WMD Commission Watch (lack of investigative curiosity -have yet to meet)

[papau]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040322-600885,00.html

Commission Watch "The Blue-Ribbon panel named by George W. Bush to study intelligence prior to the Iraq war has been billed as a bipartisan effort to get answers. But how evenhanded will it be? A TIME examination of the panel members' backgrounds reveals a web of sticky connections to the Bush team and, in one case, an alleged lack of investigative curiosity. . . . "Questions of objectivity won't be resolved until the panel completes its task. Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will."


By the way -Jessica Simpson met Interior Secretary Gale Norton at a Bush function yesterday and gushed: 'You've done a nice job decorating the White House.'

[Octafish]

1. Silberman is a steaming pile in the BFEE Turdicon.

Thanks for the heads-up, papau! The WMD commish is headed by one of the architects of the "October Surprise" treason in 1980. Silberman worked for the short-lived NSA head Richard "Resigned in Disgrace" Allen. Fine traitors, these.

The article's from waaaaay back by a group that's critical of one of the Middle East's "unnamed countries." Since then, the monster's turds have only gotten bigger and smellier...

May/June 1991, Page 11

Reprise of the October Surprise: Is the Worst Surprise Still to Come?

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Congress will not formally investigate charges that the Reagan campaign stole the election in 1980, in large part because Israel's supporters on Capitol Hill do not want to put the spotlight on Israel's role, which during that period sold weapons to Iran in blatant disregard of President Carter."

—Prediction by Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift, on the NBC television talk show The McLaughlin Group, May 12, 1991

For regular readers of this magazine, there is little that is new in the current flurry of American media reports on the "October Surprise" of 1980, other than the fact that Gary Sick, a retired career Navy officer and a National Security Council Middle East adviser in President Jimmy Carter's White House, now is writing a book on the subject. His article in the April 15 New York Times, and a one-hour sympathetic examination of the evidence on PBS's "Front Line, " shown nationwide on April 16, left little doubt among open-minded readers and viewers that Ronald Reagan campaign officials promised arms and money to Iran to delay release of 52 American hostages until after the Nov. 4, 1980 presidential election.

SNIP...

The Story Begins

It is here that the story of illegal dealings with Khomeini intermediaries by Reagan campaign officials begins. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post were the first to report that one such meeting took place in Washington, DC. It was held Oct. 2 at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel. Reagan campaign participants were Richard Allen, subsequently the Reagan administration's first national security adviser; Marine Lt. Col. Robert (Bud) McFarlane, then an aide to Senator John Tower but subsequently also a Reagan administration national security adviser; and Allen aide Lawrence Silberman, who apparently set up the meeting and who presently is a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals in the national capital. A shadowy Iranian Jewish arms dealer, Hushang Lavie, says he was the Iranian principal. Allen says he was not, but that he has forgotten the name of the Iranian they met. Silberman and McFarlane wouldn't discuss the matter with the "Frontline" producers. All three Americans maintain, however, that they have lost any notes they made during or after the meeting.

Sick and the "Frontline" producers say that long before the meeting in the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel there were others, starting in early March of 1980, involving Reagan campaign manager William Casey, a former OSS operative and, subsequently, Reagan's first director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Casey's first meeting was in Washington, DC's Mayflower Hotel with two Iranian arms dealers, Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi. The brothers, who also were involved in the Iranian dealings with the Carter administration, said Casey made it clear he wanted to prevent Carter from gaining political advantage from freeing the hostages.

Cyrus Hashemi subsequently reported some of this to the CIA before his sudden death in 1986, three months after cooperating with US Customs agents in a sting operation in which Israelis, Europeans and Americans were arrested on charges of conspiring to sell arms illegally. Jamshid Hashemi told Sick and the "Frontline" producers, however, that, after the Mayflower meeting, Casey and an unnamed US intelligence officer met Mehdi Karrubi, now speaker of the Iranian parliament, in Madrid in late July 1980, promising arms and to unfreeze Iranian assets if release of the hostages were delayed until after the election. The same threesome, Jamshid Hasherni said, met again in Madrid several weeks later, and at that meeting Karrubi agreed to cooperate with the Reagan campaign about the timing of the hostage release.

CONTINUED TREASON...

http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0591/9105011.htm

[Octafish]

2. Laurence Silberman: the Right Man or the Right's Man?

A little more on the turd Silberman from a People for the American Way press release:

Laurence Silberman: the Right Man or the Right's Man?

Is retired federal judge Laurence Silberman the right person to co-chair the Iraq intelligence commission? Those who know him—including onetime Nixon aide and respected author Kevin Phillips, former independent counsel and Eisenhower deputy attorney general Lawrence Walsh, and reformed right-wing hit man David Brock—raise serious concerns about Silberman’s past activities, his temperament, his judgement and his unyielding commitment to right-wing orthodoxy. After reviewing this criticism, along with Silberman’s own statements, it becomes clear that Silberman is ill suited for a role on the intelligence commission.

“October Surprise”

Both Phillips and Walsh allege that Silberman was involved in the Reagan campaign’s purported efforts to delay the release of American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 presidential elections.

In a commentary on National Public Radio, Phillips notes:

“Silberman has been more involved with cover-ups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them the October surprise episode in 1980 in which the Republicans were later accused of colluding with the revolutionary government of Iran to keep 52 American hostages confined in Iran so that they could not be freed by the Jimmy Carter administration in time to influence the 1980 presidential election….n 1980 as part of that year's Republican campaign, he attended at least one of the October surprise meetings where an Iranian representative discussed what Iran would want in exchange for keeping the hostages.”

Walsh’s book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, provides a similar account:

“...Silberman had been on the fringe of the negotiations to avoid the possibility of an 'October surprise'--the pre-election release of the U.S. embassy staff held captive by Iranian radicals. He and Robert McFarlane had represented Reagan in at least one meeting with a person who claimed to have influence with Iranians who might affect the timing of the release of the hostages. Among some career officers in the State Department, he was jokingly referred to as 'our ambassador to Khomeini.'”

CONTINUED...

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=13902