A little known recent action Patrick Fitzgerald took was the indictment of F. David Radler and Mark S. Kipnis, both associated with Hollinger International, for fraud. The most titilating tidbit within this indictment is the following:
"Radler, through his attorney, has authorized the government to disclose that he is cooperating with the investigation and expects to enter a guilty plea at a later date."
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/pr/chicago/2005/pr0818_01.pdf#search='fitzgerald%20hollinger'The reason why this should be of interest to those watching the Plame leak investigation is that Richard Perle of PNAC fame is also involved with Hollinger. Perle is of interest in the Plame case because of his key role in pushing Iraq as a target.
"Perle is currently a resident fellow at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. His cited research interests include defense, national security and the Middle East.
Perle's many business interests have been a source of controversy during and after his tenure in government. Among other engagements, he is co-chairman and director of Hollinger, Inc., a partner of Trireme, a non-executive director of Autonomy and a director of the Jerusalem Post (which is owned by Hollinger).
In July 2001 George W. Bush appointed Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, which advises the Department of Defense. On March 9, 2003, Seymour Hersh published an article in The New Yorker titled Lunch with the Chairman, accusing Perle of a conflict of interest, claiming Perle stood to profit financially by influencing government policy. Hersh's article alleged that Perle had business dealings with Saudi investors and linked him to the intelligence-related computer firm Trireme Partners LLP, which stood to profit from the war in Iraq."
and
"Perle is said to be the person behind the US policy on Iraq (see also: U.S. plan to invade Iraq). He believed that Saddam Hussein's control of the government was weak, and that an invasion of Iraq would remove Saddam from power within weeks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_PerleIt shoud be noted that Perle is associated with the neoconservative movement, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Perle also has strong connections to Douglas Feith, who recently played a role at Defense in the run up to Iraq and is a neoconservative, associated with the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the PNAC. In fact, the ties between Perle and Feith can be summed up by their own past association:
"Feith first entered government as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council (NSC) under Ronald Reagan in 1981, but was abruptly fired after only one year. Perle, who was then serving in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, however, hired him as his deputy, a post he retained until leaving in 1986 to found Feith & Zell. Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government and, in that capacity, worked with Perle to build military ties between Turkey and Israel.
In 1996 he participated in a study group chaired by Perle that produced a report called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" <4> for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the report Feith, along with Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, called for building a strategic alliance with Turkey, Jordan and a new government in Iraq that would transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could decisively resist pressure to trade "land for peace" with the Palestinians or Syria."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_FeithYou might recall that Feith was the boss of Larry Franklin, who has recently been indicted for passing US secrets to two people at AIPAC, who then passed the information to Israel. Franklin is also accused of passing classified information to Chalabi (although he has not been indicted for this). Chalabi, as you might recall, has been accused of being an Iranian spy who passed the classified intel to Iran that the United States had broken Iranian code and was able to decode and listen to Iranian communications. More on Chalabi in a bit.
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/08/doj080405.htmlIt's rather interesting that Feith has a strong association with Turkey when Sibel Edmonds is currently gagged from disclosing conversations she overheard about government crime, corruption and bribery she discovered while translating tapped conversations for the FBI involving various Turkish organizations in the United States. Sibel Edmonds herself is Turkish, as are the Dickersons, who she has publically stated were involved in various threats and intimidation to keep her quiet. Mr. Dickerson is currently a member of the military, and would be subject to Defense Department where both Perle and Feith served.
http://antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=2917http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=104108An additional link between Perle and Feith is their support for Ahmad Chalabi.
"Two years later, he and Perle signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for the United States to work with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to oust Saddam Hussein."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_FeithThe link to Chalabi is particularly interesting since Judith Miller, who is currently sitting in jail for refusing to disclose her sources, is also a close associate of Chalabi and spread much ink in the New York Times on Chalabi's reported WMD in Iraq.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/Chalabi is an interesting nexus for neoconservatives in Washington. Despite misgivings from both the CIA and the State Department, he has been associated with and given glowing recommendations by all the players in the run up to Iraq - Bush, Cheney, Perle, Feith, Rumsfeld, Wurmser, and Wolfowitz.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/dreyfuss-r.htmlAnother nexus is the 'Progress for the New American Century' organization:
"Present and former members include several prominent members of the Republican Party and Bush Administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ellen Bork, the wife of Robert Bork. A large number of its ideas and its members are associated with the neoconservative movement. PNAC has seven full-time staff members, in addition to its board of directors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_CenturyAn imporant link to the PNAC is John Bolton, who has been appointed to the UN, but whom most know as a key player in the run up to Iraq. Bolton, Perle and Feith signed the January 26, 1998 PNAC letter to President Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein. Bolton is also interesting because he was one of the players involved in spinning the facts to fit the policy in the run up to Iraq:
"Bolton appears to have tried to spin intelligence to support his views and political objectives on a number of occasions. Greg Thielmann, of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), was assigned as the daily intelligence liaison to Bolton. Thielmann stated to Seymour Hersh that, "Bolton seemed troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear ... I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, 'The Undersecretary doesn't need you to attend this meeting anymore.'" According to current and former coworkers, Bolton withheld information that ran counter to his goals from Secretary of State Colin Powell on multiple occasions, and from Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice on at least one occasion. <28>"
In addition, Congressman Waxman believes Bolton is linked to the Niger claims in the President's contested State of the Union Address:
"Bolton is alleged by Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman to have played a role in encouraging the inclusion of claims that Iraq attempted to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address<33>(pdf). These claims were based on documents later found to be forged <34>. Waxman's allegations are difficult to confirm as they are based on documents that have not been cleared for public release<35>(pdf)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._BoltonSince the specialty of Mr. Bolton at the State Department was WMD, it might be speculated that he would have had access to Ms. Plame's status as an undercover operative at CIA, and he may have been concerned about how her work might undermine their effort to make Iraq the evil cause celebre in persuading the American public to support invasion.
We can also see the clear links between John Bolton and Judith Miller in their past associations:
"Writing in today's Times ("Senior U.S. Official To Level Weapons Charges Against Syria"), Miller gives Bolton and his leaked testimony a very friendly hearing. You'd never know from reading Miller that in July the intelligence agencies censored Bolton from testifying on the same subject to the same subcommittee because, according to Jehl's anonymous sources, his speech did not jibe with the CIA's less menacing findings about Syria's unconventional weapons capacity. A memo exceeding 35 pages spelled out CIA objections, Jehl wrote."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2088435Cheney's connections to John Bolton are also of interest:
"The early signs are that Cheney is consolidating his grip over much of administration policymaking in the second term. While his neocon collaborators seem to be diminishing, their hawkish fellow-travelers--like Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte, and Stephen Hadley--are being promoted. In one case, it seems that Cheney himself may have intervened to make sure that one of his guys didn’t get passed over. When Rice became secretary of state, she failed to immediately give John Bolton--Colin Powell’s undersecretary of state--a new portfolio, signaling that the hardline, anti-UN ideologue had fallen out of favor.
But then Secretary of State Rice, out of the blue, nominated Bolton to be ambassador to the UN. Commented one writer: “M any were shocked, not only because Bolton ’s beliefs are antithetical to the very position for which he was tapped, but because the move appeared so inconsistent with the hopeful direction in which the second Bush term began. Beltway watchers have speculated that Vice President Cheney engineered this dramatic U-turn. After all, the administration still owes Bolton a political debt for his role in halting the Florida recount in the 2000 elections. Cheney, who consistently voted to cut funding for the United Nations while a member of the House, perhaps saw Bolton as an ally in opposing the new multilateralism of Bush’s second term.” (12)"
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/cheney_r/cheney_r.phphttp://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0405/222938.htmlCheney is an interesting player in this, as well. He's also associated with the nexus of PNAC, Chalabi, the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs - the same organizations associated with our other players. Cheney, like Bolton, was also one of those guilty of not wanting to hear intelligence that didn't fit his policy. To solve this little inconvenience, Cheney deliberately eliminated intermediary intelligence agencies who might have filtered out Iraq data that was either unreliable, or 'dead wrong.'
"The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.
For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169Cheney is also the boss of one of the key players in the Plame scandal - Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Some might say that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby acted on their own in the smear of Joe Wilson, but examining the extensive linkages and previously stated political ideology supporting the invasion of Iraq shared by all our players, I find that explanation to be extremely unlikely. It's also clear that their long stated goals would have been thwarted had Joe Wilson succeeded in persuading the public that Iraq was not seeking WMD.
Considering Fitzpatrick's recent indictment of Hollinger - the first strike across the bow of the Iraq war conspiracy - I'd say Fitzpatrick has more than he has yet disclosed about what's been going on in the Bush-Cheney White House. Perhaps the Holliger indictment is but the first of many for these players in Iraq deception.
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