Scooter-gate by Justin Raimondo

[shraby]

is a pretty good take on the Plame case and also the Franklin espionage case..are they connected by Judith Miller?

<http://antiwar.com/justin/>

[Fridays Child]

1. I read awhile back that Sibel Edmonds thinks they're all connected.

Pull one thread, anywhere, and a whole bunch of stuff will come unraveled.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. My eyes started to glaze over when we got to Franklin.

DUers should start about the middle of the article, since most of the first part is well known. But, about the middle is where most of us are following up to date. Here's a clip. They start talking about Hannah and Franklin right after this section:

"This narrowing condition <The narrowing of Judith Miller's testimony> was essential if Miller was going to continue to protect her other friends. Miller was at the center of the propaganda campaign that suckered us into war. As the War Party's major megaphone in the American media, retailing the tall tales spun by the INC and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Miller is a fitting martyr for the neocon cause: self-promoting, shameless, and an accomplished liar on a grand scale, she masquerades as the upholder of freedom – the "freedom" of journalists to protect government insiders engaged in criminal actions that can only be described as treasonous.

Even more self-consciously grandiose than Miller, however, we have Libby's letter to her, in which he says how much he "misses" her reporting – yeah, I'll bet! – and reiterates what we all know by now: that the waiver to testify was given to her long ago, and she simply chose not to cooperate unless certain other conditions were met. Libby concludes his missive on a distinctly odd note:

"You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover – Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work – and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers."


If we think of the criminal conspiracy targeted by Fitzgerald as a grove of aspens, then, yes, the neocons turn in clusters, all right, because their roots connect them: the neocon network in Washington is deeply rooted in the national security bureaucracy. Libby was brought to Washington in 1981 by former deputy secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank, then working at the State Department; Libby had been one of his students at Yale. During the Clinton interregnum, Libby had his hands full being Marc Rich's lawyer and writing The Apprentice. In 1989, Wolfowitz brought him back to government service, this time at the Pentagon. He became a central figure in the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and co-authored, with Wolfowitz, a policy memo charting a post-Cold War foreign policy and defense stance positing American hegemony on every continent and broaching, for the first time, the policy of preemptive aggression that is today enshrined in the Bush Doctrine.

While Libby is a towering aspen, whose fall will make a rather loud noise, others in the same stand have already met a similar fate, and what we have here is a sort of domino effect. John Hannah, Cheney's special assistant for Middle East affairs, was fingered early on in this investigation. Last year, Richard Sale of UPI reported a rare leak from the investigators:

see article for more info.

[shraby]

3. The Israeli spies that Franklin passed info

to sometimes gave the info to a reporter to publish about before they passed it on to Israel. You can find more on that in an earlier column that's listed in the sidebar.
My guess is that reporter is Judith Miller.

[mzteris]

6. who else thinks this

"You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover – Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work – and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers."



sounds like "secret code"??

[robertpaulsen]

7. I do. So do lots of DUers.

Here's one of the threads:

Dailykos: Libby Writes IN CODE to Miller?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4945143

[mzteris]

8. whew

I thought I'd been wearing my :tinfoilhat: too tight.

[melissinha]

4. tin-foil hat question

In reading Justin's piece it occurred to me, is it possible that the yellow-cake uranium contract was bait to get Wilson and by extension, Brewster Jennings? Its just weird, that evidence being so pathetically false, but then again the Adminstration is damn full of itself and its power that nothing ceases to surpise me.

[robertpaulsen]

5. Yet another great Raimondo piece shows Hannah as the key Plame/AIPAC link.

From the article:

Hannah has an interesting background. In the early 1990s, he served as head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). As Middle East scholar Juan Cole pointed out, Hannah was a key figure in the intelligence-manipulation effort that legitimized phony "evidence" of Iraq's WMD cooked up by the fraudster Ahmed Chalabi. Hannah, like the other aspens in the grove, turned with the rest of the cluster when it came to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East:

"The WINEP pro-Likud network, which includes Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith in the Pentagon as well as Libby and Hannah at Cheney's office, has virtually dictated Bush administration Middle East policy. Wilson's debunking of one of its central claims might well have led Cheney to fire Hannah or to disregard his opinion. The WINEP crowd takes no prisoners and is very determined, over decades, to get its way. (Josh Marshall notes that they are already trying to protect Hannah with denials he could possibly have been involved, presumably meaning that they would be willing to throw Libby to the dogs.) Wilson had to be punished, from their point of view, and if possible marginalized, to protect Hannah's position."

Hannah may have thrown Libby to the dogs, just to save his own skin. This wouldn't be any more surprising than the actions of former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who will plead guilty to spying for Israel in return for leniency in sentencing – and for testifying against his handlers, Steve Rosen, who for 20 years served as AIPAC's foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's top Iran specialist. Rosen and Weissman pumped Franklin for classified information and handed it over to Israeli "diplomats" stationed in Washington. The trial is scheduled for January.

While Hannah, the former director of AIPAC's think tank, was deeply involved in exposing a vitally important U.S. intelligence asset – Plame worked undercover in the CIA's WMD-nonproliferation unit – AIPAC officials Rosen and Weissman were sneaking around Washington, meeting Franklin in train stations and handing over U.S. secrets to Israeli spies. If we put Franklin's shenanigans <.pdf> with the AIPAC duo and the Israelis on a timeline, we see that this breach in our security occurred during roughly the same period as those involving the Niger uranium deception and the Plame matter:

Jan. 28, 2003 - The president utters those fateful 16 words.
Feb. 12 - Franklin met with Rosen and Weissman and revealed classified information relating to a certain "Middle Eastern country." (The Franklin-AIPAC-Mossad relationship, although first broached in 2002, only culminated in a personal meeting early in the next year.)
March 7 - Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, announces that the Niger uranium documents are forgeries.
March 10 - The treasonous trio met again, this time outside Union Station in Washington, and then proceeded to several restaurants, changing their venue frequently to avoid detection and ending their meeting in an empty restaurant.
March 13 - Franklin met with an Israeli official, when he revealed yet more classified information about internal U.S. government deliberations concerning a certain Middle Eastern country. Throughout the month, Franklin fed his AIPAC handlers classified documents, faxing them in some instances, while Rosen and Weissman relayed the information to the Israelis, and to certain favored members of the media.
June 26 - Franklin met with Rosen and Weissman and communicated classified information on possible attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by pro-Iranian elements.
June 30 - The bonding rituals of spies: Weissman and Franklin attended a baseball game. On that day, also, Franklin was finally confronted by the FBI with his treason: the indictment states that "on or about" that date he "possessed" classified – "Top Secret and Secret" – materials in his Kearneysville, W.V., residence. Franklin was, in short, caught red-handed, and was "turned" – that is, he agreed to cooperate with the investigation and provide evidence against his AIPAC handlers.
July 6 - Wilson's New York Times op-ed piece, "What I Didn't Find In Africa," is published.
July 9 - Franklin, no doubt wearing a wire, met with Weissman, and more national defense information was turned over.
July 9 - Judith Miller discusses the Plame affair with Libby.
July 12 or 13 - Miller again discusses Plame with Libby.
July 14 - Novak outs Valerie Plame in his Sun-Times column.
July 21 - Franklin again met with Weissman, and turned over information that he said was "highly classified" concerning a foreign government's covert actions in Iraq, warning Weissman not to use it because he could "get into trouble." That same day, Weissman related the information to Rosen, and the two of them went to their Israeli bosses with the goods.
Aug. 3 - The FBI finally moved in on Franklin and Rosen, who denied everything – and continued to leak U.S. secrets to the media on at least one occasion.
Aug. 27 - The FBI interviewed Rosen again, and he still denied everything, whereupon AIPAC's chief Washington lobbyist contacted his Israeli handler and told him that he had "a very serious matter" he needed to discuss, but couldn't do it over the phone.

[shraby]

9. Hi RP

:hi:

I think Raimondo is spot on.

[hang a left]

10. Great article by the way......everyone should read it.

I have heard people here speculate that Fitzgerald's investigation was going to the heart of the Yellow cake and WMD lies and taking our country to war. But I aways imagined that the investigation was focused on the outing of Plame and Brewster Jennings. Could what's about ready to go down be this good?

snip>
The idea that a special prosecutor was appointed, and an 18-month investigation launched, solely because Joe Wilson's wife was out of a job never made much sense. The outing of a CIA agent was only the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, the latest in a series of incidents that underscored a gaping hole in our national security defenses. The outing of Plame – an act of utter disdain for the country, and provocative in itself – provided investigators, already hot on the trail of possible treason in high places, with an opening to make their inquiry public. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald had a bone to pick with the neocons, and once he got his teeth into it he wasn't going to let go.
snip>

and let's read that part again

snip>
The outing of Plame – an act of utter disdain for the country, and provocative in itself – provided investigators, already hot on the trail of possible treason in high places, with an opening to make their inquiry public.
snip>

So even before Plame was outed there was an ongoing investigation....and Plame has its roots in the Franklin investigation. Now I have read H20 Man speculate about this but I just never could imagine that Plame would overlap with Franklin. And the discovery of the Franklin indictment was 2 years after Plame. But the timeline that was posted above meshes both Plame and Franklin together. OMG this is my dream come true. Could it actually be this good?


and the last three paragraphs:


snip>
Now that our attention is focused on Libby, the real outlines of the scandal that will envelop this administration are becoming clearer by the day. Scooter-gate isn't about revenge, although that's part of it; it isn't about intra-bureaucratic infighting, although that certainly played a role; and it sure isn't about Karl Rove, as the chattering classes were convinced only a few weeks ago. It is about how a band of ruthless ideologues lied us into war – and betrayed their country in the process. It's about a criminal conspiracy finally felled by its own hubris. And, unfortunately for the defendants, it's about espionage.

Who knows how many neocons will be caught up in Fitzgerald's net? Scooter, Hannah, maybe even John Bolton – as I predicted a few months ago – and any number of smaller fry will face their moment of truth in the dock.

As I wrote last year, this is the War Party's Waterloo. So get out the popcorn and the chips-and-dip, pull up a chair, and let the show trial begin!

– Justin Raimondo
snip>

I know everyone is excited about Delay tonight, and I am smiling too, but, could this whole damn of neocons be ready to bite the dust? Could it be possible that we can get our country back?


Now, I know what H20 Man was speaking of when he talked about a constitutional crisis unseen before in American history.

I am really excited and a little bit scared.

[enough]

11. Nominate and kick

[hang a left]

12. .........

[hang a left]

13. The more I think about this article the more I think that it could be

likely the rumour is true that Fitzgerald might need an extension.

[buzzsaw_23]

14. nominated n/t

[Beam Me Up]

16. Fourth nomination, can we have one more for this story?

Romando succinctly brings a lot of dots together here.

[hang a left]

17. I wish we could get some people here to read this article...

Maybe you could start this thread over with some snippets in the post.

[hang a left]

15. You just have to read this article.

eom

[crispini]

18. I'll come back and read this later.

Looks good!

[ClayZ]

19. They needed "Brewster Jennings" ruined. What were they on to.

I do not remember to much theory written about that aspect of it. Is that what Sibel Edmonds has in her bag of tricks. She is surely a super hero in Pandora's box.

Perhaps the Brewster Jennings network are the loggers that take the
worm infested "grove of aspens, whose roots connect them", to the wood chipper. We will then erect a monument to "Justice" in its place.





:popcorn: :hide: :popcorn:

[donkeyotay]

20. The media and Washington are very quiet about all of this

"A criminal conspiracy" – but what was its purpose? . . . the major players in this case were part of the campaign of deception that lured us into Iraq and dropped us into the middle of a maelstrom from which there seems to be no escape...

...the investigation morphed into a probe of one of the most baffling mysteries of recent times: how did the White House fall for the Niger uranium forgeries, crude fabrications of documents that purported to show Saddam's Iraq was trying to procure fissionable uranium – yellowcake – from the African nation of Niger? It only took the International Atomic Energy Agency a few hours with Google to debunk this "evidence" of Iraq's efforts to build nukes, yet somehow the infamous 16 words pinpointing "Africa" as the site of Iraq's supposed violation made it into the president's 2003 State of the Union address. Who snookered the White House?

[donkeyotay]

21. I think Russert actually asked Rice/Hadley how the yellowcake

claim got back in, and I believe they both claim THEY FORGOT that the evidence for invading a country was hooey.