Go Weldon!
Dieter PING!
L
I would be a dollar to a doughnut hole that Sandy Berger copped documents that had comments about Able-Danger written in the sidebars.
The press was quick to say that copies of the documents he stole were still within the National Archives. What they did NOT say, was that the originals, with hand-scribed commentary were stolen and never to be seen again.
Probably Bill Clinton saying "We can't respond to this Able-Danger stuff, it violates the separation of FBI and CIA clause written by our staff..."
Gorelick was only doing what Rummy wanted?
What an absolute shock. Where's the smelling salts?
bttt
Ping!
I can't wait to see the latest copy of the Revised and Amended 9/11 Commission Report - fact-corrected 23rd edition.
Gorelick Wall BumP
Weldon told this on Lou Dobbs. The video can be seen here:
http://qtmonster.typepad.com/
Also check out the below site and click on the china connection link.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/814
For all those who have attacked Weldon as a RINO, this guy has a helluva lot of guts. Go Weldon, indeed. While the RAT bastards are going after phony issues, we have some huge ammo against them. Question their patiotism? You bet.
Gorelick should be indicted.
And 3,000 times worse then Plamegate!
All of this is beginning to make more sense.
Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told [the Bush administration] that the way they were handling evidence was wrong." The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: "They did away with his job," Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers ... not a senior intelligence person who argued with them."
According to Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East intelligence for the DIA, "The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the C.I.A."
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Steering Group
Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Pat Lang, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA
All friends of JOE WILSON who are screaming the loudest about PLAMEGATE (except for FORMER CIA, Larry Johnson, that is).
Bruce Hardcastle, the Defense Intelligence Agency officer assigned to Bill Luti, provides (did provide) Luti's office with intelligence briefings. But his reports are not appreciated by Luti or his colleagues, because they do not support neoconservatives' assumptions about Iraq's weapon capabilities and terrorist activities. [Salon, 3/10/04 Sources: Paul O'Neill]
a secret September 2002 report of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency informed Secretary Rumsfeld, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to a report obtained by U.S. News & World Report. When Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, explained to the Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, according to Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush Administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post, "they did away with his job.
One senior intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency told the committee that some officials working for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were convinced that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack and may even have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"They did not tell us what to say," the intelligence officer told the committee. "There wasn't pressure in that sense. But you certainly had to make sure that your analysis was on target and that you were very precise in the words that you used."
At one point, the committee said, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith established a team that reviewed intelligence on the links between Iraq and al Qaeda. Feith told the committee that the team "found some things that looked very interesting in the year 2002 that apparently didn't register with people or were not given great prominence." Feith's team put together a briefing for Rumsfeld and, later, for CIA Director George J. Tenet, and then attended a meeting of intelligence analysts in August 2002 that sought to assess Iraq's links to terrorism.
Anthony Cordesman, a national security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, criticized the report for failing to investigate the question of pressure on analysts more deeply. "I know of DIA senior officers pressured out of the Pentagon, and younger analysts who left the community over political pressure," he said in an e-mailed assessment. He said that the committee also failed "to examine the fact that the intelligence community almost always responds to the user's demands and perceptions."
The committee's report said that it made repeated calls for analysts to step forward and reveal whether they were pressured by administration officials, and that the committee sought out and interviewed analysts who had been identified in news reports. Bruce Hardcastle, a senior DIA official for Middle Eastern affairs, was interviewed after a report in The Washington Post said he avoiding meeting with Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William J. Luti because he sharply disagreed with Luti over the imminence of the threat posed by Iraq.
But Hardcastle denied the Post account, telling the committee his dispute with Luti was not over Iraq but concerned the use of the word "assassination" to describe the killings of terrorist leaders by Israeli Defense Forces. He said he did not experience pressure to change assessments on Iraq, but he added: "Generally it was understood how receptive [Defense policy officials] were to our assessments and what kind of assessments they would not be receptive to."
This whole sorry episode stinks to high heaven.
I first heard the name Dieter Snell about three weeks ago on the Savage Nation when Mike was interviewing Weldon and pressed him to name names of the lawyers responsible for stifling Able Danger, and Weldon very quickly and quite hesitantly said the name Dieter Snell and then moved on as if it was never mentioned. I jotted it down on a slip of paper for later googling.
ping
Rush is the most respected, unelected voice on the Right--why doesn't he spend 3-5 mins. on this each and every show?!
He knows, just as Rep. Weldon does, that to get the story in the public arena you must continue to discuss it...
Rush: 3-5 mins. everyday...that's all I ask!
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Upon her retirement, Kwiatkowski took her story to Jeff Steinberg, editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, the journal of Lyndon LaRouche's movement. Pat Lang, former chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, circulated Kwiatkowski's deposition to Steinberg in a September 16, 2003, e-mail in which he carbon-copied, rather than blind carbon-copied his distribution list. Among the recipients were prominent journalists and producers, scions of the alternative press, and a smattering of current and former intelligence analysts who often serve as sources in news analyses and articles.
Many journalists and pundits ignored the deposition, tainted as it was by innuendo and falsehood. LaRouche, after all, has both peddled the theory that Queen Elizabeth II is a drug dealer and that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a Soviet agent. They dismissed Lang's endorsement that "Jeff Steinberg is a first rate scholar. I am not concerned with where he works." That a former high-ranking Defense Intelligence Agency official — one that is still welcomed to frequent lunches and meetings with former colleagues — appears to maintain close ties to members of the LaRouche organization is a separate issue.
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Kwiatkowski prides herself on her expose of a "neoconservative coup." She explained this to the Executive Intelligence Review editor. But, many of the people she alleged to be part of the Office of Special Plans, either worked in other Pentagon departments, or had long since retired from government. The errors are not surprising. In the 18 months I served in Special Plans, she did not visit the office (which would also explain subsequent errors in relating the location of the office).
Progressing from the ridiculous to the sublime, the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg memorandum suggests that one staff member pretended to care for his wheelchair-bound wife in order to travel on undercover secret missions. Unfortunately, Kennedy staff members took the LaRouche organization at its word, and dragged the career government employee in for questioning on this allegation. In her conversation with Steinberg, Kwiatkowski chided colleagues for alleged violations of standard Pentagon procedure, and yet ironically got wrong such basics as the escort ratio between Pentagon employees and visitors.
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Kwiatkowski's extremism undermined her competence. Her enthusiasm for conspiracies was matched by a lack of focus on national security. In a January 15, 2003, e-mail to a colleague, Kwiatkowski wrote that neither Osama bin Laden nor al Qaeda, let alone nuclear North Korea, posed "a serious threat" to the U.S. national security. There is a place for debate in policy — and, within the Pentagon, debates are frequent and fierce. But, living in denial about the threat al Qaeda posed after the Pentagon itself was hit in a terrorist attack did not inspire confidence.
snip
But a few journalists said they had an "inside source," and continued to pursue the conspiracies; several found their way into print, corroborated by sources like Lang and retired intelligence professionals like Vince Cannistraro, Ray McGovern, and Judith Yaphe on the Lang distribution list.
In April 2003, the LaRouche organization published a pamphlet entitled "Children of Satan." The pamphlet contained a Steinberg essay alleging that students of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss had formed a secret "cabal" to drag the United States into war by falsifying evidence.
The following month, I returned from a meeting at the National Security Council to Special Plans' suite of offices on the first floor of the Pentagon (Kwiatkowski falsely wrote that we worked in the basement). Several colleagues were pouring over a fax. Public Affairs had just brought it over, saying that a New Yorker fact checker had inquiries and that Seymour Hersh was planning an expose of our office. We answered his questions immediately. Many of his statements were factually wrong and repeated Kwiatkowski's mistakes verbatim. But, when the article was posted on the Internet on May 5, 2003, Hersh had not incorporated any corrections; his article is rife with errors.
But, with the Pentagon leadership's decision to concentrate on work rather than on public relations, falsehoods transformed into conventional wisdom. Take Hersh's opening sentence: "They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal." We had never called ourselves that, although we were aware that Lang (whom Hersh cites openly), Defense Intelligence Agency official Bruce Hardcastle, and some Central Intelligence Agency officials used the term to describe Jewish colleagues. Before Hersh, it was The Washington Report for Middle Eastern Affairs which popularized the term "cabal" to describe certain Pentagon officials. The Washington Report is not a mainstream publication. Rather, it is a fringe magazine which has put in print theories such as that the Mossad was behind John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Robert Dreyfuss, contributing editor to The Nation, repeated many Kwiatkowski conspiracies as fact, in a series of article for The Nation, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones. Ironically, until Dreyfuss pegged me as part of the conspiracy based on five weeks as a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute, no one in the Pentagon leadership knew me.
snip
Accompanying the Mother Jones article was a wire diagram outlining the alleged conspiracy to falsify intelligence. Unfortunately, the diagram, like the article, is replete with basic errors of fact. Dreyfuss and Vest confuse portfolios, positions, and such basics as who was and was not a government official. Colonel Bill Bruner, for example, was not Chalabi's handler. Chalabi did not have a set handler. I doubt Chalabi knows who Bruner is. He tended to not know the office administrators. It was Bruner's job to take notes when his superiors were absent from meetings, make sure his staff worked on deadline, and that our responses to congressional letters and Rumsfeld snowflakes were free of grammatical errors. Harold Rhode likewise did not leave the Pentagon, where he has served as a career employee under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
How did such basic errors make it into Mother Jones? Only the editors know. But, neither Dreyfuss nor Vest sought to interview any member of Special Plans, nor did either apologize for their inaccuracy. Instead, the two journalists appear to have relied on interviews with Kwiatkowski, and those on the Lang list like Greg Thielmann, a former State Department Intelligence and Research official who was uninvolved in Iraq policy.
While the Office of Special Plans conspiracy had its origins in the LaRouche organization, writers like Hersh, Dreyfuss, and Vest, broke the stigma and mainstream newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald began to run with the story. The New York Times Magazine published an overview of prewar planning based almost exclusively on second-hand sources and a background briefing with State Department lawyer Tom Warrick, a Gore campaign donor, who also had a slash-and-burn track-record among colleagues and in the interagency process. Allegations unchallenged by the administration became convention wisdom. Major columnists and correspondents from the New York Times and Washington Post repeated falsehoods, sometimes helped along by "unnamed State Department officials" seeking to score points in internecine battles.
A FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP
The tragedy of the Special Plans conspiracy is multifold. Journalists allowed themselves to be spun by a false source; fearful that doublesourcing might undermine their scoops, many journalists ignored basic fact-checking procedures. The resulting revelations pleased a partisan audience but, in retrospect, soiled the reputations of numerous newsmagazines and newspapers. Some editors may want to reexamine reporting to see whether they sourced stories to Kwiatkowski and Lang; the resulting stories were often little more accurate than those of the New York Times's Jayson Blair and USA Today's Jack Kelley. Some academic pundits who have repeated the allegations of alternative journalists and "intelligence correspondents" may want to consider whether their sources were accurate, or were merely using them to wage ideological and policy battles.
snip
The failure of leadership spreads wide. By failing to respond to falsehoods at their start, the Pentagon allowed a false conventional wisdom to develop. The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and his deputy have failed repeatedly to defend their subordinates.
More troubling, though, is the reaction of some in the White House. Many in the National Security Council realize that conspiracies woven around prewar planning are untrue. But, rather than stand by principle, they have rewarded those responsible for malicious leaks and false confirmations by changing policy as a result of falsehood. By succumbing to policy blackmail, the White House has ensured that the tactics of LaRouche and Kwiatkowski remain a factor in Washington policymaking for years to come. When the White House fails to stand by its men and women, it signals adversaries that they can target officials one by one. At the end, Bush will stand alone.
Michael Rubin, an NRO contributor, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
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You can read the entire article here...
http://tinyurl.com/dh8l6