer's identity. The jury adjourned for the day without announcing any action. The two-year criminal probe has ensnared President Bush's top political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
After the grand jury left for the day, federal prosecutors conferred for about an hour in the grand jury area of the federal courthouse. There was no word on whether Fitzgerald planned to make any announcement or when the grand jury planned to meet again. Fitzgerald and the grand jurors entered the courthouse around 9 a.m. EDT, with just three days left before the jury's term is set to expire. The timing on any decision is uncertain, however. It is possible for Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan to extend the life of the grand jury at Fitzgerald's request. Such a step would be taken in secret. Lawyers representing key White House officials expected Fitzgerald to decide this week whether to charge Libby and Rove. Rove and Libby joined other officials Wednesday at the daily White House senior staff meeting, as usual. Libby has been on crutches after breaking a bone in his foot. Fitzgerald could charge one or more administration aides with violating a law prohibiting the intentional unmasking of an undercover CIA officer. The prosecutor has also examined other possible crimes such as mishandling classified information, false statements and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald has been in Washington since Monday and over the last two days dispatched FBI agents to conduct some 11th-hour interviews, according to lawyers close to the investigation, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. One set of interviews occurred in the neighborhood of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame was outed as an undercover CIA officer. Agents asked neighbors whether they had any inkling that Plame works for the CIA. "They wanted to know how well we knew her, which is very well," said neighbor David Tillotson. "Did we know anything about her position before the story broke? Absolutely not." Agents also interviewed a former unidentified associate of Rove about his activities around the time the leaks occurred. Two lawyers familiar with the activities said the interviews involved basic fact-checking and did not appear to plow new ground. Fitzgerald may want to establish Plame had carefully protected her CIA identity as part of the process of determining whether the disclosure of her name amounted to a crime. On Tuesday, the White House sidestepped questions about whether Cheney passed Plame's identity on to Libby. Libby's notes suggest that he first heard from Cheney that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, The New York Times reported this week. Columnist Robert Novak disclosed Plame's name on July 14, 2003, eight days after Wilson said publicly that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The timing of Wilson's criticism was devastating for the Bush White House, which was struggling to come to grips with the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. The president's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was the administration's main argument for going to war.
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