Nigergate: the dangerous relations between Democrat Senators and ex spies

november 15, 2005

[smoothsailing]

Here's something you may not have seen. Free Agents

[nopardons]

bttt

[Gaffer]

Very funny....by the way, when I was growing up, we were taught to say "NIGER" for the country where the 'g' kinda sounds like a 'j'.....Now alluvasudden, the CNN, MSNBC, CBS pukes are saying "nijeeeeeerrrrrr." Makes you wonder if some bright 'bulb' at CNN thought, "Hey! If we prounounce it like we used to, some dumb CNN blond (brunette, whatever) is gonna screw up and say the "N-word" by mistake sometime....

[popdonnelly]

I agree with you that there is something strange about Cannistraro's role in this matter. How did he know so much about this false information?

[ravingnutter]

Something else about foreknowledge that I remembered, from a Ledeen article (who they are trying to blame):

JJA: Look at page 76 of the Silberman-Robb Report. CIA had received three reports from "a liaison intelligence service" in late '01 and early 2002. "One of these reports explained that...during meetings on July 5-6, 2000, Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement for the sale of 500 tons of uranium." And the "liaison service" provided a "verbatim text" of the agreement. Got that? Not the document, but a text. They were keeping the documents to themselves, and they wouldn't tell us the source, because, they said, they were afraid of leaks.

ML: Right, that text is supposed to be the text of one of the forged documents.

JJA: Silberman-Robb doesn't say that, actually, although that's probably true. Everyone has assumed that the "liaison service" was Italian, but since the Italians did not have those documents in early 2002-nobody except the French and Rocco, the French agent, had them at that time-it wasn't them.

ML: So they weren't the "liaison service." It was...the FRENCH???

JJA: Voila! Or should I say, Ecco!?

National Review

[Just mythoughts]

bttt

[smoothsailing]

LOL!

[popdonnelly]

If the French had sent this information to the CIA in late 2001-early 2002, then a possible source for Cannistraro could have been former associates in the CIA.

[pinz-n-needlez]

Bump

Pinz

[pinz-n-needlez]

Thanks for your attempts to keep these dots from floating off the page.

Pinz

[pinz-n-needlez]

Ping

Pinz

[Fedora]

Thanks!

[ravingnutter]

If the CIA was so afraid of leaks that they wouldn't provide the documents to the Intelligence Committee, why would they leak it to an ex-CIA agent? How did Castelli pass on the the the exact text of the forgeries if he never saw the documents, as he claims? Oops...I guess we ought to make that four people now that are clairvoyant.

[popdonnelly]

Well, there are all kinds of possibilities where Cannistraro could have gotten it from. It couldn't have been a public source, not at that early date. I was speculating that, since he was ex-CIA, someone he had known at the CIA could have fed him the information. An active CIA person couldn't go public with that kind of information, but Cannistraro wouldn't be hampered in that way. So if someone in the CIA wanted to get it out, feed it to Cannistraro.

[Enchante]

All that remains is a network of spies, anti-Bush journalists and Democrat Senators who all seem to forget two or three things: Rocco Martino was a spy employed by the French; Niger is an ex French colony; the French control the extraction of uranium in Niger; the French had the dossier containing the false documents in the autumn of 2000; in regards to the forgeries France remained silent, never telling the Americns a word about the forgeries, until after the IAEA disclosed all. Question: why don’t all of the highly alert Democrat Senators, beginning with Rockefeller, ask the FBI to investigate Paris?

[popdonnelly]

"How did Castelli pass on the the the exact text of the forgeries"

When did Castelli pass on the text? The CIA had supposedly been given the text - the text, not the documents themselves - sometime in late 2001-early 2002.

[piasa]

Not to mention that the guy at the IAEA who spotted the docs as forgeries was French. Last name of Baute, I think.

[SuzyQue]

"Very soon, under the title “The Rockefeller Connection”, I will post something revealing, something important that until now passed completely under the Radar Screen. Stay tuned .."

Please ping me, also, when you post.

[piasa]

Vincent Cannistraro, the ABC flak who was described as "the head of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre" during the 1988 Lockerbie investigation and as a " CIA intelligence advisor to the National Security Council" during the Ok[lahoma] City bombing investigation, is always and everywhere quoted by the liberal media, and what he has to say is revealing: "The leak was to punish Wilson, to disparage him with the suggestion of nepotism," he said. In other words, he suggested, the leaker was arguing that Wilson's report should not be taken seriously because he only got the job through his wife's intercession. (Wilson says his wife was not the person responsible for sending him to Africa.) --- LA Times, 10/1/03 Washington Abuzz Over a New Kind of Scandal [Yep, Plame Worked With Foley!]

To: okie01 Hmmm...more likely Vincent Cannistraro, who tried to finger Ledeen for the forgeries. Source [http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/04/free_michael.php]
Interestingly enough, I have found so far that Cannistraro does alot of interviews in LA, where Doug said Wilkinson's phone numbers were based from. Whether he lives in LA, I have not been able to determine. If I remember correctly, Cannistraro is in cahoots with Larry Johnson in the VIPS. Something else I found that was interesting about Cannistraro:
He organized an interview with Osama bin Laden for ABC News in 1998.
Source [http://www.pewfellowships.org/seminars/2002/fall/vincent_cannistraro.htm] 147 posted on 07/27/2005 11:12:59 AM PDT by ravingnutter

Regarding the part in bold- I remember Ollie North a while back making a comment - I think it was in his newsletter- about how people in the press who had been involved with interviews of bin Laden in the past were not cooperating with US investigators hunting for bin Laden. North was disgusted by this.

[piasa]

The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that “the jury was still out on this”—that is, on the authenticity of the documents.
-------"The Stovepipe: How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.",Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 10/27/2003