Cockamamie? Blowing Cheney's Cover - by Ray McGovern

[kpete]

Blowing Cheney's Cover
Ray McGovern
April 10, 2006

When you invest so much effort into tangling the web—in this case, corrupting intelligence analysis in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq—it becomes hard to know when to stop. Vice President Dick Cheney went to inordinate lengths, including 10 visits to CIA headquarters, to ensure that that crucial NIE on weapons of mass destruction was alarmist enough to scare Congress into authorizing war. And when the evidence turned out to be flimsy, Cheney had a back-up plan: The CIA made me do it.

Ever since their exaggerated claims about Iraq’s possession of WMD turned out to be baseless, the Bush administration’s defense has rested on blaming the government’s intelligence analysts. But one of the great revelations from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s court filing last week is more evidence that the White House—not the CIA—distorted intelligence on Iraq. It was then-chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, acting on orders from Cheney, who presented evidence of Iraq seeking nuclear weapons material to reporters as a "key judgment" from the NIE, when in fact it was a subject of debate in the intelligence community.

The White House plan to scapegoat the intelligence community about Iraq—aided by eager-to-please CIA Director George Tenet—worked beautifully. But only for a while. The plan faltered once it became clear there were no WMD and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson blew the whistle on the centerpiece report used to deceive Congress and conjure up the specter of a mushroom cloud. That report conveyed the cockamamie story about Iraq seeking uranium in the African country of Niger, in which Cheney took uncommon interest.

more at:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22437&l=i&size=1&hd=0

[symbolman]

1. Ray McGovern is one of the coolest guys in the world

I met and interviewed him during the Downing Street memo Hearing in DC, when I flew from Hawaii to DC on the contributions of the DUrs (thanks again!), and filmed the whole event in HiDef so we'd all get the real story.

After Conyers forced the White House to accept over 500,000 signatures of Americans wanting to know the damn truth, there was a protest where many spoke right there outside of the White House, after it was over there was Ray, one nice guy, a no nonsense guy, with something like 27 years in the CIA and who processed the dailies for the President to read long ago.. and I interviewed him in front of the White House, I should make that public, it's not on any DVDs..

While he was in that hearing he talked about a sitting Vice President visiting CIA headquarters, when asked if it was unusual, he said, "No, it's not unusual.. it's UNHEARD OF.." to the laughter of every single person in that hearing, including Conyers and many Congress men and women.

He said that NEVER had a VP come into the CIA to breath down necks along with the head TENET of younger Agents trying to do their jobs.. in this article he mentions that Cheney came 10 times.. in the Hearing (and under Oath) he said that the CIA was UNSURE of how many times Cheney came in, it was between 12 and 18 LOGGED visits. So he's even being conservative here in this article. Even mentioned that GH BUSH who the CIA Headquarters is NAMED AFTER, didn't bother to go there..

The NIE was basically created from a White Paper penned by the White House WHIG group. When the State Dept, slapped a big paragraph at the bottom saying that the Yellowcake was "HIGHLY DUBIOUS" it scared Congress (as he says, in the NIE, the Yellowcake was NOT a KEY JUDGEMENT..)..

So Congress balked. BUT they couldn't say anything, DURBIN himself commented later that if HE had alerted anyone to these facts he could have been Tossed in JAIL. When Congress Balked and demanded more info (and this was not ALL of Congress, most knew Nothing of what was going on) THEN Tenent brought them the actual White Paper penned BY THE WHIG GROUP.

Now remember that this White paper of course would not contain the State Dept's warning of dubiousness.

You can believe every thing that Ray McGovern says. He is an honest, decent patriotic American Hero, old school CIA, the ones that love their country, even if too much at times :)

Great post, thanks for sharing this.

***
Incidentally in my film "Rove's War" there's a section where McGovern is taking Bush to task for his JOKING about WHERE the WMD were at the Media Function (where they all laughed and applauded), and he took the media to task right there in the room.

"YOU ALL LAUGHED.. HAAA HAAA.. BIG JOKE.. Well, CINDY doen't think it's so funny.. her son was killed soon after that BIG JOKE.."

While McGovern is saying this I show the pics of Bush looking under chairs, interspersed with pictures of slain troops that get progressively smaller, and in the end you see a picture of BUSH created by these smaller pics of dead troops.. then there's the applause.

Thank god for McGovern, a man among men.

[magellan]

2. Man, this is GOOD!

It's all laid out right there so even a moran freep can understand it. This for example:

It is now abundantly clear—thanks to the release of Fitzgerald’s court papers—how the White House chose to counter Wilson’s charge that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to justify war. Adding insult to injury, not only did Wilson author the July 6 New York Times op-ed titled "What I Did Not Find in Africa;" he also chose to forgo diplomatic parlance in telling Washington Post reporters, "This begs the question regarding what else they are lying about." Wilson had thrown down the gauntlet.

In something of a panic, Cheney picked it up. First, he and Libby tried to get the CIA to support the story about Iraq and Niger. The answer was no. So the administration conceded publicly on July 7 that the information should not have been included in the State Of The Union address. On July 8 Cheney’s counteroffensive began. According to Libby, he was dispatched to Bush administration darling Judy Miller of The New York Times to explain why Wilson’s charges were wrong. The White House did not twist the intelligence to justify invading Iran: "The CIA made us do it."

Ray McGovern, true American patriot. :patriot:

Thanks for sharing that, kpete.

[Peace Patriot]

3. McGovern suggests that Fitzgerald may be tracking the Niger forgery

conspiracy back to the V-P. There was a story recently out of Italy, in which people in the Niger embassy in Italy were accused of cooking up the forgeries, although why they would do something so against the interest of their country, and not only that, would get the names and dates on the Niger forgeries so wrong that the forgeries were easily detectable, and why their embassy was burglarized and embassy stationary stolen, are anybody's guess. It looks like disinformation to me--an attempt to throw suspicion off the real perps--the attendants of the Rome meeting in 2001: Michael Ladeen and other Neo-Cons, notorious Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Italian intelligence and military leaders. This is the trail that likely leads to Cheney and Rumsfeld.

The Niger forgeries are often described as "crude" forgeries, and I've wondered why they were crude. I can't think of any obvious motive for doing BAD forgeries. But I can think of a non-obvious motive--the forgeries were bait. Draw the CIA and other honest gov't professionals into a known (on the record), or public, position of no-nukes in Iraq, then slam them (discredit them, make them more purge-able) by....PLANTING nukes in Iraq, after the invasion, to be "found' by the US military WMD-hunting teams (one of which was accompanied by none other than Judith Miller, in a high-profile "search" for the weapons they all knew were not there). Such a plot--if successful--would also enormously benefit the Bushites and the Blairites politically.

It seems to me a logical progression for conspirators to go from cooking up forged documents to fabricate a case against Saddam Hussein on nukes, to actually planting the weapons there, to be "found" by someone like Miller, who had been such a propagandist for them, once the country had been smashed, and sent into civil chaos, with the US military in charge. Easy enough for a fascist Sec of Defense like Rumsfeld to use the military for this purpose (or get them to look the other way), or use private military contractors to assist in the movement of illicit weapons into Iraq. (And there were several news reports from Islamic sources after the invasion--and from one mysterious Pentagon whistleblower-- about botched efforts to do just that).

So this is what I'm thinking: The Neo-Con cabal plots the invasion of Iraq starting way back in 2001, with the Rome meeting. They cook up the "crude" Niger forgeries and plant them into the intelligence stream, not to fool the CIA or the UN weapons inspectors (which they didn't) but to draw them out. (There was another odd episode along the way here, of a Ghorbanifar agent trying to get the CIA to believe that Iranians had entered Iraq, stolen Iraqi nukes and taken them to Iran, but the evidence apparently evaporated the moment it was investigated.) The honest people in the intelligence agencies, looking at this and other evidence, cry foul. The nuke charge is shaky at best. Thus begins the Wilson Niger trip, and his ultimately going public with a no-nukes in Iraq position--a position associated with the CIA, but only the Bushites know this, that Wilson was married to the CIA's counter-proliferation expert Valerie Plame, a covert agent, head of a covert counter-proliferation network around the world (Brewster-Jennings). So-o-o-o...

...the plotters have to get this info out into the public venue, for the arc of the plot to be complete. (The CIA saying no nukes; the nukes are then "found".) We're at late June; early July. The "hunt" for WMDs is hot in the "news" (led by NYT reporter Miller), with false "leads" reported every day and later retracted. Expectation of a "find" is being built up. Wilson publishes his article on July 6, 2003 (baited by Condoleeza Rice, apparently)--dissing the whole Niger/nuke story--and they move to expose Plame's and BJ's covert status (which they've known all along). They start calling reporters and planting the seeds of the story with whispers and innuendos ('did you hear? his wife's CIA...').

But something else has been happening the meantime. Several efforts to move the illicit nukes into Iraq have been foiled. (The Islamic news reports--one of the efforts met with "friendly fire".) The plotters aren't sure who is foiling them. They are getting nervous about their scheme, but still confident that they can pull it off. The weapons WILL be found--Cheney, Rumsfeld and others keep repeating. They're sure of it.

Then, bang. On July 7, the day after Wilson publishes his article, Bush gets a call from Tony Blair. The Brits have discovered the identity of the insider who had been whistleblowing to the BBC about the "sexed up" pre-war WMD intel (starting in late May). It was their own chief WMD expert David Kelly, who has been interrogated at a safe house (first week of July), and Blair has been informed (on July 7) that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things" (could say; not had said). If the "uncomfortable things" that Kelly "could say" were about this plot to plant nukes in Iraq, then what looks like panic and stupidity in the WAY the Bushites outed Plame and Brewster-Jennings has a cause. For certainly the cause of that panic and stupidity was not Wilson's article. A general plot to "get" the CIA has turned into an immediate crisis, with possible revelation of the plot to plant the nukes coming from another source: Kelly.

Kelly has only ten days to live at this point. He will be found dead, underly highly suspicious circumstances, ten days later on July 18, four days after Plame is outed. And four days after that, on July 22 (after Kelly's office and computers are searched), Novak additionally outs the entire Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation project, putting all of its covert agents and contacts around the world at risk of getting killed.

It seems to me that there is one thing that people who had been honestly involved in WMD counter-proliferation all their lives would balk at: more proliferation, OUR side proliferating, and, especially, moving WMDs illicitly to plant evidence. Their automatic response would be to stop it--no matter who was doing it (if they knew who was doing it).

That's certainly my read on Kelly--a straight-shooter. And that's the sense I get of Plame as well. Kelly was an insider who wanted Saddam ousted. He supported the invasion. But then SOMETHING turned him against it, in spring 2003--and he began whistleblowing to the BBC, trying to apprise people that the case had been cooked (late May 2003, post-invasion). The discovery that our side was trying to plant nukes would be just the sort of thing that would incense him. He thought he was on the good guys' team.

Manucher Ghorbanifar (of Iran-Contra infamy) was notorious for this kind of Byzantine plotting. He was persona non grata at the CIA (a known liar). He had a grudge against the CIA. The motives of the Neo-Cons at the Rome meeting, and in the White House and Pentagon, are obvious. And the Italians--who knows?--maybe they fantasized rebuilding the Roman Empire, with them taking over for the US in the Middle East, after we smashed it up for them.

It's hard for me to believe that they assembled that cabal in Rome in 2001 just to cook up "crude" forgeries.

This is basically the WMD-planting theory of Treasongate--that the outing of Plame and BJ was the coverup, not the main crime. The main crime was actually a NEWS crime, in a sense: the plot to PLANT weapons, to justify what they had just done (slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis). This is one of the few things I can think of that, had it been revealed, would have instantly toppled both Bush and Blair. Even with his buds at Diebold and ES&S "tabulating" all the votes in the 2004 election with "trade secret" programming, I don't think Bush could have survived, had someone like Kelly blown the whistle on such an attempted deception.

And, according to this theory, that deception--planting the weapons--was part of a grand scheme starting way back in 2001, to destroy the honest US counter-proliferation program, purge the CIA and the US gov't of people who desired peace--honest, decent people who thought it was their job to provide the gov't with CORRECT information, in order to PREVENT war, not to start it--and to put the US on a war footing, invade the middle east and take over its oil fields, using 9/11 as the excuse. They would INVENT the phony intelligence they needed to "convince" war profiteering corporate news monopolies that Iraq had to be invaded (they never did convince most ordinary people; even among Americans, nearly 60% opposed the invasion). They would then make that phony story come true--by PLANTING the evidence (just like bad cops)--and having it be "discovered" by a friendly war propagandist like Miller, who was all set up to do so, with a special "embed" contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld.

Their position would then be unassailable--politically and in terms of controlling all gov't power.

But SOMEONE discovered their plot to plant the weapons, and foiled it (possibly several times). And in the week LEADING UP TO Wilson's publication July 6, with the interrogation of David Kelly, they may have been finding out who it was. And to their inherent hatred of honest gov't employees was added the motives of revenge and the desire to punish--and also the NEED, not just the desire, to silence people.

This theory also goes some way to explain why they outed the entire CIA counter-proliferation project, in addition to Plame. Outing Plame would punish Wilson for his dissent. But what of outing Brewster-Jennings and putting all its covert people in jeopardy? Perhaps it was a scattershot act of revenge, HOPING that those who had foiled their dirty scheme WOULD get killed. In any case, it would silence them. And Plame. And of course Kelly is now silenced forever.

IF Patrick Fitzgerald is following this track--the track of the Niger forgeries--he may be on to a lot more than a White House conspiracy to punish Wilson by destroying his wife's career. He may be into the heart of this cabal and its darkness.

Since exposure of the Niger forgeries and the other false evidence of nukes was supposedly why they wanted to punish Wilson, Fitzgerald has more than likely done some thinking about those documents, and likely knows a lot more about them than we do. At the moment, he has Cheney's top aide Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. But the full story of WHAT Libby is obstructing, and why he lied--especially given that he now contends he had permission from Bush and Cheney to reveal classified information to reporters--is yet to understood.

McGovern suggests an intriguing reason for why Libby disclosed select portions of the NIE to reporter Miller: not to fool her (about the Niger/nuke nonsense), but rather to try to establish that it was the intelligence community that misled Bush, not the other way around. While this fits neatly into the above theory--the NeoCon subplot of destroying the CIA--I have reservations about it. For one thing, I don't think it was the first time Miller saw that classified document. For another, I don't think that that is the reason that Libby took the document to the meeting. I think he took the NIE with him to be able to say, later on, that the NIE was the main reason he met with Miller. And I suspect that the main reason he met with Miller on July 8, 2003 (and possibly also in June) was David Kelly--an old friend of Judith Miller's, and the one to whom Kelly wrote his last email, on the day he died (July 17), in which he was worried about the "many dark actors playing games."

He thought it would all blow over. His whistleblowing, the discovery that he was the whistleblower (still a mystery how that happened), his interrogation at a "safe house," their threats against him, his promise not to reveal "any state secrets," and his half recantation to a parliamentary defense committee, were now behind him. They had outed his name to the press, and sent him home (without protection and apparently without surveillance). He said in his last emails that he was looking forward to his daughter's wedding and returning to Iraq. He went out on his normal afternoon walk, and never returned. His body was discovered the next day, under a tree not far from his home. He had apparently taken some painkillers (not enough to kill him), slit one wrist, and bled to death all night outdoors in the rain. Kelly was a legendary tough guy, and an excellent scientist. A more unlikely method of suicide is hard to conceive of, for such a man. Further, the paramedics reported that there was not enough blood at the scene, for that method of death, and that the body had been moved. There was no note (that we know of--other than his forward-looking emails). Blairite officialdom declared it a suicide, exonerated the Blairites and blamed the BBC!

There sure has been a lot of death connected to WMDs that never existed. And a lot of lies. Here's hoping that Fitzgerald has the strength to penetrate that darkness, and to end it.