WHO USED THEM TO START THE WAR? HOW AND WHY DID THEY DO IT? DID BUSH LIE?

...

SOME EXAMPLES OF FOREIGN (NOT JUST ISRAELI) MEDDLING IN US POLICY THAT MIGHT SOON BE PROVED...

Meanwhile, another grand jury, Paul McNulty's, has indicted a Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, for passing US secrets to Israeli agents working for AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. McNulty has more recently obtained indictments against two employees of AIPAC for obtaining the information.

According to a 2004 story in the Washington Post, the FBI interviewed officials in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon -- including Cheney aides David Wurmser and John Hannah, former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- to determine if they were involved in the security leaks McNulty is investigating. These are some of the people to blame for starting an unnecessary war.

The FBI wants to know if the above war advocates leaked confidential information to Israel, AIPAC, AND the Iraqi exile/Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was a CIA asset who had hoped for the US to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with Chalabi. Chalabi reportedly had a hand in the Niger forgeries, hoping like many other factions to use them to justify a war against Iraq. Apparently his loyalties were with Iran rather than Iraq. Shortly after the war started, the US broke with Chalabi for leaking US secrets to Iran, and the new Iraqi government wants to arrest him.

TALLY SO FAR OF FOREIGN MEDDLERS IN US GOVERNMENT -- 5: ITALY, FRANCE, BRITAIN, IRAN, IRAQ

But wait!...There's more! The New York Times (Douglas Jehl, October 28, 2005) reports that some US officials believe the Niger uranium documents were forged in Niger's embassy in Rome in "a moneymaking scheme" (the beneficiaries of which the report didn't name). This could be another cover story, to cover up the possibility that the documents were designed to hijack American foreign policy.

At any rate, someone reported to the Rome police that between January 1 and 2, 2001, someone broke into the Niger embassy there and stole letterheads and official seals. The photocopies on this page resulted. The paper and seals supposedly were used to produce the Niger forgeries you see here. The burglary and the theft of the letterheads and seals were an inside job -- someone from Niger -- according to recent reports out of Italy.

BUT WAIT!...THERE'S MORE!

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1782577.php

and a very important story, connected to Plame in many ways. Hannah and Wurmser are connected to Plame too and J Miller is supposedly the unidentified woman in this case. FitzG. and McNulty have been working together and sharing info, such as the papers on the Niger forgery that FitzG. arranged for McNulty to see.

:shrug:

WAL MART

:kick:

SMOKING!

It is disheartening sometimes in GD isn't it SLaD? I am saddened when any Iraq update/US soldier/ Iraqi citizen death threads drop like stones.

This is an excellent post and thank you!

:hi:

I have been remiss, posting in the update lately, please forgive me, it seems I've been a little too disheartened

HOW MANY MORE GEORGIE, HOW MANY MORE?




Sam Stone came home,
To his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served,
Had shattered all his nerves,
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased the pain,
And the grass grew round his brain,
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back.

There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes,
Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don't stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.
Mmm....

Sam Stone's welcome home
Didn't last too long.
He went to work when he'd spent his last dime
And Sammy took to stealing
When he got that empty feeling
For a hundred dollar habit without overtime.
And the gold rolled through his veins
Like a thousand railroad trains,
And eased his mind in the hours that he chose,
While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes...

Sam Stone was alone
When he popped his last balloon
Climbing walls while sitting in a chair
Well, he played his last request
While the room smelled just like death
With an overdose hovering in the air
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the G. I. Bill
For a flag draped casket on a local heroes' hill.




disheartened - Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :

disheartened \dis*heart"ened\ (ds*hrt"'nd), adj.
made less hopeful or enthusiastic; as, their lack of interest
disheartened the instructor. (vs. optimistic)]

Syn: demoralized, discouraged.


Dishearten \Dis*heart"en\ (ds*hrt"'n), v. t. p. Disheartened (ds*hrt"'nd); p. pr. & vb. n.
Disheartening.]
To discourage; to deprive of courage and hope; to depress the
spirits of; to deject.
<1913 Webster>

Regiments . . . utterly disorganized and disheartened.
--Macaulay.

Syn: To dispirit; discourage; depress; deject; deter;
terrify.
<1913 Webster>

disheartened - WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) :

disheartened
adj : made less hopeful or enthusiastic; "desperate demoralized
people looking for work"; "felt discouraged by the
magnitude of the problem"; "the disheartened instructor
tried vainly to arouse their interest" demoralized, demoralised, discouraged]

disheartened - Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 :

34 Moby Thesaurus words for "disheartened":
bowed-down, cast down, dashed, dejected, depressed, despairing,
despondent, desponding, discouraged, dispirited, down, downcast,
downhearted, drooping, droopy, feeling low, heartless,
hypochondriac, hypochondriacal, in low spirits, in the depths,
in the doldrums, in the dumps, languishing, low, low-spirited,
pessimistic, pining, spiritless, subdued, suicidal, weary of life,
woebegone, world-weary

This topic (Niger documents) takes too much thinking and doesn't get our jihadist juices flowing. (I like the alliteration.) Indeed, none dare disagree on this lest they be seen as a 'freeper' - but we can freely attack others personally if they dare have the temerity to view smoking or Wal*Mart differently, no matter how principled the argument.

A White House that is full of traitors, with loose lips, who are willing to do and say anything in order to advance their insanity.

Can we shackle them now and get it over with please?

:hi:

IMPORTANT THING ABOUT MEETING: A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT LIKELY CREATED OR PASSED THE FORGERIES TO INFLUENCE US POLICY.

Whether it was France, Israel, Iran, or Italy, or some other country, this is highly illegal, and such goings on are a threat to US national security bigger than any known terrorist activity. Again, is the FBI investigating, or not? Was the idea to make Saddam "look bad," or Bush? It turns out the forgery has made both look bad, has brought down Saddam and crippled Bush.

Ledeen already had a longstanding friendship with Francesco Pazienza, an Italian felon and forger who had been kicked out of the official Italian intelligence organization SISMI but who had found a new home in the renegade intelligence agency P-2 (Propaganda Due). Pazienza apparently was not present but definitely was known to Italian intelligence agents, including Rocco Martino, as well as to Ledeen and probably Lady.

Ledeen also was a personal friend of Pollari, who, like Ledeen, is a master of the card game bridge (Ledeen writes columns on it). There are close ties between Pollari's official intelligence organization, SISMI, and Pazienza's unnofficial one, P-2. In fact, P-2 recruits from SISMI.

Somehow, through the efforts of the people at Ledeen's meeting, plus Rocco Martino, Francesco Pazienza (or at least P-2), and CIA man Bob Lady, the Bush administration soon had its causus belli, the forged letters on the sale of uranium by Niger to Iraq.

Rove, Ledeen -- the Bush administration -- obtained this historic false information through very irregular means, and this means should be the subject of a Congressional investigation, perhaps in the next Congress. To preserve the rule of law in the United States, the FBI and US attorneys should ascertain how these people and others used unofficial channels to obtain a false causus belli. The Constitution will mean little if the president and his cronies can get away with sneaking around using common criminals, false information, and clandestine foreign alliances to fabricate a case for war that they couldn't obtain through legal channels -- their own CIA and State Department.


...

The Lady Is No "lady": ROBERT SELDON LADY

It is my belief that the "Italian functionary," or "a lady," that Martino said gave him the Niger forgeries used to incite war was actually a Lady, Robert Seldon Lady Sr, the same man who headed up the torture abduction of Abu Omar.

Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro has obtained arrrest warrants for 9 more CIA spies in addition to the original 13 that included Robert Lady, in connection with the abduction.

Robert Seldon Lady, 51, had homes in Abita Springs, LA, and in Panama until 2001, when he left for the Milan post. He and his wife Martha own a villa in the Italian countryside near Penango (Asti) in NW Italy, where they hoped to enjoy retirement before he took it on the lam. Born in Honduras, he was an affable New York City cop in the 80s who infiltrated and ratted out leftist groups. He is something of an electronics hacker (someone hacked the cell phones his operatives used, but not successfully, as the Italians used base-station data to retrace the agents' movements). In the 1980s he joined the CIA and its efforts in Honduras in behalf of the Nicaraguan "contras" who were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Lady is the son of an American expatriate in Honduras, Billy Seldon Lady, who had many resources and aptitudes coveted by the CIA and who even operated an airline, Aero Servicios. And now the son, Bob Lady, is a wanted felon in Europe. He is in Honduras again as the Sandinistas are resurgent in Nicaragua, and the Bush administration no doubt needs a few good men to oppose them.

more

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=27415

has his eye on Ledeen. Can you confirm this?

K & R. Good to see you around again!

:hi:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" scandal by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

more


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10571.htm

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public. His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White House. Hence Rove's predicament.

An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant to Israel's Likud party, to prepare for the war. In the words of Robert Baer, a distinguished former CIA man, it was a "competing intelligence shop at the Pentagon"..."if you didn't like the answer you're getting from the CIA". In short, bogus stories would get a second chance at the OSP.

A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in 1980, when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan elected. They publicised a story that Billy Carter, the then President Jimmy Carter's colourful brother, had received $50,000 (£28,000) from the Libyan government.

The story was always denied by the President and no evidence of the payment was found, but the story helped to elect Reagan. Its source? Sismi, and an associate of a man called Michael Ledeen.


http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=2426_0_1_0_C


First of all, I am not a leftist. Secondly, the sources for the quotes of former CIA and DIA agent Philip Giraldi were my interviews of him, as indicated in the correctly transcribed entry on the Wikipedia page, and which I provided the mp3 link for. Fourth, I am happy that the US is no longer part of the British Empire.

As far as Ledeen and the Niger uranium forgeries, Giraldi explained in the interviews that the "couple of CIA agents" were paid in foreign accounts and that Fitzgerald had "already found the money trail." Ledeen's connections to the Office of Special Plans and Sismi are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy with Harold Rhode, who "practically lived out of (Iranian spy) Ahmad Chalabi's office," Manucher Ghorbanifar and guilty Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill:

"he intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later...

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence...

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named."

But where did they originate? Giraldi's partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, "You'd be very close," in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.

Combined with what Giraldi had to say, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?


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

July Friday 29th 2005 (05h28) :
KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS
13 comment(s).

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

...


The war is not just about oil, Israel’s fears/ambitions, or US hegemony. There are contracts and contractors in Iraq. Modern-day carpetbaggers with briefcases descended like a plague of scorpions on the poor, bloodied, bombed-out, grieving people of Iraq. They included the daughter of the war’s chief banshee -- Simone Ledeen, Michael’s young daughter -- shown in the photo, greeting with an impish smile another occupier at the Baghdad airport -- getting ready to lord it over the Iraqis as she tries out her new MBA in working for the CPA. Caption: "The creatures step out of the tripods." Maybe it’ll help to pay off those student loans -- huh, Michael?

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/145557/54

Keyser Soze aka Michael Ledeen.

Michael Ledeen was one of the founders of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank for AIPAC. He is co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. As far back as 1980, the CIA allegedly listed Ledeen as an agent of influence of Israel. Ledeen is the main foreign policy advisor to Karl Rove. Ledeens main obsession seems to be to overthrow Iran.

In 1972 he published the book Universal Fascism, in which he expounds upon "the rightness of the fascist cause." In Universal Fascism, Ledeen first builds his case that fascism was the "20th Century Revolution" and that "people yearn for the real thing - revolution". It's the blueprint for a fascist revolution.

In 1980 he collaborated with Francesco Pazienza of SISMI and P-2 in the "BillyGate" affair. This is the same Pazienze who was recently found out to belong to the parallel intelligence agency in Italy. In 1985 Pazienza was found guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of terrorists. Ledeen is identified in court documents as an agent of SISMI.

The Pentagon downgraded Ledeen's security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after the FBI began a probe of Ledeen for passing classified materials to a foreign
country, believed to be Israel.

Not willing to let it drop. The info is too important.

staggering information. No wonder these investigations have taken so much time combined with the stonwalling reluctance of the WH to admit any culpability what so ever.