The Libby case: Cover for a fiasco

[babylonsister]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1836.shtml

The Libby case: Cover for a fiasco
By John B. Peebles


Mar 12, 2007, 00:24


snip//

Sometimes the media dance gets to be too much. I stopped watching CNN’s coverage when the scrolling text described Plame as a “CIA analyst” in a gross distortion of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife’s job description. Plame, in fact, directed a unit that was actively fighting the proliferation of WMD. Her unit worked through the front company of Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Plame’s unit had rejected neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the Iraqi National Congress and a convicted embezzler, who provided a stream of lies, or “faulty intelligence” as the media likes to put it. The media (through some of the same channels used to expose Plame) fanned pieces of information fed to the White House through Chalabi.

Plame’s counterproliferation unit had discredited Chalabi as an intelligence asset. The State Department, which had assigned a team to do post-invasion planning on Iraq, similarly learned to ignore Chalabi.

Meanwhile, the neocons in the Pentagon and White House eagerly swallowed Chalabi’s claims. Chalabi had said that the Americans would be welcomed with open arms <1>. The State Department and CIA disregarded Chalabi’s assertions based on the grounds the source was biased.

The Pentagon, however, welcomed Chalabi’s cheery predictions. Neocon advocates for war were eager for any intelligence that built a case against Hussein for WMD. It had been funding Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraq National Congress <2>. His identity cloaked, quoted as an anonymous defector, Chalabi helped make the case for war, which scored political points with the neocon agenda within the administration.

The Pentagon, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, had become highly politicized. The intelligence-gathering responsibilities had shifted from traditional intelligence rivals at the CIA and State and closer to the defense secretary and Pentagon.

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[Demeter]

1. One Wishes Plame Had Gotten the Goods on BushCo

and gone public with them. We'd all have been much better off. But her people were playing by the ordinary, usual rules: the Old Rules, Reality-based rules.

The whole government was too slow to come to grips with the fact that Bush/Cheney/Co flies a black flag (Skull and Bones, to be precise--isn't 20/20 hindsight ironic?) and takes no prisoners (ask the death row in Texas).