• Karl Roves gives good handshake.
• Jenna spotted "on all fours" in NYC club?
• Jesus vs. Social Security.
• Matt Drudge's siren? Totally serious or supercalifragalistic...?
• Hannity gives the Pope an upgrade.
Somehow I found my way over this article by John Hinderaker at the Weekly Standard website. And in the course of providing an elaborate history of press malfeasance and liberal bias in the coverage of the Schiavo talking points memo,...
Meanwhile, Professor Paul Wolf shows that US intelligence urged just such a plan at the end of WWII, for atomic bombs to be used to produce earthquakes and tsunamis for "massive destruction, death and unchecked hysteria."...
Ecuador: Protests Rage On, Amidst 'Complete Political Disaster' Diego Cevallos Quito, Ecuador April 6IPS - Former Ecuadorian president Abdalá Bucaram, who was removed by Congress in 1997 on grounds of "mental incapacity" and corruption, has returned to his country "crazier than ever" -- in his own words -- promising to lead a "revolution" on behalf of the poor. Ecuador's precarious political and social climate is marked by protests and threats of labour strikes, police firing tear gas inside Congress to disrupt a sit-in by opposition lawmakers, constant insult matches between politicians, and even death threats and physical attacks against anti-government reporters and politicians.
From an interview by Ian Masters of Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan (Masters' questions are in bold):
"Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims - particularly the 16 words in the President's State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE - I'm not sure which one.
It was SISME, yeah. ...
[D]uring the two-thousands when we're talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn't that anyone had a good source on Iraq - there weren't any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.
Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...
I think I do, but I'd rather not speak about it right now, because I don't think it’s a proven case ...
If I said 'Michael Ledeen'?
You'd be very close . . ."
The handling of the source of the main lies used to justify the attack, the aptly named 'Curveball', also displays the same sophistication in technique. Curveball was too obviously undependable to be sent directly to the CIA. As Joseph Cannon writes:
". . . the [Office of Special Plans] could feed lies directly into the Oval Office - but they needed more. They needed to find a way to make the CIA bestow its imprimatur onto this silliness. Thus, the neocons somehow arranged for Curveball to be routed through German intelligence - we don't yet know how it happened, but it happened. Why give this alky German minders? If the CIA had dealt with Curveball directly, they would have seen through his deceptions rather easily. But since the information came by way of the BND, the CIA tended to trust it. By the time the agency decided to take a closer look at the sourcing, war was already a done deal.
This little scheme offered a bonus: Since Tenet and McLaughlin had bought into the BND's information, when the shit finally hit the fan, responsibility could be laid to rest at the feet of the CIA. Not the OSP, not the INC, not the BND, not Mossad, not the neocon ideologues.
Once again, we see use of a bold tactic: The use of a foreign spy shop as a go-between, in order to legitimize and circulate bogus (but ideologically useful) data within the U.S. intelligence community. A similar history beset the yellowcake scandal and the infamous 'sixteen words.'"
The common thread in the forged Niger documents, the use of Curveball, and the British intelligence manipulations which ended up getting David Kelly killed, is a very clever use of multiple intelligence agencies to disguise the source of a collection of rather obvious lies which were used to justify the attack on Iraq. Whoever was behind this had to have had a long history of involvement in American government and involvement with multiple foreign intelligence agencies. There aren't that many people with that kind of experience. Who was: 1) a neocon in favor of an attack on Iraq; with 2) connections to Feith's Office of Special Plans; and with 3) ties to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress; and with 4) long-standing documented relationships with foreign intelligence agencies, particularly SISME? At some point, Americans might want to find this guy and ask him why he decided to do such damage to the United States.
I'd missed this article from the Post. It's about Wes Clark and Richard Perle testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Iraq and WMD this week, a reprise of a similar engagement in 2002 and a sort of anticipation...
Alert issued for ex-flight school student. ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- An anti-terrorism task force headed by the FBI has issued a special alert bulletin concerning a man who authorities said took flight lessons while in the United States illegally. The man, Zayed Christopher Hajaig, has been located ...
Report: Hezbollah to drop arms if Israel quits ShebaaLondon April 9Reuters - Hezbollah would be prepared to discuss conditional disarmament if Israel withdrew from a disputed border area, the Lebanese guerrilla group's deputy leader said in a British newspaper interview on Friday. Sheikh Naim Kassem told the Financial Times that disarmament, called for by Washington and the United Nations, could pave the way for Hezbollah's fighters to become a kind of reservist army working with Lebanese authorities.
US unready for rising threat of 'moles'Faye Bowers Washington April 8CSM - A recent report on US intelligence harshly critiqued counter-spy efforts across 15 agencies and recommended major changes. Amid all the criticism of the US's faulty intelligence-gathering, a new concern is surfacing about America's premier national-security agencies - their vulnerability to counterespionage. Because the US has reached such lone, superpower status, government officials say, at least 90 countries - in addition to Al Qaeda - are attempting to steal some of the nation's most sacred secrets.
US nuclear warhead plan under fire Julian Borger Washington April 9The Guardian - Democrats and American arms control groups warned yesterday that a new Bush administration scheme to replace ageing nuclear warheads could be used as a cover for the eventual construction of a "black arsenal" of new weapons.
Rex wrote: