James Moore - The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

[Brotherjohn]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/the-most-important-crimin_b_9183.html

Sorry if this has been posted, but I didn't see it anywhere. Moore, author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential reveals that Patrick Fitgerald has requested Italian Intelligence reports dealing with the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome which preceded the "discovery" of the forged uranium documents. He makes a case that Fitgerald is trying to tie the forgery back to the White House.

"Fortunately, there are good signs. Fitzgerald has reportedly asked for a copy of the Italian government’s investigation into the break-in of the Niger embassy in Rome and the source of the forged documents. The blatantly fake papers, which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had cut a deal to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, turned up after a December 2001 meeting in Rome involving neo-con Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Harold Rhodes, and Niccolo Pollari, the head of Italy’s intelligence agency SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister.

If(sic) Fitzgerald... examining the possibility that Ledeen was executing a plan to help his friend Karl Rove build a case for invading Iraq? ...The federal grand jury has to at least consider whether Ledeen called Rove with an idea to use his contacts with the Italian CIA to hatch a plan to create the rationale for war."

[seemslikeadream]

1. Judith Miller is Unnamed Woman in AIPAC Spy Ring Indictment

not familiar with this link but very interesting


http://www.sw-asia.com/People/Judith_Miller_Naor_Gilon_Franklin_AIPAC.htm

Judith Miller is Unnamed Woman in AIPAC Spy Ring Indictment

Page 24 Paragraph numbered 7of the AIPAC Spy Ring Indictment (see below)
http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/dod/usfrnklin80205ind.pdf

This is in reference to a meeting between FRANKLIN (Larry Franklin) and FO-3 (Naor Gilon) at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club. The woman referenced is Judith Miller. Miller is a reporter for the New York Times who is as I write held in a Federal Facility in contempt of court. She wrote many now discredited stories on WMDs for the Times. The Charitable work was The Iraqi Jewish Archive which Judith Miller and Harold Rhode cooperated on with Ahmad Chalabi.

I have reason to believe that the conversation between Larry Franklin and Naor Gilon about Judith Miller included a reference to Valerie Plame. This case becomes a time bomb if it is revealed that Mossad had a part in the outing of CIA agent Plame.

[leveymg]

3. That makes complete sense. Who else would Franklin be talking about?

Let's see. June 3, 2003. That was twenty days before Judy Miller's first recorded meeting with Scooter. She claims the name "Valerie Flame" written in her reporter's notebook was from another source, which she says she did not disclose to Fitzgerald, pursuant to the agreement her lawyer made with the prosecutor to keep Miller's post-release testimony to the substance of her discussions with Libby.

It all fits nicely. Maybe too nicely. This is why. It appears that the whole Plame outing conspiracy was structured to avoid prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. (IIPA). If Judy can plausibly claim that she learned Plame's identity from Gilon -- a Mossad officer -- rather than from Scooter, that would let Libby off the hook as far as an IIPA conviction is concerned, along with anyone else at the White House she also passed identifying information about Plame to.

That particular law requires the prosecutor prove five things: 1)that the official who leaked the identity had a security clearance and 2) access to a classified document, 3) he intentionally leaked it to 4) a person without a security clearance, and 5) the US gov't was taking active measures to ptotect the covert identity of the agent who was outed.

If Gilon, an agent of a foreign government, was Miller's source for Plame's identity rather than Libby (or another US Gov't official, such as Bolton) the conspirators may have thought they had created a firewall between themselves and violation of the IIPA.

But, here's where this strategy would fail and potentially create enormous leverage for the prosecutor. If Fitzgerald had evidence that Gilon conspired to inform Miller about Plame's identity, that's Espionage and conspiracy. A violation of the section of the Espionage Act dealing with revealing classified documents to foreign powers is a potential capital offense. That's some pretty scary leverage.

I think it's entirely possible that a very powerful agency of the US Government prevailed on the Israelis to convince Gilon to talk to Fitzgerald. If Judy were linked to espionage, she would sing her head off before the Grand Jury about what she knew about Scooter and the others she talked to. And, that's exactly what I believe she has done.

If Miller was the unidentified woman referenced in the the Larry Franklin OSP-AIPAC spy case indictment, she is the key to linking the Bush White House to a foreign espionage ring that illegally funneled forged documents to the Vice President's Office in a plot to involve the US in a war with disasterous results. That is treason. It is potentially fatal to any and all involved, particularly to those officials at the top of the conspiracy.

Another possibility is that Larry Franklin was Judy's source. We know that at some point he was detected by the FBI, which "turned" him into a cooperating witness. Franklin continued to work at Feith's and Wurmser's Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon until it was shut down, and he was indicted last summer. For months, the Bureau monitored Frankin and his conversations and meetings as he moved within the OSP and neocon network trading documents alleging Iraq and Iran WMDs back and forth with the Israelis.

If this second scenario holds, that would likely mean the FBI was also monitoring Miller, as she spread the poison pill around the White House.

Either way, OMG.

[seemslikeadream]

4. Better excuse to stay in jail 85 days?

:hi:

[leveymg]

5. Protective Custody.

It was a way to keep her safely on ice while the Grand Jury wrapped things up. Having Judy in jail also put tremendous strain on the hold-outs at the White House who had been dealing with her.

Fitzpatrick and the FBI guys on this case are brilliant.

[seemslikeadream]

6. I actually posted the "Protective Custody"

reason quite awhile ago

[DemReadingDU]

15. OMG, Indeed. Exploding exponentially

[robertpaulsen]

10. Perfect. But 85 days was way too short for her.

I'm hoping Fitz will indict her, at least for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Good find! Plame/AIPACgate is really cooking!

[Peace Patriot]

12. The s-w asia site links to the Jewish charitable work. A bunch of docs,

some quite old, some more recent, of the Iraq Jewish community were found in a flooded basement of the Iraq Intel hdqtrs in May 2003, after the invasion. The U.S. Military was enlisted to "freeze" them (to preserve them) and to fly them to the U.S. (listed as an "in kind" expense), where the Nat'l Archives agency is putting together a $3 million preservation project. Click on "Iraqi Jewish Archive" at
http://www.sw-asia.com/People/Judith_Miller_Naor_Gilon_Franklin_AIPAC.htm

It takes you to an official account of the project at the following blo:

http://middle-america.blogspot.com/2005/08/iraqi-jewish-archive-harold-rhodes-and.html

What I was thinking about, reading this, was the other treasures, of much greater antiquity, that the US Military was permitting the looting and trashing of; the mass destruction of gov't records; and, of course, the dead and wounded people, in the tens of thousands, who were dying in looted hospitals, in hospitals without electricity and potable water, and all the other horror that was taking place.

I am a lover of old scrolls myself, and of libraries. And I wouldn't think twice about an effort to preserve old documents, except for the context, and the persons involved--Judith Miller and Harold Rhodes, two architects of this dastardly invasion. Another thought I had was: What's really in those boxes of frozen documents?

[robbedvoter]

2. Moore is the author of Bush's Brain

Amazing piece - I was going to post it myself.

[Chalco]

7. Gorgeous. A must read!!

This needs to be nominated for the Greatest page but I don't know how.

[hvn_nbr_2]

11. To nominate...

At the bottom of the original post in the thread, in the grey-shaded line, are links for Alert, Hide Thread, and Recommend topic for greatest page. Click "Recommend..." Looks like this thread has 5 votes now so it should be on greatest.

[katty]

8. Ledeen's paws are all over this-rarely mentioned by talking heads, he's

been a player for a very long time.

[seemslikeadream]

13. Ledeen

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.

[robertpaulsen]

9. Here's the kicker: Franklin is cooperating with Fitz!

The other American attendees at Ledeen’s Roman Holiday are also worthy of scrutiny. Larry Franklin was recently arrested for leaking classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Ledeen sprang quickly to his defense but Franklin faces prosecution next year and is most probably cooperating with prosecutor Fitzgerald. Harold Rhode, the other American actor in this tragicomic affair, worked the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Department of Defense for Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Characterized as a “counter-intelligence shop,” OSP simply interpreted intelligence in a manner that fit the need for evidence that Iraq had WMD. If the CIA gathered data that said otherwise, OSP analyzed it differently or ignored the facts and then reported to the vice president precisely what he wanted to hear. Rhode also was the liaison between Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted embezzler the Bush administration was using to feed information to them and Judy Miller about the distortions and lies required to fuel the rush to war.

That would make three that Fitz has flipped: Hannah, Wurmser and now Franklin.

It's officially a hyphenate: Plame/AIPACgate!

[leveymg]

14. Franklin was "turned" by the FBI a couple years ago. He definitely

has been a double-agent, of a sort, against the cabal. When you say that Wurmser and Hannah have "flipped" do you mean they've also been wired, or that they merely have testified against their co-conspirators?