Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity

Original FReeper research | 11/21/2005 | Fedora

[Dajjal]

BTTT

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[mosquitobite]

You know, I laid in bed last night thinking about how amazing this research really is and how without the internet & free republic it really wouldn't have been possible to do unless you had money to travel and access to interviews (and transcripts).

I also thought about how unlikely a charge of treason is this day in age - although this bastard is every bit deserving of the charge. Think about how 50% of the public would react if Bush's administration tried to charge someone with treason. The Democrats would cry foul and call it partisan. They would smear Bush far more than we've seen thus far even. It would be UGLY.

Cicero observed: "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gate is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself … he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist."

[bjc]

Great research. A shorter version is probably needed to get the attention of the neuron-deprived MSM-types.

Naive or not, the description of all the "former this's" and "former that's", forming a cabal intent on shaping or mis-shaping our foreign policy makes me very nervous. I am not sure whether it is Kafka-esque or Orwellian - but it has a nightmarish quality.

[Rocket1968]

Bump

[CHICAGOFARMER]

I'll tell you honestly that I think this needs some reworking. As a colleague of mine once advised a doctoral student who was writing a dissertation: "Tell your reader what you plan to say in your introduction, say it in the following chapters, and then tell your reader what you have said in your conclusion."

This whole business is so complicated, it needs some sort of preface outlining your major points and what you will argue, and some kind of conclusion summing up what you have said. I don't mind reading long pieces, and this is clearly a very important and very complicated matter. But it needs to be presented more clearly.

Perhaps other Freepers may see it differently

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Great reseach.

But my thesis instructor told me the same thing. tell them what you are going tell them, tell them and then tell them again. Short, long short recaps.

Great JOB on the long

[SwatTeam]

Send this to: Washington Office: Bond Federal Building 1400 New York Avenue, NW, Ninth Floor Washington D.C. 20530 Patrick Fitzgerald ;)

That was my first thought too. He probably isn't aware of half of this. He seems to be more interested in gossip than substance.

Great job Fedora.

[shield]

bttt

[MrEdd]

ping

[Kimberly GG]

As always......excellent work Fedora!

Kimberly

[ScaniaBoy]

Thanks for a huge effort. I haven't had time to read through it all yet, but I'm very happy for the collection of references you've put together.

About the possibility that the forgeries initially were intended to stop Clinton invading Iraq, this was mentioned by Michael Ledeen in this article:

The French Connection

SNIP

JJA: No, and it wasn't originally designed to stop Bush. It was designed to stop Clinton.

JJA: True, and I'll get to that in a second. But the documents were forged earlier, almost certainly by 2000.

ML: Why didn't they surface earlier?

JJA: Because they weren't needed. Clinton looked like he might have been on the verge of going to war, but he didn't, so the documents got filed away. They were used later, as part of an effort to deny Bush that U.N. vote.

ML: But you think the French were trying to convince us to bite on a Saddam-wanted-uranium-from-Niger scam?

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.

SNIP

However, I distinctly remember seeing this mentioned by someone else before Ledeen published this article. Unfortunately to find out who came up with this suggestion first (and when) will require a much longer search.

Note also that the time of the burglary in the Niger embassy does not fit with the earlier date for the forgery. On the other hand one may wonder if the French (if it was they who produced the documents) really needed to "purloin" the stamps from the Niger embassy in Rome. If this event was at all connected with the documents, maybe it was just a ruse to try and divert attention towards the Italians.

[ravingnutter]

Wow. Good work! A few things though, one from your previous post:

In 1999, French intelligence had begun investigating the security of uranium supplies in Niger, where uranium production was controlled by a consortium led by the French mining company COGEMA, a division of the French state-owned nuclear energy firm AREVA.

What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa

This is backed up by:

Iraq and four other countries were attempting to purchase uranium from Niger as far back as 1999, European intelligence officials told the Financial Times.

The unidentified sources told the newspaper illicit sales were being negotiated at least three years before last year's U.S.-led invasion.

They said between 1999 and 2001, uranium smugglers planned to sell the ore or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq.

An official said meetings between Niger officials and would-be buyers from the five countries were held in several European countries. Intelligence officers were convinced that the uranium would be smuggled from abandoned mines in Niger, circumventing official export controls.

Washington Times

European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.

Information gathered in 1999-2001 suggested that the uranium sold illicitly would be extracted from mines in Niger that had been abandoned as uneconomic by the two French-owned mining companies-Cominak and Somair, both of which are owned by the mining giant Cogema-operating in Niger.

"Mines can be abandoned by Cogema when they become unproductive. This doesn't mean that people near the mines can't keep on extracting," a senior European counter-proliferation official said.

Human Events

IOW, you are correct that the forgeries were not the reason for Wilson's trip, but it is important to note that it was the French report of the possibility of illicit mining. But once the forgeries emerged, all reports became suspect and were discounted.

You also note Cannistraro's relationship with the Vatican and his prior knowledge of the forgeries, but people may not connect the two without this bit of info:

Two other names just crept into this...Niger Ambassador Adamou Chekou, who was in charge at the Embassy when the break-in and forgeries occurred and Wissam al-Zahawiah, Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See. Seems Italian Intelligence was eavesdropping on these two and discovered their "hotline" between the Niger Embassy and the Vatican.

This is important because al Zahawie also had foreknowledge of the forgeries as evidenced by his statement below (info from piasa):

JANUARY 2003 : (AL ZAHAWIE, "RETIRED IN JORDAN" - IS RECALLED BACK TO BAGHDAD, IRAQ; HE IS TAKEN TO MEET UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS) But last January, al-Zahawie was summoned back to Baghdad for what he had expected would be a request to help Iraq's Foreign Service plan for deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's planned visit to the Vatican. Instead, upon landing in Baghdad, al-Zahawie was taken to meet with UN weapons inspectors. Five inspectors interviewed him in a 90-minute session, he says.

"They asked why I went [to Niger], why I was chosen, when I left Rome and whether there were any other Iraqi diplomats at the Vatican," he says. "But then they asked who had the seal of the embassy and where I had left it." That's when al-Zahawie got wind of some kind of foul play. Italy had handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his presence in Niger. But the inspectors were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it. "If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* My note: How would he know the 'tell-tale sign' if they refused to show the letters to him? Shades of Joe Wilson's foreknowledge of the docs?]

Also of note from the previous link:

In winter 2002, the Ambassador of Niger to Rome, Chekou, is recalled to Niamey “for consultations.” He is expected to return to Italy but instead never sets foot in Italy again. Chekou is relieved of his post and on 2 December 2002 he is replaced by Mrs. Hadjio Abdoulmoumine, serving as chargé d’affaires and head of the Counselor Section. Is this a routine changeover? Or is it—as Repubblica’s intelligence source hints, the result of the discovery by the Government of Niger the some wrongdoing in its Rome embassy has occured? Niamey is convinced that the bizarre robbery of January 2001 was, in reality, merely the cover necessary for the removal of the stationery from Via Baiamonte needed to compile the phony dossier?

While that source continues to blame the Italians...an idea that, IMHO, was "planted" by Cannistraro, as was the second attempt to blame it on Libya (who also blamed Libya for the Lockerbie incident)after the Italians issued a public denial of involvment...the Vatican connections are too large to ignore. Therein, I believe, lies the connection to Cannistraro and his foreknowledge.

Also of interest is Cannistraro also "planted" the disinformation that Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge were the actual forgers and tried to connect them to Michael Ledeen, based on Ledeen's connection to Iran Contra. Cannistraro worked directly with Clarridge during Iran Contra, so he has alot of nerve bringing that up in connection to Ledeen. Cannistaro also cites the Dec 2001 Ledeen meeting in Rome as supposed "proof", when Cannistraro himself was in Rome in Nov 2001, giving an interviewabout a possible attempt on the Pope's life by Al Qaeda.

Another interesting tidbit (#47) that I discovered is that Wolf and Clarridge worked with Aldrich Ames, who outed Plame to the Russians in the 90's. Coincidence? I think not. Cannistraro trying to kill two birds with one stone to cover his own carcass seems to be the more likely answer. To sum it up, with all these connections, Cannistraro has to be more deeply involved in this than you have currently documented. It would also back up Seymour Hersch's quotations from his sources that these documents were deliberately forged by members of the CIA because they were pissed at Cheney.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

New Yorker

What puts some credibility to Hersch's story is...why would Hersch make up these quotes? He is a certified leftwing moonbat and has no reason to exhonerate Bush in this. It doesn't make sense unless the VIPS group was the source of the actual forgeries, as Hersch asserts. Once you have all the above connections and Hersch's quotes, everything fits into place in the puzzle.

[ravingnutter]

From my files:

Wilson (as Ambassador to Gabon) had/has connections to the Gabon Chief of State, Omar Bongo, who was the chief African ally of the French oil company TotalFinaElf, a major beneficiary of the Oil-for-Food bribes. Prior to the Iraq War, they had a contract with Saddam's regime worth an estimated 12.5 to 27.0 billion barrels of oil reserves. Also he had connections via the Middle East Institute and Rock Creek, both of which are Saudi controlled.

Wilson's wife Jacqueline was also apparently a lobbyist for Bongo and it seems Wilson was pretty chummy with Saddam's weapons buyer, having dinner with him on the eve that Kuwait was invaded in 1990. She is now an advisor to Bongo, her picture from a 2005 conference can be found here That makes it very clear that there are connections to oil-for-food. No wonder Wilson can afford his lifestyle.

Source: Posts 21 and 22

[MilleniumBug]

Was Joe Wilson to blame for the Iraq War? From 1988 to 1991 Joe Wilson was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S.Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. During “Desert Shield” he was the acting Ambassador. He was the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before Desert Storm. He was number two, in charge of administrative matters, to April Glaspie, the career diplomat who it seems in July 1990 made Saddam think the U.S. would not mind if he invaded Kuwait and has not held an ambassador-level job since. She left on vacation later that month, leaving Wilson in charge, and after Saddam invaded Kuwait a few weeks later she didn’t return to Iraq. The Air Phase ofthe First Gulf War started in January 1991. From Further Reflections on Joseph Wilson’s Career http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/28 When Saddam took foreigners hostage and threatened to hang them in the event of a U.S. invasion, Joe Wilson called a press conference with a noose around his neck telling Saddam,  "If you want to hang someone, hang me." (WND) or  "if you want to execute me, I'll bring my own (expletive) rope".(news24) It may have been his proudest moment. But it was the first indication that he was a personality defined by flamboyance – a man who craved the center of attention. And it may have galvanized Saddam into action. Another famous line uttered by Wilson during that period was: "No one will be able to blame Joe Wilson for losing Iraq."  Since Joe Wilson has been found out as a habitual liar it raises the suspicion that Joe is putting up a smokescreen for another of his rash indiscretions.   From Joe Wilson's threat against me http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47309& The diplomat and his spy http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1825445,00.html. The expletive is identified as the F****** word by the Monterey County Weekly http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/issues/Issue.10-27-2005/features/Article.fourm_2

[popdonnelly]

Thank you, Fedora, for your excellent work. Obviously must reading.

[popdonnelly]

"I wonder who will play Joe in the movie?"

I'm thinking Jack Black.

[Howlin]

Excellent.

[ravingnutter]

More from my files which relates to ScaniaBoy's post #71:

According to some reports, Jeff Castelli, the Station Chief in Rome, also saw the documents, supposedly courtesty of SISME, but did not recieve a copy. He wrote a synopsis in memo form and passed it to Greg Thielmann in the NSA. Incidentally, Thielmann has toured on the anti-war circuit with none other than Joseph Wilson after he lost a "pissing contest" with John Bolton over way information was passed up the chain of command.

Thielmann ignored the info because, in his opinion, the info in the memo is "somewhat limited" and is "lacking in necessary detail" and is "highly suspect." The actual forgeries turned up much later. Still, that begs the question about how the CIA had the actual text of the forged documents during the 2000-2001 time frame as they testified to the Intelligence Committee when Castelli only provided a syopsis based on his recollections of what the documents contained and then that was not sent to the CIA in the US, but to Thielmann, who apparently sat on the info. It is also interesting that Jeff Castelli was recalled by Tenet to Washington right when this story broke, reportedly for "misconduct". Then, all of a sudden Tenet and James Pavitt resign for "personal reasons" (like I believe that nonsense). Wayne Madsen has also said the Pavitt/Tenet resignations were directly connected to the CIA leak investigation, per the usual "anonymous intelligence officials".

From my post #7 (with a link to the report) on the FR version of the Ledeen article is the relevant excerpt from the Silberman-Robb Report report:

To illustrate the failures involved in vetting this information, some details about its collection require elaboration. The October 2002 NIE included the statement that Iraq was “trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake” and that “a foreign government service” had reported that “Niger planned to send several tons” of yellowcake to Iraq.191 The statement about Niger was based primarily on three reports provided by a liaison intelligence service to CIA in late 2001 and early 2002.192 One of these reports explained that, as of early 1999, the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican planned to visit Niger on an official mission. The report noted that subsequently, during meetings on July 5-6, 2000, Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement for the sale of 500 tons of uranium.193 This report stated that it was providing the “verbatim text” of the agreement.194 The information was consistent with reporting from 1999 showing that a visit to Niger was being arranged for the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican.195

Note: the page numbering is off in the .pdf version, this section is on page 92 of the .pdf document.

This verbatim text of this report was the actual verbatim text of the forgery. How could that be possible? {***wink***}...

[SuziQ]

Whoa! Bump for later reading, when I have time! ;o)

[Fedora]

I didn't mean to keep you up, LOL. Yes, it is nice to have the Internet to save research time and costs! 15+ years ago there's no way I could've gone through the newspaper archives required for this in any reasonable amount of time.

My perception is that the government has gotten gun-shy on charging anyone with treason since McCarthy, and the charge now seems to be reserved for cases where intelligence agents are caught spying red-handed with surveillance evidence to back up the charges, like with Ames and Hannsen. But when it comes to leaks, it seems to be almost impossible to bring about a successful prosecution. I was reading the other day that the CIA files about 1,000 leak complaints a year and almost none ever result in a conviction.