Plame Affair makes clear: USA is run by TRAITORS.

Rove's Leak Points to Bush Conspiracy

By Robert Parry
July 11, 2005

A key national security principle for dealing with top-secret information, such as the identity of undercover CIA officers, is strict compartmentalization, often called “the need to know” – which raises the question why George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove would know anything about the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The answer to that mystery – why was Rove involved – may be more crucial to unraveling who was behind the illegal leaking of Plame’s name and the subsequent cover-up than even the identity of which Bush officials passed the information to right-wing pundit Robert Novak for his infamous column on July 14, 2003.

SNIP…

By contrast, George W. Bush has taken no known disciplinary action against anyone for letting the identity of a covert CIA officer leak out. Rove played a prominent role in Bush's reelection campaign and has since been promoted to deputy White House chief of staff.

Nor has Bush done anything to discourage his right-wing supporters from denigrating Wilson, who gets routinely mocked as a flaky self-promoter or a partisan Democrat.

These orchestrated attacks on Wilson have continued despite the fact that U.S. government investigations – including several ordered by Bush himself – have corroborated the absence of a pre-invasion Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

So, this long-term pattern of White House behavior suggests that negligence isn’t the whole story. Rather it looks as if the dissemination of Plame’s identity may have crossed the line into a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

CONTINUED…

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071105.html

Senate Panel to Examine Use of Cover by U.S. Spies

By Scott Shane
The New York Times, July 25, 2005

The Senate Intelligence Committee will conduct hearings on American spy agencies' use of cover to protect the identities of intelligence officers, the committee chairman said on Sunday.

The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said on the CNN program "Late Edition" that the committee was "going to go into quite a series of hearings in regard to cover." The practice of intelligence cover has come under scrutiny during the investigation of the disclosure of the C.I.A. employment of Valerie Wilson, who had worked under cover for the agency for 18 years before being publicly identified as a C.I.A. operative in 2003.

SNIP…

Some Republicans have minimized the significance of the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity, noting not only her working at C.I.A. headquarters but also the fact that she did not have an in-depth cover story: her purported employer, a shell company created by the agency, was little more than a Boston post office box. They have also questioned whether the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act applied to her, because the law applies only to officers who have served overseas under cover in the previous five years.

But agency officials apparently believe that the law does apply to Ms. Wilson, possibly because she took overseas business trips in the five years before 2003. The C.I.A. sought an investigation, and the Justice Department and Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, concurred in choosing to pursue the case.

CONTINUED…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/politics/25leak.html?hp&ex=1122350400&en=89b014aeadfe83c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) intends to interfere in Fitzgerald probe.

By Wayne Madsen
July 26, 2005

Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, announced that his commitee will be "reviewing" the criminal probe by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of the White House leak of the identities of covert CIA agents. If Roberts is serious and not just grandstanding, this may indicate that the White House is looking to give Fitzgerald's targets (Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and others) congressional general immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony before Roberts' committee. This was the method by which John Poindexter and Oliver North were able to avoid jail time for their roles in Iran-contra, their convictions being overturned by a federal appeals court because of their previously granted congressional immunity. There is also a bit of Watergate redux in Roberts' statement. Pressure by the GOP on Fitzgerald is reminiscent of the Nixon administration's decision to fire Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. That prompted the resignations of Nixon's Attorney and Deputy Attorney General. Meanwhile, the Karl Rove/neocon spin machine is stepping up its criticism of ex-CIA officers who are defending Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) director Gary Schmitt penned a screed in William Kristol's and Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard attacking former CIA officer and Valerie Plame colleague Larry Johnson, who gave the Democratic weekly radio response to Bush's address on July 23. The neocon attack on CIA veterans, including the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), began in earnest on the/Republican Freerepublic.com site, a bevy of white supremacists, JDLers, and John Birchers largely based in California's San Joaquin Valley and Orange County.

SOURCE:

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

The Veep and Pakistan

Cheney Helped Cover-Up Nuclear Proliferation in 1989, So Pentagon Could Sell Pakistan Fighter Jets

By JASON LEOPOLD

When news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered last month, the world's leaders waited, with baited breath, to see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow upon Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff.

SNIP...

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan's proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact, it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

SNIP...

In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in the magazine Mother Jones, were "politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported.

SNIP...

Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

CONTINUED…

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03082004.html

Clouds Over George Bush

by Robert Parry
iF magazine, January / February 1999

EXCERPT...

These mysteries include:

* Bush's connection to the Letelier assassination and to other Latin American human rights catastrophes, such as the launching of the Argentine Dirty War in 1976, also on Bush's CIA watch.

* Bush's precise role in the now-corroborated accounts of Republican secret contacts with Iranian radicals holding 52 U.S. hostages in 1980, while President Carter was trying to negotiate their release.

* Bush's knowledge about his Cuban-American allies and their participation in cocaine trafficking under the umbrella of President Reagan's Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

* Bush's participation in supplying secret military assistance to the armies of Iraqi dictator Saddam Husseln in the 1980s, including supplies and technology through Pinochet's Chile.

* Bush's close financial relationship with Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a major conservative political funder but also a controversial religious-business figure who favors the subjugation of the American people and who has close ties to figures from Asian and South American organized crime.

SNIP...

Among the records I pulled from the congressional files were confidential notes taken by Reagan's national security aide, Richard Allen.

According to Allen's notes, Bush called Allen at 2:12 p.m., Oct. 27, 1980, with a worried message from former Texas Gov. John Connally. A one-time-Democrat-turned-Republican, Connally was hearing some disturbing news from his Middle Eastern contacts: the possibility that Carter might yet pull off a pre-election hostage deal.

Bush ordered Allen to check out Connally's tip. When Allen knew more, he was to relay the information to "Shackley via Jennifer." The Jennifer was Bush's long-time assistant Jennifer Fitzgerald. "Shackley" was Theodore Shackley, the legendary CIA covert ops specialist known as the blond ghost.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/CloudsOverGeorgeBush.html

 
From corporate crimes to murder in Iraq
Crimes of the Bush dynasty

February 6, 2004 | Pages 6 and 7

THE GREAT myth about the United States is that we live in a "meritocracy," where the "best and brightest" will rise to the top, and anyone can make it with intelligence and hard work. The slightest examination of the Bush family tree proves that all this is a lie. As DAVID ZIRIN explains, the Bush saga--from George W. Bush in the White House today to the great grandfathers on both sides of the family--is the story of four generations amassing their fortunes and achieving the heights of power through the cronyest of crony capitalisms.


THERE ARE no think-tank theorists or college professors, no surgeons or artists among the Bush men. From root to branch, the Bush family’s rise to power and wealth has gone hand in hand with the fortunes of the oil industry and the military-industrial complex.

"(I)f Presidential family connections were theme parks, Bush world would be a sight to behold," writes Kevin Phillips, author of new book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. "Mideast banks tied to the CIA would crowd alongside Florida Savings and Loans that once laundered money for the Nicaraguan contras. Dozens of oil wells would run eternally without finding oil, thanks to periodic cash deposits by old men wearing Reagan-Bush buttons and smoking 20-dollar cigars."

To paraphrase Karl Marx, the Bushes truly came to us dripping from head to foot with blood and dirt. The Bushes claim an ancestry that goes back to British royalty. But the rotten modern house of Bush began with George W. Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, George H. Walker.

Walker was president of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. He made his fortune as a war profiteer, working alongside the House of Morgan in purchasing billions in armaments for Britain and France during the First World War. In a foreshadowing of things to come, Walker got a taste for the emerging importance of oil as the engine of profits and war when he oversaw the rebuilding of the Baku oil fields after the war in the 1920s.

At his peak, Walker was the director of 17 corporations and maintained homes around the country--including a 10,000-acre hunting preserve in South Carolina, where according to his granddaughter, "We were waited on by the most wonderful Black servants."

Dubya’s other great grandfather, Yale graduate Samuel Bush, was the president of the Ohio-based Buckeye Steel. Like Walker, Samuel Bush made his fortune during the First World War by producing material for small arms. Of course, it helped that Samuel became head of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the federal government’s War Industries Board in 1918

CONTINUED...

http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/485/485_06_BushDynasty.shtml

American Dynasty

EXCERPT...


Introduction

Concern about the first U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by  skeptics of the Bush succession, as well as by  amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and eighteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained credibility when  the 2002 elections confirmed George W. Bush’s popularity and the war  of early Spring  2003 displayed his personal commitment to renewing his father’s unfinished combat  with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical  ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.

Other institutional aspects warrant national concern. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias—in the case of  the Bushes,  favoritism  toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon and CIA, as well as insistence on  tax breaks for the investor class and upper income groups. Families restored to power also have a history of revenge  against old foes—George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such taunters of his father as Texas Governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped to force him out after the 1998 elections) and apppointing former officials dating back not just  to his father’s term but to the Ford administration of 1974-76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction. 

This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States.  In the first few years of the twenty-first century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy.  As in the United States, the principals were political 

Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological  inheritance. History is all too familiar with the Hapsburg nose, and the Tudor temper.  Some pundits have queried  whether heredity might explain certain behavior shared by the two Bush presidents —frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic arrangements of thought.  Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names, faces and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that George H.W. Bush, “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better than anyone else at memorizing names.”  At the same time, both father and son hve shown little talent for conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty, with its subordination of individual achievement  to gene pools and  bloodlines, involves a gamble on the nuances of that heredity.

In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the  five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the  exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to over-ambitious 1920s investment banking, the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex (that latter was big enough by 1961 that President Eisenhower warned against it) and a  web of close connections to the CIA, ones that began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads  like these weigh may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many  times more troubling in a dynasty.

http://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm

A National Catastrophe

By Whitley Strieber
Sunday June 27th, 2004

The outing of Valerie Plame in the column of Robert Novak has now led to the resignation of Jim Pavitt from the CIA. Mr. Pavitt was Valerie Plame’s superior. His work has been devastated by this catastrophic security leak, and he has apparently chosen to resign as a result. The announcement of his retirement is the tip of an iceberg of national disaster.

Don’t believe for a moment the rantings of lying radio hosts about this case. Valerie Plame was no small fish. The revelation of her name is, in fact, the most serious intelligence disaster in the history of this country. Only a tiny number of high officials, such as the president, the secretaries of state and defense, and a few high White House officials even have access to the names of the CIA’s NOC “non-official cover” officers. These are seemingly private individuals who are actually key CIA personnel, whose clandestine activities are run via carefully designed covers, companies that are legitimate from top to bottom and are not in any way thought to be CIA-associated, and have survived years of scrutiny from foreign intelligence operations, and are believed by even the best of them to be entirely non-CIA connected.

The names on the NOC list are among the greatest secrets possessed by our country, and the leaking of this particular name at this particular time could well be the single most traitorous act in our history, because it has blinded us to the actions of Iran as they are in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

In the case of Valerie Plame, she was connected with a company called Brewster-Jennings and Associates. They were primarily active in the US and Saudi Arabia, but also engaged in activities in China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and Syria.

Two decades of intelligence work in these countries has been compromised or destroyed by this monstrous act. Worse, we can no longer trust any intelligence being gathered via this critical resource.

Let me be very specific about the extent of this problem. Here are just two of the areas of possible compromise:

Spread across the southern areas of the former Soviet Union are numerous nuclear devices, fissionable material and delivery systems in various degrees of decay, nominally guarded by Russia and the countries in which the materials are now found. In addition, I assume that the United States has extensive operations in these areas, there to make sure that nothing more goes missing, and that what has already gone missing is tracked and located.

That work may now be effectively destroyed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/?id=162

Political Intelligence

News: What happens when U.S. spies get the goods-- and the government won't listen?

By Ken Silverstein & David Isenberg
January/February 2002 Issue

In 1989, an intelligence analyst working for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a startling report. After reviewing classified information from field agents, he had determined that Pakistan, despite official denials, had built a nuclear bomb. "I was not out there alone," the analyst, Richard Barlow, recalls. "This was the same conclusion that had been reached by many people in the intelligence community."

But Barlow's conclusion was politically inconvenient. A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad.

Barlow's report was dismissed as alarmist. A few months later, a Pentagon official downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in testimony to Congress. When Barlow protested to his superiors, he was fired.

Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987. In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb. "This was not a failure of intelligence," says Barlow. "The intelligence was in the system."

Barlow's case points to an issue that has largely been overlooked in the post-September 11 debate about how to "fix" the nation's spy networks: Sometimes, the problem with intelligence is not a lack of information, but a failure to use it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/01/political_intel.html

Bush Family Value$

News: The Bush clan's family business

By Stephen Pizzo
September 1, 1992

In 1991, President Bush bristled at a flurry of news accounts that questioned the business ethics of three of his sons. "The media ought to be ashamed of itself for what they're doing," Bush complained. "They have a right to make a living, and their relationships are appropriate," added a White House spokeswoman in June 1992.

Since George Bush has raised "family values" as a campaign issue repeatedly, though, it seems only fair to take a look at his own family. A computer search showed that over the past five years stories have periodically surfaced chronicling the individual business antics of the president's sons -- each riding comfortably through life in the slipstream of his father's growing power and influence.

Although a handful of good reporters for the New York Times, LA Times, Village Voice, and Wall Street Journal have diligently been digging through business records for months, something has been missing: an overview that "connects the dots" in the myriad deals that have been examined, making it clear that cashing in on influence has become a pattern of behavior extending through the first family.

Instead of criticizing reporters, the president might more wisely begin listening to those in government who have watched his sons with mounting worry. A year ago, I sat across a desk from a Secret Service agent who had been assigned to Bush-family security. I rattled off the names of a half-dozen questionable characters who had found their way into business deals with the Bush boys. How had these characters been allowed to get even close to the president's sons?

The agent slumped back in his chair and sighed. "We warn them," he said in a whisper. "But that's all we can do. We can't stop these kids from associating with someone they want to be with. All we can do after warning them is to sweep these guys with metal detectors when they come around."

What follows is a sourcebook of concerns about the president's three sons.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html

The most dangerous man in the world?

Some experts argue that it's not Osama bin Laden

By Chris Hansen and Richard Greenberg
Dateline NBC
Updated: 12:57 p.m. ET Jan. 19, 2005

He's been called by some, the most dangerous man in the world. And he's not Osama Bin Laden. You may not even know his name but, according to those who do know him, he helped spread nuclear bomb-making technology to some of America's most determined enemies. The question is, just how much damage has he done?

In the summer of 1999, a group of illegal weapons dealers were meeting at a warehouse in Florida, their conversations recorded by federal investigators. One of the men, from Pakistan, was seeking technology for nuclear weapons. Who did he say he was working for?

Dick Stoltz: “Dr. Abdul Khan.”

Chris Hansen: “A.Q. Khan.”

Dick Stoltz: “A.Q. Khan.”

Former federal undercover agent Dick Stoltz was posing as a black market arms dealer.

Hansen: “Did you realize what you had at the time?”

Stoltz: “No. We didn't.”

But now he does -- because A.Q. Khan is considered, by some, to be the most dangerous man in the world. Why? Because Dr. Khan has peddled nuclear weapons technology to some of the countries the United States considers most dangerous, and some accepted his offers.

Hansen: “We're talking about Iran?”

David Albright: “Iran accepted.”

Hansen: “North Korea?”

Albright: “Accepted.”

Hansen: “Libya?”

Albright: “Accepted.”

David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, has been tracking A.Q. Khan for 20 years.

CONTINUED...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6827441/

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060
Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, USN
Related Information:

Transcript of Naval Service
Citation for Navy and Marine Corps Medal
Report on Loss of PT-109, copy of original document
Information on PT-109 and Patrol Torpedo Boats
History of PT-109
Photographs of PT-109
Bibliography

"Any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction, 'I served in the United States Navy,'" wrote President John F. Kennedy in August 1963. A former naval officer, Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on 29 May 1917 to Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy. After attending public schools in Brookline, Kennedy went on to The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and attended the London School of Economics from 1935 to 1936. Kennedy graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1940 and began graduate school at Stanford University.

Despite having a bad back, Kennedy was able to join the U.S. Navy through the help of Captain Alan Kirk, the Director, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) who had been the Naval Attache in London when Joseph Kennedy was the Ambassador. In October 1941, Kennedy was appointed an Ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve and joined the staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The office, for which Kennedy worked, prepared intelligence bulletins and briefing information for the Secretary of the Navy and other top officials. On 15 January 1942, he was assigned to an ONI field office the Sixth Naval District in Charleston, South Carolina. After spending most of April and May at Naval Hospitals at Charleston and at Chelsea, Massachusetts, Kennedy attended Naval Reserve Officers Training School at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, from 27 July through 27 September. After completing this training, Kennedy entered the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center, Melville, Rhode Island. On 10 October, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, Junior Grade. Upon completing his training 2 December, he was ordered to the training squadron, Motor Torpedo Squadron FOUR, for duty as the Commanding Officer of a motor torpedo boat, PT 101, a 78- foot Higgins boat. In January 1943, PT 101 with four other boats was ordered to Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron FOURTEEN, which was assigned to Panama.

Seeking combat duty, Kennedy transferred on 23 February as a replacement officer to Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron TWO, which was based at Tulagi Island in the Solomons. Traveling to the Pacific on USS Rochambeau, Kennedy arrived at Tulagi on 14 April and took command of PT 109 on 23 April 1943. On 30 May, several PT boats, including PT 109 were ordered to the Russell Islands, in preparation for the invasion of New Georgia. After the invasion of Rendova, PT 109 moved to Lumbari. From that base PT boats conducted nightly operations to interdict the heavy Japanese barge traffic resupplying the Japanese garrisons in New Georgia and to patrol the Ferguson and Blackett Straits near the islands of Kolumbangara, Gizo, and Vella-Lavella in order to sight and to give warning when the Japanese Tokyo Express warships came into the straits to assault U.S. forces in the New Georgia-Rendova area.

PT 109 commanded by Kennedy with executive officer, Ensign Leonard Jay Thom, and ten enlisted men was one of the fifteen boats sent out on patrol on the night of 1-2 August 1943 to intercept Japanese warships in the straits. A friend of Kennedy, Ensign George H. R. Ross, whose ship was damaged, joined Kennedy's crew that night. The PT boat was creeping along to keep the wake and noise to a minimum in order to avoid detection. Around 0200 with Kennedy at the helm, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri traveling at 40 knots cut PT 109 in two in ten seconds. Although the Japanese destroyer had not realized that their ship had struck an enemy vessel, the damage to PT 109 was severe. At the impact, Kennedy was thrown into the cockpit where he landed on his bad back. As Amagiri steamed away, its wake doused the flames on the floating section of PT 109 to which five Americans clung: Kennedy, Thom, and three enlisted men, S1/c Raymond Albert, RM2/c John E. Maguire and QM3/c Edman Edgar Mauer. Kennedy yelled out for others in the water and heard the replies of Ross and five members of the crew, two of which were injured. GM3/c Charles A. Harris had a hurt leg and MoMM1/c Patrick Henry McMahon, the engineer was badly burned. Kennedy swam to these men as Ross and Thom helped the others, MoMM2/c William Johnston, TM2/c Ray L. Starkey, and MoMM1/c Gerald E. Zinser to the remnant of PT 109. Although they were only one hundred yards from the floating piece, in the dark it took Kennedy three hours to tow McMahon and help Harris back to the PT hulk. Unfortunately, TM2/c Andrew Jackson Kirksey and MoMM2/c Harold W. Marney were killed in the collision with Amagiri.

Because the remnant was listing badly and starting to swamp, Kennedy decided to swim for a small island barely visible (actually three miles) to the southeast. Five hours later, all eleven survivors had made it to the island after having spent a total of fifteen hours in the water. Kennedy had given McMahon a life-jacket and had towed him all three miles with the strap of the device in his teeth. After finding no food or water on the island, Kennedy concluded that he should swim the route the PT boats took through Ferguson Passage in hopes of sighting another ship. After Kennedy had no luck, Ross also made an attempt, but saw no one and returned to the island. Ross and Kennedy had spotted another slightly larger island with coconuts to eat and all the men swam there with Kennedy again towing McMahon. Now at their fourth day, Kennedy and Ross made it to Nauru Island and found several natives. Kennedy cut a message on a coconut that read "11 alive native knows posit & reef Nauru Island Kennedy." He purportedly handed the coconut to one of the natives and said, "Rendova, Rendova!," indicating that the coconut should be taken to the PT base on Rendova.

Kennedy and Ross again attempted to look for boats that night with no luck. The next morning the natives returned with food and supplies, as well as a letter from the coastwatcher commander of the New Zealand camp, Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans. The message indicated that the natives should return with the American commander, and Kennedy complied immediately. He was greeted warmly and then taken to meet PT 157 which returned to the island and finally rescued the survivors on 8 August.

Kennedy was later awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his heroics in the rescue of the crew of PT 109, as well as the Purple Heart Medal for injuries sustained in the accident on the night of 1 August 1943. An official account of the entire incident was written by intelligence officers in August 1943 and subsequently declassified in 1959. As President, Kennedy met once again with his rescuers and was toasted by members of the Japanese destroyer crew.

In September, Kennedy went to Tulagi and accepted the command of PT 59 which was scheduled to be converted to a gunboat. In October 1943, Kennedy was promoted to Lieutenant and continued to command the motor torpedo boat when the squadron moved to Vella Lavella until a doctor directed him to leave PT 59 on 18 November. Kennedy left the Solomons on 21 December and returned to the U.S. in early January 1944.

On 15 February, Kennedy reported to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center, Melville, Rhode Island. Due to the reinjury of his back during the sinking of PT 109, Kennedy entered a hospital for treatment. In March, Kennedy went to the Submarine Chaser Training Center, Miami, Florida. In May while still assigned to the Center, Kennedy entered the Naval Hospital, Chelsea, Massachusetts, for further treatment of his back injury. At the Hospital in June, he received his Navy and Marine Corps Medals. Under treatment as an outpatient, Kennedy was ordered detached from the Miami Center on 30 October 1944. Subsequently, Kennedy was released from all active duty and finally retired from the U.S. Naval Reserve on physical disability in March 1945.

SOURCE:

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq60-2.htm

Former Colleague Says Bolton Abused Power at State Dept.
Senators Hear Dissent on U.N. Pick

By Dafna Linzer and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 13, 2005; Page A04

The State Department's former intelligence chief yesterday described John R. Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, as a "bully" who abused his authority and power, intimidated intelligence analysts, and damaged the integrity of the agency.

Bolton's behavior "brings real question to my mind about his suitability for high office," said Carl W. Ford Jr. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is considering Bolton's nomination, that he is a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a "huge fan" of Vice President Cheney. "I'm as conservative as John Bolton is," Ford said. "But the fact is that the collateral damage and the personal hurt that he causes is not worth the price that had to be paid."

Democrats on the committee hoped that Ford's testimony would help persuade Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.) to vote against the nomination. Chafee is seen as the panel's only Republican who might vote against Bolton and block the nomination from getting to the full Senate, where the GOP holds a 55 to 45 edge.

But Chafee said after the hearing that he was still inclined to back Bolton.

"It was strong testimony from Mr. Ford. He used strong language," Chafee said. But "it's all focused on this one incident. We're not really seeing a pattern."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) disagreed. "This is not an isolated incident," he told the committee of 10 Republicans and eight Democrats. "We have testimony from a total of four other people" relating to several incidents.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46436-2005Apr12.html

George Bush, Terrorist in the White House CIA, NSA and Spies



Gen. Gehlen (middle) was imported along with his Gestapo by the Dulles Brothers after WWII to help setup and train the CIA (Operation PAPERCLIP)

Documents reveal CIA recruited five of Eichmann's associates PDF By: Yossi Melman, on: 06.02.2005

A CIA Officer's Calamitous Choices By Jerry Meldon May 15, 2003

Opening of CIA Records under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities PDF by Steve Kangas

"There has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, basically by which Israeli intelligence did jobs for the CIA and for the rest of American intelligence. You can't understand what's been going on with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand this secret arrangement."

--Andrew Cockburn

CONTINUED w LINKS to TRUTH... (and I don't agree with Cockburn a third of the time).

http://www.nogw.com/cia.html

Bush-Rove loyalty a threat, CIA retirees say

By SCOTT SHEPARD
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/23/05

Washington — A group of retired CIA officials on Friday accused President Bush of using a special investigation of White House leaks to avoid having to fire his longtime political adviser, Karl Rove.

The group said Bush — by allowing Rove to remain as deputy White House chief of staff — had undermined American security interests abroad. Rove was named as a source for news accounts disclosing the identity of a covert CIA agent married to an administration critic.

In an unofficial hearing conducted by Democratic members of Congress, the retired CIA agents and analysts also complained that Bush has done nothing to stop the Republican National Committee and GOP allies in Congress from continuing a "smear" campaign against the outed agent, Valerie Plame, and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

"Instead of a president concerned first and foremost with protecting this country and the intelligence officers who serve it, we are confronted with a president who is willing to sit by while political operatives savage the reputations of good Americans like Valerie and Joe Wilson," said Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism analyst at the CIA.

James Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer, argued that disclosing Plame's identity had seriously compromised the ability of the CIA to recruit foreign agents abroad to spy on their own countries or terrorist organizations.

"While blind deference to legal niceties may be accepted within the context of American politics, in an overseas setting, it just doesn't work," Marcinkowski said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/0705/23natcialeak.html

Rove's Backers Use 'CounterSpy Defense'

By Robert Parry
July 26, 2005

In defending White House political adviser Karl Rove, American conservatives have adopted an argument used by U.S. leftists three decades ago to rebut accusations that CounterSpy magazine's naming of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Greece contributed to his murder.

The argument – used then to defend CounterSpy and now to protect Rove for outing CIA officer Valerie Plame – was that the covers for the two CIA officers had previously been blown and that the CIA hadn’t done enough to maintain the secrecy.

Over the past two weeks, following revelations that Rove discussed Plame’s CIA role with journalists in 2003, right-wing commentators have asserted that no crime was committed because Plame’s CIA identity was “common knowledge” to some of her friends and because her cover had already been breached.

For instance, an editorial in the right-wing Washington Times asserted that Plame’s identity “was compromised twice before her name appeared” in  Robert Novak’s column of July 14, 2003.

“Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy,” the Times said. “In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana. … Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.” (Washington Times editorial, July 19, 2005.)

Denouncing Agee

In the mid-1970s, a similar debate raged over CounterSpy, a magazine associated with renegade CIA officer Phil Agee, for listing Welch’s name before the CIA station chief was gunned down in Athens in 1975.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/072605.html

Rove-Plame Scandal Leading to Deeper
White House Horrors?

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
July 19, 2005

EXCERPT...

What's being covered up in the Plame/Rove case seems to revolve around the Bush Administration's orchestrated, and perhaps illegal, propaganda campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq. Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- who wrote the op-ed in the New York Times that got this whole thing going -- are just the tips of very large icebergs, and one of those icebergs has a name: the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which we'll examine below.

SNIP...

PERSONAL REASONS MILLER NOT TESTIFYING?

Why Judith Miller is not testifying apparently goes to the heart of Fitzgerald's case. There are reasonable grounds for wondering whether Miller might have been aiding, inadvertently or consciously, Rove and the rest of the WHIG to help move the country toward war with Iraq. For example, she may have been told by Administration officials about Plame and her CIA job, and helped spread that word to other journalists, who then contacted Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Cooper over the weekend revealed that it was Libby who was the second of the "two senior administration officials" who leaked Plame's identity.

The New York Times already has apologized for running several of Miller's pre-Iraq War stories that were based on faulty weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence; much of that concocted intel was provided by Ahmed Chalabi, the sleazy Iraqi exile leader who hitched his wagon to the Pentagon neo-cons to get his forces back into Iraq in the wake of a U.S. invasion. Those Miller stories helped provide the imprimatur of New York Times prestige that other media outlets then picked up on, helping create a nationwide zeitgeist of imminent threat from Iraq.

Indeed, Dick Cheney squared the circle by using Miller's stories as "evidence" that even the hallowed New York Times had determined that Iraq had, or soon would have, nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

"The day The Times story ran," wrote Amy and David Goodman in their invaluable book "The Exception to the Rulers...," Cheney "made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. 'There's a story in The New York Times this morning,' he said smugly. 'And I want to attribute The Times.' This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to The Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling expose, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of The Times."

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-w/horrors.htm

CONTINUED...

George W. Bush - Terrorist in the White House

The Ambassador Wilson Affair:
The End of Karl Rove – And George Bush?

By Al Martin

(Sep 2) This is the hottest and most explosive story behind the scenes in Washington in terms of how it could affect the Bush administration.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been turning up the heat in this situation. He revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.

The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush’s so-called White House advisor. Ambassador Wilson identified him as Karl Roverer, with the umlaut over the "o."

According to reliable sources, as well as our own Al Martin Raw.com investigation, Karl Rove is, in fact, the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the gauleiter of Mecklenburg, who was also a partner and senior engineer of Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurbüro AG. They built Birchenau, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

So Karl Rove has been identified as the leaker responsible for the deaths of more than 70 CIA assets overseas (See previous story "Will the Real Chemical Ali Please Stand Up? The Curious Case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson)

When Ambassador Wilson was asked how he knew it was Rove, he had documents in his possession identifying Rove as the leaker from a secret investigation of the State Department’s Internal Security Unit. It was a from a small clique, four Clinton holdovers in that department of the State Department that were sympathetic to what had happened to Wilson.

These investigations could not have possibly been made without at least the tacit acquiescence of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

CONTINUE...

http://www.nogw.com/documents/rovewilson.html

HOW CONSERVATISM LEAVES US VULNERABLE TO NUCLEAR TERRORISM.

Moral Hazard
by J. Peter Scoblic
Post date: 07.28.05
Issue date: 08.08.05

EXCERPT...

For conservatives, then, Iraq--an odious regime that was susceptible to change because of its military weakness--was the most logical target for action. Iran and North Korea, by contrast, while hardly paragons of liberalism, did not spark the same moral outrage in conservatives that, say, Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds did. Moreover, a case could be made that regime change in Iraq could spark regime change elsewhere in the Middle East--a case that could not be made for North Korea. And, finally, Iran and North Korea posed far more substantial military challenges. Iran, in the words of Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, has "three times the population, four times the landmass, and five times the problems" as Iraq. North Korea has a million-man army, and U.S. war games suggest that combat with the North could leave hundreds of thousands of Americans and South Koreans dead. Ridding the world of a monster via regime change thus became its own goal, irrespective of the threat to U.S. security. The danger--or lack thereof--from Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction was almost beside the point. As Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair in May 2003, the WMD argument that Bush made was one of convenience: "The truth is that, for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction."

Unfortunately, regime change was not only the administration's preferred end in Iraq, but its preferred means everywhere else, as well. If negotiating with evil regimes equals appeasement, then diplomacy to resolve rogue-state nuclear threats is out of the question. But, aside from military action, conservatism suggests few courses of action, and, with the bulk of our combat forces tied up in Iraq, forcible regime change was not an option in North Korea or Iran. So, not only did conservatism lead us to war against a nation that was not threatening us, it paralyzed us from dealing with those nations that were.

From his first days in office, Bush refused to engage North Korea. In March 2001, he announced that he would not continue talks begun by the Clinton administration with Pyongyang to end its missile program, saying he had "skepticism" about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. A senior American official told journalist James Mann that the administration didn't want to deal with North Korea because it wasn't a democracy. As Mann explains in his book Rise of the Vulcans, for the Bush administration, "o deal was better than one that didn't work or one that helped keep a brutal regime in power." That attitude was only reinforced once North Korea admitted its uranium-enrichment program. For three months, the Bush team simply refused to talk to Pyongyang. Indeed, as was recently reported by journalist Don Oberdorfer and former U.S. Ambassador Donald Gregg, it spurned a direct offer from Kim to Bush that read, "If the United States recognizes our sovereignty and assures non-aggression, it is our view that we should be able to find a way to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of a new century." When the United States did eventually sit down with North Korea, it would do so only if China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea also participated in six-party talks, so that it could not be seen as giving in to North Korea's request for bilateral negotiations. And, for more than a year, it refused to address any of North Korea's concerns, instead simply repeating over and over that Pyongyang needed to completely, verifiably, and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear program before the United States would engage. In fact, the administration routinely went out of its way to insult North Korea, for no discernable reason other than to prevent diplomatic progress. (It is not a stretch to think that one of the reasons the six-party talks resumed this week after a yearlong lull is that Bush started referring to North Korea's leader as "Mr. Kim," instead of "pygmy" or "tyrant.")

Which is not to say the Bush administration has no strategy--it's just not a very good one. Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney have suggested that economic pressure could force Kim's downfall--i.e., nonmilitary regime change. As a Bush official told The New York Times' Bill Keller in 2003, "If we could have containment that's tailored to the conditions of North Korea and not continue to throw it lifelines like we have in the past, I think it goes away." But regime change via containment is a long shot. The North Koreans have endured 50-plus years of U.S. sanctions, and even the fact that millions of North Koreans are starving or severely malnourished has done little to destabilize the government or weaken its negotiating position. As Nicholas Kristof of the Times recently reported from Pyongyang, "The central paradox of North Korea is this: No government in the world today is more brutal or has failed its people more abjectly, yet it appears to be in solid control and may even have substantial popular support." The Bush administration has been hoping the Chinese, on whom the North Koreans depend for food and energy, would be willing to cut off aid, but Beijing fears instability on the Korean Peninsula more than it fears a nuclearized North.

The administration's response to critics who question containment's efficacy is the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a loose federation of countries who cooperate to interdict illegal weapons transfers at sea. The problem, of course, is that PSI does nothing to prevent the North from producing fissile material in the first place (as it apparently continues to do), building nuclear weapons, and mounting them on ballistic missiles. Moreover, given that a weapon's worth of plutonium can weigh as little as nine pounds, and, given that neither China nor South Korea has agreed to participate in the program, PSI offers little reassurance that terrorists could not procure a North Korean nuke.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050808&s=scoblic080805

Top Aides Reportedly Set Sights on Wilson

Rove and Cheney chief of staff were intent on discrediting CIA agent's husband, prosecutors have been told.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Top aides to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were intensely focused on discrediting former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in the days after he wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times suggesting the administration manipulated intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq, federal investigators have been told.

Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: "He's a Democrat." Rove then cited Wilson's campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.

The disclosures about the officials' roles illustrate White House concern about Wilson's July 6, 2003, article, which challenged the administration's assertion that Iraq had sought to purchase nuclear materials. Wilson's article appeared as Rove and other Bush aides were preparing the 2004 reelection campaign strategy, which was built largely around the president's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

CONTINUED...

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-leak18jul18,1,7362085.story

Rove-Bush Conspiracy Noose Tightens

By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com
July 19, 2005

EXCERPT...

But two new facts contradict that assertion and show that Rove was coordinating his leaks about Plame with officials in Bush’s National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

The first new piece of evidence is a little-noticed part of Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper's testimony last week before a federal grand jury in Washington.

Some news articles have noted Cooper’s statement that Rove brought up Wilson’s wife during an interview on July 11, 2003, and that Rove volunteered that she worked for “the agency” on WMD issues. Cooper said Rove cited these facts in claiming that Plame was responsible for Wilson’s trip to Africa in February 2002 to investigate whether Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger.

What’s been overlooked, however, is another part of Cooper’s account. Cooper said his notes reveal that Rove then added that “material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson’s mission and his findings.” In ending the conversation, Rove said, “I’ve already said too much,” according to Cooper.

Rove’s assertion that he knew about plans to declassify material on Wilson indicates that Rove was not just a loose-lipped talker repeating stuff he’d heard from reporters, but he was a participant in internal White House discussions about how to counteract Wilson’s criticisms by releasing then-secret information.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071805.html

CIA Leak Investigation Turns to Possible Perjury, Obstruction

By Douglas Frantz, Sonni Efron and Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The special prosecutor in the CIA leak investigation has shifted his focus from determining whether White House officials violated a law against exposing undercover agents to determining whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges, according to people briefed in recent days on the inquiry's status.

Differences have arisen in witnesses' statements to federal agents and a grand jury about how the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, was leaked to the press two years ago.

According to lawyers familiar with the case, investigators are comparing statements by two top White House aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, with testimony from reporters who have acknowledged talking to the officials.

SNIP...

The investigation focused initially on whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a campaign to discredit Wilson after he wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times criticizing the Bush administration's grounds for going to war in Iraq.

The sources said prosecutors were comparing the various statements to the FBI and the grand jury by Rove, who is a White House deputy chief of staff and President Bush's chief political strategist. In Rove's first interview with the FBI, he did not mention a telephone conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, according to lawyers involved in the case. Cooper has since said that he called Rove specifically to discuss the matter.

CONTINUED...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-leak23jul23,0,3075904.story?coll=la-home-headlines

On the Nuclear Edge

by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 1993-03-29
Posted 2004-01-12

In the past few weeks, news reports have revealed troubling information about the possible export of Pakistani nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Libya, and about the role played in the transfers by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. There have long been questions about Dr. Khan, who has, whenever possible, avoided the public eye. In this piece from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh takes a prescient look at Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, and at Dr. Khan.

On May 30, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union arrived in Washington for his second summit meeting with President George Bush. The Cold War was over, and the publicly announced agenda reflected that fact: the two world leaders would concentrate their talks on the future of unified Germany and on renewed negotiations to reduce long-range nuclear weapons. Most Americans were increasingly upbeat about the prospects for world peace. A Times/CBS public-opinion poll of more than eleven hundred Americans taken a week before the summit showed that fewer than one in five believed nuclear war to be likely by the year 2000—far fewer than those interviewed in earlier polls.

There was a fearful irony in the poll, because in the days before Gorbachev’s visit the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, as both nations continued their tug-of-war over control of the state of Kashmir, on India’s northern border, whose status has been in dispute since the collapse of the British Empire in India, in 1947. During months of increasing tension, India had massed two hundred thousand troops, including paramilitary forces, in Kashmir, and had deployed five brigades of its most sophisticated attack unit, the Indian Army Strike Corps, fifty miles from the Pakistani border in the south. Pakistan, against which the much larger India had fought—and won—three wars since 1947, openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert. There would be no repeat of the disastrous two-week war of December, 1971, when Pakistan, outgunned and outgeneraled, was dismembered by an Indian blitzkrieg and lost what is now Bangladesh.

The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of—or had chosen to remove herself from—the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.

Since the last week of May was summit week, President Bush and his top aides were preoccupied with Gorbachev and crucial questions about his status inside the Soviet Union. A full understanding of what could happen in South Asia during those days was thus most vivid to the men and women running American intelligence, who knew that Pakistan had long been America’s ally in the clandestine war against the Soviet Union. As early as 1950, the Pakistani government had effectively ceded remote areas of its northern provinces to the Central Intelligence Agency and to the National Security Agency—the larger and still more secretive group that, from its headquarters, at Fort Meade, in Maryland, is responsible for communications intelligence. It was from northern Pakistan that the N.S.A. eavesdropped on the Soviet nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan; it was Pakistan that provided secret bases for America’s U-2 spy flights; and it was Pakistan that served as a key jumping-off point for intelligence gathering and anti-Soviet activities by the C.I.A.

Pakistan was rewarded for its support with large amounts of American military and economic aid. The American intelligence community, to protect its investment and its continuing operations, spent many millions of dollars to recruit agents and to install technical equipment to learn as much as possible about the inner workings of its ally. Those agents and that equipment enabled America to ascertain, in the early spring of 1990, that Pakistan had gone nuclear, and that its leadership was fully prepared to use the weapons, if necessary, in a war against India.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/archive/040119fr_archive02

The Curse of Dick Cheney

The veep's career has been marred by one disaster after another

By T.D. ALLMAN

Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick Cheney to a post in his administration. The Cheney jinx first manifested itself at the presidential level back in 1969, when Richard Nixon appointed him to his first job in the executive branch. It surfaced again in 1975, when Gerald Ford made Cheney his chief of staff and then -- with Cheney's help -- lost the 1976 election. George H.W. Bush, having named Cheney secretary of defense, was defeated for re-election in 1992. The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office.

This pattern of misplaced confidence in Cheney, followed by disastrous results, runs throughout his life -- from his days as a dropout at Yale to the geopolitical chaos he has helped create in Baghdad. Once you get to know his history, the cycle becomes clear: First, Cheney impresses someone rich or powerful, who causes unearned wealth and power to be conferred on him. Then, when things go wrong, he blames others and moves on to a new situation even more advantageous to himself.

"Cheney's manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities," says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush's father as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision -- but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass."

Cheney's record of mistakes begins in 1959, when Tom Stroock, a Republican politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. "Dick was the all-American boy, in the top ten percent of his class," Stroock says. "He seemed a natural." But instead of triumphing, Cheney failed. "He spent his time partying with guys who loved football but weren't varsity quality," recalls Stephen Billings, an Episcopalian minister who roomed with him during Cheney's freshman (and only full) year at Yale. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material," says his other roommate, Jacob Plotkin. "He passed one psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that. But there are some things you can't bluff, and Dick reached a point where you couldn't recover."

Cheney might have been flunking in the classroom, but he excelled at making connections. "Dick always had this very calm way of talking," recalls Plotkin, now a retired math professor at Michigan State University. "His thoughtful manner impressed people." Forty years before the son of a U.S. president picked Cheney to be his running mate, the son of a Massachusetts governor picked him to be his sophomore-year roommate. Mark Furcolo, whose father, Foster, had been elected governor as a Democrat, invited Cheney to Cape Cod for a visit. "Dick came back enraptured," Plotkin says. "He was fascinated by the official state cars and planes. The trappings of it got him."

CONTINUED...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/rnd/1094003520950/pageid/rs.Home/has-player/true/pageregion/single7/id/6450422?rnd=1122611235865&has-player=true

Rove’s Leak Points to Bush Conspiracy

By Robert Parry

A key national security principle for dealing with top-secret information, such as the identity of undercover CIA officers, is strict compartmentalization, often called “the need to know” - which raises the question why George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove would know anything about the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The answer to that mystery - why was Rove involved - may be more crucial to unraveling who was behind the illegal leaking of Plame’s name and the subsequent cover-up than even the identity of which Bush officials passed the information to right-wing pundit Robert Novak for his infamous column on July 14, 2003.

But rather than focusing on how and why Rove knew about Plame, the latest controversy around the case has centered on whether Rove explicitly used her name in an interview with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper three days before Novak’s column.

Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin told the Washington Post that his client didn’t identify Plame by name, only mentioning her in giving Cooper guidance about who was responsible for authorizing a fact-finding trip by Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in February 2002. (Washington Post, July 11, 2005)

According to an internal Time e-mail (obtained by Newsweek), Cooper informed his editor that Rove offered a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson” and that “KR said” the Niger trip was authorized by “wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency (CIA) on wmd issues.” (Newsweek, July 18, 2005, issue)

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/071105.html

The Source Beyond Rove- Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal

by Roger Morris
July 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
 
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration’s immediate retaliatory “outing” of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President’s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak—altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely—or deliberately ignored—in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

]b]"God's never failed me yet"

One summer weekend in 1998 at the family estate at Kennebunkport, Me., former president George H. W. Bush introduced his ambitious son George W. to a 43-year-old political science professor, Condoleezza Rice. One of the rare African-American women in the field of Soviet studies, she was rarer still for her archly conservative views. She had interrupted a teaching career at Stanford to work from 1989 until 1991 on the elder Bush's National Security Council staff as a specialist on Russian and East European affairs, and remained a vocal Bush loyalist. George W. Bush was planning on running for the White House and was woefully uninformed about world politics. At Kennebunkport, the politician and academic hit it off right away, and Rice was entrusted with a vital task: "to instruct and protect G.W. at his most vulnerable," as a friend put it. How the woman who became his National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State has fulfilled that trust has had fateful consequences for the United States, other nations, and not least for George W. Bush.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0728-25.htm

QUESTIONABLE TIES

Tracking bin Laden's money flow leads back to Midland, Texas

by Wayne Madsen

On September 24, President George W. Bush appeared at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden to announce a crackdown on the financial networks of terrorists and those who support them. “U.S. banks that have assets of these groups or individuals must freeze their accounts,” Bush declared. “And U.S. citizens or businesses are prohibited from doing business with them.”

But the president, who is now enjoying an astounding 92 percent approval rating, hasn’t always practiced what he is now preaching: Bush’s own businesses were once tied to financial figures in Saudi Arabia who currently support bin Laden.

In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from James Bath, a Houstonian and close family friend. One of many investors, Bath gave Bush $50,000 for a 5 percent stake in Arbusto. At the time, Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden. It has long been suspected, but never proven, that the Arbusto money came directly from Salem bin Laden. In a statement issued shortly after the September 11 attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Laden’s, in Arbusto.

In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests. In fact, Bath has extensive ties, both to the bin Laden family and major players in the scandal-ridden Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) who have gone on to fund Osama bin Laden. BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the ’80s in what has been called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. During the ’80s, BCCI also acted as a main conduit for laundering money intended for clandestine CIA activities, ranging from financial support to the Afghan mujahedin to paying intermediaries in the Iran-Contra affair.

When Salem bin Laden died in 1988, powerful Saudi Arabian banker and BCCI principal Khalid bin Mahfouz inherited his interests in Houston. Bath ran a business for bin Mahfouz in Houston and joined a partnership with bin Mahfouz and Gaith Pharaon, BCCI’s frontman in Houston’s Main Bank.

CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/25/feature3.shtml

Plame leak damaged a major CIA investigation linking senior Bush administration officials to WMD proliferation.

U.S. intelligence insiders have pointed out that the White House is using "Rovegate" and "Who in the White House said what to whom?" as a smoke screen to divert attention away from the actual counter-proliferation work Mrs. Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates team were engaged in. The arrival of Timothy Flanigan as Patrick J. Fitzgerald's boss is likely related to the mountains of evidence Fitzgerald has now collected to indict senior White House officials, particularly, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for criminal conspiracy in exposing a sensitive U.S. intelligence operation that was targeting some of their closest political and business associates. Libby, it will be recalled, was the attorney for fugitive global smuggler and multi-bilionaire Marc Rich, someone who has close ties to the Sharon government and Israeli intelligence. It is no coincidence that FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds uncovered nuclear material and narcotics trafficking involving Turkish intermediaries with ties to Israel at the same time Brewster Jennings and the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division was hot on the trail of nuclear proliferators tied to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and the A. Q. Khan network of Pakistan.

An arrest in early 2004 points to the links between Israeli agents and Islamist groups bent on producing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. According to intelligence sources, this was a network that was a major focus of Edmonds' and Valerie Plame Wilson's work. In January 2004, FBI and U.S. Customs agents arrested Asher Karni, a Hungarian-born Orthodox Jew, Israeli citizen, and resident of Cape Town, South Africa, at Denver International Airport for illegally exporting 200 electrically triggered spark gaps -- devices that send synchronized electrical pulses and are used in nuclear weapons -- to Pakistan via a New Jersey export company named Giza Technologies of Secaucus (owned by Zeki Bilmen -- whom the FBI has identified as a Turkish Jew who was already under surveillance by the CIA team). The cargo manifest listed the equipment as electronics gear for the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa. However, the initial shipment of 66 triggers did not go to the hospital but to Karni’s Top-Cape Technology of Cape Town, South Africa. Top Cape, in turn, sent the triggers to AJKMC Lithography Aid Society in Islamabad, Pakistan through Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Top-Cape "officially" traded in military and aviation electronics equipment. It was during the summer of 2003, when Valerie Plame and her team -- at a critical stage of their investigation of the A. Q. Khan network -- were outed by White House officials Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and at least one other individual (possibly Elliot Abrams), that Karni received an e-mail from his long time Pakistani associate Humayun Khan (no relation to A. Q. Khan) asking for 200 triggers to be sent to his Islamabad-based company, Pakland PME.

After initially attempting to purchase the devices from a sale agent in France -- an attempt that proved unsuccessful when the French agent demanded a U.S. export license for the triggers because the end destination was Pakistan -- Karni managed to obtain the triggers from Perkin-Elmer's manufacturing plant in Massachusetts through Giza Technologies. Karni's e-mail traffic to and from Khan was being intercepted by a covert agent in South Africa and being forwarded to U.S. authorities. It is not known whether the covert agent was a Brewster Jennings' asset but it would not be surprising considering Karni was an important link in the A. Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network. By the time the initital shipment of 66 triggers were sent to Karni's Cape Town office, U.S. and South African intelligence were already closely monitoring the transaction and the key players involved. It is also noteworthy that Karni previously worked for a Cape Town electronic import firm called Eagle Technology but was fired after it was discovered by his boss that he was making secret deals to ship nuclear components to Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly, North Korea. Karni had been in South Africa for 20 years after arriving from Israel. His time in South Africa coincided with the apartheid government's rapid development of its own (since disestablished) nuclear weapons program and very close military ties between South Africa and Israel.

As for Humayun Khan, the Los Angeles Times discovered that the Pakistani "businessman" had been involved in nuclear weapons smuggling since 1975 when he was engaged in business with a former Nazi named Alfred Hempel, who was the kingpin in a global nuclear smuggling network active throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Hempel died in 1989. In an interview aired by PBS's Frontline on July 26, Humayun Khan said he never realized Karni was Jewish, stating that the Israeli masqueraded as a Muslim. However, what is clear is that an Israeli-based network, involving key neo-conservatives in the Bush adminstration, were attempting to speed up the clock on the delivery by the A. Q. Khan network of prohibited nuclear material to countries like Iran, thereby justifying a pre-emptive U.S. (and Israeli-supported) attack on Iranian nuclear installations. It was this network that attracted the attention of the CIA and when it realized some of the "men behind the curtain" were in the Pentagon, they had their smoking gun evidence of double dealing by Bush administration officials and their compatriots in the Sharon government.

SNIP...

According to FBI insiders, wiretaps of phone calls in the Giza-Bilmen-Karni smuggling ring yielded the name Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Plans and Policy and one of Donald Rumsfeld’s chief advisers, and Turkish MIT intelligence members of the Turkish American Council. A Malaysian link was also discovered in Karni’s network.

CONTINUED...

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Revealed: How to make a N-Bomb

The man wearing sack cloth and ashes to apologise before Pakistanis, Dr AQ Khan, is no "father figure." Wilson John unravels his role in a deadly blackmarket which thrived with official backing in Islamabad and more than a wink from Washington DC.

LET'S GO BACKWARDS

The least reported link in the otherwise raging controversy over Pakistan's nuclear proliferation happened on January 1, 2004, at the Denver International Airport, Colorado, USA. Asher Karni, 50, a Jewish businessman from South Africa, was snared in a sting operation launched by the US Commerce Department and other federal agencies. The allegation against him was that he was involved in selling 400 spark gaps to a firm in Pakistan run by an arms dealer. Spark gaps are electrical devices used in breaking kidney stones and in triggering nuclear detonations.

What had put the federal agencies on the trail of Karni was the elaborate subterfuge employed by him and the customer in camouflaging the deal. Karni owns Top-Cape Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, a firm dealing in military and aviation electronic equipment. Last year, he was contacted by Pakland PME (2nd Floor, Muhammadi Plaza, Jinnah Avenue, F-6/4, Blue Area, Islamabad) for buying spark gaps from Perkin Elmer Optoelectronics, Salem, Massachusetts. A sales brochure of Perkin Elmer describes spark gaps as useful "for in-flight functions such as rocket ignition, warhead detonation and missile stage separation." But Perkin Elmer told Karni that the sale would require a US license. Karni decided to adopt a more devious method. He subcontracted the deal. He asked Giza Technologies of Secaucus (600 Meadowlands Parkway, Suite 19 Secaucus, NJ 07094, US A) to buy 200 spark gaps from Perkin Elmer. He said the spark gaps were meant for a hospital in South Africa, the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. The spark gaps were received by Karni at South Africa who repackaged them and dispatched them to Pakland PME, Islamabad.

The deal wouldn't have attracted the attention of the intelligence agencies but for the antecedents of the owner of Pakland PME. It is owned by businessman Humayun Khan, known to be a regular supplier of military hardware to Pakistan military. Some of the emails intercepted by the agencies only confirm his linkages with the military establishment in Pakistan. These mails, produced in the US District Court, Columbia, where Karni's bail was decided early January, showed Khan discussing the possibility of buy infra-red sensors for jet fighters. The court affidavit said: "This case represents one of the most serious types of export violations imaginable. Karni has exported goods that are capable of detonating nuclear weapons to a person he knows has ties to the Pakistani military."

THE WORST KEPT SECRET

Karni is the latest link in the wide and expanding network of the nuclear blackmarket which has been exploited by Pakistan over the years to develop its nuclear weapons development programme which, incidentally, has not really been as secretive as is being made out by the western media. It was the Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace Programme in 1958 which gave Pakistan the impetus to embark on a nuclear development programme. The first light water research nuclear reactor was, in fact, set up with the help of the US. Pakistan was given a grant of $ 350,000 for the reactor. Though not much is known about the progress Pakistan made in the development of its nuclear programme, there is clear evidence that Pakistan had already begun tapping the nuclear blackmarket. This became evident in a secret note prepared by the US State Department a decade later. The note (since declassified) titled Pakistan and the Non Proliferation Issue pointed out that Pakistan was negotiating with the Belgians for a heavy water facility, with the Canadians for a fuel fabrication plant and with the French for a chemical separation plant. The note cautioned that these facilities would "give Pakistan a virtually independent nuclear fuel cycle and the opportunity to separate a sufficient amount of plutonium to build a nuclear weapon."

There is irrefutable evidence that Pakistan either tapped the nuclear blackmarket or persuaded governments to make illegal deals. Pakistan set up a number of shell companies, both at home and abroad, employed a network of agents and smugglers in Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada and the United States to smuggle, steal and trans-ship dual purpose materials. Pakistan got a Canadian firm, Canadian General Electric Company, to complete the 137 MW CANDU power reactor for the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant in 1971. A British firm, British Nuclear Fuels, designed the plutonium separating facilities; a Belgian firm, Belgonucleaire, and a French corporation, Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles, designed the pilot reprocessing facility called "New Labs" at PINSTECH. In 1976, under a highly secretive project code named 706, Pakistan bought components for centrifuges from the Netherlands; orders for 6,500 tubes of specially hardened steel were placed with Van Doome Transmissie. Other support components and subsystems were bought from Vakuum Apparat Technik (high vacuum valves) of Haag, Switzerland and Leybold Heraeus (gas purification equipment), Hanan, Germany. A year later, the British subsidiary of Emerson Electric sold 30 high frequency inverters to Pakistan for controlling centrifuge speeds.

CONTINUED...

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=john%2Fjohn30.txt&writer=john

FBI's Shifting Versions on Missed 9/11 Warnings

by Thomas Oliphant
 
EXCERPT...

That is a generic reason for remaining skeptical about FBI director Robert Mueller's tardy and modified mea culpa on the bureau's and his pre- and post-Sept. 11 behavior.

A more direct reason may be found in Colleen Rowley's remarkable letter of May 21, in which the Minneapolis field office's legal counsel notes with dry wit that this is the director's third public position on the FBI's relationship to the tragedy, not exactly a credibility booster.

The first line, she notes, emerged almost immediately after the attacks. The assertion was made that if only the FBI had some form of warning, it might have been able to take preventive action.

Rowley discloses in her letter that she and her colleagues at once began trying to reach his office in case he was unaware of the arrest and mishandling of the possible 20th hijacker, Zaccarias Moussaoui, in the weeks before the tragedy. When the public line kept getting repeated, she wrote, her office came to the ''sad realization that the remarks indicated someone, possibly with your approval, had decided to circle the wagons ... in an apparent effort to protect the FBI from embarrassment and the relevant FBI officials from scrutiny. Everything I have seen and heard about the FBI's official stance and the FBI's internal preparations in anticipation of further congressional inquiry had unfortunately confirmed my worst suspicions in this regard.''

As details about the bungling of the Moussaoui matter began to emerge, as well as the earlier report about ''Middle Eastern men'' at flight school around Phoenix, the story line changed. This spring, Mueller began claiming that even if the Phoenix tip had been acted on, and even if the French-Algerian terrorist's belongings and laptop hard drive had been searched, the attacks would almost certainly still have occurred on Sept. 11.

Rowley expressed surprise that the press never noticed the inherent contradiction between statement one and statement two, but of course this distinction has now been superseded by a fresh Mueller statement that the proper handling of the Minneapolis office's diligent work might indeed have lead to a breakthrough.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0602-04.htm

Another part of the save-Rove cover story is not holding

David Corn
Thu Jul 28,10:40 AM ET
The Nation

Once the Plame/CIA leak became big (mainstream-media) news in September 2003--when word hit that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak, which had appeared in a Bob Novak column two months earlier--friends of the White House, including Novak, started saying that Valerie Wilson wasn't really under cover at the CIA and, thus, the disclosure of her employment at the CIA wasn't worth a federal case (or investigation). They claimed that no big wrong had occurred, and this argument also conveniently offered any leaker a legal defense. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a government official can only be prosecuted for disclosing information identifying a "covert agent" whose cover the United States government was taking steps to protect. White House allies asserted that while Valerie Wilson may have technically been a clandestine CIA official, in practice she wasn't. So all this bother over the leak was much ado about nothing.

Novak, for example, downplayed Valerie Wilson's covert status in an October 1, 2003 column, in which he vaguely described how he had originally learned of her connection to the CIA. He noted that after a senior administration official told him that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, he called the CIA:

At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.

Bush-backers have cited this paragraph to argue that the CIA didn't do much to protect Valerie Wilson's cover. I've heard GOP lawyer Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the Intelligence Identities Act, claim that Novak's exchange with the CIA is proof that the CIA was not taking serious measures to preserve Wilson's cover--which means the law she helped concoct does not apply in the case of this leak.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=8813

Nuclear Blackmarket and Pakistan

Wilson John

The least reported link in the otherwise raging controversy over Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation happened on January 1, 2004, at the Denver International Airport. Asher Karni, 50, a Jewish businessman from South Africa, was snared in a sting operation launched by the US Commerce Department and other federal agencies. The allegation against him was that he was involved in selling 400 spark gaps to a firm in Pakistan run by an arms dealer. Spark gaps are electrical devices used in breaking kidney stones and in triggering nuclear detonations.

What had put the federal agencies on the trail of Karni was the elaborate subterfuge employed by him and the customer in camouflaging the deal. Karni owns Top-Cape Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, a firm dealing in military and aviation electronic equipment. Last year, he was contacted by Pakland PME (2nd Floor, Muhammadi Plaza, Jinnah Avenue, F-6/4, Blue Area, Islamabad) for buying spark gaps from PerkinElmer Optoelectronics, Salem, Massachusetts. A sales brochure of PerkinElmer describes spark gaps as useful ``for in-flight functions such as rocket ignition, warhead detonation and missile stage separation’’. But PerkinElmer told Karni that the sale would require a US licence. Karni decided to adopt a more devious method. He subcontracted the deal. He asked Giza Technologies of Secaucus (600 Meadowlands Parkway, Suite 19 Secaucus, NJ 07094, US A) to buy 200 spark gaps from PerkinElmer. He said the spark gaps were meant for a hospital in South Africa, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto. The spark gaps were received by Karni at South Africa who repackaged them and dispatched them to Pakland PME, Islamabad.

The deal wouldn’t have attracted the attention of the intelligence agencies but for the antecedents of the owner of Pakland PME. It is owned by businessman Humayun Khan, known to be a regular supplier of military hardware to Pakistan military. Some of the emails intercepted by the agencies only confirm his linkages with the military establishment in Pakistan. These mails, produced in the US District Court, Columbia, where Karni’s bail was decided early January, showed Khan discussing the possibility of buy infra-red sensors for jet fighters. The court affidavit said: ``This case represents one of the most serious types of export violations imaginable. Karni has exported goods that are capable of detonating nuclear weapons to a person he knows has ties to the Pakistani military.’’

Karni is the latest link in the wide and expanding network of nuclear blackmarket which has been exploited by Pakistan over the years to develop its nuclear weapons development programme which, incidentally, has not really been as secretive as is being made out by the western media. It was the Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace Programme in 1958 which gave Pakistan the impetus to embark on a nuclear development programme. The first light water research nuclear reactor was, in fact, set up with the help of the US. Pakistan was given a grant of $3,50,000 for the reactor. Though not much is known about the progress Pakistan made in the development of its nuclear programme, there is clear evidence that Pakistan had already begun tapping the nuclear blackmarket. This became evident in a secret note prepared by the US State Department a decade later. The note (since declassified) titled Pakistan and the Non Proliferation Issue pointed out that Pakistan was negotiating with Belgians for a heavy water facility, with the Canadians for a fuel fabrication plant and with the French for a chemical separation plant. The note cautioned that these facilities would ``give Pakistan a virtually independent nuclear fuel cycle and the opportunity to separate a sufficient amount of plutonium to build a nuclear weapon.’’

There is irrefutable evidence that Pakistan either tapped the nuclear blackmarket or persuaded governments to make illegal deals Pakistan set up a number of shell companies, both within Pakistan and abroad, employed a network of agents and smugglers in Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada and the United States to smuggle, steal and trans-ship dual purpose materials. Pakistan got a Canadian firm, Canadian General Electric Co., to complete the 137 MW CANDU power reactor for the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant in 1971. A British firm, British Nuclear Fuels, designed the plutonium separating facilities; a Belgian firm, Belgonucleaire and a French corporation, Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles, designed the pilot reprocessing facility called the New Labs at PINSTECH. In 1976, under a highly secretive project codenamed 706, Pakistan bought components for centrifuges from the Netherlands; orders for 6500 tubes of specially hardened steel were placed with Van Doome Transmissie. Other support components and subsystems were bought from Vakuum Apparat Technik (high vacuum valves) of Haag, Switzerland and Leybold Heraeus ( gas purification equipment), Hanan, Germany. A year later, the British subsidiary of Emerson Electric sold 30 high frequency inverters to Pakistan for controlling centrifuge speeds.

CONTINUED...

http://www.observerindia.com/analysis/A109.htm

The Bomb and Karl Rove

by Jonathan Schell
Published on Thursday, July 28,2005 by TomDispatch
This article will appear in the upcoming issue of The Nation

Like every important government crisis, the outing of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame by the President's chief political adviser, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others, must be seen in many contexts at once. (As all the world knows, Rove's aim was to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly disproved the administration's claim that Iraq was buying uranium yellow-cake from Niger -- a key element in the Administration's justifications for the Iraq War.) Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Sidney Blumenthal of Salon point to the broader story of Rove's habitual practice of defending his political clients by smearing their competitors and detractors. Blumenthal titles his piece "Rove's War" and Fineman speaks of "The World According to Rove." Frank Rich of the New York Times, on the other hand, suggests that the most important war to look at is the one in Iraq. He says that the injustice to the Wilsons and even to the CIA is secondary: "The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds." In other words, what's important is not the "war" but the war.

Surely, they are all right. It's true that the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict, but it's also true that the resolution of the scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on American politics, and even on the American system of government. Perhaps the most important political question is whether the Bush administration is to be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete impunity and a free field of action to do whatever it likes -- from waging war to designing and presiding over systems of torture to breaking domestic law. There are other contexts to consider, too.

If Rich is right that the scandal is really about the Iraq War, then we have to ask what the war was about. The administration's chief answer is weapons of mass destruction and, more particularly, nuclear weapons. The atomic signature is scrawled all over the scandal. It is present, of course, in the uranium the President falsely said Iraq was seeking from Niger. And Plame, as it turns out, worked for the CIA on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To defend its nuclear lies, the administration destroyed a (possible) source of nuclear truth. The smear campaign thus did double damage in the nuclear-weapon field: It propped up, however briefly, the erroneous justification for the war while shutting down authentic information on the broader problem. The nuclear issue popped up again in a State Department memo Colin Powell brought with him on Air Force One shortly after Wilson's op-ed piece appeared. It is now famous because it disclosed Plame's identity as Wilson's wife. Less noticed is that the bulk of the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger uranium allegation. This must be one of the most rebutted claims in history. Before Wilson ever spoke up, it had been disproved by several government agencies; the director of the Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei; and, of course, the State Department. (As for Powell, in February 2003 he had told the UN Security Council, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.")

Whatever else the scandal is, it is also an episode in the six-decade history of the nuclear age. In the wake of the cold war, many people imagined that nuclear danger had disappeared. A decade of utter neglect followed. Then, in 1998, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests launched the two countries on a nuclear arms race. Soon other countries, including North Korea and Iran, were knocking at the door of the nuclear club. But it wasn't until 9/11 that the neglected peril reared up again in the public mind -- and returned to the center of policy. The fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an American city was, of course, the chief justification for the war, but it was more than that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of preventive military strikes -- necessary, the President said, to forestall the hostile states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his words, "as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."

At the root of the policy was a radical reconception of the way to stop proliferation. Hitherto, the policy had been to address it by negotiation and disarmament treaties. Now it was to be addressed by military force. The decade of neglect had led to the most severe collision of nuclear policy with nuclear reality since the Cuban missile crisis. The Iraq War was the result, though not the only one. While the U.S. military was looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing forward down the nuclear path. It's worth recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part the product of misguided nuclear strategy. Policy-makers, well aware that they could not win a nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the Central European theater, hoped instead to win a "limited war" with conventional arms on the "periphery." When it went wrong, the consequence was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0728-24.htm

KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS

Bellaciao
Friday 29th July 2005 (05h28) :

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO

Karl Rove’s only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen, a rabid anti-Arab, pro-Israel activist. The FBI is investigating Ledeen for procuring forged documents (shown here) on nonexistent WMD, which George Bush used to justify his war on Iraq. When Joseph Wilson exposed the farce, Rove helped "out" Wilson’s CIA wife. Did Ledeen procure the documents for Rove, and how might he have done that? The story includes multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino, Italian spy Francesco Pazienza, wanted CIA spy Robert Seldon Lady, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who’s under charges of giving US secrets to Israel.

Karl Rove’s foreign-policy advisor, Michael Ledeen, proclaimed "the rightness of the fascist cause" in 1972. In 1984 he got George Bush Sr to appoint Iranian arms merchant and Iranian/Israeli double-agent Manucher Ghorbanifar as a middleman in the scandalous Iran-Contra affair. Ledeen has been a fixture in Washington and Israel ever since, advocating a modern version of the Crusades against Islamic nations. Based on what he has said and written, I believe Ledeen is insane.

Michael Ledeen, Rove’s "brain," is one of the leading advocates for a US attack on Iran. The Washington Post quoted Ledeen as saying that Rove told him, "Anytime you have a good idea, tell me." I guess that means we can look forward to the Bush team drumming up a war with Iran.

George Bush Jr., when he assumed the presidency in 2000, already knew that he was going to settle the family score with Saddam Hussein. His "brain," Rove, quickly enlisted Ledeen to trump up a causus belli.

EARLY 2000: ROCCO MARTINO AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Rocco Martino is a 66-year-old Italian gentleman SEE PHOTO who worked on and off for the Italian SISMI (analogous to the CIA) for many years and who also peddled the same information to various spy organizations and publications -- a convicted felon and international stool pigeon, just the kind of person Ledeen’s associates needed.

CONTINUED...

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7256

CIA Analyst Roasts Bush

By Nicholas F. Benton

Ray McGovern, a 27-year analyst for the CIA speaking in Falls Church, Virginia, to a gathering of the Virginia Votes group Sunday, unleashed a scathing indictment of the Bush’s administration’s handling of an array of intelligence, military and human rights matters in the context of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. He said the people that are currently running U.S. foreign and military policy were affectionately known as “The Crazies” during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, and were “kept at arm’s length,” never permitted to rise above middle management levels of influence because of their radical proclivities. However, with the election of the current Bush, they took over all the top positions.

McGovern and his colleagues in the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity held a press conference in D.C. last Friday to brief the media on the implications for the lives and safety of U.S. anti-terror intelligence assets worldwide of Bush advisor Karl Rove’s blowing the cover of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Rove’s action was done in order to “get even” with Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing the administration’s lie about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities prior to the invasion. “We wanted to tell the media how many people might get killed,” he said. It was in the context of that briefing that former CIA analyst Larry Johnson was invited to give the Democratic response to the president’s weekly radio address Saturday.

In Falls Church Sunday, McGovern said his group is nearing the conclusion of an independent investigation of the source of what is widely held to be a forged document attributed to the government of Niger in 2001. The document indicated there was a deal to deliver yellow cake uranium to Iraq. He said indications already point to the fact that the forgery was produced in the U.S., perhaps from among circles of former U.S. government officials that were involved in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s. He said some damning evidence and conclusions could be made public within a few months. “It was an inside job,” he charged, arising in the aftermath of the sudden assertion on August 26, 2002 by Vice President Cheney that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons along with its other phantom so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” That speech was the first “call to arms” that led to the invasion of Iraq the following March.

Then CIA Director George Tenet told his analysts, McGovern said, that the White House did not want any intelligence estimate of Iraq, but when Congressional pressure arose, he told them to do an estimate that agreed with Cheney’s claims. “Thus, we got the worst intelligence estimate in U.S. history. It was demonstrably false, matched only by the CIA assessment in 1962 that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. But that was an honest mistake,” McGovern said. “This one was dishonest from the get-go.”

SNIP...

“We have a war criminal as president,” McGovern exclaimed, noting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had advised him it was OK to violate the Geneva Convention and the War Crimes Act by permitting the systematic torture of detainees.

CONTINUED...

http://www.fcnp.com/521/benton.htm

Politicians support reappointment of Attorney Fitzgerald

BY JOHN CHASE
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald said Wednesday he believes there is mounting political pressure to oppose the reappointment of U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald this fall, given his aggressive prosecution of government corruption in Illinois.

The former senator questioned whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the state's top Republican, would support the prosecutor when President Bush decides whether to extend his term in Chicago.

But Hastert, who often battled with Sen. Fitzgerald while the two Republicans served together in Congress, quickly shot down the ex-senator's claims. Hastert's office said the decision rests entirely with President Bush and Hastert has no role whatsoever in whether the prosecutor keeps his job.

Fitzgerald was the state's Republican U.S. senator in 2001 when he went outside Illinois' political and legal circles to recommend Patrick Fitzgerald, who was then a federal prosecutor in New York. Peter Fitzgerald contends that the subsequent indictment of former GOP Gov. George Ryan and the federal investigation of Mayor Richard Daley's City Hall have angered powerful politicians in both parties. The Fitzgeralds are not related.

SNIP...

"But I'm beginning to sense that a lot of people, a lot of criminals, may hope that October brings them a new U.S. attorney in Chicago, one perhaps a little bit more malleable and acceptable to influence from leading Republicans and leading Democrats."

CONTINUED...

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/special_packages/election2004/12239742.htm

Know your BFEE: Nixon Threatened to Nuke Vietnam

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3953519


Know your BFEE: Corrupt Craftsmen Hoover and Dulles

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3908104


Know your BFEE: Poppy’s CIA Made Saddam Into the Butcher of Baghdad

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3853409


Know your BFEE: Hitler’s Bankers Shaped Vietnam War

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3832033&mesg_id=3832033&page=


Know your BFEE: Merchants of Death

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3743890


Know your BFEE: R. James Woolsey, Turd of War

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3699042


Know your BFEE: Sneering Dick Cheney, Superturd-Superrich-Supercrook

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3627538


Know your BFEE: Bush Lied America into War

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3601654


Know your BFEE: James R Bath – Bush – bin Laden Link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3571293&mesg_id=3571293&page=


Know your BFEE: War Profiteers

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3493251


Know your BFEE: Dead Men Tell No Tales

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3389867


Know your BFEE: Rev. Sun Myung Moon OWNS Poppy Bush

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3355939


Know your BFEE: Homeland Czar & Petro-Turd Bernie Kerik

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2788428


Know your BFEE: American Children Used in Radiation Experiments

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3312956


Know your BFEE: Eugenics and the NAZIs - The California Connection

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2511192


Know your BFEE: The Barreling Bushes

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2472759


Know your BFEE: A Crime Line of Treason

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2748315


Know your BFEE: How Smirko Got Rich

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2529964


Know your BFEE: George W Bush did "community service" at Project P.U.L.L.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2956067


Know your BFEE: Vote Suppressor Supreme, the Turd Bill Rehnquist

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2414083


Know your BFEE: George W Bush Knew 9-11 Was Coming and Did NOTHING!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2404049


Know your BFEE: Oliver North, Drug Dealer

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2396787


Know your BFEE: Pat Robertson Incorporated a Gold Mine with a Terrorist

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2397004


This one’s not labeled “Know Your BFEE,” but it’s meant in the same spirit:

Poppy Bush Involved in JFK Assassination -- BFEE's Spooked!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3274455

Oil and Democracy Don’t Mix

Bush administration policies guarantee a constant flow, no matter what the human cost

By Frida Berrigan

At a 1996 energy conference in New Orleans, Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton said, “The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas reserves where there are democratic governments.”

Laying the blame on the divine is a stretch, but it seems that the vice president is right: democracy and oil do not mix. Just look at the United States’ top 10 oil suppliers. Algeria, Angola, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia are repressive regimes with deplorable human rights records. Mexico and Venezuela, while democracies, are marked by instability, inequality and civil strife. Iraq remains at war and under occupation. Only Norway, Canada and the United Kingdom are fully functioning democracies.

Why don’t oil and democracy mix? At least part of the answer can be found in Washington’s policy of providing military aid and training to leaders who guarantee an uninterrupted flow of oil, defending it against all threats—even those coming from their own citizens.

Since the beginning of the war on terrorism in 2001, the United States’ top 10 sources of oil imports have experienced a 350 percent increase in U.S. military aid and training. In 2003, the United States plans to provide these countries with $58 million in military assistance. In fiscal year 2001, their military assistance totaled $12.2 million.

A large part of the increase is explained by Washington’s rewarding of regimes like Algeria and Nigeria for their ability to cloak domestic repression in the rhetoric of the “war on terrorism.” As the United States looks ahead to a never ending war on terrorism and growing dependence on foreign oil, this dynamic will become increasingly common.

Africa accounts for 16 percent of U.S. oil imports, and the National Intelligence Council predicts an increase to 25 percent by 2015. Hunger for this oil, combined with the need to collect allies in the war on terrorism, led the Bush administration to adopt a “see no evil” position toward human rights problems and inequality in the continent’s oil-rich nations.

CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/oil_and_democracy_dont_mix/